I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of Jung recently, and I’ve been in a section of a book called Man and His Symbols (affiliate link).
Before I go further, I should point out that I’m not much of an artist. I have an appreciation for art, and some basic theory, but not much in the way of practice or (barring some rare instances) interest in creating art. I have aphantasia, meaning that I cannot consciously evoke an image in my mind (though I can contemplate concepts and have vivid dreams, which I can often recall images from in waking).
As I have been reading Man and His Symbols, I have recently reached a section by Aniela Jaffé entitled “Symbolism in the Visual Arts” which talks about the use of symbolism in images.
As someone who is not “a visual person” to steal the language of laypeople, I have often been fascinated by abstract art (though I have a philosophical distaste for postmodern denials of the presence meaning in art), and I’ve been spending some time contemplating the role and presence of symbols in visual works.
Another thing that Jung mentioned in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (affiliate link) is that it’s not uncommon for people to take up the pursuit of a creative endeavor as part of a program of self-discovery; not because of usefulness but precisely because it is a form of self-expression without any other utility to the individual. Since I don’t draw or do art in any meaningful sense, this makes some logical sense for me as an outlet.
For the past couple days, I’ve had an image in my mind of a mandala; these are representations of the self, cosmos, and universe.
The mandala takes the form of a sphere with two internal squares; one oriented as a diamond and the other smaller within it. The divisions are such that three “rings” of eight pieces are formed within.
In my mental image, the mandala is also colored and rotated off-kilter, but as I drew it out in Inkscape I did not think it to be important to start with this.
Each section of the mandala is colored red, yellow, black, or white. A Sunday School song comes to mind in which the lyrics go along the lines of the following:
“Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight: Jesus loves the little children of the world”
Growing up in America in the 1990’s, I always took the lyrics of this song to imply ethnic unity under the banner of the Protestant faith, but as an adult looking back to it decades later, an alternate symbolism occurs to me.
Red, yellow, black, and white are the colors of the four humors (depending on what coloration one assigns to phlegm; while phlegm is not usually depicted as white it was so in my own mental conception of the humors at the time of the image) and the processes of the alchemical magnum opus.
As the Hermetic perspective on alchemy is to bring the incomplete toward wholeness, there is a logical continuation of these elements within the mandala.
The organization of the mandala into sections like this runs against what I would normally picture; I would rotate each ring to be in the same general pattern as the first, yet in the mental image we see that the outer rings have the pairings in sequence with each other; instead of going yellow-red-white-black-yellow-red-white-black they go red-yellow-red-yellow-black-white-black-white in a clockwise manner.
It is worth noting that each of the internal colors is “impure” (e.g. not primary); both so that the dividing lines that separate them remain distinctive but also because this is proper: the transformative process is not instantaneous. I kind of feel like I have a Norton anthology from my college days whose cover has colors similar to these (or perhaps even a mandala or mandala-elements similar to these), but I can’t be bothered to dig it out to check.
However, the mandala in question is not the sole object in the mental image; I have the perception (albeit abstractly) that it is in some way on concrete, that it is at an angle, and that there is a sol symbol in one of the elements of the mandala.
To bring this into actualization, I used an image from Morguefile, a royalty free image repository. Uploaded by the user “scottglennie” it depicts a straight-on view of concrete. The presence of discordant elements within the concrete matches the mental image I have had.
In my image, the mandala is distressed, worn down by the presence of the world. In Krita, I imported the image that came from Inkscape and rotated it to its proper orientation, then penciled in the sol-image. The sol-image is not distressed like the other elements of the mandala, but the barriers between the mandala and the outside world are particularly distressed.
The final image looks like this:
I’m not sure what the reason for this image is (or, for that matter, if there is one), but I am certain that there are deep symbolic meanings to it.
Dividing the mandala into quadrants, we can see that there is an imbalance between the parts; each has two colors that appear only once, and two that appear twice.
Combined with the distress that occurs around the rim of the mandala and the imbalance, I think it is fair to say that these elements represent chaos, though it is also important to note that the mandala is balanced within the whole if not the parts.
The presence of the sol symbol is not something that I have any experience with; a purely abstract mandala would omit it, but it is also not part of a larger zodiac or associated group of elements. Its presence at the top of the mandala may indicate something like a steady course.
If pressed to rationally explain this, I feel like my life is in some semblance of order, even though I have a certain amount of stress and responsibilities, so it is possible that my unconscious mind is creating this image as a representation of the combination of chaos (responsibility and uncertainty) and order (preparation to meet that responsibility and guiding compass of plans, morality, and ethics) in my life.
The distress on the mandala represents the conflict between the individual self and the wider world. I tend to be introverted to an extreme, avoiding serious relationships outside of those governed by my livelihood. One of my goals as I pursue some psychological development and self-analysis is to break free of some of those self-imposed restrictions: to be more spontaneous, agreeable, and open within rational limits.