Mandala 89

$1,500.00

ILLUMINATION PAGE 89
1917

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In Tibetan Buddhism, the mandala (sanskrit for ‘circle’) is a ritual instrument to aid meditation and concentration. In 1916, Jung painted his first mandala, the Systema Munditotius (System of all the Worlds), which represented the cosmology of the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead), unmindful of its significance. In late Summer and early Autumn 1917, he drew a series of mandalas in pencil in his army notebook, which he later painted in the calligraphic volume of Liber Novus. He gradually realised that the mandala represented “‘Formation, transformation, the eternal mind’s eternal recreation.’ (Goethe, Faust)…
My mandala images were cryptograms on the state of my self, which were delivered to me each day.” He conceived the mandala to be a representation of the ‘self’, which he later defined as the totality of the personality and the central archetype, whose symbols are indistinguishable from those of the Godhead. He considered the realisation of the self to be the goal of the process of development, individuation, which he had been engaged in. For Jung, mandalas occured throughout the world in various religious traditions. They also occured spontaneously in dreams and in certain states of psychological conflict.

Image 89: In Black Book 7, in Jung’s fantasy of October 7, 1917, he encounters a figure named Ha, who claims to be the father of Philemon. As a black magician, Ha knows the runes, which Jung wants to learn. Although Ha does not want to teach him, he shows some examples, which Jung’s soul asks him to explain. Some of the runes appears in these paintings.

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Weight 12 lbs
Dimensions 37 × 31 × 3 in
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The Red Book by C. G. Jung © 2009 by the Foundation for the Works of C. G. Jung, Zurich.
Notes © 2013 Sonu Shamdasani. Translations from The Red Book © 2009 Mark Kyburz, John Peck and Sonu Shamdasani.
The Red Book by C. G. Jung is a W. W. Norton & Company publication by arrangement with the Foundation for the Works of C. G. Jung, Zurich.