Professor Jung long since made the discovery that modern man, who knows nothing of Oriental mysteries, draws or dreams mandala-like figures when he is on the road to wholeness, the fusion of opposites. We would only call this process the “refounding” or reorganization of the individual; Professor Jung called it “individuation”. With all the caution of his empirical methods of investigation, he assures us that the mandala is an autonomous psychic fact characterized by an ever-repeated phenomenology that is identical wherever it is met. The mandala-symbol is for him “a sort of atomic nucleus about whose innermost structure and ultimate meaning we know nothing.” But the most important thing about it he said in his commentary to the Chinese book The Secret of the Golden Flower: “Such things cannot be thought out; they must grow again from the dark depths of oblivion if they are to express the supreme presentiments of consciousness and the loftiest intuitions of the spirit, and thus fuse the uniqueness of consciousness as it exists today with the immemorial past of life.

- C. Kerenyi, in the “Prolegomena” of Essays on a Science of Mythology.

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