[aras-image:5Ka.072,,10,,,Figure 17 Black and Violet.] |
The twentieth century painter Kandinsky also uses the circle and triangle as male and female principles while in another Kandinsky painting circles multiply and proliferate as in some Tantric paintings illustrating that such symbols have archetypal sources in the collective unconscious which moves below or beyond (whichever terminology you prefer) the conscious life. They occur from time to time, place to place, from one culture to another. These elaborations of the circle and the multiplication of forms out of that central center of nothingness are different in structure but are essentially a representation similar to tantric pieces where the circles elaborate out of each other. In many of these, not all of them, is the seed in the center which suggests a further elaboration and expansion from the form itself.
C.G. Jung quotes "God is an infinite circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."10 Neumann in discussing the containment of life within the circle of the uroboros writes, "The uroboros... then appears as the latest symbol of individual psychic development signifying the roundness of the psyche, life's wholeness and perfection regained... Thus the great round of the uroboros arches over man's like encompassing his earliest childhood and receiving him again, in altered form, at the end."11 In the vision of Henry Vaughn, the 17th Century English mystic poet, "I saw Eternity last night as a pure and endless ring of light."12