Mandalas create themselves. Anyone may use the mandala technique to create beautiful works which express the high metaphysics found in New Age Revelations. What is original is my extension of the mandala technique to music, dance, drama, architecture, and cloth.

Mandala making is simultaneously a meditation technique, a divination and revelation technique, and a way to tap the hidden aesthetic potential in all of us. And it can be used for ceremonial Magick. To do Magick, first express your intentions symbolically with a layout of Tarot cards, then do the mandalas, for paintings, music, clothing or banners, and finally, do the mandala for the drama of the ceremony itself. This can be a major group project.

A Buddhist mandala is a circle in a square, or a square in a circle, made in a divine trance. They have a center point perspective, rather than a horizon line and vanishing point. They also have symmetry in powers-of-two, i.e. bilateral, quadripartite, etc. C. G. Jung regarded any combination of circle and square as a mandala, even if the circle was sitting perched on top of the square. A Gothic cathedral rose window, a Renaissance church, and Bach's improvised polyphony are all mandalas.

Mandalas can be defined procedurally, as any work of art which creates itself, without prior plan or design or theme, simply following the impulses of the inner self. If this improvisational procedure results in a creation with symbolic meaning, then the result is a mandala. So we have two definitions of the mandala, one in terms of form, and the other in terms of process, and it is impossible to settle exclusively on one definition or the other. In every artistic medium, we shall find some version of the circle and the square, and some form of improvisation.

It is miraculous to me, someone who cannot draw a straight line, that in the unconscious process of making the mandala, something strange and beautiful and filled with symbolic meaning unfolds, in a style like nothing I've ever seen before. And all mandalas are that way. Not only does everyone have their own style, but each mandala has its own style. As for their meaning, it varies enormously.

The last mandala I did turned out to be African shields and masks (when looked at from a distance in a sufficiently dim light). This meant I was hiding behind shields and masks and not opening up emotionally to a female friend who was visiting me at the time.

In the mandalas of groups I have run, a troubled marriage stands out in one mandala, something that individual had never mentioned. In the mandala of an emergency room nurse, pride of the healer and resentment of authority was evident. One very quiet man, who had not said two words the entire semester, created the most beautiful mandala, expressing a life perfectly balanced between spiritual and domestic values. I envied him, and his wife, and told him so. A mandala can be a window into the soul, whether the mandala maker wishes or not.

The best book on Mandalas apparently has no author. It was published by Thames and Hudson in 1995, and is a small book, 5 by 5 inches, filled with remarkable, rare, new and old mandalas from all parts of Southern Asia and Central Asia, including Tibet and Nepal, with accompanying quotes from the mystical literature. It is called Mandalas, Sacred Symbols. The ISBN number is 0-500-06020-7.

The mandala technique offers a path to renewal of the higher arts, which by definition have the power to transport one beyond the mundane and everyday states of mind. Mandala making is part of a New Age, a golden age, a Renaissance of the Spirit. There are many reasons for making mandalas, but I like the Navaho version (they too make mandalas, in colored sand around the client/patient as part of a "sing" which may last for days). They say it restores harmony, so one can go in beauty.

Hypertable of Contents

• Painting
• Architecture
• Poetry
• Music
• Dance
• Cloth
• Drama

Painting

The first rule for making mandalas is that there are no rules. Having said that, we can at least give a few hints for making drawn mandalas. Use a sheet of typing paper for each mandala, taped with masking tape to a hard surface, which can withstand the point of the compass. Get out all your kindergarten art supplies, compasses (for making arcs), small squares, or plastic triangles with a right angle, rulers, liquid crayola, wax crayola, colored pencils, poster paints, regular pencils and erasers. Let the mandala create itself.

Take a break occasionally and get a fresh look at what is being created. At that point one may have a "gestalt" experience, as random lines and blotches suddenly come together as a recognizable object. Work to increase the recognizability, while eliminating superfluous lines.

Some people primarily improvise with compass and square, first in pencil, with much erasing, adding colors in later. Others do it free hand in color with no erasure, and who can say which is the better mandala? If there is a rule to making mandalas, it is to let it create itself. Do not attempt any preconceived design.

Twentieth century painting has had a liberating influence on mandala makers. A house in a mandala may be a Picasso house, showing multiple perspectives at once. We are not stuck with a horizon line and a vanishing point, or realistic portrayal of objects. Objects may be symbolic doodles, like the elements in Navaho sand paintings. Anything is possible. It might be best to stop reading at this point and go make a drawn mandala.

Interpreting mandalas is far more difficult than making them, and may take overnight. Yet it is essential, because of the revelations contained therein. Everyone can be their own source of revelation. It is not necessary to run after trance channellers or gurus. In the groups I've run, no one could interpret mandalas but me. But, of course, they did not have the benefit of "The Alphabet of Symbolism," or years of study. Try turning it this way or that, and looking at it at various distances, in various lights. Take your time. Sleep on it.

In the morning, a sudden gestalt experience may occur, just as a person is suddenly recognized at a distance. Or it may remain a doodle.

The revelation may be highly personal, instant psychoanalysis, or it may contain high metaphysical themes. How do we know it is true? If it is highly personal and the mandala maker recognizes the truth of it, fine.

If it contains universal metaphysical themes, then we expect reproducibility, in the sense that we expect to find the same themes in everyone's metaphysical mandalas, and the same themes in mystical experience. This is the beginning of the science of metaphysics.

In music, we make a distinction between the creation of a piece and the performance of the piece. In fact, the same distinction now arises in sculpture, where the artist may do a small scale sculpture in clay and at the shop it will be reproduced on any scale in marble or bronze. I apply this same distinction to all the arts, even if the creator and the performer are one and the same person. The creation and the performance remain separate and distinct acts. A drawn mandala is made on a piece of cheap typing paper, held down to a hard board with masking tape. While creating a mandala, we don't worry about staying within the lines. Mandalas can be quite sloppy in the creation. But having recognized the elements and interpreted them, why not create a polished work of art?

I have never seen an ugly mandala. But try to imagine it done on canvas or watercolor paper in a larger size, carefully painted in acrylics, oil, or watercolor. An artist could be hired to do this. That is the performance of the piece, suitable for framing and hanging on the walls of your house.

The architects of the Renaissance, Bramante especially, created mandala buildings with central perspective and power of two symmetry, usually quadripartite, with a dome on top to circumscribe the square with a circle. If I understand their methods correctly, they began by making the intersection of two arcs, known as the mandorla. Mandorlas determined the long axis. Without changing the arc of the compass, other dimensions were set by using various points along the mandorla as the point of the compass.

So the formal elements of the circle and the square certainly exist in architecture. But I know of no one who has attempted to introduce the mandala improvisation process into architecture. The creation stage could be done in a medium like clay or plaster. Make power-of-two forms and use them to create porticos and niches. The way to make a circular dome is to mount that part of the model on a potter's wheel and let the hands form whatever shape feels right. The "performance" of the mandala in an actual building is more of a challenge. Mandala architectural creations tend to have rounded shapes. Current building materials and building techniques do not favor curved shapes. 20th Century building, both domestic and commercial, places the emphasis on the plumb and the square.

All 20th Century building components are linear and flat. Everything from two-by-fours to I-beams to plywood panels to doors and windows are designed for rectilinear construction on the plumb and the square. How to break out of this? If we insist on curved walls, they can be made with bricks, used not as a facade but as load-bearing walls. It's not customary, but it can be done.

Make arches and domes from bricks or building stones, with a specially shaped keystone. It's an old technique, reaching back to Gothic cathedrals and Roman basilicas and the co-existing Persian civilization. Study earlier styles of architecture for their construction techniques.

For a twentieth Century approach to curved shapes, particularly in large public buildings, we could use custom made curved trusses. A truss is two flat plates separated by a continuous zigzag of flat plates welded together. Trusses provide maximum strength and stiffness for a given tonnage of steel. A custom truss can be made by first bending the top and bottom plates to a curved line, and then welding in the continuous pieces of zigzag bracing between the top and bottom plates. Finite element computer programs can determine the load-bearing strength of this truss for a given strength and weight of steel.

As for the surface of the building, we could imitate the Persians and use brightly colored ceramic tile. Even dull and subdued colored tile is an improvement over the gray and colorless buildings of the 20th Century.

The symbolic interpretation of buildings is very much like that of music, oddly enough. A great building has a certain rhythmic pattern, in the power-of-two symmetries, and in repeated elements, such as domes.

Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world are mandala buildings, including Gothic Cathedrals, the Orthodox Cathedrals in Moscow, the Taj Mahal and other great works of Islamic architecture. The circle on the square, bright colors, and symbolic meaning are all there.

Mandala poetry tends to produce epigrams, almost like Haiku, or short passages. The Sayings of Thales are mandala poetry. I simply left myself open to phrases floating up from the unconscious, writing them down on envelopes or any scrap of paper. They often made no sense at first. But with minor editing, they became epigrams, enigmatic but meaningful. Such mandala epigrams become the lyrics for mandala music.

Western music has always had the circle and the square, but before the invention of MIDI keyboard-synthesizers and personal computers, we had no tools for the improvisational mandala process.

Computer memory or hard disk memory is the equivalent of the sheet of paper, allowing one to capture and examine the mandala, erasing some, adding more. By pre-defining the tempo and time-signature, the MIDI software will transform inexact durations into powers-of-two notes within measures. That is the equivalent of the square. The editing software provides the equivalent of eraser and compass, with repetition of passages you like, and deletion of those you don't.

I do not play any instrument, but with practice, my "fingers" learned harmonious combinations and phrases that pleased me. Like mandalas in other media, the results are unusual and unlike traditional music. Relax and let the fingers create the music. Forget about the formal rules of composition, in case you know any. Silence the memory of generations of piano teachers which keep saying "don't pound on the piano!" Pound away. The result will not be noise; it will amaze you with its strange beauty. Better yet, open up the piano and create directly on the strings. Select passages for repetition (the circle). A simple song only requires two musical phrases, one for the melody and the other for the refrain, which are then repeated two or three times. The melody itself may be no more than several repetitions of a simple motif, with a few variations.

But can it be interpreted? Do musical mandalas carry or express a symbolic meaning? Indeed they do, and this was a fact well known to the ancient Greeks, but has been more or less forgotten since.

Can't we just enjoy a piece of music, and not worry about its meaning? Of course, but if music is your medium, it may also be your path to revelation. Symbolic meaning lies in the harmonies, rhythms and color. To prove to yourself that this is true, go to a piano (or any keyboard) and find middle C or any C. We'll call this note 1. Staying entirely on the white keys, first play CD together, i.e. C, the first note, and the second note lying next to it. You have now played the interval known in conventional musical theory as a second. Play CE, i.e. notes one and three on the white keys, and you have played a third. In similar fashion, try each combination of C with the white keys to the right, to play the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, and the eighth. The eighth is somehow the same as note one, because it is an octave, resulting in a doubling of the frequency of note one. This is the classic eight note diatonic scale in the key of C, which just uses the white keys on a piano. Do this up and down the keyboard, from one C to another.

Now as you repeatedly sound these intervals pay close attention to your emotions. Don't each of these intervals have a different "feel?" Aren't the second and the seventh intervals dissonant, i.e. unpleasant, jarring? This is not to say that dissonance is bad and should not be used. Sometimes it expresses exactly what we are feeling. The fifth and sixth (favored in early medieval music) have a sacred, holy, unearthly sound compared to the fourth and third. The consonant intervals are the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. And this is not surprising from Pythagorean theory, because the ratio of the two notes that make up a Third is always 5:4, anywhere on the scale. The Fourth is 4:3. The Fifth is 3:2. And the Sixth is 9:5. Pythagoras discovered this 2500 years ago, giving rise to a new word, "rational." We may use either the frequency or the wavelength of each note to demonstrate this "rationality" of harmony.

Pythagoras transformed Greek civilization, because suddenly everthing had to obey rational numbers. The elements of a statue were so many "thumb" units. The proportions of buildings had to be rational numbers.

The modern well-tempered scale is a geometric series of frequencies. All geometric series have the property that the same interval always produces the same ratio. The particular frequencies chosen for this scale allow almost all small numbered ratios in the first 21 intervals of the scale. But there are a few ratios not found, i.e. a few "lost chords" which are never heard in Western music, such as 6:7. And many of the chords are not exact. However, they don't improve with exactness.

The symbolic meaning of rational numbers can be determined from the symbolic meanings of each of the two component numbers, the denominator and numerator, using our alphabet of symbolism. For instance, we know that five is worldly and secular, while four is the earthly whole, the four winds of the compass, and divinity is always expressed in threes. Thus, we expect the Third (5:4 ratio) to be common in popular and secular music, especially in a non-religious age, and so it is.

Divinity always comes in threes, so the combination of divinity and the earthly whole (the Fourth, 4:3) is holy (wholeness). The same can be said for the Sixth (9:5), since nine is the trinity squared, and five is worldly and secular. We find both intervals in Medieval and Renaissance music.

The most purely religious or sacred interval is the Fifth, which shows the first entry of the holy trinity into the world of duality (3:2). And in early medieval music, only the fifth was permitted as a harmony, although dissonance was allowed. Later the Sixth was also allowed, but by the 14th Century, when the religious orders had become quite secularized, all of the consonant intervals were freely used, i.e. the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth, while dissonance was avoided.

In the paragraph above, I have used the word "interval" the same way as the musicians, basing it on the eight tone diatonic scale. However, there are a lot more possibilities on the chromatic (twelve tone) scale, especially if we consider intervals wider than an octave. So for the purpose of mandala making, we will use Chromatic Intervals (CI), using all the black and white keys. CI one is any key played with the black or white key next to it. And so forth. What follows is a portion of the dictionary of symbolic elements which I put here rather than in the alphabet chapter. Remember, symbolic meaning cannot be translated into English. My "meanings" are hints, only. The mandala musician should study these intervals for herself.

CI one and two are dissonant. CI three has a ratio of 5:6 and has a feeling of tension, worry, or competition. CI four has a ratio of 4:5. This is the ever popular Third. Its mood is voluptuous, sensual, earthy, hot.

CI five has a ratio of 3:4 and has a Renaissance feel, a sacred, holistic feel. I like this interval, which musicians know as the Fourth. CI six is dissonant. CI seven is known to musicians as the Fifth, and has a ratio of 2:3. This is a harmony of grandeur and has an even more sacred feeling than interval five. This is my favorite harmony. It is always uplifting and makes me think of the creation of oceans and galaxies. It is the music of the gods.

CI eight is dissonant. CI nine has a ratio of 3:5 and suggests the hero, going to extremes, whether it be extremes of creation, destruction, or maintenance of the status quo. CI ten is the musician's Sixth (5:9) and is the hero of the mystical path, so this is another religious or spiritual interval. CI eleven is the Seventh and has a ratio of 7:13, the sound of the wizard or occultist. CI twelve has a ratio of 1:2, which is the octave, the same note.

CI thirteen has a ratio of 7:15 and is disharmony on a higher level than interval one. CI fourteen has a ratio of 4:9 and has an air of disquiet. It is transhuman and alien. CI fifteen has a ratio of 3:7 and is somewhat strange, middle-eastern & metaphysical. CI sixteen has a ratio of 2:5 and has a feel of sickness, recovery, and renewal. CI seventeen has a ratio of 3:8 and suggests wrong directions and fanaticism.

CI eighteen (5:14), is ominous and threatening. CI nineteen (1:3) is the wholy trinity. Very nice. CI twenty (4:13) is brooding and relentless. CI twenty-one (3:10) suggests cosmos and cosmology. Some chords might sound better if they were exact ratios, and, in fact, piano tuners do not stick strictly to the geometric series, thereby "sweetening" some harmonies, at the expense of other intervals. Deciphering the symbolic meaning of a melody requires determining the chromatic intervals in the melody and looking them up in the paragraphs above. Given the symbolic meaning in each individual step in the melody and in each chord, try to put it all together. See it as a whole. It is a little like seeing the meaning of a tarot spread as a whole.

Symbolic meaning in music depends on three things: the harmonies, the rhythms, and the colors or timbres of the instruments.

Boogie-woogie has a very different feel from reggae, and a military march or Royal fanfare is very different from a waltz or rhumba. The symbolic meaning of a rhythm depends on the ways we can move to it. Is it dance-able? Is there a discernible rhythm?

I have no dictionary for rhythms, beyond saying that it is determined by the kind of dance that goes with that rhythm. I also have no dictionary for the colors in music. Clearly there is a difference in the mood of plainsong and Italian opera, and a difference between brass and reed, and between organ, harpsichord and piano. Each musician will have to find his own way of thinking about these differences. So much for music.

Let us now consider dance in its own right.

In Western culture, we do not find mandala characteristics in the "high-culture" classical traditions of dance, designer clothing or drama. We find them in the folk traditions. I refer to square dancing, quilt making and popular festivals such as Carnival.

It is quite easy to find the "square" and the "circle" in square dancing. In traditional western square dancing, the entire room is organized into many squares, each of which has four couples, who start by facing inward towards a center point for that square. Sometimes they dance as four couples, spatially arranged as a square, as in "swing-your-partner." Each square periodically forms a circle, as in "all join hands" or a moving circle, as in "allemande left, right and left hands." Sometimes there are "formation" calls such as "Texas Star, ladies to the middle," in which the ladies join all four left hands in the middle of the square.

The improvisational element comes from the caller, who can put the various moves known to the group together in any order. The equivalent of the "sheet of paper" is a list of the calls. In other words, it is easy to reproduce a dance, or modify it.

Please don't think that square dancing is just for older folks, where the women wear countless petticoats and everyone dresses alike. When I was in high school (admittedly a small country high school in the Oklahoma prairie), square dance parties were our favorite form of entertainment, and we just wore blue jeans and our normal school clothing.

Any music that has a rhythm can be used for square dancing. Try it with rock and roll. Try it with the sound track of the movie "Trainspotting." Folk arts have advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage is that tradition can become rather fixed and inflexible.

A square dance club can improvise further by inventing new steps or "formations." Clog dancing is one form of square dancing, which differs from other square dancing only in the kind of "step" used. Don't let existing forms of square dancing inhibit your imagination. All that is essential is the circle and the square, dancers maintaining physical contact with one another, the caller to introduce an improvisational element, and all dancers making the same moves at the same time, so no one feels self-conscious.

Mandala making is never self-conscious. Self-consciousness is put aside, along with deliberate design, in order to reach a level of instinct and feeling. In square dancing, no thought is required on the part of the dancers. Mandala dancing becomes an expression of the collective self. It is also important that mandala making in any medium be something anyone can do. It takes a lot of skill and practice to do some of the more showy moves of either ballroom or rock and roll dancing, as well as a total lack of inhibition. In ballroom or rock and roll, the dancer must learn the dance moves ahead of time and practice them. Many people do not have that opportunity. Most shy and awkward people do not dance ballroom or rock and roll; however, they have no difficulty with square dancing.

The basic moves and steps are easy, and since everyone in the room is doing exactly the same thing at the same time, there is none of that fear that everyone is watching the dancer make a fool of himself, which inflict some of us on the dance floor. The square dancer doesn't have to be inventive. He or she only has to listen to the caller.

The second folk art is quilting. It has all the elements of the mandala, including the circle, the square and improvisation. Quilting has to do with clothing only in the sense that the medium is cloth. The traditional quilt is something put on the bed, or if it is a rare and expensive antique, on the wall. However, it can just as easily be sewn onto jackets, skirts, pants, bags or robes, and this is often done by quilters.

The quilting technique can be used to make banners or flags by sewing the pieces together with a layer of black paper to provide reinforcement. In this case, there is no "quilting," a term which refers to the stuffing in the middle layer of a quilt, adding bulk and warmth.

While today quilts are regarded as works of art, traditionally they were a frugal way of making use of worn-out, castoff or outgrown clothing. Indeed, the improvisational part mostly comes in the selection of colors and designs of cloth. Quilting was also a communal activity. I am not a quilter myself, but my grandmother was.

The formal elements of quilting make use of both the "circle" (repeated elements, many small pieces cut to the same pattern) and the "square," i.e. power-of-two relationships between lengths. I know a few of the many primary patterns in quilting, used to make each block. One block can be sewn onto a robe or jacket or purse. Many blocks sewn together form the top level of a quilt. The stitching that holds all three layers of a quilt has its own separate beauty and pattern.

One primary pattern is the "monkey wrench." Start with four small squares of two contrasting fabrics. Sew these together to make a larger square. Then begin adding right triangles, alternating the same two contrasting fabrics. The hypotenuse of the triangle is sewn to the edge of the previous square. In this way a sequence of circumscribing and rotated squares is made, as the square grows larger.

Some designs are created by repeated folding of freezer paper. A single pattern is cut out of the folded paper, which when unfolded provides a block pattern with 4-fold or 8-fold central symmetry. It is then ironed onto the cloth to provide a pattern for cutting.

Mandala drama involves creating masks, costumes, floats, or objects carried, either individually or by a group of participants, putting on makeup or costumes to lose one's ordinary self, and dancing, drumming, raving wildly through the streets all night long. Usually these events have a religious or mythological basis. Sometimes the final act is to burn the large figures, accompanied by fireworks. One is acutely aware of the fact that this country was founded by Puritans, since the only Carnival here is in the predominately French and Catholic portions of the country, e.g. Louisiana.

Our Carnivals are nothing compared to the extravagance in other countries. We must lose our inhibitions, get in touch with metaphysical and mythological themes, and learn to express. Ex-Puritans will have to consciously re-invent Carnival, or processionals celebrating New Year's or the Fourth of July. Like square dancing, processional is a mandala of the collective unconscious of the group. Processionals or dramas are also part of mandala magick.

When it comes to both dancing and drama, our Puritan roots show. American culture has many roots, which is our strength, even if at times it threatens to split us into many warring tribes. Rock and roll springs from African-American and Irish roots in our culture. The New Age movement of the 1960s is unimaginable without rock and roll. Despite the excesses (especially with drugs) and the absurdities of the New Age, some real change began in the sixties.

A true New Age will be a tapestry with threads from every culture, including that of the First Nations. The Navaho still have elaborate festivals which last for days, which involve making the elaborate paintings of colored sand which are certainly mandalas. Why can't we claim some of those rites and make them our own? Would the Navaho object? I do not know. I can only say the mandala philosophy combined with our varied ancestry offers us a richness of cultural possibilities.

We can even mine our European roots for folk rituals, which are still practiced in small towns in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Mexico. We now have many immigrants from the Far East, so why not mine our East Indian, Japanese and Chinese roots as well?

Have fun. Lose your self in the greater Self. Tap the deeper roots of consciousness, and express ONE in motion.

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