I should like to draw your attention again to the Invocation:
“Om, all-knowing one, . . . be round and round.”
This round motif should be kept clearly in your mind, for it is an exceedingly important symbol in the West as well as in the East.
It is especially women who produce such symbols in the West.
This is not the case in the East, the mandalas are made by men, the feminine has remained unconscious.
We find an exception to this rule in the matriarchal South of India.
There it is the special prerogative of women to draw the new mandalas.
I found a woman in a Temple at Madura, actually engaged in this work, and I then dis covered that it belongs to women’s mysteries.
Modern Psychology: C. G. Jung’s Lectures at the ETH Zürich, 1933-1941
They know the meaning of the whole and of the various pieces.
It was impossible for me to enquire, for the women were dumbfounded that a man should interfere in this realm.
There are a few matriarchal traces to be found all over India, but the Mahomedan influence, which entered with the invasion of the Moghuls, almost wiped them out.
I am not at all sure if the meaning of the southern mandalas is the same as that which we find in Kundalini Yoga which still has many adherents near Calcutta in Bengal.
As I said before the former are made by women and the latter by men. Kundalini Yoga is nearly related to Tibetan Yoga and is based on the “round and round” of our text. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 70.