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.There is noEnglish term, as far as I am aware, with exactly that sense.It might be anassumption, or it could also have an unfavorable nuance of insinuation.Now, hypostasis means that there is something below which is substan-tial, upon which something else rests.Mr.Dell: From what root does hypostasis come?12Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 2d ed., translated by Norman Kemp Smith(London, 1929), 266ff.13In his 1898 lecture before the Zofingia Society, Thoughts on Speculative Inquiry, Jung critiqued Kant s concept of the Ding an sich, arguing against Kant s rigid distinctionbetween the knowable, phenomenal realm and the unknowable noumenal realm, argu-ing that science progressively made the noumenal known.Zofingia Lectures, in CW A,§§195 99.He also commented on Kant s lectures on psychology (Vorlesungen über Psycholo-gie [Leipzig, 1889]) in The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, in CW 7,§260, note 7.10 12 OCTOBER 1932Dr.Jung: Histemi is the Greek verb, to be standing, and hypo meansbelow.The same root is in the Greek word ikonostasis, which, in theGreek Orthodox church, is the background behind the altar where thestatues of the saints stand.The image or picture of a saint is called anikon, and ikonostasis is the place upon which it stands, usually a pedestal,or a wall upon which are placed such images or pictures.To make ahypostasis means to invent a subject which is hanging in the air.It has nobasis, but you assume that it has, and say it is a real thing.For instance,you invent the idea of a tattva and say it is by no means a mere word, abreath of air with nothing underneath it.You say tattva is an essence; itis something substantial something is standing underneath that holdsit up.A hypostasis contains always the assumption that a thing really is,and the natural primitive mind is always hypostatizing.In our better mo-ments, when we are a bit superstitious, we also have hypostases.Mr.Dell: The hypostasis of gravity makes the apple fall.Dr.Jung: Yes, you assume the thing is, and that makes the apple fall.Or, for instance, Kant says, in his famous discussion of the assumption ofGod, that God is, God is not that when anybody says God is, he justsays so, but his saying so does not mean that he is.He can say God is, butperhaps he is not.But when you hypostatize, then by saying God is, youassume that God really exists.You have made God, so that he is in reality.One can bring about most unfortunate situations by simply declaringthat a thing is so.That is what the animus does and what one alwaysobjects to in the animus. Oh, I thought. and then the house burnsdown because you thought you had put the fire out.But unfortunatelythe house has burned down.Mrs.Baynes: Don t all heuristic principles tend to run into hypostases?Dr.Jung: They run a risk, sure enough.As soon as a hypothesis hasgiven evidence of its applicability, it tends to become a truth, to becomea hypostasis and we forget entirely that it is only a hypothesis, an inten-tional, arbitrary theory on our part.Dr.Kranefeldt: The sexual theory of Freud could be called a hypothesis,which then became a hypostasis.Dr.Jung: Exactly: it proves its evidence by a certain amount of facts,and then one assumes it must be a truth.Well now, this is merely aboutconcepts, and in tantric yoga there were things which needed furtherexplanation from the psychological side.Mrs.Sawyer: When Professor Hauer spoke of the cakras, he called onlythe picture inside each a mandala.Could we not call the total cakra amandala?Dr.Jung: Yes, the cakras are also occasionally called mandalas.Naturally11 LECTURE 1Professor Hauer does not attach such a technical meaning to the man-dala as we do.He called the total picture padma, the lotus, or cakra.14Mandala means ring, or circle.It can be a magic circle, for example, or itcan be a cycle.There are Vedic sutras in which the series of chaptersmakes a cycle that is called a mandala; for instance, the third mandala,chapter 10, verse 15 the mandala is simply the name of the cycle.Mrs.Sawyer: But he called a square a mandala.15Dr.Jung: Yes, he calls that a mandala, and naturally anything within isa mandala too, and this is exactly what you see in the Lamaistic pic-tures:16 the mandala, the lotus, is inside, as well as the temple, and thecloister with the square walls, the whole surrounded by the magic circle;then above are the gods, and mountains below.The term mandala withus has taken on an importance which it does not possess in India, whereit is merely one of the Yantras,17 an instrument of worship in the Lamais-tic cult and in tantric yoga.And mind you, the tantric school is littleknown in India you could ask millions of Hindus, and they would nothave the faintest idea of what it was.It would be as if you asked the hon-orable citizens of Zurich what they had to tell you of scholasticism; theywould know about as much as the Hindu knows about tantric yoga.Andif you asked a Hindu what a mandala was, he would say that a roundtable, or anything circular, was a mandala.But to us it is a specific term.Even within the frame of the tantric school the mandala has not the im-portance that it has with us.Our idea of it would come nearest to La-maism, the Tibetan religion, but this is hardly known, and its textbookshave been translated only very recently, hardly ten years ago.One of thefundamental sources is the Shrichakrasambhara, a tantric text translatedby Sir John Woodroffe.1814Hauer stated: Cakra means circle, but it is also called padma, meaning lotus-flower (HS, 61).15In his description of the mÖlvdhvra cakra, Hauer referred to the square or mandalaof the earth (HS, 71).16[Note to the 1932 edition: See the frontispiece of the Golden Flower.] Jung and Wil-helm, The Secret of the Golden Flower (London and New York, 1931).This illustration is alsoreproduced in Concerning Mandala Symbolism, in CW, vol.9, part 1, fig.1, and Psychol-ogy and Alchemy, inCW, vol.12, fig.43.17Zimmer stated that the figurative sacred image (pratimv) [under which he includedthe mandala] is just one member of an entire family of representational sacred images(yantras). Artistic Form and Yoga in the Sacred Images of India, translated by G.Chapple andJ.Lawson (Princeton, 1984), 29.18This text was actually edited and translated by Kazi Dawa-Samdap: Shrichakrasambhara:A Buddhist Tantra, Tantrik Texts, vol.7 (London, 1919).The series was under the generaleditorship of Woodroffe, who wrote a foreword to this volume
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