One painting, watched closely

Systema, in the making

The canvas record of Systema Mundi Totius — acrylic and metallic pigment, six feet square — from the first pencilled circles on the second of May 2025 to the framed work on the wall in mid-July. The design itself was longer in the making: the preliminary drawings of the inner geometry, begun from one of Jung's earlier mandalas; the study; the working-out of what the painting would have to hold.

In 1916 Jung painted the Systema Mundi Totius — a system of all the worlds, a map of the whole. This painting is an interpretation of it, not a copy: the same architecture of wheel, square, star and circle, worked out again by hand, at a scale the body has to walk around.

This site keeps returning to one distinction — what is worked at, and what emerges. This page is the honest answer: both, all the way down. Every form was counted against a pencilled circle. And still the painting arrived somewhere the plan had not been.

Working drawing, ink pot and painted study — The working drawing and the painted study. The whole design existed first at small scale — compass, ink, a rehearsal of every colour — and stayed beside the canvas throughout.

Pencilled construction circles and the first yellow diamonds — First evening. Concentric construction circles in pencil, and the first yellow set against them. No diamonds are drawn here — what will read as diamonds is the interweaving of circular forms.

The yellow field growing from the centre rosette — The yellow grows outward from the centre — the blue eight-pointed star of the individuated self, which carries no interpretation beyond itself: the self re-entering its own pleroma, in recurring infinite recursion. Every form is placed by hand against the pencilled circles — no masking, no shortcuts.

Red entering the wheel as a wedge — Red enters as a wedge. The quadrants declare themselves.

Green taking the third quadrant — Green takes the third quarter. What reads as a spinning wheel is still, diamond by diamond, an act of counting.

Blue closing the wheel, white rings scribed over the field — Blue closes the wheel, and the first white rings are scribed over the finished field.

The four-colour diamond wheel complete — The wheel complete — four interweaving circular forms, red, green, blue and yellow: the four opposing functions, thinking, feeling, sensing and intuition, in tension and intermingling about the star of the self. Not a personality test — the held tension itself.

Coloured rings overlaid on the diamond wheel — The rings overlaid — red, green and blue circling the wheel. This is the heart of the painting, photographed close.

The small central motif on the large empty canvas — The same heart, photographed honestly. Most of the six-foot canvas is still empty — the pattern is small, and the ground is large.

Gold star points beginning to extend from the square — The gold star begins — points extending from the square that held the wheel. The gold, here and throughout the painting, is consciousness.

The eight-pointed gold star complete — Eight points edged in gold. What was contained now radiates — and the four diagonal points, north-east, south-east, south-west, north-west, are blue: the dominance of the thinking function since the Enlightenment, at the expense of the irrational, more spiritual functions of intuition and sensing. When the outer circle comes, these are the points that will touch it.

The outer circle arriving in ultramarine — The outer circle arrives in ultramarine — the boundary that makes a mandala a mandala.

The outer circle taking on colour — The circle takes on colour, segment by segment. The quartered circle with its wide blue cross is both the quaternity and the four rivers of the first civilisations — Tigris, Euphrates. White, black, red and gold: the earliest pigments.

Detail — Phanes above the Tree of Light — Detail — Phanes in the gold triangle: the winged child, the boy emerging from the egg, born from the flames of the Tree of Light beneath.

Detail — Abraxas, the lion-headed serpent — Detail — Abraxas, the lion-headed serpent: the god beyond good and evil, who contains all opposites without resolving them.

Systema Mundi Totius, finished — Finished. Ten weeks after the first pencil line — wheel, square, star, circle, and the figures in their places. One late adjustment: the yellow nearest the centre repainted pink — the circle of Amor, love natural and divine. The understanding and the intuition were not always in phase; hence the amendments, to the colours and to what they were understood to mean.

The framed painting hung on the wall — Framed and hung. To paint it was to inhabit the tension rather than merely think about it.

The figures have names, and the names carry the argument. Elijah and Salome from the Red Book, Ha and Ka from the Seven Sermons and the Black Books, hold their stations among the rings. And the vertical axis carries Jung's most controversial claim: the god — Abraxas below — differentiates through the Tree of Life, through human consciousness and love, to emerge through the Tree of Light, through science and the arts, as the new god — Phanes, the boy emerging from the egg. The divine cannot make that journey without passing through us. All of this is unpacked in Nucleations from the Pleroma, on the Papers page.

The finished painting lives in the collection, among the Systema works. The practice it grew out of — three decades of it — is in the Archive.

Ask about this work

Editions of the Systema paintings are planned. Questions about the original, or the making of it, are welcome.

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