Sacred symbols — the stone and the animal

Aniela Jaffé opens by asserting that anything—natural forms, artifacts, or abstractions—can become symbolic, and outlines her focus on three universal motifs in art: stone, animal, and circle. Stones once embodied divinity, from Jacob’s pillar to megalithic alignments and Zen rock gardens. Early sculpture and modern artists like Max Ernst often retained a stone’s natural form to express its “spirit,” revealing art and religion’s porous boundary.

Turning to animals, Jaffé reviews Ice Age cave art as sacred space used for hunting and fertility magic, where images functioned as effective “doubles.” Hybrid animal-men and masked rites echo totemic identifications in which chiefs become animal spirits. She links this to psyche: the “animal” symbolizes instinctual forces that must be related to, tamed, or healed; dreams of animal pursuit signal split-off instincts seeking integration.

Jaffé shows animal symbolism permeating myth and religion—from Mithras’s bull to zodiacal gods, Egyptian and Hindu deities, and Christian emblems—arguing that integrating instinct is vital for wholeness. She then introduces the circle as a Self-symbol: Brahma’s and Buddha’s cosmic orientation, Eastern mandalas and yantras (union of opposites), Christian rose windows and haloes, and “sun wheels” as archetypal inner images rendered outwardly.

The mandala extends into architecture and city planning. Rome’s founding rite (mundus, circular boundary, quadripartite division) and medieval quartered cities sacralize space by centering it. Christianity’s central symbol shifts from the equilateral cross toward the elongated Latin cross, mirroring medieval elevation of the center heavenward. The Renaissance reorients to earth and body; round church plans proliferate largely for aesthetic reasons, while alchemists pursue the squared circle as a symbol of embodied wholeness.

Modern art divides into “sensory” and “imaginative” modes. Circles reappear but lose dominance—becoming asymmetrical, multiple, or adrift (Delaunay, Kandinsky), sometimes touching divided rectangles or squares (Matisse; Nash), while Klee places a simple sphere above complexity at the “limits of understanding.” With Mondrian’s quaternary harmonies, the circle (psyche) and square (matter) often remain loosely connected, expressing modern dissociation even as their recurrence shows a persistent drive toward integration.

Jaffé concludes that this symbolic tension surfaces beyond art: the 20th-century “visionary rumor” of circular UFOs reflects collective projections of the archetype of wholeness, signaling the unconscious psyche’s attempt to heal a split age through the circle symbol.