Dear Jill,

Thank you for your kind response on the Yantra site - would you be so kind as tell me how you found the site?

I think that your questions are in themselves, enormous, and perhaps lifetime or two would suffice to answer them.

C. G. Jung has given a great deal of information about what in this context we can call the archetype of 8-ness, especially for example, in his great opus 'Psychology and Alchemy'. [The number eight is entered in the Index under NUMBERS.]

From another perspective, the Number 8 does not exist, without bringing into consideration the Centre - which would mean that 8 is actually 9.

Go to the Main Index - follow the Archetypal Tarot link - and shop around until you find the ARCANUM 8 material.

Re: Islamic esotericism - this is also an area that interests me greatly - and I have gathered some material - the key area here is of course - Harran - and the so-called Sabians. At the moment there is a slight Renaissance of interest in Harran - most people have never even heard of it - but it remains the Bethlehem of Hermeticism…I would like to publish this material on the Web as well - when time and economy permits.

We find 'eightness' in Harran as well - and I suppose we could trace a particular esoteric transmission across the millennia by the NUMBER codes that act as its container. Certainly Henry Corbin gave some insight into numerology and esoteric esotericism, in his various writings. On this level, which is an initiatory, transmission matrix - we can again, excavate [from existence itself, so to speak] a yantra!

For example, why there are only a certain amount of initiates at any given time - this was expressed very simply in Jim Henson's film 'The Dark Crystal ' which incidentally, was one of the first films to use Yantra in the sense I am considering here. I suppose we would have to consider the relationship, if any, between yantras - and the pentagrams of classical magic. But that is an area that I steer clear of, as it has its darker side.

Instead, we need to do an exhaustive research on the yantras in the Collected Works of Giordano Bruno - a vast task indeed. Some have been published, here and there - especially in the works of Dame Francis Yates; and a few by Elmire Zola in his book on The Divine Androgyne.

Eightness, also appears in Gnosticism - and in the environment of Paracelsus.

The Eight-Petaled Lotus is of course, fundamental to Hindu and Tibetan sadhanas, and is associated with one or another of the chakras, depending on which system is being used.

Indeed, I would say I am not too keen on the yantra as a fixed object - but more interested in seeing its manifestations as a living dynamic principle, the pattern of the energy field. Even archetypal psychology would do with vivifying its 'concept' of the archetype - according to some Buddhist thinking, a concept is a stable structure at the end of a process. Though a yantra is a stable structure, as a painting or form - it is the process that we should be paying attention too! This would apply to eightness as well.

Yours sincerely,

Samten de Wet