Introduction to Damiani’s Diagrams and Mandalas
Starting from his earliest days at the American Brahman Bookstore in Ithaca, NY, and continuing through his leading classes at Wisdom’s Goldenrod, Anthony Damiani always had a blackboard by his side when he was teaching. After drawing a picture to illustrate his remarks, he would punctuate his speech by striking the board at the appropriate spots as he explained a passage from a text, “This is the source of this here!” or “This is included in that!” He would often say that if you couldn’t draw a picture that distilled your understanding of something, you didn’t really understand it. Trying to pictorialize your understanding in a diagram was thus a crucial part of the process of assimilating meaning.
Contemplating Diagrams as Symbols
He sometimes explained the importance of these diagrams by using Carl Jung’s notion that symbols function to unite the unconscious and conscious levels of mind:
AD: Symbol seems to be the only means at our disposal by which we can, so to speak, allow the unconscious and the conscious to get combined. In other words, it’s the only way that apperception can take place. There’s something unknown in us and there’s something in our conscious mind that we do know, we’ve developed certain skills, alright. Now the combination of these two is going to produce a symbol, and it is off of the symbol that we’re going to try to understand what those meanings are. (transcript, 1/9/1982)
AD (with some intensity): You mean after all the diagrams we’ve been putting up, trying to elicit, force out of you reactions of what you understand? Isn’t that the best example you had so far of a symbol that is forcing you to bring together your unconscious innate knowledge and what you understand? (transcript, 1/9/1982)
Damiani had a very profound view of symbols. For him, even a text could be symbolic if it was formulated by someone in the state of inspiration or by someone, for example, a sage, who lived in the Truth and had the ability to formulate an expression of it. When something is approached as a symbol, or perhaps better, when we are seized by something as symbolic, there is a depth to it that is not limited by our current conscious understanding. It goes way beyond anything our lower mind can imagine. We have a dim awareness that there is much more there and that something in us knows this more, which is why Damiani says that there’s something “unknown in us.” And if the symbol truly seizes us, we will feel a vital urge to plumb its depths. This could lead to deeper and deeper verbal formulations, as well to the creation of more and more diagrams, each affecting the other in turn.
We can see this process at work in Anthony Damiani’s life. He gave classes from 1967 through to his death in 1984, often teaching six to seven evenings per week, with additional classes in the mornings and afternoons on weekends. His ability to formulate and reformulate both questions and answers to metaphysical problems went hand-in-hand with the creation of new diagrams. His sketchbooks contain over 300 diagrams!
In this part of the archive, we thus have a record of how he explored the depths of the One, Intellectual-Principle, Soul, and the universe through the production and contemplation of symbolic diagrams. Most of these diagrams were drawn in sketchbooks that were left to Wisdom’s Goldenrod as part of his research materials, along with drafts of papers and notes.
He didn’t bring these sketchbooks to classes and so many of his students didn’t see these diagrams until after he passed away. But he did draw versions of some of them on the blackboard in class, or else had Avery Solomon, one of his main student-collaborators, draw them. And a few were executed on posterboards, which were also referred to in classes.
About the Sketchbooks
There are over 300 images of diagrams in the diagram archive. Most of the diagrams were drawings on pages that originally were part of sketchbooks or drawing pads but that are now loose pages. Some were not part of sketchbooks but were drawn on loose pages—sheets of paper, cardboard, and even pages from a Cornell University class reunion pad!
We also refer to these diagrams as “mandalas.” Mandalas are circular symbols that represent the dynamic interplay of subtle aspects of reality through the spatial arrangements of their parts, used for visualization practices and contemplation in Hindu and Buddhist tantra.
These mandalas are also “astrological” in the sense that they use astrological symbols; however, the symbols are here used to represent cosmological and metaphysical ideas. In many of them, the viewer will see a unique combination of geometrical mandala form, astrological symbols of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the planets of the solar system, and labels using philosophic terms and concepts from various traditions. For more on the astrological mandalas, see About the Metaphysical Chart.
After Anthony Damiani’s death, these sketchpads were found and secured. They were labeled using capital letters, A-P. There are no dates on the sketchpads, so the sequence A-P doesn’t represent a chronological order. However, we believe he worked in one sketchbook at a time, so the sequence of diagrams within a sketchbook represents a chronological sequence.
At first, digital photos of most of the pages of the sketchbooks were made, and the filenames generally indicated the sketchbook name and the diagram’s page number in the sketchbook, along with some information about the camera roll. Later, at the start of the Anthony Damiani Digital Library project, the filenames were simplified, preserving the convention of referring to the sketchbooks via capital letters and using a two-digit number to indicate the page number in the sketchbook.
Most of the diagrams were drawn by Damiani. Some are by students but were found in his sketchbooks, and others were drawn by students who were executing his instructions. Sometimes these student-drawn diagrams are annotated by Damiani in cursive handwriting. For each diagram, we indicate who created it (either Anthony Damiani, Anthony Damiani and student, or student).
Based on the way Damiani talked about certain topics at certain times (as evidenced by the audio and transcripts of classes and contemporaneous student notes that included diagrams copied from the blackboard), a rough guess (in terms of years) as to when Damiani drew some of these diagrams could be made, but we decided it was too speculative to include even approximate dates for these diagrams.
The diagrams usually have labels written by Damiani in cursive. You might need to enlarge the image to read some of the labels, especially when trying to read Damiani’s handwriting. The labels are usually in pencil and can be hard to read when the contrast with the background isn’t so good.
Although most of these pages consist of diagrams with labels, some consist entirely of handwritten cursive text, some are purely geometrical without any labels, and some consist mostly of text with a small diagram included.
Information about the Diagrams Devised by the Editors
For each diagram, we supply a title, topic, keywords, and in some cases, a note.
Titles: In most cases, Damiani didn’t provide titles for the diagrams. If there was some handwriting on the diagram that seemed to be a title or could be used to devise a title, we used that in our title. Otherwise, we tried to create a title that indicates the basic subject matter of the diagram without prematurely limiting its meaning by being too specific or interpretive. But we also wanted to avoid titles that relied solely on the technical terms of astrological symbolism, though in some cases that was unavoidable.
Topics: The topics are broad categories under which many diagrams fall. In many cases, two or more topics might apply, but we settled for a single topic for each diagram—the one that best fits what the diagram is about, in our estimation. We tried not to be too granular in devising topics, so the list of topics would be easy to view in a drop-down menu.
Keywords: The keywords were mostly taken from the labels used in the diagram. In some cases, the keywords also supply information as to which philosophic system the keyword is from—for example, “seven principles of man (Theosophy).” The keywords are searchable and can be used to help find the diagrams you’re interested in.
Notes: We also supplied notes for most of the diagrams. These notes have a specific function: to help the viewer begin to understand the diagram by explaining analytically some of its features. They are not meant to provide an overall interpretation of the diagram. Many of these diagrams are so complex and have so many levels of meaning that an entire essay would be needed to say what they mean.
The idea for the notes originated with the thought that many of the diagrams arrange the glyphs of the zodiacal signs and planets in ways that will be baffling to a viewer unfamiliar with the way Damiani used them. It looks like he’s using a specialized notation, similar to mathematical or musical notation, or writing in a foreign language. And in a way he is. There is a kind of grammar to his use of these glyphs.
The Rosetta stone needed to understand this notation is what he often called the “metaphysical chart.” If you are unfamiliar with the metaphysical chart, you can learn more about it by visiting About the Metaphysical Chart. In general, the notes explain how the glyphs in the diagram are derived from their placement in the metaphysical chart but not what the diagram “means” or why Damiani selected a particular configuration of planets in signs. But we hope they will be useful aids in the process of seeing the meaning of the diagram or what problem Damiani was working on. You can find a more detailed explanation of the relationship of the notes to the metaphysical chart here: Diagram notes.
Other metadata: The metadata for each diagram also includes its physical dimensions, its creator(s) (Damiani, student, or Damiani and student), whether it contains a table, and whether it consists entirely of handwriting or is only a preliminary sketch of a geometric shape with no labels at all.
For help in searching the diagram archive, see Searching the diagram archive.