A circle, a cross, four points and a center: a similar form appears in Kongo, Lakota, Maya, Celtic and Vedic sources.
The Convergence · 6-9-26
The symbol on the cover of The Ground Beneath is the Kongo dikenga. It comes from the Kongo tradition of central Africa — a circle divided by a cross, with four cardinal marks and a center point. It maps existence: the living world above the horizontal line, the world of ancestors below, the four cardinal moments of a life.
A similar form appears in the Lakota medicine wheel, the Maya four-directional cosmogram, the Celtic wheel cross and the Vedic solar wheel. Each uses a circle, a cross, four cardinal points and a center. Each tradition has its own name for its form and its own meaning for it. In the sources I studied, the forms look alike and are used to map ideas about space, direction, and the relationship between the living and what came before and after.
Whether each form arose independently or through contact is a question for specialists in each tradition, and one image does not settle it. What the research does is set the sources side by side.
This is one example of the kind of pattern The Ground Beneath sets side by side across eighty-five traditions.
The book looks for what many traditions have in common, and this image is one way into that. The dikenga remains a Kongo symbol, and I credit it as one.
The methodology that governs how this was researched and verified is documented here: The Method →
Richard P. Wolf is the author of The Ground Beneath, in progress: I am reviewing and cataloging the sources. About the research methodology →
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