Averill and Sundararajan, "Experiences Of Solitude: Issues Of Assessment, Theory, And Culture"

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

The nested circles of the Great Chain of Being that represents the worldview of all pre-modern cultures

Cognitive conceptualization of borderline personality disorder

Hal Straus and Jerold Jay Kreisman, Sometimes I Act Crazy

Magical and Amuletic scroll of Franz Anton Buechler 

[Germany, 17th century]

Lavishly illustrated with 56 various amulets and sigils drawn from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia and Johann Baptista Großchedel’s ‘Magical Calendar’, as well as medieval grimoires and the Clavicula Salomonis, this scroll was designed to invoke powerful spiritual and angelic protections for its owner, 17th-century magician Franz-Anton Buechler.

Akali Sikh warrior wearing the distinctive Akali turban, India, 1860. 

El primer mandala de Carl Jung.

Roberto Assagioli’s Psychosynthesis Star Diagram

“Drawings based on subtle-knowledge and brief description of some types of angels“

The famous tattooed leg of Queen Vaikehu of the Marquesas Islands, from Atolls of the Sun by Frederick O'Brien,1922

In classical empiricist approaches, we could say that our ways of talking depend upon the world; to the extent that our talk is rooted, or grounded in what the facts of the world will permit or allow us to say, our talk is about what we ‘find’ to be there. 

On the other hand, in line with hermeneutical or interpretive views, it is equally true to say that what we take to be the nature of the world depends upon our ways of talking about it; thus, to the extent that it is they that ‘give’ or ‘lend’ it intelligible (and legitimate) structure and significance, it is as we ‘make’ it to be.

—John Shotter, Social Individuality Versus Possessive Individualism