Timeless, universal and all embracing, the Mandala is one of the great symbols of the contemplative and ritualistic elements of all religions and has passed from east to west as a means of inner healing and self-orientation. "Carl Jung regarded the Mandala as one of the archetypal symbols issuing from the collective unconscious",says Fitzpatrick,"and I first became seriously interested in the religious and artistic symbolism of the Mandala a couple of years ago when a group of Tibetan monks came to Dublin and exhibited the making of a Mandala, with coloured sands, on the floor of the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Trinity Colege. The Kalachakra Sand Mandala has been handed down in an unbroken line from earliest times and is believed to have been taught by the Buddha in 600B.C. I am fascinated by the links between the beliefs and practices of the very early Celtic Christian church, Coptic and Gnostic Christianity and the influences of Buddhism in the teachings of Jesus, as relayed to us in the Gospels, the Gnostic Scriptures and the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it is obvious that the Teacher of Righteousness, who was the pivotal figure of the Dead Sea Scrolls, is one and the same as the later Jesus of the Gospels and probably more historically correct.

In my own interpretation of the Mandala, I want to include the beliefs and practices of the pre-Christian Celts and Irish; their belief in a solar deity and their stellar cosmology. I intend to produce, over the next couple of years, a definitive series of Mandalas: three in all, reflecting the basic Trinity as revealed in the carved stones of Newgrange and elsewhere, and reflected in later Christian religious practices".