Introduction:
In her article in Omni entitled ‘Mandala Architecture,’ Tracy Cochran [1994] writes: “while many people of the West accept mandalas as representative of a cosmic force, few understand they are meant to be blueprints as well.” Cochran elucidates that the Mandala is not just a ‘tantric’ or philosophical system. The priest’s function is more or less the same as the architect’s, from his conceptualizing the image to his systematic and interpretative approach to his task of analysis. James Ferwerda, faculty member, Cornell University, explains how the two-dimensionality of the Mandala is transmuted into the three-dimensional verisimilitude of the ‘real’: “we model the process of light reflection. We create a geometric model, then we study the materials that go into the building, exactly the way physicists and chemists analyze material. Then we simulate the way light reflects and refracts and is transferred by these materials, and that's how we make an image.” (Cochran 1994)

Analysis:
Architecture seems to operate along the basis of instinctive behaviour, like many other activities performed by human beings. The underlying impulses beneath many seemingly ‘rational’ human systems seem to be instinctual rather than ruminative in nature; for example, as evidenced many a time by architects and researchers in the field, making structures to live in, whether they be simple or elaborate in nature, is a repetition of the act of nesting. [Collie, 1999]

Besides its structure, the centuries-old St. Sepulchre's Church in Cambridge, England, is also ‘typical’ of the archetypal act of image conceptualizing, as evidenced by the alterations and restorative work that have been carried out on it. For what is alteration but the attempt, among other objectives, to achieve perfection?
Another aspect of the church’s structure is, of course, the attempt to raise the human to the level of the divine; to the level, as Coleridge put it, of the Infinite I AM. Creation is a divine act, involving the efforts of the reason as well as the intuition. And architecture, involving as it does the sweat and labour of physical toil as well as the tangibles of concrete and cement, somehow secularizes the idea of creation in a far more corporeal manner than perhaps any other act of creation can – either human or divine, for that matter.

Ironically, the porch of St Sepulchre’s overlooks Newgate, notorious for its inhumane treatment of prisoners; a further irony is that St Sepulchre’s was often a stop where prisoners sentenced to the gallows at Tyburn would be ‘treated’ to a final drink. As an article in the Newgate Chronicler reports, a tradition was established at St Sepulchre’s of tolling the funeral bell for every condemned prisoner who was driven past. (Storyoflondon.com)

Regardless of whether or not we see St Sepulchre’s as an architectural marvel today, it tells a tale. Like all works of art that attempt to concretize the mystical and the unfathomable, monuments like this one are almost preternatural emblems of the human attempt to overreach. [Long, 1959] At the time, though, there is the somber reminder of the bell, a reminder, among other things, to researchers and academics, signaling that a work of art is also, in many ways, a time capsule of sorts. St Sepulchre’s is not just a magnificent church, not merely a work of staggering architectural importance; it’s also a reminder that the ‘divine’ – or the Mandala, if you will – is often relative to interpretation. What a future generation chooses to see as apocryphal or transcendent may actually be nothing more or less than the secular reality of an earlier time, represented to a later age only by an anachronistic, solitary, misinterpreted ambassador of sorts.

Conclusion:
Is the Mandala, then, also a primarily secular construction rather than an esoteric, hidden art? As the historiographer has told us, it is never possible to know the past completely – only to write about it from our telescoping perspective. But it is fun, nevertheless, and it is also humbling – to turn concepts on their heads, and to wonder, ‘what if?’. Perhaps, instead of the old antithetical ways of looking at the secular and the religious as mutually exclusive, the mute monument of St Sepulcher’s may yet reveal to us an untold story. A story that takes us back to a truth – that it is only the tale, never the teller, who is to be trusted.