For readers of Jung, the image is familiar at first glance because Jung includes it as one of the plates accompanying his seminal essay ‘Concerning mandala symbolism’, where it appears following page 356 in CW 9(i), The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, as Figure 14. It is, however, somewhat confusingly explained in the discussion of this figure on page 368 as an ‘image of Shiva bindu, the unextended point’, showing ‘the divine power before creation’, and thus the god (Shiva) ‘resting in the point’. Jung adds: ‘Hence the snake signifies extension, the mother of Becoming, the creation of the world of Forms’. As to the point itself, Jung tells us that ‘In India this point is also called Hiranyagarbha’, ‘golden germ’ or ‘golden egg’.