Well, this started out innocently enough with inspiration by Jeannean - just playing around with the cool Photoshop kaleidoscope templates by Lloyd Williams
He calls them "Kaleidoscapes". I had this image of a gypsy moth caterpillar on a tree that I wanted to experiment with and see what kind of image I could make of it. I was playing around with changing the orientation of the caterpillar when I stumbled upon this arrangement of moths. I thought it looked like some tribal art or something, so I went down the road of making whatever this is. I wanted it to look like something that would be part of some ancient ritual, in a cave lit only by torches. I found a red sky image with clouds in my "skies" folder and added it as a layer in PS. I mixed the layer with the original in "overlay" mode to give a mysterious look to the lighting. I added the circle so I could call it a mandala...