University of Virginia Library

MACROCOSM AND MICROCOSM

The idea indicated by the couple, Macrocosm-
Microcosm, is the belief that there exists between the
universe and the individual human being an identity
both anatomical and psychical. The macrocosm is the
universe as a whole, whose parts are thought of as parts
of a human body and mind. The microcosm is an
individual human being whose parts are thought of as
analogous to the parts of the larger universe. Thus the
idea is similar to all ideas that project human traits
into Nature, ideas such as that of creative causation,
natural teleology, moral progress as a natural law, and
obviously all instances of the pathetic fallacy.

Creative causation is the idea that physical causes
produce their effects as an artisan produces his arti-
facts: the cause of rain, for example, makes it rain. By
natural teleology is meant the idea that all changes
in nature are made for a purpose. But the only purposes
we know anything about are human purposes. And
when we say that the eye was made for seeing, or that
the plant breathes carbon dioxide in order to furnish
oxygen for the animals, we are reading into things that
are nonhuman traits that are specifically human. And
when we say that the course of natural history is to-
wards maximum goodness, we are expressing the idea
of moral progress as a natural law.

If we extend such ideas, we find that we are investing
the whole of nature with more and more human char-
acters. For instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans
saw omens of the human future in the flight of birds,
in the shape and markings of the entrails of sacrificed
animals, in an eclipse of the sun or moon, or in the
appearance of a comet. Behind all this lay the vague
notion that man's place in nature was different from
that of any other animal. The cosmos existed for his
sake and hence anything out of the ordinary must have
some special message for him. Some of this has survived
in our popular superstitions, superstitions about lucky
and unlucky days or numbers, about thunder on the
left, about black cats crossing one's road. Modern sci-
ence has depended upon the abandonment of all such
ideas and has seen the universe as a mechanism com-
pletely independent of humankind except insofar as
mankind modifies it.

That man was a microcosm makes the identification
of man and the cosmos almost complete. The element
of incompleteness is the perfection of the macrocosm
and the imperfection of man. The macrocosm has no
imperfection for the simple reason that it is the model
of perfection. That is why it is called a cosmos, the
primitive meaning of which is “order.” But what will
be called order will depend on what sort of regularity
one is looking for. And there are certain regularities
in human individuals as there are in the heavens: the
rhythms of sleeping and waking, of hunger, of sexual
desire, of menstruation, of fatigue. Curt Richter in his
work on “biological clocks” has shown how many
illnesses recur at rhythmic intervals.

The projection of human rhythms into the cosmos
is only one form of identifying the microcosm and the
macrocosm. But classical mythology is full of similar
projections. In fact in one of the early Greek philoso-
phers, Empedocles (fifth century B.C.) we find that the
two fundamental forces in the universe are identified
with the gods of Love and Strife, Aphrodite and Ares.
Love brings order into the world, Strife disorder; Love
produces harmony, Strife warfare. Thus the cosmos is
like an individual torn between conflicting impulses
which recur at regular intervals. The manic-depressive
would be a modern illustration of this. We should today
preserve Empedocles' two gods, but we should deper-
sonalize them and call them attraction and repulsion.
Yet even so sophisticated a thinker as Aristotle when
he came to explain the action of his Unmoved Mover
upon the world which he moved, said that it came
about in the same way as the beloved moves the lover.
The Unmoved Mover could thus preserve his immobil-
ity and yet attract the lower world towards exemplify-
ing the order that is inherent in him.

The literary source of the idea of the microcosm is
usually given as Plato's dialogue Philebus (29). In that
dialogue Socrates says that just as there are four ele-
ments in the universe, so there are in us. In us they
are weak and mixed, but in the cosmos they are pure
and strong and are the source from which we derive
our own. So we would say that the hydrogen, oxygen,
carbon, and so on that compose our bodies are identical
with the same elements in the nonhuman world. But
Plato's elements were only four in number, earth,
water, air, and fire, and they exist in us as bones, blood
and the other liquids, breath, and bodily heat. It is

obvious that our earthy parts must come from our solid
food, our liquids from the water we drink, our breath
from the air about us, and our heat from the sun.

But there is more to a human being than a body.
What unifies and holds together the elements in our
bodies? Why do we not fall apart? We know that the
body acts as a unit, the parts acting “for the sake of”
the whole. This can only be explained, as Greek scien-
tists would say, by some agent. And that agent is the
soul. But if this is true of the human body, then it must
also be true of the universal body, the cosmos. The
cosmos, says Socrates, must have a soul just as we have,
a soul which in the Middle Ages was called, after
Plotinus, a third-century Greek philosopher, the “Soul
of the World” (anima mundi). Our soul is primarily
rational; we are rational animals. The Soul of the
World must have a corresponding rationality and the
idea of a rational universe was thus launched. And the
split between a world in which miracles could happen
and one in which all proceeded according to law was
definitely made. Plato argued in this same dialogue
(30A) that the Soul of the World, like our own, must
have wisdom (sophia) and intelligence (nous). This idea
is repeated in another dialogue, of the greatest influ-
ence in later times, the Timaeus (30), where the cosmos
is said to be an image of the Demiurge, endowed with
soul and intelligence and thus duplicates the individual
human being.

The actual word “microcosm”—the word, not the
idea—meaning a little world, was first used by Plato's
pupil, Aristotle, in his Physics (252b 26). In this passage
he assumes that animals can initiate motion; they pro-
pel themselves about. If, he says, this is true in the
little world, why should it not also be true in the large
world? This argument from analogy evidently seemed
sound to the inventor of syllogistic logic and it estab-
lished the habit of referring to the cosmos as if it were
alive and self-contained. It was, in fact, later called
by the Stoics, who were materialists, a great animal
(mega zoon).

All such analogies strengthened the idea of man as
a microcosm. In Aristotle's psychology, for example,
there are three kinds of living beings, plants, animals,
and men. The plants feed and reproduce themselves
and their souls are said to have the faculty of appetite.
The animals have a vegetable soul, but add to it the
faculty of sensation. And men have not only vegetable
and animal souls, but also reason which is unique in
them. Man therefore recapitulates all life and forms
a psychic universe parallel to the universe as a whole.
Though Aristotle makes no overt use of the microcosm
as an idea, it evidently was in the back of his mind.

The microcosm was also used when discussing the
state. In Plato's Republic we find that there are three
kinds of people, the appetitive, the irascible or spirited,
and the rational. All men have appetites, some have
both appetites and irascibility, and a few have these
two faculties plus reason. It is their reason which keeps
the other faculties under control. In the state, seen as
a large human being, there are three classes of men
who correspond to three psychological types. They are
the artisans (the appetitive type), the military (the
irascible), and the philosophers (the rational). Each
serves a legitimate function but trouble arises when
one or the other of the two lower classes gets control
of the state and usurps the power of reason. The state
then becomes like a man who is a lustful glutton or
a belligerent captain. Therefore things must be so
arranged that the three classes will be kept in their
proper places and philosophers will be rulers.

Such ideas only hint at a full-fledged theory of the
identity between microcosm and macrocosm, but at
least they use the human being as a basic metaphor
of something larger and not obviously human. But at
the end of the pagan period we find the idea of the
microcosm in both the Jewish philosopher, Philo of
Alexandria, and in the Hermetica. Philo, like so many
other theologians, was worried over the biblical verse,
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”
(Genesis 1:26). In De opificio mundi (23, 69), he points
out that the likeness could not be corporeal and must
therefore be psychical. The psychical image of God
in man is the intelligence (nous), which rules us exactly
as God rules the world. He thus takes over from the
Platonic tradition that the world is a world of order
and reason. This bolsters his use of the allegorical
method of interpreting the Bible, for were he to take
it literally, he would have to grant the existence of
things which would be almost nonrational by definition.

Another Platonic strain comes out in Philo's Legum
allegoria (I, 29, 91-92), where he says that we may
think of God as the soul of the whole. And in the
Migration of Abraham (De migratione 33, 185) he uses
the simile of the household for the body, the household
in which there is a duality between the master and
those subject to him, the living and the lifeless, the
rational and the irrational, the immortal and the mor-
tal, the better and the worse. So the cosmos as a whole
has God corresponding to the mind, the master, the
life, the immortal, the best, the rational, and so on.
Just as the mind rules the body, so God rules the
universe. And indeed he takes over Aristotle's term,
the little world, and says that man is a small world
and the cosmos a large man (Quid rerum? 29-31,
146-56). In fact the use of the phrase, the human being
as a little replica of the universe and of the universe
as an enlarged man, is frequent in Philo and is evidence
of how commonplace the term and its usage had be-

come by the end of the last pre-Christian century.

Similar metaphors are found in the Hermetica which
date from the end of the pagan period to the end of
the second century A.D., though some of the writings
may be earlier and some later. In Poimandres (I, 12,
31) we are told that nature is the image of man and
that just as eternity is the image of God, so the cosmos
is the image of eternity, the sun of the cosmos, and
man of the sun (Nous to Hermes, Poimandres XI, 15).
Man, we also read, is called a cosmos from his divine
composition (Asclepius 10). How much of this is play-
ing with figures of speech and how much is serious
philosophizing can only be determined by one's sym-
pathy with the vagueness of religious writing. But at
least it shows, as do the passages from Philo, that the
notion of man as a microcosm was common at this
time.

In Seneca the earth itself was talked of in terms of
the human body. In his Natural Questions (III, 15, 1)
he says that just as we have veins and arteries, so has
the earth. Our veins carry blood and our arteries air;
in the earth there are conduits like them that carry
water and air. We have various “humors,” brain, mar-
row, mucus, saliva, tears; the earth has other humors
which harden into minerals and become gold, silver,
bitumen. Just as blood will spurt out if you open a
vein, so a spring or river will gush forth if you open
one of the veins of the earth. Seneca carries out the
correspondence to the point of correlating the perio-
dicities of the body—quartain fever, gout, menstrua-
tion, the time of gestation—with the overflowing of
springs and their dessication. It was common belief that
stones grew in the body of the earth and that the earth
as a whole had grown old and its powers of production
weakened. It was common practice to speak of the
earth in terms of the human body.

Meanwhile the pseudoscience of astrology was
developing. In astrology not only are certain planets,
including the sun and moon, said to have characters
resembling human temperaments, but they, like the
signs of the zodiac, have a mysterious control over
human life, the kind of control that in primitive science
is believed to exist between similars. In Greek thought
we find that there must always be an identity between
cause and effect and in astrology the saturnine temper-
ament, for instance, is produced in a man born under
the sign of Saturn, the jovial in the man born under
the sign of Jupiter. Thus the heavens possess psycho-
logical traits identical with those of human beings. We
preserve this idea in our vocabulary when we speak
not only of saturnine and jovial people, but also of
lunatics, mercurical people, and venereal diseases. In
one of the Hermetic fragments preserved by Stobaeus
(fifth century A.D.), we find that the planets are actually
in us. That is why we breathe, shed tears, laugh, grow
angry, beget children, sleep, speak, and have desires.
For tears come from the Kronos (Saturn) who is within
us, generation comes from Zeus, speech from Hermes,
anger from Ares, sleep from Luna, desire from Aphro-
dite, and laughter from the Sun.

The control of the zodiacal signs over our bodies
was believed to be even more detailed. For each sign
had its particular region of our anatomy under its sway.
The list follows.

• The Ram (Aries)—the head

• The Bull (Taurus)—the neck

• The Twins (Gemini)—the arms

• The Lion (Leo)—the shoulders

• The Crab (Cancer)—the breast

• The Maiden (Virgo)—the entrails

• The Scales (Libra)—the buttocks

• The Scorpion (Scorpio)—the genitals

• The Centaur (Sagittarius)—the thighs

• The Goat (Capricornus)—the knees

• The Water Bearer (Aquarius)—the lower legs

• The Fish (Pisces)—the feet

It was thus possible to envision the zodiac as a great
man lying in a circle with his head at Aries and his
feet at Pisces. And because of the astrological associa-
tion of planets with the zodiacal signs, the correlation
of the heavens with man was both anatomical and
psychological. For since the planets had definite tem-
peraments, the zodiacal man had not only control over
the various parts of our bodies but the planets influ-
enced our souls as well. Like most figures of speech
this one broke down, for the planets were not part
of the zodiac and, though lustful desires arise in our
genitals controlled by Scorpio, the connection between
Scorpio and Venus may be remote.

By the third century the Platonic tradition had
developed into Neo-Platonism under Plotinus. Accord-
ing to Plotinus the universe was not created by God
but emanated from Him as light emanates from a
candle. God is replaced by The One, whose first two
emanations are the Intelligence (nous) and the Soul
of the World (anma mundi). From the former emanate
all the Platonic ideas and from the latter the individual
souls of men, animals, and plants. The importance of
this for us lies in its positing two human characteristics
at the source of all being. The Intelligence and the
Soul of the World can be described only in human
terms and therefore at the very heart of reality was
a human element. The three persons (hypostases) of
Plotinus' trinity were analogous to the three elements
of a human being, his unity, his intelligence, and his
soul. Psychically he is as he was described by Philo,
a little world. And since out of an individual's intelli-

gence were believed to flow his most general ideas,
and from them his less general, down to sensations,
so from the cosmic intelligence flowed all the abstract
ideas that were logically possible and from them the
less general, down to particulars. The Tree of Porphyry,
which can be found in any elementary textbook of
logic, illustrates how from the most abstract and gen-
eral of ideas, that of Being, emanate the species of
being until one comes down to the material world.

The process of emanation permitted a philosopher
to have a God as a supreme being, immutable and
eternal, and yet the source of all beings. But it con-
flicted with the biblical account of creation. This might
have proved a stumbling block to the Jewish philoso-
phers of the Middle Ages but, as the Cabala shows,
emanation seemed reconcilable with creation in the
eyes of some of them. As early as the Abot (eighth
or ninth century) we find R. Nathan (Ch. 31) comparing
every part of the human body to some feature of the
earth, the hair to the forests, the bones to the wood,
the lungs to the wind. And in Bahya (eleventh century)
the nine spheres correspond to the nine substances of
the human body, while the twelve signs of the zodiac
correspond to the twelve apertures. There is a com-
plete parallel between the bodies and souls of individ-
uals and the cosmos. A similar but less fantastic point
of view was expressed by the tenth-century Jewish
Neo-Platonist, Isaac Israeli. Borrowing from Al-Kindi
(ninth century), who said that philosophy is self-
knowledge, and that self-knowledge expands to knowl-
edge of all things, he says, “For this reason the philoso-
phers called man a microcosm” (Israeli, p. 28). The
source of the idea that self-knowledge is cosmic
knowledge is probably a treatise by Porphyry, On
Know Thyself. This exists only in fragments and the
following can be found in Stobaeus (Vol. 3, Ch. 21,
no. 27, p. 580):

That self-knowledge is cosmic knowledge is based
upon an identity between the self and the cosmos, an
identity of a “spiritual” rather than a corporeal nature.
Yet unless one believed in a strict existential duality
between mind and body, one was likely to believe that
each faculty of the mind corresponded to some faculty
of the body. Just as, for example, vision was dependent
on the eye, the eye could be, as Schopenhauer was
to say in the nineteenth century, a corporeal embodi
ment of the desire to see. In this manner the whole
material world became a symbolic set of desires and
thoughts, and parallelism between material and mental
existences was developed in detail. Just as any abnor-
mal occurrence was an omen to the pagans, so a comet
or earthquake or sudden flash of lightning or, of course,
a dream “meant” something to the medieval Christian.
Hence there grew up the tradition that the microcosm
was of a spiritual nature and the corporeal parallels
were not emphasized.

So Godefroy de Saint Victor (d. 1194) said in so many
words in his Microcosmus (Ch. 18) that man is called
a world not because of his body but because of his
spirit. In his case the parallelism is based on Saint
Augustine's identification of the ages of the world and
those of the individual. To this is added a parallel with
the six days of creation. In Godefroy the details are
all worked out. “In the beginning of nascent time,”
he says (p. 47), “Moses says that God created heaven
and earth.” And in the beginning of nascent mankind
God created the human spirit capable of celestial and
terrestrial things by communicating to him the aptitude
of four powers, sensuality, imagination, reason, and
intelligence. And as the earth was “without form and
void,” so the human spirit was created only with the
aptitude of exercising these faculties, not with their
actualization. Godefroy then takes up each day of
creation and explains it as one of the ages of man from
infancy on.

In the second chapter of Book I (p. 31) he points
out that “most men may be called a world.” “Indeed,”
he continues, “the philosophers call the world generally
by the Greek name of cosmos, which again they divide
as it were into two kinds, one the macrocosmos, the
other the microcosmos, meaning by the megacosmos
[sic] this visible machine of the world. But by micro-
cosmos they mean man.” The parallelism between man
and the universe is given in detail in Chapter 12 (p.
39).

Thus the word “microcosm” in Godefroy is not a term
of praise. The changes of the world are all in the

direction of degeneration, another idea that comes to
Godefroy from Saint Augustine. So each age of an
individual man is a step towards degeneration and
death.

A more proper use of the word mundus, we are told,
has nothing to do with man's body. It is properly used
only in reference to his spirit. There follows (Chs. 21ff.)
a discussion of human psychology which develops the
parallelism between the four elements and the human
body and soul. The body corresponds to the two passive
elements and the soul to the two active. The body
corresponds to the former and the soul to the latter.
Left to himself, man goes steadily downhill, but can
be rescued by grace, another Augustinian element. By
grace he may come to know the good (scire bonum),
to will the good (velle bonum) and to have the power
to do the good (posse bonum). Posse comes from the
Father; scire from the Son; velle from the Holy Spirit,
an order which, says Godefroy, is the exact opposite
of the order of things in nature. The details of this
account are all worked out and give one a clear idea
not only of the microcosm as a spiritual being but also
of the medieval imagination. Distinctions are made
only to be erased; all interpretations are based on
biblical texts; and they are all allegorical. The spiritual
microcosm, enlivened by grace, corresponds to the
Trinity, and just as the three Persons of the Trinity
coalesce into one, so do the three powers of the human
spirit.

The use of man as a basic metaphor was also to be
found in political treatises, as it was in Plato. To take
but the most famous example, John of Salisbury talks
of the prince as the head of the body politic—the
expression corpus politicum is itself of interest—the
senate as the heart, the court as the sides, the officers
and judges as the eyes, ears, and tongue, executive
officials as the unarmed hand, the army as the arms,
the financial department as the belly and intestines,
and so on (Gierke, p. 131, n. 76). This goes back to
Plato's Republic, though Plato made no such detailed
similes, and it continued at least until our own times,
as when people say that the legislature reflects the will
of the people, the executive carries out the decisions
of Congress, and the judiciary reasons to the conclu-
sions of the law. It is as if the government had sensation
(Congress), reason (The Supreme Court), and will (the
President).

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the idea of
man as a microcosm took a different turn. It is found
in “spiritual magic” (Walker) and even in architecture
(Wittkower, Yates). These derivatives probably stem
from the revival of interest in the Cabala in men of
whom Pico della Mirandola and Reuchlin were the
most important. Confining ourselves to these two, the
idea that interests us is to be found in the former's
Heptaplus (1491) and the latter's De arte Cabalistica
(1517).

There are, says Pico, four worlds, but each is a
replica of them all. They are the angelic and invisible
world, the celestial, the sublunary and corruptible
world, and mankind. Since each world reproduces all
the others, this must also be true of man. Going back
to the Cabala, Pico bases his ideas of the Tree of
Sephirot, a representation of the metaphysical universe
in which the Spirit of God is at the top and matter
at the bottom. In between are the various levels of
reality as in Plotinus (Sérouya, p. 259). Just below the
Spirit of God comes the Metatron who communicates
between the ideas and the corporeal world, called by
Reuchlin (p. 773) “the intellectual agent of the First
Mover.” This corresponds to the Neo-Platonic nous.
Just below the Metatron is the Soul of the Messiah,
“of an essence continuous with both the angelic and
divine worlds.” Then comes the “Soul of Elba.” In spite
of these distinctions, there are no gaps between these
worlds; all is continuous. Similarly there are no gaps
in the microcosm, the Intelligence, the Will, and the
Memory being tightly bound together, three functions
of one being.

In the Heptaplus Pico asserts the existence of only
three worlds, the intellectual, which is the realm of
the Platonic Ideas, the celestial, consisting of the
heavens with the stars and planets, and the corruptible,
which is sublunary. In this place he clearly states that
these stand for the three parts of a man, “at the top
his head, then that which extends from his neck to his
navel, third that which extends from his navel to his
feet” (p. 61). There is a complete similarity among
these three parts of the microcosm and the three realms
of the macrocosm. In the head is the brain, the source
of knowledge and hence of the ideas. In the chest is
the heart, “source of vital motion and heat.” And below
are the organs of generation. So in the macrocosm there
is the level of the angels who know the Ideas directly,
the heavens in which is the sun which corresponds to
the heart, and below that the moon where corruption
and change begin. This correspondence is so exact that
magical influences can be brought down from heaven
by preparing the soul to receive them (Yates, passim).
One of the effects of music is this end (Walker,
Ch. 1).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the corre-
spondences between microcosm and macrocosm were
used in a variety of ways; in the perfection of memory
(Yates), in medicine, and in divinatory astrology. But
the most influential use of the idea is to be found in
the Monadology of Leibniz (Wiener, p. 533). In this
metaphysical treatise the universe is a constellation of

centers of force called monads. There is no interaction
among the monads; each is self-enclosed, or in Leibniz'
words, “windowless.” But each monad reflects all the
others by a pre-established harmony, and hence, the
monad which is the soul of a man represents as in a
mirror all the other monads in the universe. The only
differences among these beings is the clearness and
distinctness of the images. Monads on the sub-human
level have less clear reflections of the higher monads
but the higher monads have clearer images of those
below them as well as of those above them. Thus man
is preserved as the image and likeness of God, who
is also a monad, but one of infinite clarity. As in Pico,
there are no gaps in Leibniz' universe. There is a
continuous gradation of clarity and activity running
from God down to the most inert level of existence.
It was this philosophy which eventuated in the nine-
teenth century in that system of metaphysics known
as personalism.

The rise and rapid progress of the natural sciences
proved to be an obstacle to the idea of the microcosm
and it became, like astrology, an interest only of his-
torians. No one of the stature of Pico or Leibniz could
take it seriously as science, though it may survive in
popular beliefs. The zodiacal man can still be found
in rural almanacs and is still reproduced in books on
astrology (MacNeice, p. 127). It is one of those ideas
that go underground and then emerge from time to
time as the ideas of self-taught philosophers. But to
all intents and purposes it is obsolete except as a figure
of speech, sometimes meaning no more than any small
independent group of people, a lodge or church or
school. When we speak of the head of the state, we
do not consciously apply the idea of the microcosm
to the state. In fact the idea became so watered down
that when Maurice Scève came to write his poem, Le
Microcosme (1562), he used the term to denote only
Adam before the Fall, living in pure innocence, with-
out art or science, without even an articulate language,
“knowing only his God.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Translations, unless otherwise identified, are by George
Boas.

George Perrigo Conger, Theories of Macrocosmos Micro-
cosmos in the History of Philosophy (New York, 1922).
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi... (1617). Otto Gierke,
Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F. W. Maitland
(Cambridge, 1900). Godefroy de Saint Victor, Microcosmus,
ed. Philippe Delhaye (Lille and Gemblous, 1951). Louis
Ginzberg, article, “Cabala,” Jewish Encyclopedia (New
York, 1902). Louis MacNeice, Astrology (Garden City, N.Y.,
1964). Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, in Opera omnia
(Basel, 1557). Johann Reuchlin, De arte Cabalistica, in Pico's
Opera omnia (Basel, 1557). Curt P. Richter, Biological Clocks
in Medicine and Psychiatry (Springfield, Ill., 1965). Maurice
Scève, Le Microcosme, ed. Albert Béguin (Paris, 1947). Henri
Sérouya, La Kabbale (Paris, 1947). D. P. Walker, Spiritual
and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London,
1958). Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age
of Humanism (London, 1949). Frances A. Yates, The Art
of Memory (Chicago, 1966).

GEORGE BOAS

[See also Allegory; Analogy in Early Greek Thought; Anal-
ogy of the Body Politic; Anthropomorphism; Astrology;
God; Neo-Platonism; State.]