Microcosm and macrocosm: the human being as a little world

Among the images the Renaissance inherited from antiquity, few enjoyed a fortune comparable to that of the microcosm. The idea is simple to state and dizzying in its consequences: the human being contains within itself, on a reduced scale, everything that makes up the universe. Elements, planets and celestial intelligences all find a counterpart in body and soul. For Cornelius Agrippa, who wrote De occulta philosophia between 1510 and 1533, this correspondence was not a poetic metaphor but the very foundation of the possibility of knowing and acting upon the world.

The ancient roots of the idea

The formula “man is a little cosmos” has come down to us as a fragment of Democritus, the philosopher of Abdera who lived in the fifth century BC. Plato, in the Timaeus, describes the human body built by the lesser gods from the same elements as the cosmos, with a round head in imitation of the heavenly sphere. The Stoics, with their doctrine of a pneuma pervading all things, strengthened the parallel. In late antiquity, medical astrology then fixed the so-called melothesia, which assigned a part of the body to each zodiac sign, from Aries for the head to Pisces for the feet.

The Middle Ages: from cosmos to body

The twelfth century gave the idea memorable literary and visual forms. Bernardus Silvestris, around 1147, divided his Cosmographia into two parts entitled Megacosmus and Microcosmus, narrating first the creation of the world and then that of man. Hildegard of Bingen, in the Liber divinorum operum composed roughly between 1163 and 1174, had a human figure with outstretched arms depicted within the circles of the universe, crossed by winds and influences.

The “zodiac man” often appears in late medieval books of hours. The most famous is found in the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, illuminated by the Limbourg brothers in the second decade of the fifteenth century: a naked body covered with the signs of the sky, a practical tool for physicians and barbers deciding the days for bloodletting.

Agrippa and the ladder of the three worlds

Agrippa places the microcosm at the centre of a universe divided into three worlds: elemental, celestial and intellectual. Man shares in all three, because he has a body made of elements, a spirit akin to the heavens and a mind that opens onto the divine. According to the philosopher from Cologne, precisely this intermediate position allows him to climb the ladder of beings and draw their virtues downwards. In the second book he even measures the proportions of the human body, showing how to inscribe it within circles and squares according to numerical harmonies.

In 1617 the English physician Robert Fludd published at Oppenheim the Utriusque cosmi historia, the history of the “two worlds”, the great and the small. The engravings of the work, produced in the workshop of the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry, make visible the entire system of mirrors between heaven and body: concentric spheres, rays, musical scales and a human figure that sums up in itself the architecture of creation.

The doctrine lost its foundation with the new science of the seventeenth century, when the cosmos ceased to appear as an animated organism. Yet it remains an indispensable key for reading the medicine, art and philosophy of Agrippa's age, in which every limb of the body pointed to a star and every star to a part of man.