Microcosm

Man as Microcosom. Drawing from Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi historia, Oppenheim/Frankfurt, 1617–1621.

The microcosm (from Greek: μικρός mikrós "small") is, in the spiritual-scientific sense, the human being who reflects the world of the macrocosm in miniature. The sign of the microcosm is the pentagram.

„For, you see, the human being is indeed like an extract of the whole cosmos. In the human being one finds - somehow modified, somehow extracted, compensated or the like - what is present in the cosmos as law [...]

One discovers, by experiencing the will, the thinking, as I have described it to you, that the human being is really a kind of microcosm. I say this not as a phrase, as the nebulous mystics say, but in the consciousness that it has become as clear to me as only some solution of a differential equation, out of complete logical clarity. One discovers that the human being is inwardly a summary, a compendium of the whole world. And just as in our ordinary life we do not merely know what surrounds us sensually at that moment, just as we, leaving aside what surrounds us sensually at that moment, look at the image of something we experienced some ten or fifteen years ago, how that appears before us as something that is no longer there - but something of it is there in us, enabling us to reconstruct what was there then - so it is also with the expanded consciousness that arises through the transformation of ordinary thinking and willing. In that man was actually connected with all that is past, only in a more comprehensive, in a quite different, in a more spiritual sense connected with what is past, than he was connected with experiences of ten, fifteen years ago, which he can bring up again from within himself, so it is possible, if the consciousness is expanded, we can simply find out, as if from a cosmic memory, that which we were there, which simply does not live on in us for the ordinary consciousness, but which lives on for that consciousness which has arisen through the metamorphosis I have described.

It is therefore nothing other than an extension, an increase of that power which is otherwise our power of memory, whereby man inwardly, simply from his own nature, which is a summary of the macrocosm, constructively resurrects that which actually was in a certain period of time on our Earth. Man then looks to a state of the Earth where it was not yet material. And while otherwise he must construct something out of the present experiences of geology which is supposed to have been in time, he now looks to a time when the Earth was not yet there, when it was in a much more spiritual form. By constructively recreating that which lives in him, he sees that which actually underlies the formation of our Earth.

And it is the same with that which in a certain way can emerge as something constructive in us from a future state of the Earth.“ (Lit.:GA 73a, p. 374ff)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Fachwissenschaften und Anthroposophie, GA 73a (2005), ISBN 3-7274-0735-2 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Makrokosmos und Mikrokosmos, GA 119 (1988) ISBN 3-7274-1192-9 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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