II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

2. Perennial Wisdome: An AnthropoCosmic Code

Faivre, Anton. The Children of Hermes and the Sciences of Man. Merkel, Irene and Alan Debus, eds. Hermeticism and the Renaissance.. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1988. By the French scholar of esoteric philosophy, a clear discernment of its central concepts. These principles underlie and are manifest in all modes of belief and provide the necessary path to perceive an ordained, nested and portentous creation.

The universe, conceived as a system of analogical and dynamic relationships, like a text to be read, decoded, is obviously one of the biggest common denominators within this vast current of thought….What a beautiful lesson so many of the thinkers of the Renaissance teach us, those who knew how to read the book of the world, of man and of theophanies! They understood that language starts with reading and passes through it - the reading of myths, of anthropos and of cosmos.

Feldhay, Rivka. Galileo and the Church. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. In part on the analogical “cultural field” of Renaissance and Reformation thinking which was founded on a human-nature correspondence leading to the “emblematic” worldview held by Jesuit scholars of the time.

FitzGerald, Garret, et al. The Future of Humans as Model Organisms. Science. 361/552, 2018. A seven person team from the USA and UK including David Botstein post a remarkable proposal that as comparative anatomy, physiology and genomic studies across all species find deep homologous similarities, we people ourselves could well serve as iconic entities. We thus locate these scientific advances in this section as a 21st century confirmation of the traditional wisdom that macrocosmic universe and microcosmic persons are very much mirror images of each other. In our temporal genesis, a corollary could well be, as long alluded to, parents and children – mother/father and son/daughter.

Indeed, over the past decade, we have deepened our understanding not only of how the genomic blueprint for human biology manifests physical and chemical characteristics (phenotype), but also of how traits can change in response to the environment. A better grasp of the dynamic relationship between genes and the environment may truly sharpen our ability to determine disease risk and response to therapy. A collection of human phenotypic data, and its integration with “omic” information (genomic, proteomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, microbiomic, and metabolomic, among others), along with remote-sensing data, could provide extraordinary opportunities for discovery. (552)

Fowler, Jeaneane. An Introduction to the Philosophy and Religion of Taoism. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2005. A methodical treatise on traditional Chinese cosmic complementarities which embrace a parental universe and exemplary human persons.

Gordon, Kerry. Worlds Within Worlds: Kabbalah and the New Scientific Paradigm. Zygon. 37/4, 2002. As the latest science finds a complex, self-organizing cosmos where the same dynamics and patterns apply everywhere, this model is seen to converge with the ancient teachings of Judaic wisdom.

From its earliest beginnings Kabbalah has held that the coevolutionary dynamics exhibited at the macrocosmic level of cosmological unfolding are reiterated in a self-similar fashion at the microcosmic level of human consciousness. (973)

Gordon, Robin. Searching for the Soror Mystica: The Lives and Science of Women Alchemists. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013. By much travel and research, a Mount St. Mary’s College psychologist and educator achieves an overdue study of the strong feminine contribution to this field of original metaphysics. From the apocryphal Maria the Hebrew (c. 3rd century) through history to 17th natural philosophers and psychologists such as Isabella Cortese, Althea Talbot, and Elizabeth Grey, a visionary woman’s wisdom illuminated the Magnum Opus or Great Work to perceive, heal, unify, and abide in matter and spirit.

Another important aspect of understanding the idea of the psyche is that it has both a feminine and masculine nature, regardless of one’s sex. Balancing the feminine and masculine principles is a goal of individuation or psychic development. Eastern philosophy speaks of the feminine yin and the masculine yang as being active principles in our psyches. It can be argued that macro-entities such as culture and world consciousness contain these opposing aspects as well. The alchemical term “coniunctio” describes the joining of the two principles, resulting in something is greater than the sum of the parts. This challenge of achieving harmony with the delicate balance of differing psychic energies will be illuminated in the course of telling the women alchemists’ stories. (7)

Green, Arthur. A Kabbalah for the Environmental Age. Tikkun. 14/5, 1999. A Brandeis University theologian remands us to the Sefirot so as to appreciate its recurrent textual cosmos whereof human life is a microcosmic image of a spiritual creation. Only by this recovery of wisdom and its revelatory principle can ecological sustainable be achieved

Each person is a microcosm, also built in the same pattern of the sefirot, so that cosmology and psychology, our ways of understanding life’s origins and our own innermost selves, are quite identical. God’s cosmic journey into multiplicity and your inward journey into unity are mirror images of one another….The human being is thus a microcosm of the Torah, itself the blueprint through which God created the cosmos. (34)

Griffiths, J. G. Triads and Trinity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996. On the constant perception of a tripartite reality in Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Persian, Greek, Chinese, Roman, Celtic, Hebraic and Christian cultures. Its epitome is the “ubiquitously popular” model of the father, mother and child family.

Guenther, Herbert. From Reductionism to Creativity. Boston: Shambhala, 1989. Each Asian religion has within its teaching a dynamical facet which complements its holistic, contextual emphasis. A Canadian scholar of Far Eastern Studies then finds the rDzogs-chen school of Mahayana Buddhism to anticipate complexity science whence universe and mind are to be seen as self-structuring, emergent processes.

The idea of a hierarchical organization of the universe and of man evolving with, rather than in it, is as old as Buddhism itself. We only have to think of the triadic world system of the Kamaloka, Rupaloka and Arupyaloka and the individual’s corresponding levels of psychic awareness. In rDzogs-chen thinking, which is thoroughly evolutionary, this idea of a hierarchical organization is intimately intertwined with the principles of homology and complementarity. (215, 216)

Guenther, Herbert. Wholeness Lost and Wholeness Regained: Tales of Individuation from Ancient Tibet. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994. The same story of psychic passage resides at the heart of every culture, which is now being rediscovered on a new stage and vernacular by humankind.

In their process-oriented thinking, the rDzogs-chen thinkers were fully aware of the circularity of the processes of life that is characteristic for dynamic, complex, self-organizing, autopoietic systems of which the human individual is an immediately experiencable illustration. (143)

Haberman, Jacob, translator. The Microcosm of Joseph Ibn Saddiq. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. An introduction to the thought and writings of this 13th century Iberian Kabbalist which is founded upon three concepts: a natural hierarchy, a resemblance between each stage and the Divine macrocosm, and human beings as the intended exemplar. So there is an incarnate code by which access to true knowledge is made possible. But Haberman’s lucid introductory essay laments the loss of this path to wisdom:

What has been lost by discarding these theories is not only a unifying concept of the universe but also a sense of belonging and security. Modern man is characterized by the loss of intimacy, charisma, and traditional values….men and women find themselves alone and homeless in an indifferent universe and sense a latent meaninglessness of life. (26)

Hanegraaff, Wouter. Reason, Faith, and Gnosis. Meusburger, Peter, et al, eds. Clashes of Knowledge. Berlin: Springer, 2008. The University of Amsterdam historian of Hermetic philosophy articulates the perennial secret that in some deep, ingrained way human microcosm and Divine macrocosm are one and the identical same.

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