100.8-10), eight metals are said to have been formed from the eight parts of his body: lead came from the head, tin from the blood, silver from the marrow, iron from the feet, copper from the bones, crystal from the fat, steel from the arms, and gold from the living soul. In the chapter about the death of Gayomard ( Bundahišn, p. 33-35) the list of seven terms is extended to the religious realm, so that the seven creations (sky, water, earth, plants, livestock, mankind, fire) are compared to the seven divin ities-Ohrmazd and the six Amesha Spentas. These last are limited here to the head, namely, the two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and mouth. 194-95), the classification of seven visible versus invisible, and seizable versus non-seizable, things draws a parallel between the stars and atmospheric phenomena, the seven terrestrial creations (with mistakes), and the seven parts of the body. The parallelism of some of them with those mentioned by a 6th-century Syriac author, Aḥūhdemmeh, suggests a borrowing from the Syriac source (Gignoux, 2001b, pp.
#Example of microcosm skin#
For example: “The skin is like the sky, the flesh like earth, the bones like mountains, and the veins like rivers, the blood in the body like the water of the sea, the belly like the ocean and hairs are like the plants.” Seven parts of the body form the nucleus of the doctrine (except that here the belly no doubt is an error by the editor), but the book enumerates many other correspondences. Most notable is the Bundahišn, chapter 28 -the very title of which (“About the human body resembling the world”) is eloquent-which contains a wealth of equivalences. It is only in the Pahlavi texts of the 9th-10th centuries that the elements of the doctrine are collected. Only one passage of the Vendidad (17.5) appears to compare hair with plants, this equivalence being one of the components. Neither the Gathas nor the Younger Avesta explicitly attest this theory. The Manichean treatise in Chinese provides a good summary of all the implications of the micro-macrocosm doctrine for it also includes, within the correspondence of the fleshly body to the celestial and terrestrial universe, other features such as the celestial wheel, the planets, the seas and the rivers, the dry and the humid, the plants and the animals, the mountains, the four seasons, the years, months, days (Gignoux, 1994, pp.
Two sets of correspondences lie at the basis of the theory of microcosm and macrocosm: (1) the equivalence between the different components of the material world and the various elements of the human body, which often amount to seven-hence the link with the astrological seven planets and (2) the correspondence of the four cosmic elements (water, fire, air, earth) to the four bodily humors (blood, phlegm, red bile, black bile) the members within either group mutually contrast in the same fashion in respect to their qualities-hu midity, dryness, heat, and cold. Within these, philosophical speculations were closely connected with medicine and astrology and so there developed a structured body of doctrines which is of great interest to the historian of ideas. While not made explicit in the Avesta, the concept is well attested in the religions that developed during the Sasanian period: Manicheism, Mazdaism (or Zoroastrianism), and Nestorian Christianity. It was not overlooked within ancient Iranian thought. In the West it continued into, and even beyond, the Middle Ages. This vision of the world is not unique to the Middle East and India but is also attested in the Far East. It is thus one of the great theories of the ancient world, especially in the systems of Vedic, classical Greek, and Gnostic thought. It is one of the ancient ways in which people have represented existence, seeking to define a unity between themselves and the world in which they lived. The theory of microcosm and macrocosm, i.e., of the correspondence between the different parts of the human being and those of the cosmos, is no mere mental game. MICROCOSM and MACROCOSM in pre-Islamic Iranian thought.
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