The Hermetic Cosmos: Macrocosm and Microcosm

Every practice in the Western esoteric tradition assumes a picture of the universe. It is not the picture given by modern astronomy and was never meant to compete with it. It is a map of experience, drawn in the language of the sky, and its purpose is to show a human being where they stand and which way is up. This page describes that map as the Hermetic texts give it.

The order of things

The first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres, describes creation as a series of outpourings. At the summit is God, who is Mind, life and light. From Mind comes the Word, the ordering principle. A second, craftsman Mind then shapes fire and air into seven governors, the planets, whose circling is called fate. Below them the heavier elements, water and earth, settle and bring forth living things.

The result is a universe in layers, each depending on the one above it and each alive. The Hermetic writers insist on that last point. The cosmos is not a machine. It is described as a second god, an immortal living being, full of soul in every part.

The twofold human

Into this order the Poimandres places a being unlike any other. God brought forth a primal Human, made in the divine image and dear to its maker. This Human looked down through the spheres, saw its own beautiful form reflected in the waters of nature and loved it. Nature loved in return, and the two were joined.

That, says the text, is why humanity alone among earthly creatures is twofold: mortal because of the body, immortal because of the essential Human. We are subject to fate, since we live beneath the spheres, and yet above fate, since we carry within us a mind that comes from beyond them. The whole of Hermetic practice follows from this double nature. To know oneself is to remember the half that has been forgotten.

The microcosm

Because the Human passed down through every level of the cosmos and took something from each, the human being contains the whole in miniature. This is the meaning of the word microcosm, the small world, set against the macrocosm, the great world. The body is built of the four elements. The vital and emotional life was thought to be woven from the influences of the seven planets. The mind is a spark of the divine Mind itself.

The doctrine has a practical edge. If the same powers are at work in the sky and in the self, then the sky can be used as a diagram of the self. The seven planets become seven faculties to be recognized and brought into order. The tables of correspondence are the developed form of this idea, and the principle behind them is stated in the Emerald Tablet.

The ascent through the seven spheres

The Poimandres ends with an account of the way back. When the body is laid aside, the soul rises through the spheres and at each one surrenders a power that it had taken on in its descent and misused. Stripped of all seven, it enters the Eighth sphere in its own proper nature, sings with those who are there, and passes at last into God. This is the good end of those who have attained knowledge, the text says: to become God.

Later tradition did not wait for death. The ascent was understood as something to be accomplished in life, in contemplation and in ritual, and the seven surrenders as a program of self knowledge. Read in this way the table is a mirror. Each planet names a power that is good in its place and ruinous out of it: the Moon's changeability, Mercury's cleverness, the appetite of Venus, the pride of the Sun, the anger of Mars, the acquisitiveness of Jupiter, the cold calculation of Saturn.

A world bound by sympathy

The levels of the cosmos are not sealed from one another. Influences pass down from the stars, and likenesses run through all the levels like threads. Gold, the lion, the heart, the heliotrope and the quality of generosity belong to the Sun. Silver, the sea, the tides of the body and the changing moods belong to the Moon. Ancient writers called these connections sympathies, and spoke of chains reaching from the highest things to the lowest.

This is the theoretical basis of natural and planetary magick. To gather things of one family at the hour of their planet was thought to make a channel for its influence. Whether one takes this literally or as a discipline of symbolic attention, it gives the practitioner an ordered language in which every object and every hour means something.

Fate and freedom

The government of the seven planets was called heimarmene, fate. The Hermetic texts accept that the body and the lower soul are subject to it. They deny that mind is. A person who lives only by appetite and reaction is carried round by the spheres like everything else beneath them. A person who has woken to mind is, in the old phrase, above the stars.

It is easy to hear this as a boast. It is better heard as a description of two ways of living that everyone already knows: the days when we are pushed by mood and circumstance, and the rarer hours when we act from a quiet center. The aim of the tradition is to enlarge the second at the expense of the first.

Reading the map today

The Earth is not the center of the solar system, and the planets are not set in crystal shells. No serious student pretends otherwise. The old cosmos keeps its value because it was always a picture of how the world stands in relation to an observer, with the ground of the senses at the bottom, the heavens of the mind above, and a ladder of seven steps between. As astronomy it is obsolete. As a diagram of attention, character and aspiration it has not been bettered, and the whole symbolic language of the West is written in it.