Everything about Macrocosm And Microcosm totally explained
Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient
Greek schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of the
cosmos, from the largest scale (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level).
History
It may have begun with
Democritus in the 5th century BCE or with
Pythagoras and is a philosophical conception that runs through
Socrates, and
Plato all the way to the
Renaissance. With
Pythagoras, the discovery of the
golden ratio and its philosophical conception called the
Golden mean, the Greeks observed the golden ratio in many parts of the ordered universe both large and small. Philosophically, the Greeks were concerned with a rational explanation of everything and saw the repetition of the golden mean throughout the world and all levels of reality as a step towards this unifying theory. In short, it's the recognition that the same traits appear in entities of many different sizes, from one man to the entire human population.
Macrocosm/microcosm is a
Greek compound of μακρο- "Macro-" and μικρο- "Micro-", which are
Greek respectively for "large" and "small", and the word
κόσμος kósmos which means "order" as well as "world" or "ordered world".
The English physician and alchemist
Robert Fludd (1574-1637) expicitly based his work
Utriusque Cosmi Historia (The history of the two worlds) upon the macro/micro correspondence; as did
Sir Thomas Browne in his
binary Discourses of 1658:
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial depicts the small, temporal world of man, whilst
The Garden of Cyrus represents the macrocosm, in which the ubiquitous and eternal
quincunx pattern is discerned in art, nature and the Cosmos.
The great enigma of
alchemy is the mystery between the macrocosm and
microcosm. Equally an unsolved enigma of English literature is the relationship between Browne's diptych Discourses: the microcosm world of
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and the macrocosm world of
The Garden of Cyrus.
Today, the concept of microcosm has been taken over by
sociology to mean a small group of individuals whose behavior is typical of a larger social body encompassing it. A microcosm can be seen as a special kind of
epitome.
Conversely, a macrocosm is a social body made of smaller compounds.
Further Information
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