Anima Mundi

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A physician compounding a cordial against melancholy did not think he was merely steeping herbs in wine. He thought he was reaching, through the body of the patient, into the body of the world. The plants had been gathered under a friendly star; the gold and the coral and the sweet odors had each been chosen because each was reckoned to carry, in concentrated form, a single subtle substance that streamed through all things alike — through stars and stones and breath and blood. To draw that substance down was to tap the life of the cosmos itself. The whole procedure rested on one assumption so large that it rarely needed stating: that the universe is alive, that it has a soul, and that the soul of the world and the soul of the patient are made of the same stuff. This is the assumption the Latin tradition named anima mundi — the World Soul — and for the better part of two millennia it was less a doctrine to be argued than a ground on which other doctrines stood.

The living cosmos of the Timaeus

The fountainhead is a single dialogue. In Plato’s Timaeus — composed in the fourth century before the common era and, for the Latin Middle Ages, very nearly the only Plato anyone could read — the title character delivers a long, deliberately tentative account of how the visible world came to be. A divine craftsman, the demiurge, looking to an eternal model, fashions the cosmos out of disordered matter. And the craftsman does not make a mere machine. Reasoning that an intelligent work is fairer than an unintelligent one, and that intelligence cannot exist apart from soul, he puts intelligence in soul and soul in body. The conclusion follows with the cadence of something the speaker himself finds astonishing: “the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God.” The whole of what later thinkers would call the World Soul is compressed into that one line of the hosted Timaeus.

Plato is precise about where the soul goes. The craftsman places it not in some corner of the world but at its center, and from there diffuses it throughout the entire body, and beyond — so that the soul is also the world’s exterior envelope, wrapping the cosmos as well as filling it. The result is a sphere, self-sufficient, “a circle moving in a circle, one and solitary,” needing no friend and no food because it contains everything there is. Having shaped it so, Timaeus says, the demiurge “created the world a blessed god.” The cosmos, on this telling, is not the dwelling of the divine; it is itself a divine animal, a single enormous living being of which every star, every season, and every creature is an organ.

This is the seed of everything that follows, and it carries two ideas that will travel together for centuries. The first is hierarchy: soul is older and higher than body, the ruler rather than the ruled, and body is alive only because soul has condescended to inhabit it. The second is wholeness: because one soul animates the whole, the whole is genuinely one thing, an organism rather than a heap. A reader of the Timaeus comes away not with a universe of inert parts pushed about by external forces but with a universe that feels, in some attenuated sense, from within.

Pneuma: the Stoic breath through all things

The other great ancient source ran through different channels and reached a strikingly similar place. The Stoics, beginning in the third century before the common era, refused the Platonic split between an immaterial soul and a material body. For them everything that acts or is acted upon is body, and the active principle that orders the cosmos is itself a supremely fine, supremely tense material: pneuma, breath or fiery air, the vehicle of the divine reason, the logos. This pneuma pervades all things and holds them together, and the early Stoics — Chrysippus above all, in the third century — identified it with the god who is the soul of the world. The cosmos, on the Stoic account, is a single rational animal, a living being whose soul is god and whose body is the furniture of the heavens and the earth.

From this followed the idea that would prove most fertile of all for the later magical and astrological traditions: sympatheia, cosmic sympathy. If one pneuma strings the whole cosmos into a continuous tension, then the parts are not isolated. They answer one another. A change at one point registers at another, however distant, because both are stretched on the same taut web. Chrysippus is reported to have used cosmic sympathy to explain how the movements of the stars could bear on events on earth — not by pushing them, but by the responsiveness of a single body to itself. Here the World Soul stops being a cosmological ornament and becomes a working principle: the metaphysical license for divination, for astrology, and eventually for a magic that operates not by command but by attunement. To act on the world by sympathy is to pluck one string and listen for the answering hum elsewhere.

“Integra naturae speculum artisque imago” — the mirror of all nature — from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617). A chained female figure of Nature, the World Soul, links the hand of God above to the ape of human art below. — Robert Fludd, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Plotinus and the third hypostasis

It was a third-century philosopher of Roman Egypt who gave the World Soul its most exact metaphysical home. Plotinus, writing the treatises his pupil Porphyry would later gather as the Enneads, reads reality as a graded descent from absolute unity to the edge of nothing. At the summit is the One; from it overflows Nous, Intellect, the realm of the Forms thinking themselves; and from Nous proceeds Soul, the third of the great realities — the third hypostasis. This much is the architecture of Neoplatonism entire, the chain along which everything flows by emanation without the higher being diminished.

Soul, for Plotinus, faces two ways at once. Turned upward it contemplates Nous and receives the Forms; turned downward it gives life, order, and motion to the world of bodies. The World Soul — the All-Soul, in Stephen MacKenna’s English — is Soul in its cosmic office, the soul that animates the visible universe as a whole, while individual souls are continuous with it, each retaining, in the more daring of Plotinus’s claims, an undescended part that never wholly leaves the intelligible. The Fourth Ennead is the long meditation on these problems, and in its fourth tractate Plotinus states cosmic sympathy with a clarity the Stoics never quite reached. The hosted text of that tractate puts it in an image: “This One-All, therefore, is a sympathetic total and stands as one living being; the far is near; it happens as in one animal with its separate parts: talon, horn, finger.” The intervening flesh may feel nothing, yet a wound at the extremity is known at the center, because the whole is a single living thing. Distance in space is no barrier where one nature binds the parts into a sympathetic organism.

With this the two ancient streams — the Platonic ensouled cosmos and the Stoic web of sympathy — are joined in one system. Plotinus keeps the Platonic hierarchy, in which soul rules body from above and never sinks into it as the Stoics’ material pneuma did; but he keeps the Stoic intuition that the cosmos is one feeling animal. The World Soul is what makes the universe both ordered from above and responsive throughout.

The Hermetic ensouled world

A roughly contemporary body of Greek writings carried the same vision into a more devotional key. The treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, composed in the early centuries of the common era and ascribed by tradition to the sage Hermes Trismegistus, weave Platonic, Stoic, and Egyptian threads into a portrait of a living, ensouled cosmos pervaded by divine mind. The world is described as a second god, a living being filled with soul and spirit, generated by and dependent upon the supreme intellect. What is distinctive in the Hermetic handling is the tight knot it ties between the soul of the world and the doctrine of correspondence: the patterns that order the great world above are reproduced in the small world below — the microcosm and macrocosm — precisely because both are utterances of one living cosmic principle. The same soul speaks at every scale. This is the conceptual ground beneath the Hermetic formula of the things above answering the things below, and it is the form in which the World Soul would pass, centuries later, to the magi of the Renaissance.

Ficino and the spiritus mundi

When the Florentine priest and translator Marsilio Ficino gave Latin Europe its Plato, its Plotinus, and its Hermes in the second half of the fifteenth century, he gave it the World Soul as a practical instrument. In the third book of his De vita libri tres — the treatise De vita coelitus comparanda, on drawing life from the heavens, completed in 1489 — Ficino set out a medicine and a magic founded on a single intermediary. Between the soul of the world and the gross body of the world, he reasoned, there must be a subtle bridge: a spiritus mundi, a world-spirit, “a very tenuous body, as if now soul and not body, and now body and not soul,” diffused everywhere, the actual conduit through which the life and the qualities of the stars are carried down into the things of earth.

The scheme is ingenious because it solves a problem the older texts had left hanging. If the stars influence terrestrial things, by what do they reach them? Ficino’s answer is the world-spirit, the breathing medium of the cosmic animal. Certain plants, metals, stones, scents, and tones are richer in the spirit proper to a given planet, and by gathering them — by living among solar things if one would be healed by the sun, by compounding them into images and cordials — the physician concentrates the relevant stellar virtue and draws it into his own spirit, which is itself a drop of the same world-spirit. The whole apparatus of Renaissance astral magic and talismanic medicine rests on this identification: the operator and the operated-upon are organs of one living body, and the spirit is the blood that runs between them. The danger Ficino courted, and the reason he wrapped the third book in cautions, was that this natural magic of the World Soul shaded easily into the worship of the cosmic gods his Church forbade.

The Anima Mundi as a chained female figure linking the divine name above to the elemental world below, from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi Historia (1617). — Robert Fludd, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The vision spilled well past Ficino. The German-Swiss physician Paracelsus and the Paracelsian reformers built their medicine on an ensouled nature shot through with hidden virtues, and the English physician Robert Fludd, in the great cosmological engravings of his Utriusque Cosmi Historia of 1617, drew the World Soul as a chained woman strung between the hand of God and the elemental world — the most famous picture the doctrine ever received.

Plastic nature, Weltseele, and the soul of the world after Newton

The mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century should have killed the World Soul. A universe of inert matter governed by impersonal law has no need of a cosmic animal. Yet the doctrine survived by changing its work. In England, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in his vast True Intellectual System of the Universe of 1678, argued that mechanism left something unexplained: the orderly, end-directed formation of living things, which seemed to require an agency working through matter rather than reducible to it. His name for that agency was “plastic nature,” a subordinate, unconscious, formative power that executes the divine purposes in the world without God’s direct intervention at every step — and which Cudworth himself recognized as a renovation of the old Platonic World Soul. The cosmos was no longer simply a god; it was a system of laws, but laws administered by a vital principle that bent matter toward life.

A century later the World Soul returned under its own name and at the height of philosophy. In 1798 the young Friedrich Schelling published Von der Weltseele — On the World Soul, a Hypothesis of Higher Physics for the Explanation of the Universal Organism. Schelling proposed a single organizing force underlying every level of nature, manifesting as the mechanical, the chemical, the electrical, and the vital, and binding the whole into one developing organism. The work impressed Goethe and helped win Schelling his chair at Jena; it also drew the predictable charges of pantheism from the theologians and of metaphysical overreach from the Kantians. For the Romantics it was a liberation. Against a clockwork cosmos they set a living, striving, self-organizing nature, and the Weltseele gave their intuition a philosophy.

The twentieth century gave it a psychology. Carl Jung, reading deeply in the alchemists who had inherited the Hermetic and Ficinian World Soul, drew the old term toward his own. In his alchemical studies he identified the anima mundi with the collective unconscious — an impersonal, structuring layer of the psyche that is not enclosed in individual skulls but belongs, as he came to suspect, to the order of reality itself. His concept of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidence of inner state and outer event without causal link between them, reads almost as cosmic sympathy translated into the language of mind: a single ordering principle showing itself at once in psyche and in world. And in the closing decades of the century the World Soul found a scientific echo it had never sought, when the Gaia hypothesis proposed the Earth’s biosphere as a single self-regulating system — a planet, if not ensouled, then at least behaving as one living thing. The framers of Gaia were careful to disclaim the ancient metaphysics; the metaphysics, twenty-four centuries old, had already prepared the thought that a world might be alive.

What the long history shows is a single image proving almost endlessly portable. The cosmos as one feeling animal began as a craftsman’s reasoning in a Greek dialogue, became a fiery breath for the Stoics and a hypostasis for Plotinus, served the Renaissance as the working ground of medicine and magic, hid inside the laws of nature for the mechanists, and emerged again as a force, a psyche, a planet. The shape of the question scarcely altered across all of it: whether the order we find in things is the trace of something that, in some sense we can barely state, is itself alive.

→ In the library: Plato — Timaeus (Jowett) · Plotinus — Fourth Ennead, Fourth Tractate (MacKenna)

→ Related: Plato · Platonism · Neoplatonism · Plotinus · The One · Nous · Soul · Emanation · Demiurge · Stoicism · Marsilio Ficino · Corpus Hermeticum · Microcosm Macrocosm · Porphyry · Iamblichus · Proclus · Astrology · Paracelsianism · Paracelsus · F W J Schelling · Carl Jung · Gaia Hypothesis