Many mystical traditions picture the universe as a human body, and Kabbalah gives the idea one of its fullest forms. A primordial human figure, called Adam Kadmon, “the first man,” represents the first form the divine takes in making the world. The ten sefirot of the Tree of Life are often drawn as the parts of his body: the crown above the head, wisdom and understanding in the two sides of the brain, mercy and judgment in the arms, beauty in the heart, and the lowest sefirah, kingship, at the feet.
Light, broken vessels and repair
In the Lurianic Kabbalah of sixteenth-century Safed, light pours from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth of Adam Kadmon as creation begins. The vessels meant to hold that light shatter, scattering sparks through the world. It is the task of humanity to gather the sparks and repair creation, an idea known as tikkun, which has become a rallying word for social action as well.
Microcosm and macrocosm
The same idea of correspondence runs through Hermeticism, astrology and Freemasonry: the human being is a small universe, and the universe is a great human being. Medieval almanacs pictured a “zodiac man” whose body parts were ruled by the twelve signs, and Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man of about 1490 fits the human figure to a circle and a square. The idea is far older than Kabbalah. In the Indian Rig Veda the world is made from the body of the cosmic man Purusha, and in Norse myth the giant Ymir’s body becomes the earth.
The painting
A nude, white-bearded giant stands in a shallow sea off a mountain coast, holding up a ring of zodiac signs, with a golden ring of planetary orbits around his waist and the sun at its center. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- The twentieth-century scholar Gershom Scholem argued that the Zohar was mostly the work of Moses de León in the 1280s, though de León attributed it to a second-century sage.
- Christians had a cosmic man too. The twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen painted visions of a giant human figure holding the cosmos.
- William Blake’s giant Albion, a human figure who contains a whole nation, has often been compared with this tradition.
- The Genesis verse “let us make man in our image” has been read in this way for two thousand years. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria already distinguished a heavenly, original human from the earthly man.
The Grand Man of the Zohar appears on our: