Archaic Body and Cosmic Man

by | Apr 8, 2019 | Inglese | 0 comments

In the book of Genesis, it is written: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1, 26-28.31a). On the basis of this myth of origins, which constitutes the starting point of the Jewish religion, the absolute being, God, can create man in his image and likeness only starting from the awareness of his own anthropomorphic structure. The conception of the body that emerges from the analysis of iconographic, archaeological and ethnographic documents, allows us to elaborate an idea of creation that originates from a similar starting point, which is based on the cognitive modalities of archaic man. In this perspective, man attributes to the Universe the form and functions of a divine entity after having obtained them, by analogy, from his own body. Archaic man, therefore, considers cosmic events as acts and behaviors in which a God endowed with a human form is manifested. The foundation of this hypothesis, which has unfortunately not been developed in all its premises and whose conclusions have not been drawn in full, was formulated by Marcel Jousse, a Jesuit priest and French anthropologist (1886-1961). According to Jousse the knowledge of the origins is a drama that leads back to two actors: on the one hand the multiplicity of the manifestations of the cosmos, on the other the archaic man, whom Jousse calls Anthropos. The spectacle of the Universe suggests two questions: what does man know? And how does he know it? The answer is clear: what Anthropos knows are the actions it can detect in the cosmos and how to know them depends on its cognitive tools, first of all the body, through which the language of the origins is spoken. Starting from this perspective, the Whole presents itself essentially as energy and Nature as movement. His personality and his sensitive life are the only basis available to the archaic man for a coherent causal observation. Thus the cosmos is read as a concatenation of interactions, a formidable tangle of interactive gestures. “Faced with something that moves – continues Jousse – the archaic man sees the action and tries to imagine the one who does it. But no one can see the force that moves the world”. Jousse claims that archaic man knows things in bodily and gestural ways. Consequently, he believes that the actions he sees taking place in the cosmos are attributable to an absolute entity, a super-man, God, in fact. Based on these assumptions that the cosmos is a macro-Anthropos, legends have been told for millennia that explain how the birth of the cosmos is a consequence of the sacrifice and subsequent dismemberment of an immense human being, the Cosmic Man, existing before creation. The pieces of his body thus formed the entire universe. In the myths of origin from the Middle East, the body of the Cosmic Man is broken into two parts.

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In the Egyptian myth, Shu, god of the air and cosmic axis, separates Geb (god of the earth) from Nut (goddess of the sky) interrupting their sexual act (Piantelli, 1983). In the Babylonian poem “Enuma Elish” (2nd millennium BC) the body of the goddess Tiamat, which the god Marduk has divided into two like the valves of a shell, forms the sky and the earth. In the Indo-European myths, the parts of the universe come from the dismembered body of the Primordial Cosmic Man. Western sources, the “Grimnismal”, an ancient Germanic poem and the “Gylfaginnig”, written by the Norwegian Snorri Sturlson (13th century), tell the story of Ymir, the first being in the Universe, a giant already existing before creation who is killed and dismembered by Odin, the supreme deity of the Germanic Olympus. “From the flesh of Ymir, the earth was formed, from the blood the seas, the mountains from the bones, the trees from the hair and from the skull the sky.”

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