Tickling the cosmic body

 

When you become conscious that everything is connected in the weave of life – as above so below, as within, so without – you may discover that if you pluck a thread anywhere, you stir the whole pattern. For Synesius of Cyrene, the Neoplatonist philosopher I call the Bishop of Dreams, prophecy requires us to see that we are parts of a cosmic body in which all things are related and can influence each other. At the risk of levity, I am tempted to call the practice derived from this tickling the cosmic body.

“Prophecy is among the best of human pursuits…it gives signs of all things through the medium of all things, because all things which are within that living being that is the cosmos are akin…These signs are different kinds of writings in the book of existence. One wise man learns one sort of writing and another another…All things have significance for all. If birds had wisdom, they would have constructed an art for knowing the future based on observing humans, as we do by observing them. “It was necessary, I believe, that the limbs of this universe which feels and breathes as one belong to one another as parts of a single whole…A person who knows the kinship of the parts of the cosmos is wise, for they can attract one thing by means of another.” [1]

In his important treatise De insomniis ("On Dreams") composed around 405 and dedicated to his teacher Hypatia, "The Philosopher", Synesius urges us to keep a “day book” for our observations of twitches in the cosmic body as well as a “night book” for dreams.   He declares that “All things are signs appearing through all things…they are brothers in a single living creature, the cosmos…they are written in characters of every kind”. The deepest scholarship lies in reading the sign language of the world; the true sage is a person “who understands the relationship of the parts of the universe”. [2] He observes elsewhere that “The same things very often happen in different places and times”.[3]

References

1. Synesius "On Prophecy" trans. Augustine Fitzgerald in Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930). Lightly edited by me.

2. Synesius "On Dreans" in Essays and Hymns 3. Quoted in Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius (Berkeley:  University of California Press,1993) p.289.

Illustration: Integra naturae speculum artisque imago ("A complete mirror of nature and an image of art"). The Anima Mundi depicted by Robert Fludd (1617). Here the world soul is feminine and there is a key to correspondences between all parts of the cosmos. Public domain.