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Anima Mundi

Anima Mundi

The anima mundi — soul of the world — is the late-Platonic and Hermetic name for the cosmic soul that animates the visible cosmos, the bridge by which Plato’s Timaeus world-soul is transmitted into Renaissance alchemy and from there into Jung’s reading of the unconscious. Avicenna already identifies Mercurius with the anima mundi (Jung 1967, par. 263). The alchemists relate the concept “on the one hand to the world soul in Plato’s Timaeus and on the other to the Holy Spirit, who was present at the Creation and played the role of procreator (φύτωρ), impregnating the waters with the seed of life” (Jung 1967, par. 263).

Christopher Steeb gives a Renaissance formulation that captures the chain in one sentence: “The brooding of the Holy Spirit upon the waters above the firmament brought forth a power which permeates all things in the most subtle way… so that the supracelestial spirit of the waters, united with the light, may fitly be called the soul of the world” (Steeb, cited in Jung 1967, par. 102). Here pneuma, spiritus, anima mundi, and Mercurius converge: they are the same psychic phenomenon under successive cosmologies.

The anima mundi is therefore one of the points at which the depth tradition’s continuity with Neoplatonism is most visible. Where the moderns speak of the collective unconscious, the alchemists spoke of the anima mundi — and the older language preserves the cosmological dimension that the modern term abstracts away.

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