Anthropos

The primordial Man of the Poimandres. In the first treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum, God brings forth a divine Anthropos in his own image, equal to him in beauty, to whom he gives authority over all creation. The Anthropos descends through the seven planetary spheres into matter, falls in love with his reflection in nature, and is bound to the body — yet retains his divine origin. Human beings are the bearers of this mixed inheritance, mortal in body and immortal in their noetic essence.

The Anthropos mythologem is the direct antecedent of Jung’s self as imago Dei — the image of God in the human soul. Jung’s reading of the alchemical tradition in Mysterium Coniunctionis traces the figure through the alchemical filius philosophorum, the homo altus of Paracelsus, and the Anthropos speculations of the Valentinian Gnostics. The Anthropos names the paradox the Lineage returns to repeatedly: that the human being is simultaneously a creature of matter and the site of the divine image, and that redemption is the recognition of what was there from the beginning.

The concept is load-bearing for any depth-psychological reading of the imago Dei, of the Self as wholeness, and of the alchemical opus as the making-conscious of what was already whole in potential.

Relationships

• corpus-hermeticum
• nous
• self
• coniunctio

Primary sources

• corpus-hermeticum (Corp. Herm. 1, Poimandres)
• jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)
• dihle-theory-will-classical (Dihle 1982)