Alessandro Scafi

Sex and the Cosmos: Sketching the Kadmon in Late Renaissance Europe

A number of Renaissance diagrams, sketched between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, combined Platonism, Christianity and Cabalism to depict the universe and display the interaction between its material and non-material dimensions. These diagrams illustrated texts such as Johann Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica (1517), Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia libri tres (written by 1510, printed in a complete text in 1533), the French edition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Heptaplus (1579), Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi… historia (1617-1621), Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650), the Kabbala denudata edited between 1677 and 1684 by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth and Francis Mercury van Helmont.

These Christian writers were inspired by the Cabalist and Platonic traditions. Their geometrical configurations of the cosmos offered a visual travel narrative of the journey par excellence, the human path away from and back to the Deity. The idea underlying these diagrams was that in the microcosm of man were reflected the attributes of divine perfection and that human nature and the natural world had the same heavenly model, with the macrocosmos and microcosmos mirroring each other. Particularly interesting are those images inspired by the cabalist idea of the first manifested configuration of the , Adam Kadmon, an idea adopted in different religious and cultural contexts. The ‘body’ of Adam Kadmon was a cabalistic symbol to convey the notion that the cosmos itself had both a and a body very much like that of a man. Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, was thought to be formed by the ten emanations or sephirot begotten by to reveal His nature through creation, and equated to different parts of the human body. Specific attention will be given to the prevalence of sexual symbolism and sexuality found within the Godhead itself, and the use of gender in cabalistic symbolism and on those Renaissance cosmographical charts, which expressed rather unorthodox Christian views on the primordial Fall, on the emergence of matter and the final reunion of the exiled soul with the divine light.