Neoplatonic cosmology retained a female world-soul as the source of natural motion
Evidence
The female soul of the world was everywhere present and, as in Plato’s Timaeus, was the source of motion and activity in the macrocosm. It contained the celestial images of the divine Ideas. The world’s body was its matter, the elements out of which corporeal objects were generated. Linking the celestial images in the world soul to the matter in the body was the world spirit. The spiritus mundi was the vehicle by which the influences of superior powers in the celestial realm could be brought down and joined to the inferior powers in the terrestrial region. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 458
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the tripartite body-soul-spirit architecture in which a female world-soul animates matter, giving the ecofeminist thesis its technical basis.
- XREF: Female soul of the world as source of motion pays off the Platonic Timaeus thread already flagged for the polyad’s cosmology vocabulary. — connects to: The female earth was central to premodern organic cosmology — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 61; Organic cosmology was embodied in circular city plans replicating the macrocosm — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 382; Premodern thinkers conceived the cosmos as a living male-female animal — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 449 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoplatonic cosmology treated the cosmos as a living macrocosmic organism
#expands(0.92) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 458 - Mechanism killed the female world-soul by reducing nature to dead moving corpuscles
#responds-to(0.85) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 766 - Copernicus’s cosmology displaced the female earth for a masculine sun
#contradicts(0.80) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 539