Macrocosm and Microcosm

Macrocosm and Microcosm are Greek compound words of μακρο ("macro", large) and μικρο ("micro", small), and the word κόσμος (cosmos), which means "order" as well as "world" or "ordered world." In the Theosophical literature the macrocosm generally represents the “Great Universe” or Kosmos while the microcosm refers to the human being: "Man is the microcosm of the macrocosm; the god on earth is built on the pattern of the god in nature". However, the terms Macrocosm and Microcosm may also be applied in other contexts, as referring to the higher and lower planes, to human beings and animals, etc.

This idea is related to the law of correspondences asserting that man is a reflection of the universe, containing all the essentail elements present in the latter. As Mme. Blavatsky wrote:

Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a foetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause -- the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature -- the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that "The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe"; the three constituting the Intelligible Triad. Everything in this visible universe is the outflow of this Triad, and a microcosmic triad itself.

Further reading

• Macrocosm at Theosopedia