ABSTRACT
Zhongshu), who worked out reciprocal connections of the two fundamental principles with everything under the sun.13 The idea of the world as an organism with interactive parts had a counterpart in Medieval-Renaissance Europe, but the system was one of hierarchical correspondence rather than reciprocal correlation. The world of man mirrored the cosmos-a microcosm-macrocosm relationship that was a chain of being stretching from an immobile earth at the center of the solar system through seven crystalline “planets” riding on spheres and three additional spheres circling the earth with God seated in Heaven (the Empyrean) just outside the tenth sphere. The natural orders on earth corresponded to the structure of the heavens. Everything and everybody had a fixed place created by God.14
