Kosmos w religiach pozachrześcijańskich

Abstract

Man of traditional cultures experienced the surrounding worlds as a cosmos, i.e. an organic Whole and unified Totality which embraced the Nature, the community of the living and the dead as well as the world of the divine, all things being fundamentally bound together by sharing the same nature and the same interaction one upon another in a total cosmic community. The unity of the cosmos was a unity within multiplicity, a diversity bound together in a rhythmic, ordered and ordering Harmony. In Egypt, the cosmic order went by the name of maat, being conceived as the harmony of the world as well as the universal law and reward for everybody who observed it. The Iranian concept of the cosmic order, called asha, emphasized the dualistic character of the Persien religion. The Vedic rta was the parallel, with the Iranian asha, concept of the universal order. It went by the name of dharma in Upanishads, its principal manifestations being the systems of so-colled terms or periods of life and the hierarchy of castes as well. In the religious tradition of China, the word tao was used to express the ordered harmony of the universe. The Cosmos was thought as living and meaningful world which spoke to man through its own mode of being, through its structures and its rhythms. In the last analysis, it appeared as a kind of language or symbol which revealed to man the „lunar” structure of the universal becoming, i.e. „the eternal return”. The Cosmos – in contrast with Chaos, i.e. a foreign, profane and unconsacrated space, devoid of the orientation and structure – was thought as a sacred reality. It was not simply a sacrality in the meaning of a divine creation – the different modalities of the sacred were manifested in the very structure of the world and of cosmis phenomena. The Cosmos appeared as a mysterious and sacred reality where the holy could be encountered at any point. The life and the cosmic anviromment were accepted as a gift from „above” which filled man with admiration and gratitude. The experience of sacred was accompanied by the feeling of the intimate belonging, of being at home in the world. The active response of man to the sacral world was based on macro and microcosmic parallelisms. Man of the traditional cultures „cosmicized” himself and his surrounding universe; while making a house, village or a city, he modeled it after the image of the Cosmos. Settlement in a new, unknown, uncultivated country (i.e. Chaos) was equivalent to its transformation into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of the cosmogony. All significant actions were, patterned after archetypes that were revealed in the Cosmos. The Cosmos was thought to be a organism, through its own duration it degenerated and wore out; this is why it had to be symbolically re-created every year. In the Cosmic Totality, conceived as an interdependent unity of all the beings, man was considered the principal and responsible member. His contribution for the maintaining of the universe – particularly through the ceremonies of the periodical regeneration of the world – was believed to be so important that the very existence of the world depended upon it.