“But All-Father Mind, being Life and Light, did bring forth Man (Ἄνθρωπον) co-equal to Himself.” (Pœmandres treatise) “This Man or Anthrōpos is the Spiritual Prototype of humanity and of every individual man, and is a technical term found in a number of the early Christianised Gnostic systems” (G.R.S. Mead). “So says the Zoroastrian: I hold my lineage from Gayōmart (Anthrōpos), and the terrestrial state is not my origin, but is the spiritual” (In Henry Corbin’s “Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis,” 1951 cf Pand Namak i Zartusht or “The Book of the Counsels of Zartusht”)

Anthrōpos is described as the Primordial Man, i.e., the Archetypal Man or “the Image,” the Mystical Adam. It is a phase of the first intellect, or Primordial Light from its passivity to activity in the understanding of some Jewish and Muslim philosophers. The divine Image or perfected Man (Adam, or symbol of Humanity) on earth is the gradually deepened (manifested) copy of the true and immortal Essence of Man. What is this quintessential source of Man’s being?

Mahmoud Amirzadeh in a short E-Book, pg. 37 quotes Ibn ‘Arabi:

The whole cosmos is the differentiation of Adam, and Adam is the All-Comprehensive Book. In relation to the cosmos he is like the spirit in relation to the body. Hence man is the spirit of the cosmos, and the cosmos is the body. By bringing all this together, the cosmos is the great man, so long as man is within it. But, if you look at the cosmos alone, without man, you will find it to be like a proportioned body without a spirit. (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 2:67.28)

Mahmoud Amirzadeh quotes Avicenna:

The true Perfect Man is the barzakh between Necessity and possibility, the mirror that brings together in its essence and level the attributes and properties of Eternity and new arrival… . He is the intermediary between the Real and creation… . Were it not for him and the fact that he acts as a barzakh no different from the two sides, nothing of the cosmos would receive the divine, unitary effusion, because of the lack of correspondence and interrelationship. (Qûnawî al-Fukûk or Removing the Seals, 248)

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