Puruṣa · पुरुष · the cosmic person

The Ṛg Veda's Puruṣa-sūkta describes creation as a sacrifice in which a primordial Person is divided, and the worlds are made from the parts: the moon from the mind, the sun from the eye, the sky from the head, and the four social orders from mouth, arms, thighs, feet. The Kabbalah's Adam Kadmon is the same enormous idea and refuses the same reduction: the primordial human form through which the infinite first shaped itself, whose limbs are the sefirot and of whom every human body is the diagram. Both traditions concluded that the cosmos is person-shaped rather than the person being world-shaped. Both were also read, later, as underwriting a social hierarchy — the Vedic hymn far more explicitly and far more damagingly. Worth naming rather than admiring around.