Definition
Anima mundi (“world soul”) refers to the idea that the cosmos itself is alive, ensouled, and internally coherent, rather than a collection of dead, disconnected objects. It names the unifying psychic–vital principle that binds all beings into a single living order, allowing stars, elements, plants, animals, humans, and spirits to participate in one continuous field of meaning and motion.
Within this view, individual souls are not isolated units but local expressions or differentiations of the world soul. Sensation, imagination, sympathy, and correspondence are possible because all things share participation in the same underlying life. Nature responds, communicates, and remembers—not metaphorically, but ontologically.
Origin / Tradition
The concept originates in Platonic philosophy, especially in Plato’s Timaeus, where the cosmos is described as a living being endowed with soul and intelligence. This idea was developed extensively by Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, and later absorbed into Hermeticism, where it became central to magical, astrological, and cosmological thought.
In Hermetic tradition, the anima mundi functions as the medium of influence and transmission: planetary powers, divine ideas, and human intentions move through it like currents through a living body. Renaissance thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino revived the concept, treating it as the key to natural magic and cosmic sympathy. Modern echoes appear in depth psychology, Romantic philosophy of nature, and ecological metaphysics, all of which resist reducing the world to inert matter.