ChatGPT created the mandala above. I had the following conversation with Claude. There’s something very profound about this little story, but I’m not quite sure what.
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In the Symposium Plato has Aristophanes explain love in the following way (I’m quoting from Wikipedia):
“His speech gives an explanation of why people in love say they feel ‘whole’ when they have found their love-partner. He begins by explaining that people must understand human nature before they can interpret the origins of love and how it affects their own times. This is, he says because in primal times people had doubled bodies, with faces and limbs turned away from one another. As spherical creatures who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels, these original people were very powerful. There were three sexes: male, female, and hermaphrodite; they were said to have descended from the Sun, the Earth and the Moon, respectively. These creatures tried to scale the heights of Olympus and planned to set upon the gods. Zeus thought about blasting them with thunderbolts, but, not wanting to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half, in effect separating each entity’s two bodies.
“Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature. [...] Aristophanes then claims that when two people who were separated from each other find each other, they never again want to be separated. This feeling is like a riddle, and cannot be explained.”
A couple of years ago I was a Jewish wedding and heard the rabbi tell a similar story from a Hebrew background. And I’ve just heard Seema Anand tell a similar story out of a Hindu background. Do you have any idea about where the Jewish and Hindu versions came from?
This is a fascinating example of how similar archetypal stories appear across different cultures! You’re right to notice these parallels - the theme of originally unified beings who are separated and then seek reunion appears in several traditions.
For the Jewish version, the most likely source is from Talmudic and later Kabbalistic literature. The Talmud (Tractate Berakhot 61a) contains a teaching that Adam was originally created as a double-bodied being, male and female joined back-to-back, whom God then separated. The Zohar and other mystical texts expand on this, developing the idea that souls are created in pairs and separated before birth, leading to the search for one’s bashert (soulmate). This interpretation often draws on the Genesis creation narrative where Eve is formed from Adam’s rib, but recasts it as a splitting of an originally unified being.
For the Hindu version, there are several possible sources. The concept appears in various Puranas and in the mythology surrounding Ardhanarishvara (the half-male, half-female form of Shiva and Parvati). Some versions tell of cosmic beings or divine couples who were split apart and must find reunification. The Shiva Purana and other texts contain variations of this theme.
The really intriguing question is whether these represent independent cultural developments or whether there was some cross-pollination of ideas. Given the ancient trade routes and cultural exchanges between these civilizations, it’s possible there was mutual influence, though each tradition developed the story in ways that fit their particular theological and philosophical frameworks.
The fact that this archetypal pattern appears so widely suggests it taps into something fundamental about human psychology and the experience of love and longing.
Yes, the issues you raise in the last two paragraphs are fascinating. But if the story does tap into something fundamental about human psychology, then it’s easy to see how they could have arisen through independent creation, on the one hand, and why the story would move from one culture to another through ancient trade and such.
Exactly! You’ve identified a really important dynamic with archetypal stories - the very qualities that make them likely to emerge independently also make them highly “transmissible” between cultures.
If a story pattern emerges from deep psychological truths about human experience - like the longing for wholeness, the sense that love makes us complete, or the feeling that we’re searching for something we’ve lost - then it becomes almost inevitable that different cultures would develop similar narratives. These aren’t just arbitrary tales; they’re attempts to make sense of universal emotional experiences.
But precisely because such stories resonate so deeply, they’re also the ones most likely to “travel well” when cultures interact. A merchant or scholar encountering this story in another tradition would recognize its power and meaning, making it more likely to be remembered, retold, and eventually absorbed into their own cultural framework.
This creates a kind of feedback loop where psychologically resonant stories both arise organically and spread readily. We see this with other archetypal patterns too - flood myths, hero’s journeys, creation stories involving cosmic eggs or primordial chaos. The stories that survive and spread across cultures tend to be those that speak to something essential in human experience.
So rather than having to choose between independent creation or cultural transmission, we might be looking at both processes working together - the archetypal pattern emerging naturally from human psychology, then being reinforced and refined through cross-cultural contact.
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