Prof. Heiner Fruehauf: Male and Female Archetypes within the 12 Organ Networks of Chinese Medicine

Key Takeaways

yeah good morning everybody it's wonderful to see so many familiar faces and have this reunion of sorts going on here I am particularly excited to combine two things in this lecture and one of them is sort of my life's work which is really alchemy which is the holistic underpinnings of our medicine which is this universal doctrine of as above so below so through the study of the the macrocosm that ancient people were doing getting a philosophy and science of the microcosm below that and then specifically for the context of this conference to apply to look at that at these twelve major functions in the human body that we call the twelve organ networks of Chinese medicine through the lens of gender you know which ones are specifically male archetypes and which ones are female archetypes and which ones and the first view look like there might be a man but then turned out to be a woman and vice versa and so we have six men and six women and they are not as we would think exclusively well for the most part that may be true that that xylem organs are female and and the four organs are male and I looked at the record I found different arguments for that that in in some cases it's different from what what it seems to be and when I say I find different male or female archetypes in their eyes because the 12 organ networks of Chinese medicine are linked to mythology and therefore stories of ancient time when we say as above so below we primarily start with the with a Zodiac with Estella constellations and of course all ancient mythology starts with these stars and people creating stories about this great creation story that plays itself out in the heavens and so in a certain way you know so we've got the twelve Olympians in Greece and the twelve Nader's in Egypt so we also have the 12 months gods and different kinds of heroic persona in Chinese mythology that are sort of half historical half the stuff of legends that a Yellow Emperor included and they show up in these positions in these 12th positions we are going to investigate so will it's a little bit of an ambitious project I've cut this of course way down because in a certain way it's I would normally take like at least a whole day for one organ network but in the in the interest of completeness and really looking at this gender lens I'll try and go through all all twelve of them [Music] you