As the opening phrase of the assigned title “Various degrees of transferring the cosmic system upon humans” implies, panel B represents an iconographic gradation, a progressive (and sometimes regressive) transition from figurative to abstract representations of the world centered around the image of man. The same iconographic gradient further reflects an epistemological transition from mystical and hermetic cosmological beliefs involving medical prognostication to the geometric and proportional principles of early modern science. Attempting to map out the stages of this transition we could tentatively distinguish three groups within panel B: first those representing the world in the guise of a human body surrounded by an abstract macrocosmic circle or cladded by the animal figures of the Zodiac (#1-6); second those that still represent the human body as the center of the world but with an increased emphasis on its geometric proportions, progressively disengaged from earlier cosmological meanings (#7-8); and third, two representations of the human body and the hand inscribed in a circle which appear to regress to earlier mystical cosmological associations of the human body (#9.1-9.2). 

A similar shift among the varying representations of the microcosmic figure is mapped out in a lecture that Saxl first presented in front of the Society for the Comparative Study of Religion in Hamburg in October 1926 in Hamburg, on representations of “Microcosm and Macrocosm,” which was ultimately published (with a number of revisions) thirty years later in English as part of the posthumous volume of the scholar’s Lectures edited by his collaborators at the Warburg Institute in London (Fritz Saxl, Lectures). I plan to use this lecture as a guide for tracing a pathway among the cosmic images of panel B.