The Ideas

As above, so below

It’s on posters, in tattoos, in every second video about “hermetic wisdom”: as above, so below. Four words doing a lot of unpaid work.

Where it’s from

The source. Not the Corpus Hermeticum. The line descends from the Emerald Tablet, whose oldest known text sits inside an Arabic book attributed to Balinas, the Kitab sirr al-khaliqa (“Book of the Secret of Creation”), which scholars date to the 8th-9th century (critical edition: Ursula Weisser, 1979; first modern study of the Tablet: Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina, 1926). E.J. Holmyard published a second early Arabic version in Nature in 1923.

The Latin. The medieval Latin vulgate, edited by Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer in 1928, offers a simile with a purpose clause: what is below is like what is above, and what is above like what is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing. Isaac Newton translated the same sentence in the late 17th century: “That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to do the miracles of one only thing” (Keynes MS 28, King’s College, Cambridge).

The slogan. The short form belongs to 19th-century occultism. The earliest datable use we can cite is H.P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (New York, 1877), which has “As above, so it is below” in vol. 1, p. 35. The Kybalion (Chicago, 1908) then printed “As above, so below; as below, so above” as an “old axiom” and made it the second of its seven principles. We have not traced an earlier printing.

Our reading. The Latin is an operator’s sentence: a claim that transformation works because the levels of reality answer each other. That reading of the purpose clause is ours, following how alchemists used the text.

What the ancients did say

The underlying idea, sympathy and correspondence between cosmos and human, heaven and earth, runs deep in the Hermetica and in Stoic and Platonic thought around them. The Corpus makes humanity a microcosm; astrological Hermetica map heaven onto body and fate. The intuition is ancient. The bumper sticker is not.

Three wordings, three meanings

The famous line changed shape as it travelled, and the changes matter:

• Arabic (8th-9th century). In E.J. Holmyard’s 1923 translation of an early Arabic version: “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above.” Not likeness but origin: each level comes from the other.
• Latin (12th century). Hugo of Santalla’s translation, made from the Kitab sirr al-khaliqa version rather than the one Holmyard used, keeps that sense, superiora de inferioribus, inferiora de superioribus, “the higher from the lower, the lower from the higher”. The later vulgate turns it into a simile, sicut, “like”, the version Newton translated.
• Modern slogan. “As above, so below” keeps only the simile and drops the purpose clause, the miracles of the one thing.

How the phrase is used today

As a motto in astrology and the occult revival, where it justifies reading the sky for the person; as the second principle of the Kybalion (1908); in the extension “as within, so without”, a modern addition with no counterpart in the Tablet; in the tarot Magician card, whose raised and lowered hands are commonly read as the motto; and as the title of a 2014 horror film set in the Paris catacombs. None of these uses is ancient; all of them descend from the Latin simile.

What it doesn’t mean

It is not a law of attraction, a promise that thoughts summon events, or a licence to read any coincidence as cosmic signature. In its home context it grounds a discipline, alchemy, in a claim about nature’s coherence. Correspondence was a working hypothesis, not a comfort blanket.

Fair questions

Is the phrase in the Corpus Hermeticum?

Not in this form. The correspondence idea is present; the famous wording belongs to the Emerald Tablet tradition and its 19th-century paraphrase.

Who first said 'as above, so below' exactly?

No single author. The idea comes from the Emerald Tablet (Arabic, 8th-9th century; medieval Latin translation). The short form belongs to 19th-century occultism: the earliest datable use we can cite is Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled (1877, vol. 1, p. 35), and the Kybalion (1908) made it a principle.

Is correspondence the same as astrology?

Astrology is one application of it. The principle is broader: a claim that the world's levels mirror and answer one another.

Sources & further reading

• Ursula Weisser (ed.), Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung (Kitab sirr al-khaliqa), Aleppo, 1979: the oldest Arabic text of the Tablet.
• Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina (Heidelberg, 1926).
• E.J. Holmyard, “The Emerald Table”, Nature 112 (1923).
• Hugo of Santalla, De secretis naturae, Latin translation of the Kitab sirr al-khaliqa (12th century), ed. Françoise Hudry, Chrysopoeia 6 (1997-1999): the ‘superiora de inferioribus’ wording.
• Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, “The Emerald Table”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1928): the Latin text.
• Isaac Newton, translation of the Tablet, Keynes MS 28, King’s College, Cambridge (late 17th century).
• H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York: J.W. Bouton, 1877), vol. 1, p. 35.
• Three Initiates, The Kybalion (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1908).
• Copenhaver, Hermetica (1992), for correspondence and the human as microcosm in the Corpus and the Asclepius.