The Ideas
As above, so below
The idea of correspondence between levels of reality is genuinely Hermetic. The slogan itself is a 19th-century condensation of a Latin sentence from the Emerald Tablet — an Arabic-era text — and the original says more, and means differently.
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
Not the Corpus Hermeticum. The line descends from the Emerald Tablet, first attested in Arabic in the 8th–9th century. The Latin vulgate offers a simile with a purpose: what is below is like what is above — and what is above like what is below — to accomplish the miracles of the one thing. It’s an operator’s sentence: a claim that transformation works because the levels of reality answer each other. The crisp modern epigram was popularised in the age of Blavatsky.
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.
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?
The condensed English form spread through 19th-century occultism (Blavatsky's era); the Latin behind it is medieval, translating Arabic.
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
- Research dossiers: emerald-tablet-arabic.md §2, ideas-glossary.md §4–5.
- Copenhaver, Hermetica (1992) — correspondence passages.
The source text → The Emerald Tablet