As Above, So Below: The Hermetic Key
Of all the phrases the Western occult tradition has handed down, none has been quoted more confidently and read more loosely than "as above, so below." It is treated as a password, a slogan, a tattoo — but its actual home is a single cryptic paragraph attributed to a god who never lived, and the whole adventure of Western magic is, in a sense, the centuries-long argument over what those four words were trying to say.
Origins: a sentence from the Emerald Tablet
The phrase descends from the *Tabula Smaragdina*, the Emerald Tablet — a short, dense text attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, "thrice-great Hermes," a syncretic fusion of the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth who Renaissance scholars wrongly believed had lived in deep antiquity, before Moses. No emerald tablet was ever found; the legend that it was discovered clutched in the hands of Hermes' mummified body, seated on a throne in a hidden chamber, is itself part of the folklore.
What we actually have is a text. The Emerald Tablet first appears in Arabic, embedded in a longer work known as the *Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa* (the Book of the Secret of Creation), associated with the name Balīnūs, the Arabic Apollonius of Tyana, by around the early medieval period. It reached the Latin West through translation — Hugo of Santalla rendered a version in twelfth-century Spain — and by the later Middle Ages it was a fixture of alchemical manuscripts. Its second line, in the familiar Latin, runs *"Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius"* — "that which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below." The modern English compression "as above, so below" is a paraphrase of that sentence, not a direct quotation, and it is worth remembering that the famous form is a translator's polish, not the words on any tablet.
What it actually meant: a rule for the work, not a cosmic mood
The Tablet is an alchemical document, and in its native context the line is closer to an operating instruction than a piece of dreamy mysticism. It is followed immediately by a stated purpose — *"ad perpetranda miracula rei unius,"* to accomplish the miracles of the one thing — and then by a strange recipe-like passage about the Sun as father, the Moon as mother, the wind carrying the thing in its belly, the earth as nurse. Alchemists read this as a coded description of how a single primal substance descends, is purified, and ascends again.
So the original "above and below" is vertical and operational: the heavens and the earth are made of the same hidden principle, which means the alchemist working in a sealed flask is, in miniature, repeating the cosmos's own process of creation. Isaac Newton, who copied out his own English translation of the Tablet among his vast unpublished alchemical papers, took it seriously as natural philosophy rather than mere mysticism. The point was correspondence — the conviction that the structure of the great world (the *macrocosm*) is mirrored in the small (the *microcosm*) — and that this mirroring is what makes magic, medicine, and transmutation thinkable at all. If above and below are *not* alike, nothing the magician does on earth could possibly reach the stars.
The doctrine of correspondences: how the West built a cosmos out of one line
What began as a sentence became a worldview. The Hermetic writings gathered as the *Corpus Hermeticum* — Greek philosophical-religious dialogues of the early centuries CE, translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino for Cosimo de' Medici in 1463 — describe the human being as a creature poised between the divine and the material, a small cosmos who contains the large one. From this seed the Renaissance grew an entire science of *correspondences*: the seven classical planets answered to seven metals, to organs of the body, to herbs, stones, colours and days of the week. Saturn ruled lead, melancholy, the spleen; the Sun ruled gold, the heart, the lion.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's *De occulta philosophia* (three books, published 1531–33) is the great catalogue of this thinking, arranging the natural, celestial, and divine worlds as three storeys of a single building, each floor reflecting the others. The same instinct produced Paracelsus's doctrine of *signatures* — the idea that a plant shaped like an organ was marked by heaven to heal that organ — and the very logic of astrology, in which a pattern "above" in the sky is read as a pattern "below" in a human life. Strip away the specifics and one principle remains: nothing stands alone, everything answers to everything else, and to know one level is to gain a key to the others.
In Kabbalah: the Tree, Adam Kadmon, and the mirror of worlds
When Christian scholars of the Renaissance braided Jewish mysticism into their Hermeticism — figures like Pico della Mirandola and, later, the so-called Christian Cabala — "as above, so below" found a ready partner in Kabbalistic cosmology. The Kabbalah of the *Zohar* and the later Lurianic system describes reality as a descent through four worlds (*Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah* — emanation, creation, formation, action), each a denser reflection of the one above it. The same ten *Sefirot* — the divine emanations diagrammed as the Tree of Life — are said to structure every level, so that the pattern repeats from the highest unknowable source down to the physical world.
Most strikingly, there is *Adam Kadmon*, the "primordial man" of Kabbalah: a cosmic anthropos whose form is the template of all creation, so that the human body below is an image of the divine architecture above. The rabbinic and Kabbalistic commonplace that a person is a small world — *olam katan* — is the Hebrew face of the same idea the Hermeticists wrote in Latin. The two streams were not originally the same, and serious scholars of Jewish mysticism — Gershom Scholem foremost among them — insisted on separating authentic Kabbalah from the occult-revival borrowings later layered on top of it. But in the Western esoteric imagination they fused, and the Tree of Life became, for the magicians of the modern era, the master diagram of "above and below."
The occult revival: Tarot, the Golden Dawn, and the Magician's gesture
By the nineteenth century the phrase had become a watchword of the occult revival. Éliphas Lévi, the French magus who did more than anyone to shape modern ceremonial magic, made correspondence central; Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy preached macrocosm and microcosm as a universal law; and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — the late-Victorian English society that trained, among others, the poet W. B. Yeats — built its entire curriculum on systems of correspondence linking Tarot, Kabbalah, astrology, and the elements into one cross-referenced web.
The image most readers know without knowing its source is the Magician of the Tarot. In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck of 1909 — drawn by Pamela Colman Smith under Arthur Edward Waite, both Golden Dawn initiates — the Magician stands with one hand raised toward heaven and one pointing to the earth, an infinity sign above his head, the four suit-emblems on his table. The pose is "as above, so below" made flesh: the human being as the channel through which the powers of the higher world pour into the lower. It is the single most efficient visual summary of the doctrine ever produced, and it is why the phrase and that gesture are now inseparable in popular imagination.
In dreams: the dream as a small mirror of a large night
Tie the thread back to dreaming and the idea sharpens rather than softens. The whole premise of classical dream interpretation is a kind of "as above, so below": the dream is the microcosm, the waking world and the soul are the macrocosm, and the art is reading the correspondence between them. Artemidorus, writing the *Oneirocritica* in the second century CE, interpreted dreams precisely by analogy and likeness — the head standing for the head of the household, the feet for slaves, the body a small map of one's relations — which is correspondence reasoning applied to the night.
In the esoteric tradition this becomes explicit. The dreamer is held to descend at night into a finer "above," and the images that return are treated not as random but as *reflections* — the higher world casting its shapes onto the screen of sleep. Carl Jung, who read the alchemists closely and devoted *Psychology and Alchemy* and *Mysterium Coniunctionis* to them, secularised this: for him the dream is a microcosm of the psyche, and the figures in it correspond to inner forces — the shadow, the anima, the Self — just as the planets once corresponded to the metals. To dream of the phrase, of a tablet, of mirrored worlds, of a figure pointing up and down at once, is in this reading a dream about correspondence itself: a part of you looking for the hidden likeness between your outer life and your inner one.
How to read it when it appears
As a symbol surfacing in a dream or in your reading, "as above, so below" rarely arrives as a literal instruction. It tends to mean *pattern* — the suspicion that two things in your life, one large and visible, one small and private, are secretly the same shape. A relationship below mirrors a wound above; a habit in the small repeats a fate in the large. The image asks you to look for the rhyme rather than the cause.
Read it also as a question of integration: the Magician's two hands are not in conflict, they are completing a circuit. Drawn or dreamt, the figure may be pointing to a gap between what you aspire to (above) and how you actually live (below), and asking whether the two are connected by anything at all. The Hermetic optimism is that they can be — that the lower can be brought into accord with the higher by attention, and that nothing in the small world is too humble to carry meaning. That is a useful frame for reflection whether or not one believes a word of the metaphysics.
A careful note: folklore, history, and the limits of the key
Everything above is offered as history, symbolism, and folklore — the long, strange argument the Western imagination has had with itself about whether the universe rhymes. It is not a claim that the planets govern your spleen, nor an instruction in any operative magic, and the alchemical "recipe" of the Emerald Tablet is best read as poetry of the soul, not chemistry of the bench. Living faiths have their own and often cautious views of this material; many traditions regard occult practice as forbidden, and we describe these ideas without endorsing or instructing in them.
The honest caution that scholars urge is worth keeping front of mind. Hermes Trismegistus was not an ancient Egyptian sage; the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614, by the language of the texts, that the *Corpus Hermeticum* belonged to the early Christian centuries, deflating the Renaissance dream of a primordial wisdom older than Moses. The Emerald Tablet is medieval, its famous English form a modern paraphrase. None of which makes the idea less interesting — only more human. "As above, so below" endured not because a god wrote it on a gemstone, but because it names something people keep noticing: that the world seems to be made of echoes, and that a dream, a chart, a body, or a single sealed flask might each be a small mirror held up to a very large night.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the phrase "as above, so below" actually come from?
It is a modern English paraphrase of a line in the Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina), a short alchemical text attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. The Latin reads roughly "that which is below is like that which is above." The Tablet first appears in Arabic sources (embedded in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation, linked to the name Balīnūs) and reached the Latin West through medieval translation. There was never a literal emerald tablet; that is part of the legend.
Who was Hermes Trismegistus, and did he really exist?
No. Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice-great Hermes") is a legendary figure who fuses the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth. Renaissance scholars believed he was a real ancient sage who lived before Moses and wrote the Hermetic texts, but in 1614 the philologist Isaac Casaubon showed, from the Greek of the texts themselves, that the Corpus Hermeticum dates from the early Christian centuries, not deep antiquity. He is a mythic author, and the wisdom attributed to him is a tradition rather than one person's writing.
What does "as above, so below" mean in plain terms?
It expresses the doctrine of correspondence: the idea that the large world (the macrocosm) and the small world (the microcosm — a person, a body, an experiment) share the same hidden pattern, so that knowing one gives you a key to the other. In its original alchemical setting it was almost an operating principle — heaven and earth are made of the same one thing — which is why astrology, the theory of signatures, and ceremonial magic could all treat earthly things as mirrors of celestial ones.
How does "as above, so below" connect to dreams?
Classical and esoteric dream interpretation runs on the same logic: the dream is a microcosm that mirrors the soul and the waking world. Artemidorus's Oneirocritica interpreted dreams by likeness and analogy, reading body parts as social relations, and the esoteric tradition treats dream images as reflections cast down from a finer "above." Carl Jung secularised the idea — for him the dream is a small mirror of the psyche, its figures corresponding to inner forces like the shadow and the Self, just as planets once corresponded to metals.
Why is the Tarot Magician card linked to this phrase?
In the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot (1909), made by Golden Dawn members Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, the Magician stands with one hand raised to the sky and one pointing to the ground, an infinity sign above his head. The gesture is a visual translation of "as above, so below" — the human being as the channel through which higher powers flow into the lower world. It became the most recognisable picture of the doctrine, which is why the card and the phrase are now inseparable.
Is "as above, so below" a real spell or instruction?
No. On DreamTabeer it is presented as history, symbolism, and folklore — the long Western argument about whether the cosmos mirrors itself. The Emerald Tablet's "recipe" is best read as soul-poetry, not chemistry, and astrological correspondences are cultural symbolism rather than verified physics. Many living faiths regard occult practice as forbidden; this material is described, not endorsed, and contains no actionable ritual.
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