As above, so below
"As above, so below" is a popular modern paraphrase of the second verse of the Emerald Tablet, a short Hermetic text which first appeared in an Arabic source from the late eighth or early ninth century.[1] The paraphrase is based on one of several existing Latin translations of the Emerald Tablet, in which the second verse appears as follows:[2]
For other uses, see As above, so below (disambiguation).
The paraphrase is peculiar to this Latin version, and differs from the original Arabic, which reads "from" rather than "like to".
Following its use by prominent modern occultists such as Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891, co-founder of the Theosophical Society) and the anonymous author of the Kybalion (often taken to be William W. Atkinson, 1862–1932, a pioneer of the New Thought movement), the paraphrase started to take on a life of its own, becoming an often cited motto in New Age circles.[3]
Occultist interpretations[edit]
Helena P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877)[edit]
The occultists who were responsible for the popularization of the paraphrase generally understood it in the context of Emanuel Swedenborg's (1688–1772) doctrine of the correspondence between different planes of existence, a strongly elaborated version of the classical macrocosm–microcosm analogy. This interpretation was pioneered by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891),[12] whose works contain some of the earliest occurrences of the phrase as an independent axiom. Generally writing from a perennialist perspective, Blavatsky associated the phrase with a number of historically unrelated thought systems such as Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah and Buddhism.[13]
In popular culture[edit]
The phrase has also been adopted as a title for various works of art, such as the 2014 found-footage horror film As Above, So Below, as well as a number of musical works listed at As above, so below (disambiguation).