As above, so below

Did You Know?

• The phrase was used as the title of a 2014 found-footage horror film.
• A number of musical works have also adopted the phrase as a title.

Scholarly interpretations

Historians of philosophy and science often interpret the verse as referencing the influence of heavenly bodies on terrestrial events, such as the Sun's effect on seasons or the Moon's on tides, as well as more elaborate astrological effects. Another common interpretation sees it as describing structural similarities between the macrocosm (the universe as a great living being) and the microcosm (the human being as a miniature universe). This macrocosm–microcosm view appears in many philosophical systems, notably ancient Greek and Hellenistic thought, with proponents including Anaximander, Plato, the Hippocratic authors, and the Stoics.

Occultist interpretations

The occultists who popularized the paraphrase understood it through Emanuel Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence between different planes of existence, an elaborated version of the classical macrocosm–microcosm analogy. Helena P. Blavatsky pioneered this interpretation, and her works contain some of the earliest occurrences of the phrase as an independent axiom. Writing from a perennialist perspective, Blavatsky linked the phrase to Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah, and Buddhism. In her 1877 work Isis Unveiled, she wrote that Swedenborg's doctrine of correspondence, or Hermetic symbolism, is that of Pythagoras and the kabalists—"as above, so below"—and also that of Buddhist philosophers, who call invisible types the only reality and everything else illusions. She further stated that the imagery of antediluvian ages reflects itself in later historical periods, and that the spirit of a mineral, plant, or animal may begin to form on Earth and reach final development millions of ages later on other planets, with harmony as the great law of nature.