“As Above, So Below”: Following a Slogan Back to Its Source

In 1908 the Yogi Publication Society of Chicago issued a slim book called The Kybalion, offered as a study of the Hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece. The author's name was withheld. It was credited only to "Three Initiates."¹

The book sets out seven "Hermetic Principles," each introduced by a maxim in quotation marks and attributed to an older work, also called "The Kybalion." The second principle is the one that escaped into the wider culture:

"As above, so below; as below, so above."²

The phrase now appears in tarot handbooks, astrology columns, album titles, and tattoo parlours, and it is nearly always described as ancient. The 1908 book certainly says so. The question this article follows is simple: how old is it, really, and did it always mean what it is now taken to mean?

What the Book Claims

The Kybalion is direct about its pedigree. Its teachings come from Hermes Trismegistus, who lived "in Egypt in the earliest days" and was "the father of the Occult Wisdom; the founder of Astrology; the discoverer of Alchemy." As to date: "The best authorities regard him as a contemporary of Abraham."³

The maxims themselves are said to come from a collection handed "from Master to Student; from Initiate to Hierophant; from lip to ear," and the authors add a remarkable admission about this source: "Its precepts have never been written down, or printed, so far as we know."³ The reader is thus offered quotations from a text that, by the authors' own account, nobody could check.

On the Principle of Correspondence, the book explains that "there is always a Correspondence between the laws and phenomena of the various planes of Being and Life."² It speaks elsewhere of "the Physical Plane" and of "the Mental and even the Spiritual Planes,"² and presents the axiom as a tool of reasoning: what we understand on one level lets us infer what is true on another. The rest of the book makes the practical application clear. The first principle is "THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental,"² and the point of knowing the laws is to work with them mentally.

Who the Three Initiates Were

Scholars now largely agree on a less mysterious author. According to the references gathered in Wikipedia's article on the book, several researchers, among them Philip Deslippe in his 2011 edition, identify the writer as William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932), a prolific Chicago author and publisher and a leading figure in New Thought, the American movement that taught the power of mind over circumstance.⁴ The Sacred Text Archive's own note on the book likewise suggests it was probably written by Atkinson under a pseudonym for the Yogi Publication Society.¹

That attribution matters for reading the book. The same article summarises the scholarly view that The Kybalion "is more indebted to the ideas of modern occultist authors, especially those of the New Thought movement to which Atkinson belonged," than to the ancient Hermetic writings, and cites Nicholas Chapel's conclusion that it "is too bound up with early 20th-century ideas emanating from the New Thought movement" to stand for the historical tradition.⁴ Even the name gives the game away: "The title Kybalion looks like an ancient Greek word, but it has no known meaning in that language. It was likely made up in an attempt to convey a false sense of antiquity."⁴

So the unwritten ancient source is, as far as anyone can tell, a literary device. But the second maxim is a special case. Unlike some of the others, it was not invented in Chicago.

One Step Back: A Victorian Paraphrase

The exact four-word form has a traceable history in English. Wikipedia's article on the text we are about to meet credits Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, writing in the 1870s: "She also popularized a paraphrase of the second verse of the vulgate: 'as above, so below.'"⁵ The Kybalion took up the phrase a generation later and carried it to a much larger audience, and from there it passed into late twentieth-century New Age usage.⁵

Note the word "paraphrase." Blavatsky was condensing something. The thing she was condensing is called the Emerald Tablet.

Two Steps Back: Newton's Alchemy

The Emerald Tablet is a short, cryptic text, about a dozen sentences long, that European alchemists from the Middle Ages onward revered as the summary of their art and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Isaac Newton, who spent years on alchemy, made his own English version. His rendering of the line in question reads:

"That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracle of one only thing"⁵

Put this beside the modern slogan and two differences stand out. First, it is a statement of likeness, not a rule of inference about planes of being. Second, it does not stop where the slogan stops. The likeness is "to do the miracle of one only thing." For Newton and the alchemists, this was a sentence about a work to be accomplished, generally understood as the preparation of the philosophers' stone, and the correspondence of above and below was part of a recipe, however obscure.

Newton was translating from Latin. The standard medieval Latin version, which scholars call the vulgate and date to the first half of the twelfth century, has: "Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius," that is, "That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above."⁵ An earlier Latin translation was made by Hugo of Santalla around 1145–1151 but circulated little.⁵

Three Steps Back: Arabic, and a Different Verb

The Latin was itself a translation. The oldest known version of the Emerald Tablet is in Arabic, in a work called the Book of the Secret of Creation, compiled in the late eighth or early ninth century and attributed to "Balinus," the Arabic form of the name of the ancient sage Apollonius of Tyana.⁵ In the frame story, as it is usually told, Balinus discovers the tablet in a vault, in the hands of a statue or corpse of Hermes. Other early Arabic versions appear in writings ascribed to the alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan and in the pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets.⁵

Here the line reads differently. The Arabic of the Secret of Creation is translated: "the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost."⁵

Not like, but from. In the earliest witness we have, the claim is about origin or derivation: higher and lower things come out of one another. The Latin translators turned this into resemblance, sicut, "just as." Whether that was a misreading, a different Arabic text, or an interpretation, the sources consulted here do not say. But it means the idea of correspondence, on which the modern use depends, may owe as much to a twelfth-century translator's choice as to Hermes.

And before the Arabic? No Greek original is known to survive, though some scholars think Greek or Syriac precursors plausible.⁵ There the trail ends, around the year 800, in Abbasid-era Arabic, a very long way from the Egypt of Abraham.

What the Journey Shows

It would be easy to conclude that the slogan is a fake. That is not quite what the evidence says. The saying has a real history of some twelve centuries, which is old by any standard, and the Emerald Tablet was attributed to Hermes from its first appearance. People who call it "Hermetic" are using the word the way medieval alchemists did. What is not supported is the further claim of Egyptian antiquity, or of continuity with the Greek philosophical Hermetica of the early centuries AD, in which, so far as the sources consulted here indicate, the Tablet does not appear.

More interesting is how the meaning moved. In Arabic, the higher and lower derive from each other. In Latin alchemy, they resemble each other for the sake of "one only thing," a material and spiritual operation. In Blavatsky's paraphrase, the sentence loses its second half and becomes a portable principle. In The Kybalion, it becomes a law of mind in a universe where "THE ALL IS MIND," suited to a movement that taught the power of thought. In present-day usage it often means simply that the cosmos and the self mirror each other.

None of those meanings is illegitimate; traditions change by reinterpretation. But a reader who meets the phrase on a poster can now ask a better question than "is it ancient?" The better question is: which version is this, and what was cut to make it fit?