Four words, and you will find them on book covers, on jewelry, in song lyrics and tattooed on forearms. As above, so below. They are offered as the essence of Hermetic wisdom, and in a sense they are. But a phrase repeated that often wears smooth, and this one has been made to mean almost anything. It is worth going back to see what was actually said.
The wording
The source is the second line of the Emerald Tablet, which in the Latin version known to the Middle Ages runs: Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the wonders of the one thing.
Set this beside the four word version and three differences appear at once. The original begins with below, not above. It states the relation in both directions. And it does not stop where the slogan stops. It goes on to say what the likeness is for. The four word form is a modern compression, convenient and memorable, and each thing it leaves out has been the occasion of a misunderstanding.
First misreading: that the two are the same
The word in the text is sicut: like, in the manner of. It is not idem, the same. The tablet does not say that heaven and earth are identical, or that the human being is God, or that there is no difference between levels. It says there is a likeness between them, of the kind that holds between a map and a country or a seed and a tree.
The difference matters in practice. If above and below were the same, there would be nothing to do. It is because they are alike and yet distinct that one can serve as a key to the other, and that work is possible. The same tablet, a few lines later, instructs the reader to separate the subtle from the gross. You cannot separate what is identical.
Second misreading: that it runs one way
The slogan is often taken to mean that what happens above determines what happens below: the stars decree and we comply. This is the fatalist reading, and it has the text against it. The line is carefully symmetrical. Below is like above, and above is like below. The Kybalion preserves the symmetry in its own formula: as above, so below; as below, so above.
The second half is the more radical. It implies that the lower can be a way of knowing the higher, that the examined particulars of a human life are a text in which larger things can be read, and that what is done here is not without consequence there. The whole of the tablet describes a circulation: the thing ascends from earth to heaven and descends again, receiving the power of both. A one way street would not describe it.
Third misreading: that any likeness will do
Because the principle licenses analogy, it is sometimes used as if it licensed every analogy. The atom resembles a solar system, so the solar system is alive. Water takes the shape of its vessel, so reality takes the shape of belief. Arguments of this kind have the form of Hermetic reasoning and none of its discipline.
The tradition was stricter than its admirers. The correspondences of the old tables were not improvised. They were worked out over centuries, argued about, and tested against one another for coherence. An analogy, in this way of thinking, is a hypothesis. It tells you where to look, and then you have to look. Likeness is the beginning of an inquiry and it settles nothing by itself.
Fourth misreading: that the world obeys the wish
The most popular modern reading takes above to mean the mind and below to mean circumstances, and concludes that whatever one holds in thought must appear in fact. Think of wealth and wealth will come.
There is a grain of something here. The Hermetic texts do teach that mind is prior to matter, and anyone can observe that a settled intention changes what a person notices and does. But the tablet says nothing about wishing. Its verbs are verbs of labor: separate, ascend, descend, receive. And its condition for success is the opposite of mental picturing. The power is complete, it says, when it has been turned into earth. The teaching is not that thought replaces work but that work on one level, carried through, takes effect on the others.
What it does say
Read whole, the line makes three claims. That reality has levels. That the levels answer to one another by likeness, in both directions. And that this is useful: it is the means by which the wonders of the one thing are accomplished.
That last phrase is the one the slogan drops and the one I would most like to see restored. The correspondence of above and below is not offered as a consoling thought about the harmony of the universe. It is offered as a working principle, as a craftsman might tell an apprentice that the grain runs this way. It says: because things are like this, you can do something. The rest of the tablet says what.
For a student, then, the maxim is less a belief to hold than a habit to practice. When you meet a pattern in one place, ask where else it appears. When something resists you on one level, look for its counterpart on another, where it may be easier to reach. And keep both halves of the sentence. The work begins below.