The Law of Correspondences

From the Lesson

"As above, so below" is the most quoted line in the Hermetic tradition, and it is also the most practical. It is the reason a magician lights a gold candle on a Sunday, burns myrrh for Saturn and sets a cup in the west. This teaching traces where that chain of correspondences came from, how it was built, and how to use it without mistaking a symbol for a law of physics.

Sympathy Before Science

The idea that like acts upon like is far older than the Hermetic books. Stoic philosophers spoke of sympathy (sympatheia), a single breath, or pneuma, running through the whole cosmos so that what happens in one part is felt in another. The Emerald Tablet, a short Arabic text first attested around the eighth or ninth century and later translated into Latin, gave the idea its famous form: that which is below is like that which is above, for the accomplishment of the miracle of the one thing. The Neoplatonists added the image of a hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being, descending from the One through the stars to stones and herbs. Each planet, they taught, sends its rays down a ladder of things that share its nature.

It is important to be honest about the sources. No Egyptian priest of the pharaohs wrote these tables. The Corpus Hermeticum was composed in Greek, in Roman Egypt, in the first centuries of our era. The full tables of correspondence were built much later, piece by piece.

The Builders of the Tables

Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum in Florence in 1463 and, in his Three Books on Life (1489), taught that a scholar could draw down the healthful influence of the Sun and Jupiter through music, scents, colours and foods. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) gathered the classical, Arabic and medieval lore into the great scales of correspondence: the planets with their metals, stones, plants, animals, angels, magic squares and divine names. Three centuries later the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn mapped these scales onto the Qabalistic Tree of Life and the tarot, and Aleister Crowley's 777 (1909) printed them as columns. Most modern tables, including the one in the Mystic Practices sanctuary, descend from these books.

How a Chain Is Made

A correspondence is a shared quality perceived across planes. Saturn is slow, cold, heavy and distant; lead is the heaviest common metal; black is the absence of light; myrrh is bitter and used for the dead; Saturday closes the week. None of these things causes the others. They are rhymes, and the magician uses rhyme to concentrate the mind on one quality until it saturates the whole working. The Seven Hermetic Principles describe this exactly: Mentalism (the mind agrees to let the symbol stand), Correspondence (the shared quality across planes), Vibration (scent, sound and colour actually change the state of the room and body), and Rhythm (the day and hour supply the tide).

The Seven and the Four

The backbone of the system is the seven classical planets, the lights visible to the naked eye: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The seven metals known in antiquity were paired with them: lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, quicksilver and silver. Laid across them are the four elements of Empedocles, each with its qualities from Aristotle (Fire hot and dry, Air hot and moist, Water cold and moist, Earth cold and dry) and its humour from Galenic medicine. The twelve signs are the elements expressed in three modes. Every other column, from herbs to archangels, hangs from these.

Using the Tables Well

Choose your aim first, then the planet whose nature matches it. Gather three or four of its links: colour, incense, a stone or metal, its day. Open the working in its hour and keep everything in the room on that one note. Afterward, act in the world; the correspondences focus will, they do not replace it.