II — The Principle of Correspondence

“(…) and so he formed it as a single visible living thing which was to include all related creatures (…). By turning it he shaped it into a sphere (…), giving it the most perfect form of all.”

Timaeus, c. 410 BC

In ancient times, man sought comfort in what he could not understand. Within him, he carried a heart full of faith and the certainty that, beyond himself, other worlds and gods existed. The fear of being alone, the fear of death and of time — all of it was reduced to crumbs before the immensity of the unknown.

Nothing without God

The fear of the end and of the inevitable was completely subdued by belief in miracles and supernatural forces.

Nothing has changed in a thousand years.

The monsters may have taken on other perspectives, less allegorical ones, and divine forces may now be seen in another light. That said, I can say that faith today is merely more covered in facts, and there is no reason not to believe in God.

Hermetic principles have been given other names. What was once called esotericism, we now call science.

Nothing has changed; everything has been transformed. There has been ebb and flow — the fifth Hermetic law: the Principle of Rhythm.

From Plato and Aristotle to Paracelsus; from Hippocrates to Isaac Luria; from Thomas Aquinas to Hildegard von Bingen; all the way to Einstein and Hawking.

From cosmology to Benoît Mandelbrot’s system of fractals.

Just as what is above is below — as above, so below.

What I mean is this: we seek explanations, we change the names, but reality remains one, even if it exists according to each person’s perspective — a conversation for another time. We give more complex names to ancient explanations in an attempt to kill or rationalize what the mind could not comprehend. And the fact is: God makes Himself even more present.

Fractals show that the smallest particle existing in the universe is a reflection of the great cosmology. This presence manifests itself, with absolute existence, in the fingerprints of the galaxies of the cosmos: everything made minutely and peculiarly by the same Architect.

Nature possesses self-similar structures.

The Golden Ratio

The relationship between microcosm and macrocosm does not belong to one isolated science, nor can it be reduced to a single philosophical school. It is born from an ancient cosmological vision according to which the human being, as a “small world,” reflects within himself the greater structure of the universe. Man would not be merely a creature within the cosmos, but a living synthesis of it: body, soul, reason, instinct, matter, and spirit gathered into a single form.

This idea crosses many traditions. In Hermeticism, it appears directly in the maxim: “As above, so below” — “as it is above, so it is below.” The phrase, associated with the Emerald Tablet, expresses the notion that there are correspondences between different levels of reality. The higher world and the lower world, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, the universe and man would not be realities absolutely separated from one another, but mirrors of the same order.

In Neoplatonism, this relationship appears in the idea that everything emanates from a higher source and returns to it. The sensible world would be an imperfect, yet still meaningful, manifestation of a higher reality. In Hermeticism and alchemy, this correspondence takes on a symbolic language: transforming impure metals into gold was not merely a material operation, but also an image of man’s own inner transformation. Matter and soul took part in the same drama of purification.

In Kabbalah, the relationship between the human and the divine also manifests itself in a profound way. Man can be seen as a symbolic image of creation, and creation as a reflection of a higher spiritual order. In ancient medicine, especially in certain Hippocratic, Galenic, and later Paracelsian traditions, the human body was interpreted as a small cosmos, subject to balances, forces, elements, and influences that corresponded to the greater order of nature.

For this reason, “as above, so below” should not be understood merely as a beautiful mystical phrase. Its meaning is more radical: what happens on one plane of reality finds its reflection on another. The outer universe and the inner universe are in dialogue. The order of the cosmos and the order of the soul are not entirely foreign to one another. To know the world is, in some way, to know man; and to know man is also to touch something of the structure of the world.

Modern science does not adopt this idea in its original spiritual or metaphysical sense. Even so, many echoes of it can be perceived in areas such as cosmology, physics, systems theory, fractals, and the study of complexity. Contemporary science observes patterns that repeat across different scales, structures that organize themselves from the small to the great, relationships between parts and totality. But caution is necessary: this does not literally prove Hermeticism. It only shows that the ancient intuition of a connection between scales still finds interesting resonances in modern thought.

The relationship between microcosm and macrocosm remains powerful because it offers an integrated vision of existence. It affirms that the human being is not separated from the universe, but participates in it. Man is small before the immensity of the cosmos, yet he carries within himself an image of that immensity. It is at this point that the Hermetic phrase reveals its strength: “As above, so below.” What is above reflects what is below; what is outside finds correspondence within. And perhaps true wisdom lies precisely in perceiving these correspondences without confusing symbol with proof, nor mystery with ignorance.

Stay well for now …