Talk:As above, so below

References/sources of using the term, "As above, so below"
This article needs some references/sources of using the term, "As above, so below" which was the ancient precept of sacred geometry. I'm working on it. If others could help and editors could be patient. 69.180.104.60 (talk) 15:31, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Step Pyramid of Djoser was designed to be 7 levels high and had 4 sides/4 corners
I tweaked... Royal cubits were used in the design of all sacred buildings in Egypt starting with the first Step Pyramid of Djoser which was 7 levels high and had 4 sides/4 corners. 69.180.104.60 (talk) 16:05, 4 January 2016 (UTC)


 * This http://www.themystica.com/mystica/default.html is not a wp:reliable source for Wikipedia's standards. I undid the edits that were based on it . - DVdm (talk) 16:26, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

As you believe the world to be so it is. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:586:8103:ABB0:3C28:FF3F:6CD4:504D (talk) 13:59, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Complete rewrite 8 January 2021
The old version of this page did not cite any reliable sources, and was generally in a very bad shape. I have completely rewritten it. Apaugasma (talk) 20:52, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

Not neutral to state that Blavatsky's associations of "as above, so below" with Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah, Buddhism are false?
An IP editor contended that is not neutral for us to state that "Blavatsky falsely associated the phrase with such variegated thought systems as Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah and Buddhism", preferring to strike the word "falsely". I pointed out that the source used (Prophet 2018) supports the statement that these associations are false, but  disagrees.

Here's Prophet 2018, p. 87 on Blavatsky:

What she called “Hermetic philosophy” must be understood in the context of nineteenth-century Hermeticism, which was already entwined with alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and Freemasonry, and injected with a good dose of Egyptomania. What she often seemed to mean when she referenced “Hermetic philosophy” was a general opposition to materialist science, affirmation of the reality of spiritual forces and immaterial beings, and support for a “double evolution” of body and soul, as proof of which she often quoted the Hermetic maxim “as above, so below.” In promoting this ancient “Wisdom-Religion,” Blavatsky was espousing perennialism and smoothing the contradictions between the various systems of thought from which she drew. [...] Blavatsky wove the “Hermetic philosophy” into a narrative that also incorporated references to the Bible and Apocrypha, along with gnostic, Kabbalistic, and Eastern texts.

In accordance with perennialist thought, Blavatsky believed that the books of Hermes predated and inspired Pythagoras and Plato (Prophet 2018, p. 89), and generally that Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah, Buddhism are all representative of the same perennial truth. But from a scholarly point of view, this is of course untenable, and among scholars there is no doubt at all that these associations are false. Prophet also clearly indicates this by pointing out that Blavatsky needed to take recourse to smoothing the contradictions between the various systems of thought from which she drew, that she wove [...] a narrative, that she believed that the Hermetica (actually dated to the first centuries CE) predated Pythagoras (6th century BCE), and that in historical reality, the maxim “as above, so below” is a simplification of a sentence from the Emerald Tablet, an influential Hermetic text of unknown date that surfaced in the thirteenth century (Prophet 2018, p. 87, n. 9; Prophet is slightly mistaken here: though the phrase is indeed based on the 13th-century version, the Emerald Tablet itself actually goes back at least to the 8th century).

In all of this, Blavatsky was consciously contradicting the existing scholarship of her time (late 19th century), and thus engaging to a certain extent in pseudohistory.

Because of the dearth of secondary sources on this, we are citing Blavatsky's own words. But if we do that, it becomes especially important to contextualize these words, and clearly state how actual historians (like Prophet) look at these words. We do that by saying that Blavatsky was "falsely" associating the phrase with variegated thought systems (Prophet and all other scholars' view), and striking this would only serve to obscure the scholarly view. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 18:27, 18 August 2021 (UTC)


 * I changed it to "Generally writing from a perennialist perspective, Blavatsky associated the phrase with a number of historically unrelated thought systems such as Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah and Buddhism." (with reference to Prophet 2018, p. 87) for now, which also works for me. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 19:13, 18 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, I agree that's much better. Dicklyon (talk) 20:43, 18 August 2021 (UTC)