As Above, So Below

Dorion Sagan is a US- and France-based writer working at the interstices of literature, fiction, sciences, and philosophy.

“As above, so below.” The second verse of the Emerald Tablet, known from an Arabic source from the late eighth or early ninth century (although it’s possible the sentiment dates back to ancient Egypt), reads: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above.” Best known as the message represented by The Magician from the 1909 Rider-Waite tarot pack, the second part of the Latin translation – et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius – “and that which is below is like to that which is above” – differs from the Arabic original which, translated into English, reads “and that which is below is from that which is above.” The earlier Arabic seems to more closely align with modern scientific understanding.


Although it may be true that the science of today often becomes the mythology of tomorrow, one notices a newfound force of the ancient mytheme: how what is below (presumably down ‘here’ on Earth) comes from what is above (the cosmic matter-energy manifold). Hydrogen accounts for 62% of the atoms in our bodies and is simultaneously the most abundant element in the universe. Originally a universal toxin which our bacterial ancestors evolved to tolerate and then require (as O2) some two billion years ago, oxygen represents the lion’s share of mass in our bodies. Carbon, the main component (as CO2) of Mars’ and Venus’ atmospheres (though it makes up less than one percent of Earth’s) is integral to carbon-based life forms (for example your body, which is 20% carbon by mass,or 10% of your atoms).


Though not made in the image of a tyrannically vengeful patriarchal God – such a being is made anthropomorphically in our image and given our limitations – we do seem to reflect the elemental makeup of the universe at large, as evidenced by the quantity and mass of atoms in our bodies which complement our cosmic ‘parent’. As above, so below.


The motto not only applies to the atomic composition of life’s material bodies, but also to their energetic process. The largest known living body, the Earth system (with its intelligent blue-and-white visage, whirls and swirls, the Gulf Stream and Hadley Cells in its atmosphere) includes us as part of an energy-using, gas-exchanging, waste-producing, recycling regime of sensing, metabolising, reproducing, sometimes-merging surface beings (whose collective external chemistry is none other than that of the circulatory system of Gaia which has been out of thermodynamic equilibrium for billions of years). This fractalated system extends from the microbes cohering its soils and living in boiling hot springs or in sulfide-spewing vents at the bottom of the sea or even deeper, to the surface of the orbiting International Space Station.


Life shares basic material-energetic processes with certain nonliving systems: a whirling, swirling, ‘autopoietic’ turnover of atoms, molecules and more become complex local organisations laying usable energy to waste as they make, grow and reproduce themselves. Rather than violating the tendency for energy to spread as formalised by the second law of thermodynamics, the sensing, intelligent, growing, reproducing, symbiotic and symbiogenetic systems of life inevitably produce waste, including, ultimately, heat. Flooded with the Sun’s light from 93 million miles away, Van Gogh’s swirling sunflowers follow their stellar source of sustenance as they track their swirling day-star across the face of the sky and into the black, growing and going to seed by tapping cosmic energy. We, like most all familiar life forms, are agglomerations of eukaryotic cells which can trace their evolutionary history back billions of years. We resemble young star larvae. Photosynthetic bacteria, algae and plants feed on the energy of the sun, and most of the rest of us on them and each other. It is, and has long been, a hot mess.


Early Christian Gnostic sects believed humankind’s true home wasn’t here below on Earth, but rather above, in or beyond the realm of the stars in a place they termed the Pleroma (‘the fulness’). We’re stuck on Earth in the samsara-like realm of recycling and reproduction, but the lingering light of our true home, the divine spark of the ‘pneuma’, could be seen in the starry gleam of the human eye, the starry element in both ourselves and our neighbours stuck in this fallen realm.


Not quite Gnostics but related sects include the snake-worshipping Ophites, and the Sethians and the Peratae. “Every snake biting its tail becomes a circle,” opines Lacarrière, “a circle which the Gnostics discover over and over again at all levels: the cosmic level, where it is called Leviathan and its rings encircle the whole of the Hebdomad (the seven planetary circles ranging from the Earth to Saturn ¹), thus constituting the ring that divides the domain of darkness from the domain of light; the terrestrial level where, under the name of Ocean, its complex windings encircle our planet like a gigantic river.”²

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¹ Saturn was the last planet in the Ptolemaic geocentric conception of the cosmos, before Sir William Herschel discovered what he thought was a comet—but if it was, something was wrong. It was so bright it must have been close to the sun, but then it should have been moving much faster than it appeared— and where was its tail? Fellow astronomers found it had a near circular orbit and thus suggested it might be another planet. Herschel accepted this idea by 1783, trying to name the planet ‘King George III’. The discovery of the planet Uranus opened up the heavens, which Tycho Brahe had shown two centuries earlier could not be composed of seven crystalline spheres: the comet of 1577 would have smashed them. The Gnostic-inflected Christian universe thus, relatively speaking, abandoned its symmetrical and oppositional structure and opened itself in principle to the ongoing scientific dream of actual physical ascent, of the literal human conquest of space. But the cosmos is not an ocean, and planets are not islands.

²Jacques Lacarrière, 1977. The Gnostics, tr Nina Rootes, Peter Owen Limited: London, pp. 81-2.]


Although some might commonly think of ancient Egyptian beliefs as an inscrutable mystery religion, a closer look suggests deep ties to naturalism. The Pharaohs who had themselves mummified and buried in caverns at the base of giant pyramids seem mystifyingly idiosyncratic to us today. In their own frame of reference, however, the ancient Egyptians probably thought themselves eminently practical. In piling up great triangular configurations of limestone over their recumbent and swathed bodies, their leaders may have been copying the behaviour of the dung beetle (family Scarabaeidae), a ground-burrowing insect whose young emerge from the desert to live again. Dung beetles roll balls of dung in which to lay eggs and on which the white, mummy-esque larvae feed. According to old Egyptian folklore, the male beetle, wishing to procreate, found a piece of ox dung. The sacred beetle shaped it into a ball with his hind legs, rolling it from east to west, then buried the ball in a special hole dug out for this purpose and left it there for twenty-eight days. On the twenty-ninth day, the beetle pushed the dung into water so its young could emerge. Egyptians employed the form of this beetle as a talisman and symbol of resurrection, carved in either stone or earthenware decorated with opaque, coloured glazes (faïence). The wearing of scarabs around the neck as jewellery or pendants and made of either the dried exoskeletons or other materials in the beetles’ shape is a vestige of this worship.


In ancient Egyptian religion there was a correspondence between the ball of dung, rolled in the life-storing process of propagation from east to west, and the Sun, which also gave life and moved from east to west. By descending after death to the Earth with all their possessions, the Pharaohs were attempting to preserve themselves as hard parts in preparation for a journey into a new form. After all, if an insect can live long by transforming from one sort of body to another, what prevents human beings from considering their old age and death as illusory—a prelude to a grander life to come, a blossoming into another sort of body or phase of being? As below, so above?


The viscera of the pharaohs were kept preserved in canopic jars, protecting their organs from being devoured by Candida albicans, a fungus normally found in the human body, but one which, when it overgrows, can cause skin infections and other problems. This too seems a naturalistic way of prolonging the perishable body into a theoretical second life after death.


The mythology of the pharaohs was grounded in the observation of life’s mixed and changing forms. Indeed, forty percent of the yellow limestone of the Sphinx is composed of real chimaeras. Inclusions in the limestone – which Herodotus took to be lentils left by the workers and which were later called ‘coin-stones – are actually fossilised foraminifera. Some 40% of the Sphinx and the pyramids consists of these fossilised limestone-making algae. And the forms were often symbiotic with other algae—diatoms and radiolaria that swam in the Tethys Sea thirty-odd million years ago.


The idea that Gaia is – not an organism; no organism recycles virtually all its liquid, gaseous and solid wastes, let alone using myriad forms of metabolism for literally billions of years – temporarily glowing with (and suffering from) human technology, puts us in mind of a rather angelic being, one which feeds off starlight and puts out heat into space as its very fine and final waste product. Like the beautiful houris promised to martyrs in paradise, Gaia does not defecate, menstruate or micturate. In general, she burns clean, except for her human technocapitalist industrial component, responsible for producing too much heat waste too close to her sensitive surfaces. This more recent part of Gaia’s growing, changing body is more reminiscent of those infamously destructive beings of mediaeval Arabic philosophy—the djinn, beings made of smokeless fire. Though of course capitalism produces plenty of literal smoke, including particulate pollutants like gasoline additives and coal fly ash which traps and reradiates solar and Earth radiation, on the whole, the vast photosynthesis of Gaia makes her reminiscent of the djinns’ finer, more celestial counterparts—angels, beings made of light. Although human beings spring from the same chthonic source as the rest of Earth’s life (microbes) we – despite our arrogance, accomplishments and propaganda – represent an almost infinitesimal fragment of Earth’s life temporality. Divide the time of civilization (about ten thousand years) by life’s earthly tenure (some four billion years) and you get 0.0000025 – we literally don’t exist if you round down, representing a quarter of a thousandth of a percent since life’s terrestrial start.


We are quite full of ourselves and this applies even to the broad recent scientific prejudice that life must have a terrestrial origin. Why? The answer has to do with the peculiar history of science, in particular the synthesis of amino acids from basic starting materials— hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen (as methane and ammonia) exposed to electrical discharge in famous experiments at the University of Chicago in 1952. Nonetheless, the presumption that life evolved on Earth seems increasingly unlikely. The ISS is now full of microbes. Extremophiles with multiple forms of metabolism are far hardier than men in space suits. There are far more opportunities for life to have evolved elsewhere in space than to presume it evolved here. Earth may be our natal land, but it need not be life’s. On the other hand, insofar as crewed space exploration bears fruit, in terms of actually going to other planets, it would expand an ancient microbe-based and far-more-than-human empire, one which may well already be established well beyond Earth. A natural, material-energetic phenomenon, life, and the cosmos, may be eternal. Despite the popularity of “everything” beginning in a “big bang” and perhaps ending in a “heat death” of spent energy (entropy), basic logic suggests the cosmos is infinite. Any sleight-of-hand or stage magician knows you don’t get something from nothing. Rather, to make something appear – appear to appear – you remove a secret cover.


Living matter on Earth’s surface is part of a vast material-energetic cosmic flux. So are the two-thousand odd words of this or any such text.


“Yes,” writes Maurice Blanchot, “happily language is a thing: it is a written thing, a bit of bark, a sliver of rock, a fragment of clay in which the reality of the earth continues to exist.”


And in which the reality of the cosmos does also.


It shines through as white letters on a black page.


Everything sparkles with primal matter and energy..


As above, so below.