If you are a magical practitioner you will no doubt be aware of correspondences which are the reason will carefully match various elements in spells and ritual to improve performance. But what determines these correspondences? Despite cultural differences and various theoretical underpinnings these connections are found in magical practice around the world and throughout history. Celestial positions, dates, times, herbs, crystals, and many other factors combined are judged by centuries of practitioners to synthetically interact with each other giving potency and power to magical acts.

Summary

When magic practitioners employ in their rituals sage to purify the space, the timing associated with Mercury to aid communication, they are resorting to something called Correspondences.

Learn what they are, their history up until the Enlightenment and their philosophical underpinning by watching this episode.

Hello, everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium I’m a PhD and a Religious Studies scholar and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Paganism, Shamanism and all things occult.

Correspondences in magic are all those analogical associations between different elements in the practitioner’s experience that are believed to be linked on an occult level and influence each other.

Examples are the planets bearing correspondences related to possible magical aims, such as Mars linked to war and aggression, or Venus linked to love and attraction. Similarly, we see correspondences at play when yellow is associated with the element Air and the cardinal direction East or green to the element Earth and the North.

Most magical operations employ a variety of correspondences to affect reality by leveraging the invisible ties of which the fabric of reality is believed to be made, identifying which tie to work on to pull another at a distance and reshape the entire frame of reality so that the intended change is brought about.

But the very concept of correspondences is based upon some core philosophical concepts.

This perception of a reality that consists of multiple ‘levels’ that mirror one another and can influence one another is widespread in traditional societies and is foundational to esoteric practices such as Divination, Spell-casting, and Astrology.

It’s not only present in Western cultures but also in the Eastern world. Indeed, Sinologists have highlighted the foundational importance of “correlative thinking” to traditional Chinese culture.

[Marcel Granet’s La pensée chinoise (1934) and the second volume of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China (1956)]

As (Hanegraaff and Brach, 2006) highlight, such correlative thinking is ubiquitous in all pre-modern and even early-modern cultures, and their expressions.

We find strikingly similar and elaborate systematic tables of correspondences in China, India, the Middle East, Mesoamerica, and Europe in pre and early-modern times.

Now, let’s explore the theoretical foundations underpinning formulations of correspondences until and well into the Renaissance. You may find that they still – perhaps implicitly – inform today’s employment of correspondences in magical workings.

1. The first philosophical tenet underpinning the practice of correspondences can be defined as the unicity of creation, meaning that there is a perfect continuity that connects all levels of the universe, throughout the overall hierarchy of being.

The theme of the “great chain of being” is a pivotal metaphysical foundation of ancient cosmological systems, whose historical origin is unclear. We find it in Plato’s “Ion” but it certainly dates before the ancient Greek culture.

2. The second philosophical tenet is the doctrine of ‘participation’ derived from Plato, which sees ‘love’ as the universal link or bond between the constituents of the universe, in a vertical as well as a horizontal sense (Symposium, 186b-188d).

This is similar to the stoic scheme of sympatheia/antipatheia, the cosmic pattern of attraction/repulsion which determines the relations and interactions of all things, properties and beings within the world.

3. The third tenet is the perception of The Universe As A Living Being, endowed with an animating soul, whose parts are utterly complementary and interdependent, exactly like the limbs of a body. The oneness and “wholeness” of the universe’s structure are frequently likened to an organic image of the human body.
4. The fourth and last tenet is the Doctrine of Universal Analogy, meaning that all levels of existence within the ‘hierarchy of being’ mirror each other and the lower in ontological rank is considered a ‘symbol’ of the superior, fundamentally imbued with the same virtues, features and properties.

The most known analogy of this sort is that of the macrocosmos/microcosmos, harking back to Plato’s “Timæus,” likely dating much earlier than Plato and found in non-Western cultures, such as in Taoism, as well.

This concept sees the universe as “grand human”, a macrocosm, while human beings constitute a synthetic abridgement – a microcosm – of that universe.

Thus, ‘correspondences may be seen as the “horizontal” counterpart of the network of universal analogies; but according to a more encompassing understanding, they overreach from one natural realm or plane to another and, moreover, overlap quite frequently with analogies proper’. (Hanegraaff and Brach, 2006)

The network of correspondences could be seen as the outward expression of the hidden dynamics of sympatheia/antipatheia – attraction/repulsion – as a system of “signs” outlining the qualitative interactions of natural things and beings, and expressing how they unfold and manifest, and their magical or therapeutical application.

Correspondences were deemed to inherently possess a dual aspect, external and internal. The external one was based on plain outward resemblance in shape or characteristics – for example between a plant and a human limb, or between a given animal and a natural body, both being considered to stand under the dominion of the same astral influence and therefore to manifest, each in its own way, similar properties.

The internal or intrinsic aspect refers to an internal “essence” of things, deemed as the root of all material features.

The external or manifested aspect, being visible, is the manifestation of the inner principle and can be known and utilised.

What mediates between the internal and external essence of things is the SIGN – a bridging manifested element – that denotes the presence of an invisible counterpart to the outwardly observable characteristics.

This is different from the concept of Signatura in Paracelsus[Astronomia magna, Von der natürliche Dinge] or in Jacob Boehme [De signatura rerum]) this is also a concept expressed by Jacob Boehme in the “Signature Rerum.” This concept of Signature refers to the very relation between the occult and the manifest, trying to explain this relationship as an “imprint” or translation of an archetype into material reality, that really works both ways – from the visible to the invisible and vice versa.

For instance, to understand the invisible from the visible Paracelsus suggested a close observation of what he considered to be “Astronomy” because it would reveal the outward, visible manifestation, on a large scale, of what is hidden and invisible on a smaller scale – corroborating the underlying understanding that there is a shared nature of internal archetypes between the two orders.

But how does causality work when it comes to correspondences?

In this case, the conceptualisation of causality is nuanced, varied and sometimes ambiguous.

Linked with the cosmic network of sympathies and antipathies, correspondences may be understood in terms of a ‘pre-established harmony’, or ‘immanent determinism’, embedded as such in material reality and independent, for this reason, of causality in a strict sense.

Astrology presents an interesting case when we analyse the correspondences or occult relation between celestial bodies and terrestrial beings or events.

This relation is also founded on the non-causal notion of ‘pre-established harmony’ and manifests as essentially dynamic and interactive, based on a common set of elements and qualities held in common by the different realms.

It can also be seen as a relation founded on an astral influence that is both invisible and permeating the physical matter.

Lastly, it could be explained through the presence of an invisible archè – or principle – imbued in all natural things and hence hinting at an “ontological” causality, where the cause transcends its effects.

So, as this episode hopefully made plain, correspondences are not just principles used – knowingly or unknowingly – by magic practitioners but also important clues as to how the universe is cosmologically conceived when such principles are included as part of one’s worldview as well as how the visible and invisible facets of the universe relate and interconnect.

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REFERENCES:
(Hanegraaff and Brach, 2006)

Hanegraaff, W.J. and Brach, J.-P. (2006) ‘Correspondences’, in W.J. Hanegraaff (ed.) Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden, London: Brill, pp. 275–279.

Uploaded 18 Sep 2020