A Manual of Occultism

Sepharial offers methods rather than the “deeper arcana.” His stated aim is to let an ordinary reader test whether occult practices contain what he calls “a deep substratum of truth.” The manual therefore treats divination as something done by procedures, not accepted merely because it sounds mysterious.

That standard matters. A symbol must be observed, handled according to a method, and interpreted. Whether or not we accept Sepharial’s conclusions, his intended approach is methods before mysteries: learn what produced a judgment and how the reader reached it.

“As above, so below” names the assumption beneath Sepharial’s methods. The “above” is the superior or causal order; the “below” is the visible world of effects. He believes an analogy connects cosmic and spiritual processes with natural events, bodies, and minds.

This does not mean that every earthly occurrence is a miniature copy of something in the sky. It means that related orders can express a shared pattern. The interpreter looks for correspondence, not duplication—a meaningful relation between levels that appear separate.

What does “As above, so below” mean in Sepharial’s framework?

• Earthly causes always determine what happens in the spiritual world
• Anything imagined strongly enough must appear as a physical fact
• Every visible event exactly copies an event in the heavens
• Patterns in one order can disclose related patterns in another✓Correct answer

The maxim asserts an analogy between causal and visible orders. It supports interpretation through related patterns, not literal duplication or wish-fulfilment.

Sepharial finds correspondences already embedded in ordinary language. He associates commerce and the merchant with Mercury, joviality with Jupiter, and destructive words such as “martial” with Mars. These examples show how a planet can gather a family of actions, qualities, and images around it.

For him, such associations are remnants of an older symbolic science. Their immediate lesson is grammatical: a symbol carries a field of relations, not one fixed dictionary definition. Interpretation asks which part of that field fits the matter being judged.

Sepharial calls this system the Doctrine of Correspondences. It binds the microcosm—the human being and immediate world—to the macrocosm, the greater cosmic order. He describes their relation as that of an effect to an antecedent cause.

An occult sign therefore matters because it is taken to express something beyond itself. A planet, number, colour, or form is not merely decorative; it becomes evidence within an assumed network of affinities. Occult interpretation traces relations from the observed sign toward the hidden condition it is thought to reveal.

For Sepharial, correspondence means that events above and below must be literally identical.

False✓Correct answer

Correspondence is an analogy between connected orders, not exact sameness. The interpreter seeks a shared pattern expressed through different forms.