# Hermeticism - As Above So Below > [!gist] Heaven in the sky to the Earth below > Heaven in your eye from the Earth below. > > Hermeticism is a foundational Western esoteric and philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the mythical figure Hermes Trismegistus. Within the Jagwar Twin project, it serves as a primary cosmological framework used to understand reality, consciousness, and the architecture of the self. > > **Core Axioms and The Kybalion** > Roy has explicitly grounded Hermetic philosophy in the project's lore, listing books like the Hermetica and The Kybalion on his curated reading lists. > On his "I'm 33 this year" conceptual board, he transcribed the seven core principles of The Kybalion: > > **The 7 Hermetic Principles** > 1. The Principle of Mentalism > *The Law: "The All is Mind… Mind woven into matter".* In the Vault: This is the foundational premise that consciousness precedes and shapes physical reality. It underpins the project's view of the universe as a mental construct where the self can be "uploaded" or read as information in a field. > 2. The Principle of Correspondence > *The Law: "As above, so below."* > In the Vault: This dictates that the structures and laws of reality repeat fractally across all scales, from the macrocosm of the solar system down to the microcosm of the atom or the individual psyche. The vault uses this to map personal, internal psychological splits onto larger, cosmic-scale narratives. > 3. The Principle of Vibration > *The Law: Everything is in constant motion; nothing rests.* > In the Vault: Roy explicitly grounds this principle in his own 2020 commentary: "Everything is a vibrational frequency. Light, matter, sound, it's all the same thing at variable speeds". > 4. The Principle of Polarity > *The Law: Everything has an opposite, and opposites are merely two extremes of the exact same thing.* > In the Vault: This is the root architecture of Duality within the project. It dictates that conflicting forces—like the heart and the mind, Roy and Sir Lucius, or light and dark—are not meant to destroy one another. The goal of the initiate is not elimination of the shadow, but the correct ordering and integration of these polarized forces. > 5. The Principle of Rhythm > *The Law: The universe moves in cycles, tides, and pendulums; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left.* > In the Vault: Roy illustrates this law by curating Walter Russell's "The Cosmic Pendulum," noting that creation is a continuous swing of expansion and contraction. This principle underwrites the cyclical nature of the catalogue, from the recursions of the Loop to the returning orbit of the Circle. > 6. The Principle of Cause and Effect > *The Law: Every cause has an effect, and every effect has a cause; nothing happens by chance.* > In the Vault: This principle speaks directly to the themes of self-authorship and the consequences of perception. It is mirrored in the lyrics of Imagine A World, which frames reality as a direct response to individual action: "Depending on how you acted / You were the cause and reaction". > 7. The Principle of Gender > *The Law: Gender is in everything; everything has its masculine and feminine principles.* > In the Vault: The project explores this extensively through the Left/Right brain hemisphere split (Order/reason/masculine vs. Chaos/creativity/feminine). It also manifests in the tension between the masculine structuring "angles" (consonants) and the feminine, animating "angels" (vowels/spirit/Sophia). > > > Roy didn't just read up on it. He printed the maxim on a music video in 2021, and he transcribed all seven of the Kybalion's principles, verbatim and in full, onto his own board. The song-by-song mappings are a lens the work fits, not a blueprint, and Roy runs the correspondence-method and disclaims it in the same breath, so if we ever sound sure we are doing it wrong! **Where it enters** * The 2021 [[Down to You]] official-video-title: **"AS ABOVE SO BELOW"** printed as a sigil, flanking the seeker-question *"WHAT IS IT THAT YOU SEEK?"* * The "I'm 33" board: all seven Kybalion principles in Roy's own hand, on a tab titled *"How to upload myself to the internet."* (Yes. The cosmology and the upload fantasy share a browser tab.) The board is also where the term [[The Pattern]] comes from. * The 2026 *welcome to the circus (Live Underground)* card, five years after the title card: *"DID HERMES PAINT HIS FACE? I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE."* That is the surface, and it holds on its own. The drawers go one reading deeper at a time. --- > [!map]- The books are on the shelf > Roy names this tradition out loud instead of leaving us to infer it. Both the *Hermetica* and *The Kybalion* sit on his public Instagram Book Club reading list. He posted a quote-card crediting Hermes Trismegistus by name (*"The center is everywhere"*). He stated the Vibration doctrine in his own voice in a 2020 Q&A: *"Everything is a vibrational frequency. Light, matter, sound, it's all the same thing at variable speeds."* In a Mirror Sessions interview he names Mercury as the higher self, flagging it himself with *"this is gonna get nerdy"*: *"it's like the spirit of Mercury, the winged messenger god… it's our higher self… pay attention to what grabbed your attention."* And the board's freehand *"Undefined Map"* sketches planetary correspondences, Mercury out to Neptune, in his own hand. The public lineage floor is 2020. > > One more post matters as much as all of these, because it points the other way. In 2026 Roy wrote: *"I would map a crow onto Mercury but that's just personal. I don't recommend you do it."* The author runs the correspondence-system and disowns it as idiosyncratic in the same breath. > [!lore]- Two books, eighteen centuries apart > Two different texts get called "Hermeticism," and they shouldn't be blurred. The old one is the *Corpus Hermeticum*, or *Hermetica*: late-antique writings attributed to a legendary sage, **Hermes Trismegistus**. The famous maxim rides in on the **Emerald Tablet**. The modern one is **The Kybalion** (1908), a New Thought primer that boils the tradition down to **seven principles**: Mentalism (*"The All is Mind"*), Correspondence (*"as above, so below"*), Vibration, Polarity, Rhythm, Cause and Effect, Gender. Related-but-distinct vocabularies, a primer and its ancient namesake, and both are on Roy's shelf. > > The throughline of the whole stream is *coherence*: a legible cosmos, not a hostile one. One caution the tradition itself deserves: correspondence is not sameness. The lower is not a photocopy of the higher; it's analogy across difference, the same shape at a different scale, and sometimes the mirror distorts or the scales don't line up at all. Resemblance across levels doesn't make the levels identical, and it doesn't prove a single hidden blueprint. > > A word on how to use any of this: don't push for meaning. Put on an audiobook about Hermeticism, or Kabbalah, or both, then just play the albums and let the meaning happen on its own. That's the honest way in, and it's how most of this page got found in the first place. > [!reading]- Everything everywhere all at once > Down in Sources there's an honesty test waiting for this page: a principle-reading only earns its keep if it would *fail* on some songs. So here is the strongest reply the page can make, and it's a single song. [[Down to You]] is the one that wore *"AS ABOVE SO BELOW"* on its 2021 title-card, and read through the board it doesn't run one Kybalion principle. It runs a fistful at once. > > * **Mentalism** and **Correspondence** live in the title itself. *"It all comes down to you"* reads two ways at once: the divine descending *to you*, and *you* as the level where the whole pattern finally lands. Above answered below. It's an I-and-You machine, mirror made grammar. > * **Polarity** is the refrain refusing to pick a direction: *"Heaven in the sky to the Earth below / Heaven in your eye from the Earth below,"* with the ad-lib *"up from below."* Descent and ascent are the same string, pulled from both ends. The circuit completed, not a one-way drop. > * **Cause and Effect** is *"comes down to you"* heard as responsibility: nothing here is chance, the weight lands exactly where the line points. > > The lyrics are grounded; the multi-principle reading is interpretation, built on the board as a key. Two looser alchemical overlays ride on top of this song, and they live downstairs in the Deep End, held as speculation and nothing firmer. > [!reading]- Tune to desired frequency > **Vibration** is the firmest dial on the page, because it stands on three public anchors instead of one. The board cell quotes Tesla straight and closes on *"Tune to desired frequency."* Roy restated the doctrine himself in the 2020 Q&A. And the released lyric *"My head's an antenna / I'm wide awake"* ([[Life Is Good]]) is the principle in first person, mind as a receiver. Three anchors lift this past coincidence into documented engagement. > > Two released songs then turn the same dial the wrong way, and the readings are ours, not named in the songs. [[Online]] (*33*, 2022) flips the mind-to-mind register into surveillance: *"They infiltrate my brain"* reads as the tuned mind broken into, the receiver watched. [[Loser]] (*Subject to Flooding*, 2018) takes the destructive register: *"Jericho fell like a wave"* is frequency turned to collapse, the wall that comes down to a sound. The board names the principle; the lines let it ring on the wall. The clause-by-clause version lives in the Deep End. > [!reading]- The other dials > The remaining principles map more unevenly, and the honest move is to say which is which. > > **Mentalism**, *"The All is Mind,"* is the premise under the whole consciousness-and-upload imagery. If that sounds like a bridge too far, start somewhere you can measure: the placebo effect. The mind alone, we've seen it, named it, measured it, can change the material body. That's a small, sturdy door into a very big idea. And if reality is information at bottom, then a self is information too, and information can, in principle, be externalized. That single move is the engine of the upload cosmology (see [[The Upload]], [[The Digital Double]]). > > **Correspondence** is the principle Roy leans on hardest, so hard he gave it his own name: **The Pattern**. The board's cell reads, in part, *"The formula is the same from a solar system down to the atom,"* and closes on *"The Pattern is present on all levels."* Its worked home is [[The Pattern]]; this page just holds the seven-principle frame around it. > > **Polarity** is the project's whole obsession with [[Duality]]: the Roy/Lucius split, the one-becomes-two shape of the story. The Kybalion's teaching is that opposites are two ends of one thing, and the cleanest way to hold it is a thermostat: hot isn't good or bad, extreme hot is bad, same with cold, and both are just aspects of one whole called temperature. Which is why the work's resolution is never to defeat a pole but to re-order the pair. [[Life Is Good]] even stages the refusal outright: *"Keep a smile on my face, too happy to choose."* > > **Rhythm**, **Cause and Effect**, and **Gender** map most lightly of all, by resonance: Rhythm to the Circle-and-Loop recurrence ([[The Circle]]), Cause and Effect to the seed-and-karma material, Gender to the divine-feminine thread ([[Mary]]) and the board's own Left/Right-hemisphere cell. Where a mapping is this light, it's decoration until proven otherwise, and this page says so. > [!mask]- Hermes paints his face > The 2026 *welcome to the circus (Live Underground)* card added a line the studio song doesn't have: *"BUT WHO ARE YOU WITHOUT THE MASK? DID HERMES PAINT HIS FACE? I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE."* That surfaced the Hermetic thread in public again, five years after the *Down to You* card, and it set the tradition's namesake next to the face-painting ringmaster. > > The fit is dense, which is exactly why it needs a hedge. Hermes is the trickster; the psychopomp, the guide who walks souls through the underworld, which reads as the job description for a *"Live UNDERGROUND"* series; the inventor of writing and letters; the namesake of both *Hermeticism* and *hermeneutics*, the art of decoding. In the alchemical tradition the corresponding figure is **Mercurius**, the duplex trickster-spirit, and that correspondence rhymes with [[Sir Lucius]]'s three registers and his signature move, *tells the truth, but the truth deceives*. The guide and the trickster in one body. The *"I don't know, maybe"* is the cipher performing its own shrug. The card is grounded; the full equation is a reading, and Lucius's clean esoteric seat stays Hod/Mercury, with the morning-star only a demoted name-resonance on him. > [!mask]- The upside down > Every affirmation in this catalogue has a counterfeit, and the maxim is no exception. [[Welcome to the Circus]] runs a *broken* correspondence, as below so above: the material treated as supreme, the supreme dragged down into the muck. *"Spinning you 'round and 'round / Everything's upside down."* A true *as above, so below* affirms the cosmos; the Circus's involuntary upside-down is the same axis run backwards, matter promoted into spirit's chair. That move has its own page, [[Inversion]], and the scriptural and Kabbalistic signatures stamped on it live there and in [[The Circus — The Deep End]], not here. What this page holds is just the geometry: the affirmation and its counterfeit are one line, read in two directions. > [!map]- Now that's what I call cosmology > The board carries a typed *"Tracks"* list, a separate and probably-unreleased concept album (not *33*): **xWebx · The Fall into Matter · Marduk · Let Them Eat Cake · Sun of God · Dissolution · As Above So Below · Genesis · The All Is Mind · O.** Read straight down, that reads as a Hermetic descent-and-return in ten titles: spirit falling into matter, dissolving, then climbing back to *The All Is Mind*. The list is grounded; the arc-reading is ours. > > Here's the part that lifts the frame from decorative toward operative, and it's the strongest single piece of evidence on the page: several of those titles surface as solved, Roy-confirmed [[Hall of Mirrors]] unlock-codes. *Marduk*, *Let Them Eat Cake* (*"Caution, All Kings End. CAKE"*), *Genesis*, and *O* are the confirmed ones. The board's cosmology didn't stay on the spreadsheet; it became playable architecture. Whether any *"Track"* was ever recorded as a song is still genuinely open. Its medium may be the maze, not an album. > [!warning]- Don't cross the streams > Three distinctions that have to stay clean, because the same imagery (descent, ascent, the spark) can carry opposite meanings depending on which tradition you're standing in: > > * **Hermetic ≠ Gnostic.** Hermeticism is world-affirming: the cosmos is a coherent law, legible and climbable. [[Gnosticism - The World as Trap]] is world-rejecting: the cosmos is a false copy to flee. Same descent-and-return imagery, opposite telos. Always label the stream. > * **Hermetic ≠ Lurianic.** The Hermetic Qabalah (Golden Dawn, tarot, Qliphoth-as-Tree-of-Death) is not the Jewish-Lurianic Kabbalah ([[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]], [[Keilim - The Breaking of the Vessels]]). Different "Tree," different lineage. > * **Engagement ≠ architecture.** That Roy transcribed the seven principles proves he read and collected the Kybalion. A reading-list, not a proven compositional grammar. The leap from *"he wrote it down"* to *"the songs run on it"* is interpretation, and it's labeled as such everywhere it appears here. > > And the master-key guard, because seven near-universal principles (duality, rhythm, cause and effect) fit almost *any* catalogue: a lens that matches everything explains nothing. There's real silliness and absurdity in this catalogue too, songs hovering outside the whole arc; not every line is a doorway. A song-level Hermetic reading is only worth its weight if it would fail on some songs, so note where the principles *don't* illuminate, not only where they do. > [!question]- Left open on purpose > **Was any board "Track" ever recorded?** *xWebx*, *The Fall into Matter*, *Sun of God*, *Dissolution*: no released song answers to them, and the confirmed maze-codes suggest the medium may be the Hall itself. Open. **Did Roy reach for the alchemical overlays on Down to You** (base-to-gold, descent-of-Nous), or are those the reader's ladder leaned against his wall? Exactly the kind of thing worth not being sure about. **How far does the frame run before it breaks?** The honest map has holes in it, and the holes are part of the map. And the tarot light-sequence questions (who holds the Star, the Moon, the Sun, and whether the Sun is [[SOL]]) stay open where they live, downstairs and on [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life]]. > [!descend] The Deep End > The heavier apparatus behind this page, the board read as a syncretic operating system, the six-fold ten-stage ladder and its productive disagreements, the Gurdjieff and Walter Russell octave readings, the Star-Moon-Sun card map, the Down to You alchemical overlays, the clause-by-clause dark-Vibration readings, the inherited substrate, and the feed posts, lives in [[Hermeticism - As Above So Below — The Deep End]]. Dense and speculative by design. The page you are on stands without it. > [!receipts]- Sources and confidence > Grounded in Roy's own materials and public record: *"AS ABOVE SO BELOW"* on the 2021 *Down to You* title card; the *Hermetica* and *The Kybalion* on the public Instagram Book Club; the Hermes Trismegistus quote-card; the full seven-principle transcription on the "I'm 33" board, with its Correspondence, Mentalism, and Vibration cells and the *"Undefined Map"* sketch; the 2020 Vibration statement; the Mirror Sessions Mercury-as-higher-self moment; the 2026 *"Did Hermes paint his face?"* card; and the crow-onto-Mercury disclaimer. Together these establish Hermeticism as a named, documented influence with a public lineage floor of 2020. > > Grounded lyrics, interpretive mappings: *"My head's an antenna"* and *"too happy to choose"*; *"they infiltrate my brain"*; *"Jericho fell like a wave"*; the reversible heaven-and-earth refrain; *"everything's upside down."* The lyrics are on the albums; reading them as specific Hermetic principles is interpretation, built on the board as a key. > > Framework, attributed to its traditions and never claimed as authorial intent: the Lucius-as-Hermes/Mercurius correspondence, the tarot and Tree scaffolding, the octave readings. The work permits these resonances; it doesn't assert that Roy intends them. > > How we'd be wrong: you can make everything either meaningful or derivative, and finding a place to apply a concept you already know across a career's worth of songs is not hard. Roy hands us the ceiling himself, defusing his own method with a straight face. If it ever sounds sure, it's doing it wrong. None of this is the answer; it is one way of seeing it. > [!feed]- Read next > [[The Pattern]] · [[Down to You]] · [[Source vs Reflection]] · [[Sir Lucius]] · [[Inversion]] · [[Gnosticism - The World as Trap]]