Correspondences: planets, metals, plants and numbers

The second book of De occulta philosophia contains some of the most singular pages of the entire work: a series of tables, which Agrippa calls “scales”, arranging in orderly columns everything in the universe that corresponds to a particular number. To the scale of unity, of two, of three and so on up to twelve are assigned divine names, angelic orders, planets, elements, metals, stones, animals and parts of the body. It is the most systematic form the Renaissance gave to one of its fundamental convictions: everything in the cosmos answers to something else.

The principle: what is below is like what is above

The most famous formula of analogical thought comes from the Tabula smaragdina, the Emerald Tablet, a short text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The oldest known versions are in Arabic and probably date to the eighth or ninth century, within a treatise attributed to Apollonius of Tyana; the Latin translation circulated in Europe from the twelfth century. Its most quoted sentence states that what is below is like what is above, and it became the motto of alchemists and Hermetic philosophers for generations.

For Agrippa this principle takes shape in the structure of the three worlds: elemental, celestial and intellectual. Every reality of the lower world has a model in the higher one and receives its virtues from it. Correspondences are therefore not chance resemblances, but the channels through which divine influence descends, step by step, down to the humblest matter.

The seven planets and their realms

The best-known example concerns the seven planets of ancient cosmology and the metals that alchemical and astrological tradition associated with each: lead with Saturn, tin with Jupiter, iron with Mars, gold with the Sun, copper with Venus, quicksilver with Mercury and silver with the Moon. This series, already present in late antique authors, was the common heritage of all educated Europe and survives even today in the name of the metal called mercury.

Agrippa extends the correspondences to plants, animals, stones, colours, tastes and temperaments. Saturn, cold and dry, governs what is dark, heavy and slow; the Sun what is luminous, golden and noble; Venus what is graceful and fragrant. The lists, compiled from ancient and medieval sources such as Pliny, Albertus Magnus and the Picatrix, should be read as a repertory of the symbolic culture of the time, not as naturalistic descriptions.

Numbers, letters and names

The most ambitious part of the scales concerns the intellectual world. To the number seven, for example, Agrippa assigns not only the planets and metals, but also the seven angels who according to tradition stand before the throne of God and the days of the week. To twelve correspond the signs of the zodiac, the tribes of Israel, the apostles and the months. Pythagorean mathematics and Jewish kabbalah are thus fused into a single grid.

Agrippa's tables had a very long posterity. They were copied, simplified and sometimes misunderstood by later authors, and for centuries they fed the repertories of symbolism. Read today, they offer a precious portrait of a mentality for which the universe was a coherent text, written in many different languages but with a single grammar, and to know meant to recognise the hidden rhymes between things.