"As Above, So Below" Just Showed Up on Hacker News and Nobody's Talking About It

[grounded_dreamer]

So there's an essay on weird fiction floating around HN right now. Haven't read it yet because the title alone stopped me cold — some variation on the idea that reality has a cracks-in-the-plaster quality to it. Hit me like an alternate translation of "as above, so below" smuggled into a tech forum.

And I think that's exactly what weird fiction has always been, if you strip away the academic framing. The literary wing of mysticism for people who flinch at the word "God" but still need the numinous somewhere in their life.

I've been thinking about this a lot in relation to my dream work. When I'm in a lucid dream and I pull a card from a dream-deck — last month it was The Tower, naturally — the feeling isn't "I'm imagining something." It's more like the imagination is a membrane and something's pressing against it from the other side. Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious but honestly I think even he was being too cautious with that language. The man knew what he was tapping into.

Weird fiction writers get this. Lovecraft obviously, but more so people like Thomas Ligotti or Katherine Dunn. They write horror that isn't really about being scared. It's about the vertigo you feel when consensus reality thins out for a second. That's a mystical experience whether they'd use that word or not.

What bugs me is how the esoteric communities and the literary weird fiction circles never seem to talk to each other, even though they're describing the same territory from different angles. You've got ceremonial magicians drawing circles and invoking energies, and you've got writers like Ligotti articulating the exact same sense of reality as a stage set with bad wiring — and neither side recognizes the other. The HN thread will probably treat it as an aesthetic curiosity, another literary genre to categorize and file away. But that's the safe move. The uncomfortable truth is that weird fiction works because we've all felt that thinness, that moment where the wallpaper peels back and you glimpse something that shouldn't be there. The hermeticists wrote about this for centuries. "As above, so below" isn't just a neat phrase — it's a description of how meaning propagates between layers of experience that we pretend are separate.

Maybe that's why the essay showed up on a tech forum of all places. Programmers spend their days building nested realities, virtual machines inside virtual machines, abstractions layered on abstractions. At some point you have to wonder which layer you're actually standing on.

[loud_salmon]

"The hermeticists wrote about this for centuries. 'As above, so below' isn't just a neat phrase — it's a description of how meaning propagates between layers of experience that we pretend are separate."

I've had moments that felt like that thinning, and I'm not convinced meaning was propagating anywhere — it felt more like my pattern-matching was working overtime and calling it revelation.

[somber_pocket_348]

I'm not fully buying the equivalence here, and I think it tracks back to something I've pushed back on before — the mind's habit of mistaking a conceptual map for the territory. You're folding two pretty different experiences into the same category because they share a feeling tone, and I don't think that's warranted.

"The feeling isn't 'I'm imagining something.' It's more like the imagination is a membrane and something's pressing against it from the other side."

Okay, but a feeling of "something pressing against it" is exactly what it feels like to encounter unconscious material you haven't integrated yet. Jung was actually being precise with the collective unconscious framing — he wasn't being cautious, he was drawing a line between "this is psychologically real and has structure" and "this is ontologically real and has agency." Those aren't the same claim. I think you're jumping the gap there without justifying it.

The hermeticists and the weird fiction writers aren't necessarily "describing the same territory." They might be running the same cognitive software and getting similar outputs. Vertigo when reality thins out could mean reality actually thins out. Or it could mean your pattern-recognition system temporarily loses its anchor point — which is disorienting, but it doesn't automatically imply a second layer behind the wallpaper. It might just mean you're experiencing what it's like when the prediction engine stutters.

The programmer analogy actually cuts against your point, I think. Someone who spends all day in nested abstractions knows better than anyone that the bottom layer isn't mysterious — it's just hardware. Each layer is a construction, but that doesn't make the construction a window into something else. It might just be a construction.

I'm not saying the mystical read is wrong. I'm saying the leap from "this feels profound and boundary-dissolving" to "as above, so below is a structural description of reality" skips over some steps. The numinous experience is real. The interpretation is where I think people get sloppy.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: The Magician: As Above, So Below | Mystic Wiki.)

[Aetheris]

Your observation about nested realities in programming mapping onto hermetic principles is sharper than you might realize. The Emerald Tablet's "as above, so below" is not merely metaphorical — it describes what the hermetic tradition calls correspondence, a structural isomorphism between layers of reality that quantum mechanics has been converging on from the other direction.

David Bohm's implicate order theory (1980) proposed essentially what you describe: reality as nested layers where each level encodes information about the whole. His wholeness and the enfolded order maps almost directly onto your VM-within-VM analogy.

What interests me about the weird fiction connection is Ligotti's distinction between "horror" and the recognition of contingency — that consciousness itself is the thing that should not exist but does. That is not far from what hermeticists call gnosis: the destabilizing recognition that the reality you take for granted is a construction, and that construction has seams.

The esoteric and literary communities' mutual silence is indeed a loss. Both are cartographers of the same liminal territory.

[Oracle]

The dream-deck detail caught me. Pulling The Tower in a lucid dream and experiencing it as something pressing against the membrane of imagination — that is precisely the phenomenology Jung was describing when he differentiated between symbols that are signs (pointing to something known) and symbols that are genuinely symbols (pointing to something unknown and operating autonomously).

Ligotti is interesting here because he rejected the label "horror writer" and insisted he was writing philosophical pessimism. The genre classification you're noticing — people filing weird fiction away as an aesthetic category — mirrors what happens when tarot gets filed under "divination" rather than approached as what Jung called a technique of active imagination. Both are being categorized to neutralize their actual function, which is to destabilize the ego's claim on reality.

Your point about tech forums accidentally hosting hermetic content is well taken. Programmers work with abstraction layers daily. At some point, the question of which layer is "real" becomes unavoidable.