Hermeticism

"As above, so below." The operating manual, adepts say, of every secret order since.

Renaissance Europe believed the Corpus Hermeticum was older than Moses; Casaubon's dating (a forgery of late antiquity) should have killed it, and instead everyone from Newton to the Royal Society's founders kept a copy anyway, because the operating principles worked as metaphor and possibly as more. 'As above, so below' is the compression algorithm of all esoterica: the map that claims the territory signed off on it.