Below

The Seba library treats Below in 9 passages, across 5 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming).

In the library 9 passages

he sees the stars below, as if you could see through the firmament below. There is a famous alchemical dictum which says: Heaven above, Heaven below, Stars above, Stars below. All that is above All that is below

Von Franz deploys the alchemical ‘as above, so below’ axiom to diagnose the puer’s ego weakness as a pathological transparency between consciousness and the collective unconscious, making ‘below’ the site of both danger and transformative potential.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

he sees the stars below, as if you could see through the firmament below. There is a famous alchemical dictum which says: Heaven above, Heaven below, Stars above, Stars below. All that is above All that is below.

This parallel passage confirms that the motif of ‘stars below’ expresses the puer’s flat world—the absence of psychic depth—while the alchemical dictum reframes ‘below’ as the mirror and ground of all that is above.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Shake: Thunder rises from below, shaking and stirring things up. Shake begins the yang hemicycle by germinating new action. Connection to the inner: sprouting energies thrusting from below, the Woody Moment beginning.

In the I Ching cosmology, ‘below’ is the inner trigram position from which yang energy erupts and new cycles commence, establishing the below as the originating, generative pole of change.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rousing the people must be like the wind gradually rising from below, ascending from lowliness to the heights.

The Taoist I Ching presents ‘below’ as the necessary starting point for spiritual cultivation: genuine transformation of the vital spirit must rise organically from the depths, not be imposed from above.

Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rousing the people must be like the wind gradually rising from below, ascending from lowliness to the heights. Nurturing virtue must be like the stability of a mountain as it nurtures beings, nurturing with richness and warmth.

Liu I-ming’s commentary uses the spatial dynamic of rising-from-below as a model for internal alchemical work, pairing ascent with the sustaining stability of the earth—below as both origin and nutritive ground.

Liu I-ming, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Above Stripping exhausted, below reversing. Anterior acquiescence has the use-of Returning.

The Sequence commentary establishes the dialectic of above and below as the engine of cyclical return: what is exhausted above initiates reversal below, the structural basis of the Return hexagram’s regenerative logic.

Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A curtain or veil separates the realm of fullness from the world below in Valentinian thought, and a curtain separates the holy of holies from the holy place in the temple in Jerusalem.

Valentinian Gnostic theology maps ‘below’ as the deficient lower realm of the demiurge, separated from the pleroma by a veil—a cosmological schema depth psychology reads as a mythologization of the unconscious.

Marvin W. Meyer, The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus: The Definitive Collection of Mystical Gospels and Secret Books about Jesus of Nazareth, 2005supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →