Correspondence as a way of thinking

The habit of reading the world as a web of correspondences, as above, so below, runs through astrology, alchemy, magic and much of traditional medicine, and this section holds the natural-world terms of that web. The assignments are not uniform: different authorities give a stone or colour to different planets, and the entries note the main variants rather than imposing one.

The classical four- and five-element schemes here underlie systems throughout the atlas; the Chinese five phases, closely related in role, are gathered under Eastern Systems.