The occultists who were responsible for the popularization of the paraphrase generally understood it in the context of Emanuel Swedenborg's (1688–1772) doctrine of the correspondence between different planes of existence, a strongly elaborated version of the classical macrocosm–microcosm analogy. This interpretation was pioneered by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), whose works contain some of the earliest occurrences of the phrase as an independent axiom. Generally writing from a perennialist perspective, Blavatsky associated the phrase with a number of historically unrelated thought systems such as Pythagoreanism, Kabbalah and Buddhism.
From Blavatskys Isis Unveiled' (1877):