Fractals, Cats, and the Secret Hidden in Plain Sight
The room went dark, and I heard it — that particular hum of an old incandescent projector warming up, the mechanical thunk as the first slide locked into place.
It was the day before a holiday break. My middle school teacher had abandoned whatever was on the actual lesson plan, and instead, we were looking at pictures.
The first image: a microscopic image of a cell- impossibly intricate, perfect.
Then a fern frond. Then a nautilus shell. Then a river delta photographed from above. Then a coastline. Then — and here is where something in me went completely still — a spiral galaxy, hundreds of millions of light years away.
The same pattern. Over and over again. From the microscopic to the cosmic. I didn’t have a name for what I was seeing. But I knew, in the way you know things before you have language for them, that I had just been shown something important.
Then the teacher said the word: fractals.
And then — in what might be the most ambitious thing a middle school teacher has ever attempted the day before a holiday break — she challenged us to draw our own.
It was a little heady. We were twelve. But we leaned over our desks and started designing patterns we liked, then tried to extend them outward — from a Post-it note to a full sheet of paper to, eventually, the chalkboard. Watching a pattern you invented with your own hand scale upward like that, staying true to itself at every size, is not something you easily forget.
For an artist already wired to seek pattern and complexity in everything, it was a small detonation.
“As Above, So Below” — The Oldest Idea in the Room
If you’ve never heard of the Seven Hermetic Principles, you’re not alone. Most people haven’t — at least not by that name.
They come from the Hermetic tradition, one of the oldest streams of Western mysticism, attributed to the legendary figure Hermes Trismegistus — “Thrice-Great Hermes.” Whether he was a real person, a mythology, or a name given to accumulated ancient wisdom probably doesn’t matter as much as what was written in his name: a set of seven principles that describe how reality actually works, at every level, in every direction.
The second principle is this: As above, so below. As below, so above. As within, so without.
In the simplest terms: the patterns of the cosmos repeat themselves at every scale. What is true in the heavens is true on earth. What is true in the cell is true in the galaxy. What is true in the ocean is true in the raindrop.
Scientists now call these patterns fractals — geometric structures that repeat at every level of magnification. My teacher showed us fractals that day without ever using the word. And my artist’s brain, hungry for exactly this kind of knowing, absorbed it completely.
The Sketchbook I Carried Everywhere
I’ve been an artist my whole life. Pen and ink, mostly — detailed, pattern-oriented work that takes time and attention. When I started traveling the world, I learned early on to bring a sketchbook to every historical site and museum I visited.
But here’s the thing: I was never interested in sketching the artifacts themselves.
I wanted the patterns.
The animal motifs. The geometric borders. The symbols that appeared on pottery, on walls, on the edges of sacred objects. I wanted to collect them the way some people collect stamps — not for their monetary value but for the story they were telling across time and space.
And here is what I kept finding, site after site, continent after continent:
The same patterns. Everywhere.
Diamond shapes, zigzags, and circular spirals show up in rock art from cultures that had no known contact with each other. The divine feminine — that rounded, abundant form we call the Venus figure — carved from stone in Ice Age Europe and honored in clay across ancient Anatolia and the Aegean. The mother-and-child motif, so universal it almost disappears into the background of human art-making. And animals — always, always the animals. The domestic companions, the totemic beasts, the divine creatures that humans have been depicting since the first handprints appeared on cave walls.
Now, a skeptic might say: there are only so many ways to draw a line. Diamonds and spirals aren’t that complicated. It makes sense they’d appear everywhere.
That’s true. It’s also spectacular — that across the full breadth of human civilization, these particular forms kept rising to the surface. That certain symbols kept insisting on themselves, in culture after culture, as if they were trying to tell us something we kept forgetting.
Messages across time and space, I always think. That’s what those patterns are.
The Labyrinth at Knossos
Of all the places I’ve stood with a sketchbook in my hand, one image stops me every time I turn to it.
The labyrinth symbol at Knossos, on the island of Crete.
If you’ve been to Crete, you know the feeling of walking the ruins at Knossos — that strange sense that you are walking through the memory of something enormous. Contemporary archaeologists tell us the Minoans were building here four thousand years ago. This is the civilization that gave us the myth of the Minotaur, the story of Theseus, the legend of Daedalus and his wings. And their sacred symbol — the one carved into stone and painted onto pottery and pressed into coins — was the labyrinth.
What archaeology can’t fully explain is where the Minoans came from — or why their civilization appeared with such sudden sophistication, as if they arrived already knowing things. There are those who believe that the answer lies further back than the official record goes. That the seeds of what became Minoan Crete — and perhaps the labyrinth symbol itself — were carried there by people fleeing something older. Something we’ve lost the name for, but haven’t quite lost the memory of.
I’ll leave that thread for you to pull.
That seven-circuit spiral path, turning in on itself and back out again.
What arrested me wasn’t just its beauty. It was that I had SEEN it before.
That same symbol — sometimes identical, sometimes with small variations — appears in the Native American traditions of the American Southwest, carved into canyon walls and woven into baskets as the “man in the maze.” It shows up in ancient India in Hindu temple design. The Romans used it for mosaic floors. You can find it scratched into the turf at Chartres Cathedral in France, where pilgrims have walked it as a meditation for centuries. It appears in Scandinavia, built from stones on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
No cultural exchange that historians can trace. No Silk Road connecting the Hohokam people of Arizona to the Minoan civilization of the Aegean.
And yet: the same spiral. The same path. The same return.
As above, so below. The same truth, finding its way into the same symbol, at the same turning point of human spiritual seeking — independently, across the globe.
The Cats Knew First
Here is where I want to talk about cats.
Specifically: the four cats currently living in my home in Stillwater, Minnesota. Carl, with his dark almost-black tabby markings so striking that every vet stops to comment on them. Tag, light grey and fiercely protective of our family, who seems to know when something needs watching. Bjorn, fluffy and cotton-candy soft, who has decided that the most important place to be during school hours is directly on top of a student’s laptop. And Shiruko, the long-haired Siamese who hides from visitors but will press his impossibly soft face against yours once he trusts you — which is one of the great privileges of living in this house.
I have always shared my home with at least a pair of cats. At one point, six — when I was fostering my grandfather’s cats while he was in hospice.
My grandfather was a dairy farmer in northern Minnesota. His parents had immigrated from Czechoslovakia, bought acreage, and built a life from that land. He grew up knowing his animals the way farmers do — not sentimentally, but truly. He knew each cow’s temperament. He knew which ones needed extra watching. He was connected to his animals in that deep, practical, loving way that is probably the oldest form of animal communication humans practice.
And when he could no longer care for his cats, they came to live with me. Of course they did.
Because this is what humans have always done.
In ancient Egypt, the cat was goddess — Bastet, protector of the home, depicted with the head of a feline and the bearing of divinity. Egyptian cats were mummified and offered as sacred gifts. In ancient Crete, the same Crete where I sketched that labyrinth, cats appear in Minoan frescoes as household companions and hunters. In medieval Europe, cats prowl the margins of illuminated manuscripts — sometimes reverent, sometimes mischievous, always watchful. In Japan, the beckoning Maneki-neko invites abundance with one raised paw. In nearly every culture I’ve researched, on every continent where humans have kept homes, the cat appears in the record.
Always the guardian. Always the liminal creature — the one who seems to live with one paw in this world and another somewhere we can’t quite see.
As above, so below. The same bond. The same recognition. The same instinct to invite this particular animal into our circle of hearth and home, repeated across every civilization that left behind a record.
My great-great-grandparents brought that instinct from the Carpathian Basin to northern Minnesota. My grandfather carried it into his dairy barn. It lives now in me and in my children — and in Bjorn, who is, as I write this, approximately as helpful as you’d expect.
The pattern persists.
What the Wisdom Studies Gave Me
I want to be clear: I was not thinking about Hermetic Principles in that middle school classroom. I didn’t know what they were. I was just a kid with an artist’s eyes who had been handed a visual language she recognized without knowing why.
I spent the next couple of decades following that pull — sketchbook in hand through Knossos and Stonehenge and Machu Picchu and the Cahokia Mounds, collecting evidence I didn’t yet know I was collecting.
When I began the Wisdom Studies through the Good Knight Network’s School of Noetic Alchemy, something clicked into place. The framework I had been building through travel and art and intuition suddenly had names. Scaffolding. Context.
As above, so below wasn’t just a pretty phrase. It was a description of reality — one that ancient peoples across the globe had independently arrived at and encoded into their art, their architecture, their sacred symbols, and their daily lives.
I hadn’t been imagining the patterns. I had been reading them.
An Invitation — And an Honest Admission
I am still very much a student of the Hermetic Principles… and the Universe in general.
I know enough to recognize the principle of Correspondence in snowflake spirals and labyrinth carvings and the thousand years of humans sleeping with cats. I know it in my bones in a way I haven’t fully articulated yet.
But on April 11th, our Second Saturdays series is hosting Dr. Steven Young — and I plan to sit in that session as a student, asking the questions I genuinely don’t yet know the answers to.
If you’re curious about the Hermetic Principles — if something in this post struck that same tuning fork feeling I had in that darkened classroom — I’d love for you to come along. Not as an expert leading you somewhere. As a fellow pattern-watcher, following a thread that seems to go all the way down.
The same seven principles have been encoded in mystery schools, sacred texts, and ancient teachings for thousands of years. Across cultures that never met. In symbols that keep insisting on themselves.
As above, so below.
The pattern is there. You just have to learn to look.
Register for the April 11th Second Saturdays talk with Dr. Steven Young here
About the Author
Amy Marotz, M.Ed., is Vice President of the Good Knight Network and a guide and teacher within the School of Noetic Alchemy’s Wisdom Studies program in Stillwater, Minnesota. She has been studying the Ancient Wisdom teachings under Sophia West since 2018. Amy is a Reiki Master, world traveler, pen-and-ink artist, and passionate advocate for experiential learning that honors the whole person — and the whole pattern.
Questions about the Wisdom Studies or Second Saturdays? Reach out at thegoodknightnetwork@gmail.com or visit goodknight.org.
