The Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet (Latin Tabula Smaragdina) is a short, cryptic text attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. It survives first in Arabic sources of the early Islamic period, reached Europe in Latin in the twelfth century, and became one of the founding texts of alchemy, best known for its line that what is below is like what is above.

Where the Text Comes From

Legend says the Tablet was found in the tomb of Hermes, carved on a slab of emerald and held in the hands of the dead sage. The historical trail is more modest. The oldest versions known are in Arabic, most importantly in a book on the secrets of creation, the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa, attributed to Balinus, the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana. Historians generally place it in the eighth or ninth century, not in ancient Egypt.

From the twelfth century the text circulated in Latin translations, and medieval writers began to comment on it as a compressed description of the alchemical work. A commentary under the name Hortulanus, from the fourteenth century, read each line as a stage of making the philosopher’s stone, and that reading shaped the way the Tablet was quoted for the next four hundred years.

The Text

Isaac Newton made his own English translation of the Latin Tablet among his alchemical papers, now in the Keynes collection at King’s College, Cambridge. Its opening lines read:

Tis true without lying, certain & most true. That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.

The rest of the text describes that one thing in images. Its father is the sun and its mother the moon; the wind carried it in its belly; its nurse is the earth. It is to be separated, earth from fire and the subtle from the gross, gently and with great skill. It rises from earth to heaven and descends again, and so receives the force of things above and below. Its force is complete if it is turned into earth.

As Above, So Below

The second line is the one everyone knows, usually shortened to “as above, so below.” In the alchemical tradition it described a correspondence: the heavens and the earth, the great world and the small one, are built on the same pattern, so that what happens in one can be read in the other. Later Hermetic writing applied it to the human being as a small world, a microcosm, mirroring the large one.

The modern Kybalion (1908) turned the line into its second principle, the Principle of Correspondence. The page on the seven Hermetic principles sets that modern reading beside the older sources it drew on.

The Tablet in the Laboratory and the Emblems

For practising alchemists the Tablet read like a recipe in code. The instruction to separate the earth from the fire became an operation in its own right, separatio; the line about the force becoming complete when turned into earth was read as the fixing and setting of the stone, coagulatio. The movement up and down, rising to heaven and descending again, was read as the repeated distilling and returning that the work required.

The images also passed into art. Michael Maier opened his emblem book Atalanta Fugiens (1618) with two plates taken straight from the Tablet: Emblem I, the wind carrying the child in its belly, and Emblem II, the earth as its nurse.

How to Read It Now

The Tablet does not explain itself, and it was never meant to be read once. It reads best as a compressed map of the whole Great Work: something has to be separated, raised and returned before it can be fixed in a form that holds. Taken that way, its claim is less about the cosmos than about method: change comes from moving between levels, not from staying on one.

Questions

What is the Emerald Tablet?

The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) is a short, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Its earliest surviving versions are in Arabic, from around the eighth or ninth century, and from the twelfth century Latin translations made it one of the founding texts of European alchemy.

What does “as above, so below” mean?

It paraphrases the Tablet’s second line, which says that what is below is like what is above. In alchemy it expressed a correspondence between the heavens and the earth, and between the large world and the small one; later Hermetic writers read it as a correspondence between the cosmos and the human being.

Did Isaac Newton translate the Emerald Tablet?

Yes. Among Isaac Newton’s alchemical papers is his own English translation of the Latin Tablet, with a commentary, now held in the Keynes collection at King’s College, Cambridge.

Who wrote the Emerald Tablet?

No one knows. It is attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, and its oldest known source is an Arabic book on the secrets of creation attributed to Balinus, a name for Apollonius of Tyana. Historians date it to the early Islamic period, not to ancient Egypt.

Sources: Isaac Newton, translation of the Tabula Smaragdina (Keynes MS 28, King’s College, Cambridge); the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa attributed to Balinus; Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens (1618); The Kybalion (1908).