The Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet first appears at the end of an Arabic book known as the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation. The book is attributed to Balinus, the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century Greek sage famous for wisdom and wonders. In its frame story, Balinus enters a vault beneath a statue of Hermes and finds an old man seated on a throne, holding a tablet of emerald inscribed with the text, and a book on the secrets of creation before him.

The text itself is very short. It begins by declaring that it is true, without falsehood, certain and most true, and that what is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing. It goes on to speak of the sun as father and the moon as mother, of the wind that carries it in its belly and the earth as its nurse, of separating the subtle from the gross, and of rising from earth to heaven and descending again. It ends by naming Hermes as the speaker, thrice great because he holds the three parts of the wisdom of the world.

Another version appears in the Secret of Secrets, a widely read Arabic book of advice to rulers that was attributed to Aristotle. Like many Arabic works on alchemy and natural philosophy, the book drew on Greek learning that had been translated into Arabic and Syriac, and it presented its teachings as ancient wisdom recovered by a sage of the past.

Scholarship since Julius Ruska’s study of 1926 has traced the text through Arabic and Latin manuscripts. Most historians date the Book of the Secret of Creation to the eighth or ninth century, although parts of it may draw on older Greek or Syriac material. Whether the Emerald Tablet itself translates a lost Greek original is unknown. Its ideas, such as the unity of creation and the correspondence between heaven and earth, echo late antique philosophy, but no ancient source quotes it.

In the twelfth century the text reached Latin Europe through translations of Arabic works, and it soon circulated on its own as the Tabula Smaragdina. Alchemists treated it as a compressed recipe for transmuting metals or preparing the philosophers’ stone, and they wrote commentaries explaining each line. The most influential, attributed to Hortulanus in the fourteenth century, read it as a description of the alchemical work. Printed editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries made it a standard part of alchemical collections.

Isaac Newton, who spent years studying alchemy alongside his work in physics, translated the text and wrote notes on it. His manuscript, now at King’s College, Cambridge, shows how seriously early modern thinkers took this short and obscure work.

The legend of the tablet grew with each retelling. Medieval and early modern writers said it had been found in the tomb of Hermes by Alexander the Great, or by Sarah, the wife of Abraham, and some imagined it carved by Hermes before the Flood. These stories gave the text an ancient Egyptian pedigree that its manuscript history does not support, but they belonged to a long tradition of honouring Hermes Trismegistus as a source of primordial wisdom.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occultists, Theosophists and members of groups such as the Golden Dawn read the tablet as a statement of universal spiritual law rather than chemistry. Its abbreviated phrase, as above, so below, became a motto for astrology, magic and many forms of modern spirituality. It now appears in books, tattoos, music and films. A separate work, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, published in the twentieth century by a writer calling himself Doreal, is a modern composition and is unrelated to the medieval text.

For historians, the Emerald Tablet is a striking example of how a brief text, attributed to a legendary sage, can travel across languages and religions, from the Islamic world to Christian Europe and into contemporary culture.