The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

No text in the Western esoteric tradition is shorter, more quoted or more variously explained than the Emerald Tablet. It can be read in two minutes. Alchemists from medieval Baghdad to seventeenth century England regarded it as the complete statement of their art, and its second line, in the abbreviated form as above, so below, has become the motto of the whole tradition.

The English above is our own rendering of the standard medieval Latin version. The division into fourteen lines is a convenience for commentary and is not part of the original.

Where the tablet comes from

Legend says the text was engraved on a slab of emerald and found in a hidden vault, clasped in the hands of the dead Hermes. The legend is itself old. It forms the frame story of the earliest work in which the tablet is known to appear, an Arabic treatise on the causes of things called the Book of the Secret of Creation, which was probably composed between the sixth and the ninth centuries and is attributed to a sage named Balinus.

No Greek original has been found, though many scholars think one may have existed. From Arabic the tablet passed into Latin in the twelfth century, and it is the Latin text, known as the Tabula Smaragdina, that medieval and Renaissance alchemists knew and commented on. A translation in the hand of Isaac Newton survives among his alchemical papers. The tablet is therefore not a relic of the pharaohs. It is a work of late antiquity or the early middle ages, and none the worse for that.

A commentary

The tablet has been read as a recipe for the philosophers' stone, as a cosmology in miniature and as a description of an inner process. These readings do not exclude one another. The notes below give the main lines of interpretation and leave the reader room.

Line 1: the claim

The text begins by insisting three times on its truth. This is not bluster. It marks what follows as something to be verified, a procedure and not a poem. The alchemists took it as a promise that the work can actually be done.

Line 2: above and below

Note what the line says and does not say. It does not say that above and below are the same. It says they are like, and that this likeness has a use: to accomplish the wonders of the one thing. The heavens and the earth, the mind and the body, the divine and the human answer to each other, and because they do, work done on one level takes effect on another.

Line 3: the one thing

All things come from a single source and are varieties of a single substance, differing by adaptation. Some manuscripts read mediation where others read meditation, and both make sense: the many proceed from the One by an act of mind, and through an intermediary. The alchemists called the one thing their first matter.

Line 4: the four parents

Sun, Moon, wind and earth are the four elements under other names: fire, water, air and earth. They are also the active and receptive principles, the gold and silver of the alchemists, joined and carried and nourished until something new is born of them.

Lines 5 and 6: turned into earth

The one thing is the source of every perfection, yet its power is complete only when it is turned into earth. This is one of the most important sentences in the tradition. Insight that remains insight is unfinished. The spiritual has to be embodied, fixed and lived before the work is whole.

Line 7: the separation

Here is the instruction. Separate the subtle from the gross: distinguish what is essential from what is accidental, in a substance or in oneself. And do it gently and with great skill. Violence spoils the work. The line has been a rebuke to impatient students for a thousand years.

Line 8: ascent and descent

The matter rises and falls again, as vapor rises in the alchemist's vessel and returns as liquid, purer each time. The path is a circulation and not an escape. Whoever climbs must come back down, bringing what was found above into the life below. Only so are the two powers united.

Lines 9 to 11: the result

The fruit of the work is clarity, the flight of all darkness, and a strength that is both subtle and penetrating. The tablet then makes its largest claim: this is how the world itself was made. The work of the alchemist repeats in small the work of creation.

Lines 12 to 14: the signature

Hermes is thrice great because he holds the three parts of the wisdom of the world, which later tradition named as alchemy, astrology and theurgy: the operations of the Sun, the stars and the gods. The operation of the Sun is the making of gold, and in the inner sense the bringing of the self to its own noon.

The Latin text

Read the Tabula Smaragdina in Latin

Verum, sine mendacio, certum et verissimum. Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. Et sicut omnes res fuerunt ab uno, meditatione unius, sic omnes res natae fuerunt ab hac una re, adaptatione. Pater eius est Sol, mater eius Luna. Portavit illud ventus in ventre suo. Nutrix eius terra est. Pater omnis telesmi totius mundi est hic. Vis eius integra est, si versa fuerit in terram. Separabis terram ab igne, subtile a spisso, suaviter, cum magno ingenio. Ascendit a terra in coelum, iterumque descendit in terram, et recipit vim superiorum et inferiorum. Sic habebis gloriam totius mundi. Ideo fugiet a te omnis obscuritas. Hic est totius fortitudinis fortitudo fortis, quia vincet omnem rem subtilem, omnemque solidam penetrabit. Sic mundus creatus est. Hinc erunt adaptationes mirabiles, quarum modus hic est. Itaque vocatus sum Hermes Trismegistus, habens tres partes philosophiae totius mundi. Completum est quod dixi de operatione Solis.

Using the tablet

The traditional way to study a text of this kind is not to analyze it once but to live with it.