The Emerald Tablet
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
The shortest and most influential text in Western alchemy: a dozen cryptic lines, including "as above, so below," that alchemists treated as the compressed formula of the Great Work.
- Composed
- First attested 8th century CE, in Arabic
- Original language
- Arabic
- In the SOL library
- 22 searchable passages
- Rights
- Public domain
What this text is
The Emerald Tablet is a brief, enigmatic text of about a dozen sentences, first attested in Arabic works of the eighth century and translated into Latin in the twelfth. Medieval and Renaissance alchemists regarded it as the most concentrated statement of their art, and its second line, rendered in English as "as above, so below," became the most quoted sentence in Western esoteric literature.
Isaac Newton kept his own handwritten translation of the Tablet among his alchemical papers. Its history runs from Arabic compendia through Latin scholastic manuscripts into early modern laboratories, which makes it a compact case study in how a short text can carry an entire tradition.
Why researchers read it
The Tablet’s doctrine of correspondence, the claim that the pattern of the whole repeats at every scale, is one of the recurring structural ideas SOL’s investigations track across traditions, from Kabbalistic cosmology to sacred geometry. Reading the actual text, rather than the slogan it produced, shows how much of the later tradition was built from these few lines.
Again it descends to earth, and takes back the power of the above and the below. 9) Thus you will receive the glory of the distinctiveness of the world. All obscurity will flee from you. 10) This is the whole most strong strength of all strength, for it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates all solid things. 11a) Thus was the world created. 12) From this comes marvelous adaptions of which this is the proceedure. 13) Therefore I am called Hermes, because I have three parts of the wisdom of the whole world. 14) And complete is what I had to say about the work of the Sun, from the book of Galieni Alfachimi. [From Latin in Steele and Singer 1928: 492.] Translation from Aurelium Occultae Philosophorum..Georgio Beato 1) This is true and remote from all cover of falsehood 2) Whatever is below is similar to that which is above.
The Emerald Tablet, Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus · Public domain
Research that draws on this text
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