The Emerald Tablet
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus; translated by Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer (1928)
The shortest and most influential text in Western alchemy: about a dozen cryptic lines that alchemists treated as the compressed formula of the Great Work. The popular slogan "as above, so below" is a later shortening, not the Tablet's own words.
- Composed
- First attested 8th century CE, in Arabic
- Original language
- Arabic
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. Its second sentence reads, in Steele and Singer's English, "That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing." The popular slogan "as above, so below" is a later shortening of that sentence, not the Tablet's own words.
The version shown here is the English that Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer published in 1928, which they describe as "somewhat expanded." SOL's Library also holds The Mirror of Alchimy, an English translation printed in London in 1597 that includes the Tablet under the heading "The Smaragdine Table of Hermes, Trismegistus of Alchimy."
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.
Research that draws on this text
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