The Emerald Tablet

What it is

A very short text — a dozen or so lines — attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and the single most influential brief document in Western esotericism.

Its opening lines, in the standard Latin form, give the doctrine of correspondence its canonical statement:

That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to accomplish the miracle of the one thing.

Compressed in modern usage to "as above, so below" — which appears in tarot manuals, yoga studios, astrology columns, tattoo parlours and song lyrics, generally with no idea of its source.

The remaining lines describe the One Thing born of meditation on one thing; the Sun as father and the Moon as mother; the wind carrying it in its belly; the separation of earth from fire, the subtle from the gross, gently and with great skill; ascent from earth to heaven and descent again, receiving the power of things above and below; and the whole concluding with the speaker's signature — therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.

Where it came from

Not from Egypt, and not from Hermes.

The earliest known version is Arabic, appearing in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa — the Book of the Secret of Creation — attributed to Balīnās, an Arabic form of Apollonius of Tyana, and dating to around the eighth century CE. Related versions appear in the Jābirian alchemical corpus. A story is attached in which the tablet is found in a vault beneath a statue of Hermes, in the hands of a corpse — a discovery narrative structurally identical to the one attached to Christian Rosenkreutz seven centuries later.

Latin translations circulated from the twelfth century, and the text became a fixture of European alchemy. Whether an earlier Greek original existed is disputed and unproven.

So the most quoted line in Western esotericism comes from a medieval Arabic alchemical text attributed to a Greek wonder-worker and presented as the writing of an Egyptian god.

How it is read

Alchemically, as an encoded recipe. Generations of alchemists read the separation of earth from fire, the subtle from the gross, as a description of an actual laboratory sequence — distillation, sublimation, purification — and the ascent and descent as the circulation of a substance in a closed vessel. Read this way it is a compressed set of operating instructions, consistent with the practical reading of alchemy that the historians have restored.

Philosophically, as the doctrine of correspondence: the macrocosm and the microcosm reflect one another, so that what holds at one scale holds at another, and knowledge of one gives knowledge of the other. This is the assumption underneath astrology, sympathetic magic, signature doctrines and most of the material in this section.

Both readings were held at once, and by the same people, which is characteristic of the tradition.

Newton translated it. Among his alchemical papers is an English rendering in his own hand — a real, surviving manuscript. The man who gave us universal gravitation copied out a medieval Arabic alchemical aphorism, and both activities were, to him, the study of how the world is put together.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the dating and transmission are established: Arabic, eighth century or thereabouts, pseudepigraphic, and not connected to Egypt except through the Hermes attribution that Casaubon undid for the rest of the corpus.

We can say the influence is out of all proportion to twelve lines. The correspondence principle it states is the load-bearing assumption of most of Western esotericism, and its compressed form is probably the most repeated sentence in modern spirituality.

We can say the correspondence doctrine is not true as a claim about the world. Things at different scales do not systematically mirror one another; the movements of planets do not correspond to events in a human life; a plant's shape does not indicate its pharmacology. Where the sciences have found scale-invariance — in fractals, in critical phenomena — it is specific, mathematical, and not what the tablet is asserting.

We can say the text is genuinely well made. Whatever it means, it is a striking piece of compressed writing, which is a large part of why it has lasted.

We cannot say who wrote it, or what they intended by it, or whether the alchemical or the philosophical reading is closer to the original purpose. Twelve lines, no context, no author, and twelve hundred years of people finding what they were looking for in them.

Further reading

• The text itself — a hundred and fifty words, freely available in several translations, and worth reading once directly rather than in quotation.
• Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina (1926) — the study that established the Arabic origin.
• Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy (2013), for how alchemists actually read it.