The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus

The text fits on a single page. A dozen sentences, in dense Latin, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, “having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.” The first sentence is the sentence. “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 the One Thing.” That sentence, more than any other single sentence in the alchemical corpus, is the axiom of the tradition, and the axiom has been quoted, commented on, expanded, and argued over for at least a thousand years. Isaac Newton wrote a long commentary on it. Carl Jung quoted it as a motto. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn made it the foundation of its magical system. It is, by any measure, the most reproduced text in the Western esoteric inheritance.

The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina) is the most famous single text in the Western alchemical tradition, and the fame is deserved. A short, dense, and cryptic composition, the Tablet condenses the entire Hermetic worldview into a few compact formulae. Its central maxim became the central axiom of the alchemical tradition and of the broader Hermetic worldview. Newman’s The “Emerald Tablet” and the Origin of the “Summa perfectionis” (2019) and Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (2013, pp. 101–110) are the modern scholarly points of entry, and the reader who wants to do the work should start there.

The Latin text

The standard Latin text of the Emerald Tablet, established by the medieval and early modern commentators, runs as follows. The key opening formula: “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.” The middle section reads: “Pater eius est Sol, mater eius est 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 ab spisso, suaviter, cum magno ingenio. Ascendit a terra in caelum, iterumque descendit in terram, et recipit vim superiorum et inferiorum.” The text concludes: “Sic mundus creatus est. Hinc erunt adaptationes mirabiles, quarum modus est hic. Itaque vocatus sum Hermes Trismegistus, habens tres partes philosophiae totius mundi. Completum est quod dixi de operatione solis.”

The English translation

The standard English rendering, based on the Latin, runs: “True, without falsehood, certain and most true: that which is below is like to that which is above, and that which is above is like to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing. And as all things have been and arose from one, so all things have their birth from this one thing, by adaptation. Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon; the wind carried it in its belly; its nurse is the Earth. This is the father of all telesms of the whole world. You shall separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently, with great skill. It ascends from the earth to the heaven, and again descends to the earth, and receives the power of the superiors and of the inferiors. Thus the world was created. Hence will be marvelous adaptations, of which the manner is here. Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.”

The principle of correspondence

The first three lines are the most famous and the most quoted. The principle of correspondence — “That which is below is like to that which is above, and that which is above is like to that which is below” — became the central axiom of the entire alchemical tradition and of the broader Hermetic worldview. The Tablet states the principle; the alchemists spent the next thousand years working out the consequences.

The principle anchors the alchemical theory of matter. The metals are linked to the planets, the days of the week, the organs of the body, the colours, the humors. The alchemist who works on the metal is working on the planetary influence. The lower and the higher are bound together by the cosmic Pneuma, the divine breath that animates all things (Copenhaver, Hermetica, 1992; Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964).

The principle is not a metaphor but a metaphysical claim about the structure of reality. The Hermetic tradition holds that the correspondences are not merely analogical but real, that the higher and the lower are bound together by the same divine breath, and that the alchemist who works on the lower is therefore participating in the higher. The principle of correspondence underwrites the alchemist’s confidence in the transmutational project. Principe (2013, pp. 104–106) is the right person to make the point, and the point is that the alchemists were not being poetic. They were making a metaphysical commitment.

The One Thing

The second key concept of the Emerald Tablet is the One Thing (res una). The Tablet says that “all things have been and arose from one” and that “all things have their birth from this one thing, by adaptation.” The One Thing is the undifferentiated substance from which all things are made, the prima materia of the alchemical tradition. The One Thing anchors the doctrine of the unity of matter. All substances — metals, minerals, plants, animals — are made of the same underlying substance, and the differences among them are differences of form and proportion rather than of kind. The alchemist’s work is to identify the One Thing, to purify it, and to use it as the starting point of the great work. The philosopher’s stone is the One Thing brought to its perfect form.

The doctrine of the One Thing is more sophisticated than it first appears. It is not a claim that the substances are identical; it is a claim that they are made of the same underlying substance in different proportions. The alchemist who understands the One Thing can manipulate the proportions and effect the transformations. The doctrine is the metaphysical foundation of the alchemical project, and the project is the working out of the doctrine.

The Sun and the Moon

The Tablet’s third key concept is the pairing of the Sun and the Moon. “Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon.” The Sun and the Moon are the two parents of the One Thing, the two complementary principles whose union produces the alchemical work. The Sun is the active, masculine principle, associated with gold, with the heart, with the day, with the spirit. The Moon is the passive, feminine principle, associated with silver, with the brain, with the night, with the body. The alchemical work is the marriage of the Sun and the Moon, the production of the hermaphroditic rebis that is the goal of the work.

The Sun and the Moon are not merely symbols but the planetary bodies whose influences are responsible for the formation of the metals in the earth. Gold is the metal of the Sun; silver is the metal of the Moon. The alchemist, by working with the corresponding metals, participates in the planetary influences that produced them. The doctrine of planetary influence is grounded in the principle of correspondence, and the principle of correspondence is grounded in the unity of matter. The three doctrines are interlocking.

The ascending and descending principle

The Tablet describes the “ascending and descending” of the One Thing: “It ascends from the earth to the heaven, and again descends to the earth, and receives the power of the superiors and of the inferiors.” The ascending and descending principle underwrites the alchemical theory of the circulation of matter and the alchemical laboratory practice. In the laboratory, the ascending is the distillation, sublimation, and vaporisation of substances. The alchemist heats a substance in a closed vessel, the volatile components rise as vapor, and the vapor is condensed and collected in a separate vessel. The alchemist who works with the volatile has separated the subtle from the gross, the spirit from the body, the active from the passive. The descending is the condensation, precipitation, and fixation of the volatile.

The ascending and descending principle anchors the alchemical theory of the magnum opus. The four colour stages of the great work — black, white, yellow, and red — are stages in the cycle of ascending and descending, the alchemist’s progressive purification and perfection of the matter. The cluster on the magnum opus treats the four stages in detail.

The author: Hermes Trismegistus

The Tablet ends with the author’s self-identification: “Therefore I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.” The “three parts of philosophy” are the three branches of the Hermetic tradition: alchemy, astrology, and theurgy. The Tablet is presented as a summary of the entire Hermetic programme.

The historical reality is that the Tablet is not the work of an ancient Egyptian sage. The text was probably composed in the early centuries CE in the Hellenistic intellectual milieu of Roman Egypt. Isaac Casaubon’s De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes (1614) demonstrated, by careful philological analysis, that the Hermetic texts were Hellenistic rather than ancient. The dating effectively destroyed the prestige of the Hermetic tradition as a source of ancient Egyptian wisdom, though it did not extinguish the philosophical and religious influence of the texts.

The history of the text

The earliest surviving text of the Emerald Tablet is in Arabic, where it appears in a corpus of works attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan and later to the legendary figure of Apollonius of Tyana. Newman (2019) is the definitive treatment of the Arabic and Latin transmission.

The Arabic text was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, most likely by Hugo of Santalla (c. 1100 – 1160), the prolific translator of Arabic scientific, divinatory, and alchemical texts working in Tarazona in Aragon. The attribution to Plato of Tivoli is a minority view; Newman’s 2019 study of the Latin and Arabic transmission makes the case for Hugo on stylistic and codicological grounds, and Charles Burnett’s “Arabic into Latin” (in The Introduction of Arabic Philosophy into Europe, ed. Burnett, 1999) corroborates the wider Tarazonan milieu. The Latin text circulated widely, and the Tablet was the subject of more than sixty commentaries between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The most important of the medieval commentaries is that long attributed to Roger Bacon, who treated the Tablet as a foundational text of the alchemical tradition. The Baconian authorship of the Speculum secretorum and De arte chymica is now disputed, but the commentary’s place in the Baconian tradition is secure. The most important of the Renaissance commentaries is the one by Hortulanus (probably a pseudonym of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century), which became the standard Renaissance commentary and was printed in many editions. The Tablet was also incorporated into the Rosicrucian and alchemical literature of the seventeenth century, and became one of the central texts of the modern esoteric revival. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, and the Anthroposophical Society all treated the Tablet as a foundational text.

The famous commentaries

The history of the Emerald Tablet is a history of commentaries. The text is so dense that it has invited the most diverse interpretations, and the major commentators have used the Tablet as a starting point for their own programmes.

Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292), the English Franciscan friar and polymath, is associated with a long commentary on the Emerald Tablet that is one of the most important medieval expositions of the text. The commentary presents the Tablet as a complete system of natural philosophy, and it uses the principle of correspondence to develop a theory of the unity of matter, the action of the heavens on the sublunary world, and the alchemical art. The attribution of the Speculum secretorum and De arte chymica to Bacon himself is now disputed in modern scholarship; the works long circulated under his name but are probably by later Franciscan followers. Hortulanus (probably a pseudonym of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century) wrote the most influential Renaissance commentary on the Emerald Tablet. Hortulanus’s commentary is a systematic exposition of the alchemical work, and it uses the Tablet as a framework for a complete theory of the magnum opus. The Hortulanus commentary was printed in many editions and was a major influence on the Paracelsian and Rosicrucian traditions.

Isaac Newton devoted a long commentary to the Emerald Tablet in his alchemical papers, one of the most important documents of the early modern alchemical tradition. Newton’s commentary interprets the Tablet as a guide to the alchemical art, and he uses the principle of correspondence to develop a theory of the action of the heavens on the terrestrial metals. The commentary was not published in his lifetime; it is preserved in the Portsmouth Collection at Cambridge, and Newman’s Newton the Alchemist (2018) is the standard modern discussion.

The Theosophical tradition of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society — made the Emerald Tablet a central text of the modern esoteric programme.

The Tablet and the modern esoteric tradition

The Emerald Tablet remains a foundational text of the modern esoteric tradition. The principle of correspondence, with its claim that the higher and the lower are bound together by the cosmic Pneuma, is one of the most quoted axioms of contemporary esoteric thought. The Tablet as a whole is read as a summary of the Hermetic worldview, and the text is studied in esoteric orders and in the academic study of Western esotericism (Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 2012).

The Tablet is also a living part of the contemporary alchemical revival. The spagyric practitioners, the Hermetic orders, and the modern schools of alchemy all return to the Tablet as a source of inspiration and as a guide to practice. The Tablet has been printed in hundreds of editions since the fifteenth century, and the number of editions is the simplest measure of the text’s continuing influence.

FAQ

Q: Who translated the Emerald Tablet into Latin? A: The standard Latin Tabula is most likely by Hugo of Santalla (c. 1100 – 1160), the Tarazona-based translator of Arabic scientific, divinatory, and alchemical material. The older attribution to Plato of Tivoli is a minority view; Newman’s 2019 study of the Latin and Arabic transmission makes the case for Hugo on stylistic and codicological grounds.

Q: Is the Roger Bacon commentary genuine? A: The Emerald Tablet commentary long attributed to Roger Bacon is securely in the Baconian tradition, but the Speculum secretorum and De arte chymica are now generally regarded as pseudonymous works by later Franciscan followers. The commentary’s influence on the Latin alchemical tradition is not in doubt (Principe, 2013).

Q: How did Casaubon’s 1614 critique affect the Tablet’s reputation? A: Casaubon’s demonstration that the Hermetic texts were Hellenistic rather than ancient, together with the rejection of the qualitative alchemical framework by Boyle and Lavoisier, stripped the Tablet of its claim to ancient Egyptian antiquity. It survived, however, as a Hermetic theological and philosophical text rather than as natural philosophy.

Q: Did Newton write on the Emerald Tablet? A: Yes. Newton’s alchemical papers include a long commentary on the Tablet that uses the principle of correspondence to develop a theory of celestial influence on terrestrial metals. The commentary was not published in his lifetime (Newman, 2018).