The Emerald Tablet

The dozen or so lines of this text carry the single most quoted sentence in Western esotericism, the statement that what is below corresponds to what is above. Its attributed origin, an emerald slab inscribed by Hermes Trismegistus and found in a tomb, is a legend, and the actual transmission is traceable.

Julius Ruska's 1926 study established the position that still holds. The earliest surviving witnesses are Arabic. The text appears embedded in the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation, a work attributed to Balinas, the Arabic name for the figure Europe knew as Apollonius of Tyana, datable to roughly the eighth or ninth century. It circulates in other Arabic alchemical compilations of the same period. It reaches Latin Europe by translation in the twelfth century, and it is in Latin that it becomes the maxim of European alchemy.

No Greek version is attested. No Egyptian version is attested. There is no evidence the text existed before its Arabic appearance, and its structure, a short revealed cosmological formula framed by a discovery narrative, is characteristic of the Arabic hermetica of exactly that period.

This places it in the same category as the philosophical treatises catalogued alongside it here, though a few centuries later and in a different language. Both are pseudepigraphic, both are considerably later than the antiquity they claim, and in both cases the redating leaves the content untouched while removing the authority that the claimed antiquity was doing the work of supplying.

Its influence is genuinely enormous and does not depend on any of this. Newton made a translation of it. The correspondence axiom it states became the organising principle of the entire system of magical attributions that the later tables in this collection set out. A ninth-century Arabic text of a dozen lines is one of the load-bearing documents of Western esotericism, which is a more interesting fact than the legend it replaced.

The Emerald Tablet is extremely short, a dozen or so numbered sentences depending on the recension, and almost every one of them has been the subject of centuries of commentary. It contains the line usually given in English as as above, so below, which has become the most quoted sentence in Western esotericism and which in the original is a statement about correspondence between what is above and what is below for the accomplishing of the miracle of one thing.

What the tablet was actually used for is more specific than its modern reputation suggests. Alchemists read it as a veiled recipe: a compressed account of the stages of the Work, with the separation of earth from fire, the ascent and descent, and the acquisition of the glory of the whole world read as operations to be performed rather than as metaphysics to be contemplated. Dozens of commentaries survive that take it exactly that way, matching each sentence to a laboratory stage.

Isaac Newton made his own English translation of it, in a manuscript that stayed unpublished for centuries, which is a useful corrective to the idea that the alchemical and the scientific are separate lineages that never touched.

Its brevity is part of its function. A text of a dozen sentences can be memorised, carried without a book, and set at the head of a longer work as an epigraph, and the Emerald Tablet has been used all three ways.