The Emerald Tablet: history of alchemy's shortest text

Few lines have enjoyed a fortune comparable to that of the Tabula Smaragdina, the Emerald Tablet. It is a very short text, about a dozen sentences in all, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and considered for centuries the foundation of alchemy. Its history, however, does not begin in ancient Egypt, as legend has it, but in the Arabic world of the first centuries of Islam.

The Arabic versions

The oldest witnesses to the Tablet are in Arabic. The best known is included in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation, attributed to Balīnūs, the Arabic name of Apollonius of Tyana. The work is usually dated between the eighth and ninth centuries, although it may draw on older material, perhaps of Greek or Syriac origin. Another Arabic version appears in a work of the corpus attributed to Jābir ibn Ḥayyān.

In the Book of the Secret of Creation the Tablet is introduced by a story. The narrator enters a crypt beneath a statue of Hermes and finds an old man seated on a throne, holding a tablet of emerald with the text engraved on it. Beside him lies a book on the secrets of creation. It is a legendary frame, typical of texts that present knowledge as rediscovered rather than invented.

Arrival in the West

In the twelfth century the Tablet passed into Latin. A translation of the Book of the Secret of Creation was made by Hugh of Santalla, active in Spain, and another version of the text circulated within the Secretum secretorum, the famous pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. From these sources came the Latin vulgate version, which became the reference text for European alchemists.

The most famous sentence states that what is below is like what is above: Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius. There follow images of the Sun as father, the Moon as mother, the wind carrying in its womb and the earth as nurse. The language is obscure and for that very reason lent itself to endless interpretations.

Commentators and illustrious readers

In the fourteenth century an author known as Hortulanus wrote a commentary explaining the Tablet in alchemical terms, as a description of the preparation of the philosophers' stone. His commentary was often copied and printed together with the text. In the Renaissance the Tablet appeared in many alchemical collections, and in the seventeenth century it caught the attention of Isaac Newton, who made an English translation preserved among his papers.

Modern research on the origin of the text is largely a twentieth-century achievement. The German historian Julius Ruska devoted a substantial monograph to the Tabula Smaragdina in 1926, reconstructing the Arabic and Latin versions. Further finds in Arabic manuscripts have enriched the picture without fully settling the question of the earliest sources.

The Emerald Tablet is an exemplary case of a text whose fame far exceeds its length. Probably born in Arabic, attributed to a legendary Hermes, translated and commented on in Latin, it became the motto of an entire vision of the cosmos founded on the correspondence between heaven and earth.