The Emerald Tablet, or Tabula Smaragdina, is a brief, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus that became one of the foundational documents of Western alchemy and Hermeticism. Its earliest known versions are Arabic, from the eighth to tenth centuries CE. Translated into Latin in the twelfth century, it was studied by alchemists for centuries and is the source of the famous principle often summarized as "as above, so below."
Emerald Tablet at a glance
| Also known as | Tabula Smaragdina, Smaragdine Table |
|---|---|
| Attributed to | Hermes Trismegistus (pseudepigraphical) |
| Earliest versions | Arabic, 8th-10th century CE |
| Earliest source | Book of the Secret of Creation (Sirr al-khaliqa), attributed to Balinas |
| Latin translation | 12th century (Hugo of Santalla and the Latin vulgate) |
| Famous translator | Isaac Newton (English version) |
Legend and authorship
According to the legends attached to it, the text was engraved on a slab of emerald or green stone and found in the tomb of Hermes Trismegistus, the "thrice-great" sage whom late antique and medieval writers regarded as an ancient Egyptian teacher of wisdom. In the oldest Arabic frame story, the discoverer is Balinas, the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana, who enters a vault beneath a statue of Hermes and finds an old man seated with the emerald tablet in his hands. Later European tradition added other finders, including Alexander the Great and Sarah, the wife of Abraham.
Modern scholars regard the attribution to Hermes as pseudepigraphical: the text was composed much later and given an ancient author to lend it authority. Whether it rests on a lost Greek or Syriac original is debated, and no such original has been found.
Arabic origins
The earliest surviving versions come from Arabic works of the eighth to tenth centuries. The oldest is found at the end of the Book of the Secret of Creation (Sirr al-khaliqa), a treatise on the formation of the world, minerals and living things, dated to the late eighth or early ninth century. Another version appears in a work attributed to the alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan, and a further one in the Secret of Secrets, a popular book of advice for rulers falsely attributed to Aristotle. The German scholar Julius Ruska, in a 1926 study, gathered these witnesses and argued for the Arabic background of the text, and research since then has refined the dating of the individual versions.
Latin versions and Newton
The Tablet reached Europe in the twelfth century. Hugo of Santalla translated the Secret of Creation in the mid-twelfth century, and an anonymous Latin version, later called the vulgate, became the standard text. Philip of Tripoli's thirteenth-century Latin Secretum secretorum spread another version widely. Medieval commentators, notably the writer known as Hortulanus in the fourteenth century, read it as a concise description of making the philosopher's stone.
Isaac Newton, who devoted many years to alchemical study, made his own English translation. It begins:
Tis true without lying, certain and most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.
The text continues with images of a single thing whose father is the sun and mother the moon, carried by the wind and nursed by the earth, which must be separated, refined and reunited.
Themes and interpretation
The Tablet is short, a dozen or so lines, and its obscurity invited endless commentary. Its central ideas include the unity of all things arising from "one thing," the correspondence between higher and lower levels of reality, and a process of separation and recombination, of ascending from earth to heaven and descending again, that gathers the powers of both. Alchemists read these lines as coded laboratory instructions for working with a primal substance, the prima materia, through stages of purification.
Others read the Tablet cosmologically or spiritually, as a teaching about the relation of the human being to the cosmos, the microcosm to the macrocosm. The Latin word telesmus, which appears in the text and has no clear classical meaning, was variously understood as perfection, talismanic power or completion; Newton rendered it as perfection.
Influence and legacy
From the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century the Tablet was one of the most frequently copied and commented texts of alchemy. Renaissance and early modern authors printed it alongside emblems and diagrams, and it shaped the symbolic language of Hermetic philosophy and Rosicrucian literature.
In modern occultism the paraphrase "as above, so below" became a slogan for the doctrine of correspondences, used in astrology, ceremonial magic and New Age writing. Helena Blavatsky and later Theosophists helped popularize this short form. Historians of science, for their part, study the Tablet as evidence of how Arabic natural philosophy passed into Latin Europe and influenced figures from Albertus Magnus to Newton.
Related entries
Frequently asked questions
Who wrote the Emerald Tablet?
Tradition attributes it to Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Egyptian sage, but scholars consider the attribution pseudepigraphical. The oldest surviving versions are Arabic texts from the eighth to tenth centuries CE, and the real author or authors are unknown. Whether an earlier Greek or Syriac original existed remains an open question.
What does as above, so below mean?
The phrase is a modern paraphrase of the Tablet's statement that what is below is like what is above. In Hermetic thought it expresses correspondence between the heavens and the earth, and between the cosmos and the human being, so that studying one level reveals the other. Occultists apply it to astrology, magic and spiritual practice.
Did Isaac Newton translate the Emerald Tablet?
Yes. Newton, who studied alchemy intensively alongside his work in physics and mathematics, made an English translation from the Latin vulgate version, which survives among his manuscripts. His rendering of the obscure word telesmus as perfection is often quoted in discussions of the text.
Sources and further reading
This entry replaces an article from the original Mystica encyclopedia (online since 2001). It was rewritten from the sources above by The Mystica Editorial Team under our editorial standards. Last reviewed: September 30, 2026.