The Emerald Tablet
Hermes Trismegistus · first Arabic text around the 6th century · translated into Latin around the 12th century
A few hundred words. No more. Yet this tiny text crossed fourteen centuries, was translated into a dozen languages, studied by alchemists, annotated by Newton and contemplated by Jung. The Emerald Tablet is probably the most widely read esoteric text in human history.
Its best-known sentence — “That which is above is like that which is below” — became one of the mantras of Hermetic thought, a key to the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm. But what does the text actually say, and where did it come from?
The full text
Here is the medieval Latin text in English translation:
It is 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 accomplish the miracles of the one thing.
And as all things have come from one, through the mediation of one, so all things are born from this one thing by adaptation.
Its father is the Sun. Its mother is the Moon. The wind carried it in its womb. The Earth is its nurse.
The father of all the work of the whole world is here. Its power is complete when it has been turned toward Earth.
You will separate Earth from Fire, the subtle from the dense, gently and with great skill.
It rises from Earth to Heaven and descends again to Earth, receiving the strength of things above and below.
Thus you will have the glory of the whole world, and all darkness will flee from you.
It is the strong force of every force: it overcomes everything subtle and penetrates everything solid.
Thus the world was created.
From this will come and arise admirable adaptations, the means of which is here.
That is why I have been called Hermes Trismegistus, possessing the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
What I have to say about the work of the Sun is complete.
Origins and transmission
Unlike the Corpus Hermeticum, written in Greek in Alexandria, the Emerald Tablet has a different transmission history. The oldest known text is in Arabic, in the Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation, attributed to Apollonius of Tyana and dated roughly to the sixth–eighth centuries. It was translated into Latin in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the translators of Toledo, carrying Arabic wisdom into Europe.
Legend says the original was engraved on an emerald tablet found in Hermes Trismegistus’s tomb by Alexander the Great, Apollonius of Tyana or, in other versions, Sarah, Abraham’s wife. These myths signal the text’s perceived preciousness: something this old and hidden must be beyond value.
Line-by-line analysis
“That which is above is like that which is below”
This is the law of correspondence: the different planes of existence — cosmic, earthly, psychological and spiritual — reflect one another. What is observed in the stars appears again in the atom; what happens in the macrocosm is repeated in the microcosm of the human soul. It is the philosophical foundation of astrology, where planetary movements correspond to inner dynamics.
“Its father is the Sun. Its mother is the Moon.”
The text allegorically describes the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, the object of the alchemical Great Work. The Sun is the active, masculine, sulphur principle; the Moon the receptive, feminine, mercurial principle; Earth is the body in which everything takes form. It is also a description of creation itself: an active and receptive polarity giving birth to something new.
“It rises from Earth to Heaven and descends again to Earth.”
The movement of ascent and descent — solve et coagula, dissolve and fix — is at the heart of alchemy. It is also a description of the Hermetic soul: it descends into matter, gains experience, then rises toward its divine origin enriched by what it has lived.
Newton and the Emerald Tablet
Isaac Newton translated and annotated the Emerald Tablet. His manuscript, found among his unpublished alchemical papers preserved at Cambridge, reveals a Newton very different from the father of classical mechanics: a researcher fascinated by Hermetic texts and convinced that nature concealed a secret language that alchemy could decipher.
Newton saw in the Tablet a coded description of physical forces — gravitation as the “strong force of every force” that “penetrates everything solid”. Whether he was right matters less than what this reveals: Newtonian physics and Hermetic philosophy once nourished the same imagination.
The Tablet and alchemy
For medieval and Renaissance alchemists, the Emerald Tablet was the complete programme of the Great Work. Each sentence was a veil over a real or symbolic operation: separating the subtle from the dense, ascending and descending, and creating an admirable adaptation.
In the sixteenth century, the alchemist Paracelsus claimed that the Tablet contained everything medicine needed to know about the active principles of nature. Understanding it, for him, meant understanding how to heal.
Modern echoes
“As above, so below” continues to resonate in many contexts. In Jungian psychology, it expresses the correspondence between the collective unconscious and the individual psyche. In theoretical physics, some have seen an echo of the formula in the holographic principle, where information about a volume can be encoded on its surface.
In contemporary spiritual practice, it grounds the idea that inner and outer worlds reflect one another: what we deeply feel is expressed in our environment, and what we observe outside tells us something about our inner world.
Frequently asked questions
Did the Emerald Tablet really exist as a physical object?
Probably not. The emerald tablet is almost certainly a literary fiction, a rhetorical device giving authority to the text. No physical tablet has ever been found, and the legends of its discovery have no archaeological basis.
What is its relationship to the law of attraction?
Modern law-of-attraction ideas draw indirectly on Hermetic tradition, especially mentalism and correspondence. But the Emerald Tablet is much more complex: it describes a process of transformation requiring work and discernment, not simply positive thinking.
Is “as above, so below” scientifically true?
Not literally. Similarity across scales does exist in physics, but that is not proof of Hermetism. It is a coincidence that continues to fuel fascination.