The Emerald Tablet
A Tablet Nobody Has Seen
- First attested
- around 800 CEthe Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa ascribed to Balinas, compiled c. 750-850 CE, the earliest text to carry it
- Claimed
- around 1200 BCEasserted by the Hermetic tradition, which ascribes the text to Hermes Trismegistus; Renaissance readers following Ficino placed him in the age of Moses, and Arabic writers identified him with Idris, before the Flood
The claim runs about 2 thousand years ahead of the evidence.
Its authority rests on a fiction it states openly: a tablet nobody has produced, found in a vault nobody entered, signed with a name its author did not own. The earliest version is Arabic, of about 750–850, with no Egyptian or Greek original behind it.
'As above, so below' — a cosmology in a few lines, resting on a tablet nobody has produced.
Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and so to Egyptian antiquity, the Tablet has no known Egyptian or Greek original. Its earliest surviving version is Arabic, embedded in the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa ascribed to Balinas and compiled about 750-850; the frame story has the tablet found in a vault beneath a statue of Hermes. Latin versions circulate from the twelfth century, one by Hugo of Santalla; Hortulanus glossed it, Nuremberg printed it in 1541, and Isaac Newton put it into English. The line the slogan is cut from runs both ways: what is below is like what is above, and what is above like what is below, 'to do the miracles of one only thing'. It stands outside the Corpus Hermeticum, the Greek Hermetica of the second and third centuries.
Light
Compresses a whole cosmology into a few lines: the pattern above and the pattern below are one, and either end can be worked from. That compactness is why it was copied, glossed and translated for nine centuries, Newton among the translators.
Shadow
Its authority rests on fiction: a tablet nobody has produced, from a vault nobody entered, signed with a name its author did not own. E. J. Holmyard printed an Arabic version in 1923, Julius Ruska the oldest witness in 1926; the slogan outlived the argument.
