Short answer
The Emerald Tablet (in Latin, Tabula Smaragdina) is a short, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It says, in brief, that what is below corresponds to what is above, that all things come from one thing, and that this one thing, with the sun as its father and the moon as its mother, is to be refined carefully to achieve a kind of perfection. It became a foundational text of alchemy.
What the text says
There are several versions and translations, so no single wording is definitive. One famous English rendering is by Isaac Newton, who left a translation among his papers. It opens with the line “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 then goes on to say, in summary:
- Everything comes from one thing, by the mediation of one thing.
- The sun is its father, the moon its mother; the wind carried it in its belly, and the earth nursed it.
- The thing is to be separated, the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, gently and with skill.
- It rises to heaven and descends again to earth, taking the power of things above and below.
- Whoever does this gains the “glory of the whole world.”
- The speaker names himself Hermes Trismegistus, “having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.”
For the exact wording, consult a reliable translation, since renderings differ.
What “as above, so below” means
The phrase “as above, so below” is a later, compressed paraphrase of the opening line, not a quotation from the text. Its core idea is correspondence: the heavens and the earth, the large and the small, the cosmos and the human being mirror each other, so understanding one gives insight into the other. It is a central assumption in Hermetic and astrological thought and in natural magic, and it is sometimes confused with the “Principle of Correspondence” listed in The Kybalion, an early twentieth-century book; see Hermeticism for the difference.
Alchemical readings
Alchemists read the text as a description of the Great Work. The “one thing” was often identified with the prima materia or the philosopher’s stone; the sun and moon with gold and silver or with sulphur and mercury; and the separation with distillation or purification. Spiritual readers took the same lines as a description of inner transformation. As is common with alchemical texts, the wording is open enough to support many interpretations, so no single reading can be claimed as the original meaning. For more, see the concept of alchemy.
Where the text came from
Despite legends of an ancient emerald slab found in Hermes’s tomb, the earliest known versions are in Arabic, within works from roughly the eighth to ninth centuries, such as the Book of the Secret of Creation attributed to Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana (Balinus). A Latin translation appeared in the twelfth century, after which the text circulated widely among European alchemists. A Greek original has not been found, and scholars debate how much earlier source material it may draw on.
Different translations
Because the text is terse and the original Arabic and Latin are ambiguous in places, translators differ on phrases such as “the one thing,” on how the subtle and gross are separated, and on what “the operation of the sun” means. Newton’s wording, Victorian translations, and modern scholarly ones can all read quite differently. When quoting, name the translator.
Its place in Hermeticism
The Emerald Tablet is usually grouped with the Hermetic literature because of its attribution, but it is separate from the Greek philosophical texts of the Corpus Hermeticum. It belongs to the later, technical and alchemical side of the Hermetic tradition, and it remains one of the best-known documents of Western esotericism.