Hermeticism
What does the Emerald Tablet actually say?
A real text, a legendary tablet
The Emerald Tablet is a short alchemy text of about a dozen lines, credited to Hermes Trismegistus. It says that what is above is like what is below, that all things come from “one thing” whose father is the Sun and mother the Moon, and that this thing must be separated, raised to heaven and brought back to earth to gain “the glory of the whole world.” Its oldest known version is Arabic, from around 800 CE. No actual tablet has ever been found. Isaac Newton translated it himself.
Left
Right
Tap a line. Arabic: literal English of the Secret of Creation version. 1927: Steele and Singer. Newton: normalized text of his manuscript.
Who wrote it
Not Hermes, not Egypt, not a tablet
The oldest copy is Arabic. The Tablet first appears at the end of an Arabic book, The Secret of Creation and the Craft of Nature, credited to “Balinas,” the Greek sage Apollonius of Tyana. Scholars date it to around 750 to 833 CE. No Greek or Syriac original has ever been found; some scholars think one existed and was lost, others that the text was written in Arabic from older ideas.
The tablet is part of the story. In the book, Balinas goes down into a crypt under a statue of Hermes and finds an old man on a throne holding a tablet of emerald. A Latin version from 1496 has Alexander the Great find it in Hermes’ tomb instead. The text survives only in manuscripts. There is no stone.
Latin made it the alchemists’ creed. Hugo of Santalla translated the Arabic book into Latin around 1145 to 1151, and a separate Latin text, the “vulgate,” became the version every European alchemist quoted. It was printed at Nuremberg in 1541.
Newton copied it out and translated it in a manuscript now at King’s College, Cambridge. His English is the right-hand column above.
The other Emerald Tablets
The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean
A different book with a borrowed name. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean was written by an American occultist who called himself Maurice Doreal, born Claude Dodgin, founder of the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Denver. He said he found the tablets in the Great Pyramid in 1925 and translated them, with Thoth as a king of Atlantis.
No tablets were ever shown. Scholars class the book as modern pseudohistory and point to influences from 1920s pulp horror fiction, including H. P. Lovecraft. Its publication date is itself unclear: catalogues say 1930 or 1939, and the historian Michael Barkun puts it in the 1940s or early 1950s. It has no textual link to the medieval Emerald Tablet on this page.
Real vs legend
The Emerald Tablet, sorted
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| The text exists in Arabic from around 800 CE. | Real · The Secret of Creation |
| Isaac Newton translated it. | Real · Keynes MS 28 |
| It was translated from a lost Greek original. | Debated · no Greek copy known |
| Hermes Trismegistus wrote it in ancient Egypt. | Legend · see Hermes |
| A real emerald tablet was found in a tomb or crypt. | Legend · part of the story |
| The Emerald Tablets of Thoth are ancient. | Legend · a 20th-century book |
| It gives the recipe for the philosopher’s stone. | Belief · how alchemists read it |
Questions
The Emerald Tablet
What does the Emerald Tablet actually say?
In about a dozen lines: that what is above is like what is below; that all things come from one thing, whose father is the Sun and mother the Moon; that it must be separated, the subtle from the gross, rise to heaven and come back to earth; and that this gives “the glory of the whole world.” It ends by naming Hermes as the author.
Have the Emerald Tablets ever been found?
No. No physical tablet is known. The tablet exists only in the story around the text, where it is found in a crypt under a statue of Hermes. The text itself survives in medieval manuscripts.
Who actually wrote the Emerald Tablet?
No one knows. It first appears in an Arabic book credited to Balinas, that is Apollonius of Tyana, dated to around 750 to 833 CE. Both that credit and the credit to Hermes Trismegistus are traditional, not historical.
Is the Emerald Tablet older than the Bible?
No. Its oldest known version is Arabic, from around 800 CE, long after the Bible was written. The claim that it is older rests on the legend that Hermes wrote it, not on any manuscript.
What did Isaac Newton say about the Emerald Tablet?
He translated it into English in a manuscript now at King’s College, Cambridge, beginning “Tis true without lying, certain & most true.”
What is the Emerald Tablet of Thoth?
A different book, written by Maurice Doreal in the 20th century, which claims to translate tablets he said he found in the Great Pyramid. No tablets were ever shown, and it has no link to the medieval text.
Sources
Where this comes from
- Emerald Tablet: Arabic text and literal translation, dating, Latin versions, 1541 print, 1496 Alexander version: Wikipedia.
- Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, “The Emerald Table,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1928): PMC.
- Isaac Newton, Keynes MS 28, ed. William R. Newman, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, Indiana University: dlib.indiana.edu.
- “Hermetic writings,” Encyclopaedia Britannica: britannica.com.
- Maurice Doreal and the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, citing Barkun 2003 and Partridge 2014: Wikipedia.
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