Mystical systems
Emerald Tablet
Direct answer
Emerald Tablet: The Emerald Tablet is a brief, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, first known in Arabic, which alchemists treated as the summary of their whole art.
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At a glance
- Also called
- tabula smaragdina, smaragdine tablet
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Hermes Trismegistus, As Above, So Below, Alchemy, Hermeticism
The Emerald Tablet is a brief, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, first known in Arabic, which alchemists treated as the summary of their whole art.
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What is the Emerald Tablet?
The Emerald Tablet, Tabula Smaragdina in Latin, is a text of about a dozen lines. Legend says it was found cut into a slab of green stone in a hidden vault. It speaks of a single thing from which everything arises, gives that thing the Sun and the Moon for parents, and tells of its rising and its return, by which it takes on the strength of both the higher and the lower.
Alchemists read these lines as a veiled account of making their stone. The second line is the source of the motto as above, so below. The text is short enough to learn by heart and vague enough to bear many readings, which goes far to explain its long life.
On the tree of the hidden arts: The Hermetic principles.
What sets Emerald Tablet apart
Almost everything about the tablet is brief except its afterlife. The text runs to roughly a dozen sentences, with no recipe, no named substance and no instruction that can be followed, and that emptiness is what let every alchemist find his own process in it. Its frame story is as old as the text: a seeker enters a vault beneath a statue of Hermes and takes the green slab from an old man seated on a throne. The commentaries written on it outweigh it many hundreds of times over.
- Latin name: Tabula Smaragdina, the tablet of emerald
- Oldest source: Arabic, in the Book of the Secret of Creation, eighth or ninth century
- Named finder: Balinus, the Arabic form of Apollonius of Tyana
- Into Latin: Hugo of Santalla, twelfth century; a second version came with the Secret of Secrets
- Famous reader: Isaac Newton, whose English version survives in his alchemical papers
- Modern study: Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina, 1926, which established the Arabic origin
Often mistaken for something else: The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a twentieth-century book by Maurice Doreal; the Emerald Tablet is a single medieval text of a few lines.
The story behind Emerald Tablet
No Greek version exists. The earliest text is Arabic, in the Book of the Secret of Creation, a work of the eighth or ninth century ascribed to Balinus, the Arabic name of Apollonius of Tyana. Other Arabic versions stand in the writings under the name Jabir and in the Secret of Secrets. Hugo of Santalla made a Latin translation in the twelfth century. Isaac Newton left an English version among his papers, and Julius Ruska traced the Arabic sources in a study of 1926.
Why Emerald Tablet matters
Emerald Tablet is the most cited authority in European alchemy and the source of the best known Hermetic motto, so a great deal of later writing assumes it.
How to read Emerald Tablet
Readers go through it a line at a time and ask what each could describe on three levels: the sky, the workshop and a human life.
Emerald Tablet in practice: an example
A reader might copy out one line, such as the one on rising and returning, and ask where in the past year something of theirs went out and came back changed.
Where readings of Emerald Tablet go wrong
Emerald Tablet’s Egyptian antiquity is a legend with no evidence behind it, and books titled Emerald Tablets of Thoth are modern and unrelated.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- tabula smaragdina, emerald tablet of hermes, emerald tablet meaning, smaragdine tablet, emerald tablet of thoth
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is the Emerald Tablet?
It is a short cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. It is first found in Arabic in the eighth or ninth century, and medieval alchemists took it as the key to their work.
Does the Emerald Tablet say as above, so below?
Not in those four words. Its second line says, at greater length, that the lower and the higher are alike. The short motto is a later English summary of that line.
Is it the same as the Emerald Tablets of Thoth?
No. The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a twentieth-century book by the American occultist Maurice Doreal. It shares nothing with the medieval text beyond the name.
