The Emerald Tablet of Hermes

← Ancient texts · Hermetic & esoteric

English, from Latin, from a lost Arabic (and perhaps Greek) original · The Arabic text is attested by c. 800 AD; the Latin 'Tabula Smaragdina' circulated in Europe from the 12th century.

Translation: Anonymous (in The Mirror of Alchimy), 1597 — The Mirror of Alchimy (London, 1597), attributed to Roger Bacon — "The Smaragdine Table of Hermes". Public domain.

A dozen cryptic lines on the unity of all things — "That which is beneath is like that which is above" — the founding text of Western alchemy and Hermeticism, quoted for centuries (Isaac Newton translated it). It is not a parallel to the Bible: it belongs to the Hermetic tradition, a body of Greek and Arabic esoteric writing attributed to the legendary sage Hermes Trismegistus.

It sits here because the question comes up, and because the Renaissance read it alongside scripture — Christian writers sometimes treated "thrice-great Hermes" as a pagan witness to the Trinity and to Genesis. The closest scriptural echo is Ecclesiastes 1:9, "that which hath been is that which shall be … there is no new thing under the sun," and the personified Wisdom of Proverbs 8 who was present when the world was made — but the resemblance is atmospheric, not textual. This is the 1597 English, spelling and all.

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The Smaragdine Table 2 biblical parallels