Emerald Tablet: Where Does "As Above, So Below" Come From?

A short, cryptic alchemical text attributed to Hermes: "That which is below is like that which is above."

The Emerald Tablet is a text of about a dozen lines attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the founding charter of European alchemy. Its oldest known version is Arabic, from the late 8th or early 9th century.

The Emerald Tablet is a text of about a dozen lines, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, that became the founding charter of European alchemy. Isaac Newton's translation, made around 1680, begins: "Tis true without lying, certain and most true. 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."

It goes on to describe the "one thing" whose father is the sun and mother the moon, which the wind carried in its belly and the earth nursed, and tells how to separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, so that it ascends from earth to heaven and descends again. It ends with Hermes naming himself as having the three parts of the wisdom of the whole world.

The oldest known version is in Arabic, in the Book of the Secret of Creation, compiled in the late 8th or early 9th century and attributed to Balinas, the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana. In its frame story, Balinas enters a vault beneath a statue of Hermes and finds an old man on a throne holding a tablet of emerald. Latin translations began in the 12th century and spread widely.

The Emerald Tablet should not be confused with Doreal's Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, a much longer book written in the 1930s. The genuine tablet is short and is about alchemy and cosmology, not Atlantis or visitors, though its line about above and below is quoted everywhere. Newton copied and studied it with care.