The Emerald Tablet
Tabula Smaragdina, the Smaragdine Table, as above so below, Verba secretorum Hermetis
The short text the whole tradition quotes, and the one sentence of it everybody knows. This collection holds it four ways: printed entire, carved into a rock, split across two obelisks, and held out in a hand.
A printer at Rorschach am Bodensee put the Tablet on a page in 1598 and then drew it. The Aureum Vellus gives the Latin entire, and facing it sets a woodcut ringed with the acrostic “VISITA INTERIORA TERRAE RECTIFICANDO INVENIES OCCULTUM LAPIDEM”, visit the interior of the earth and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone. Over the block stands a promise nothing else in this collection makes: “Außlegung vnd erklärung des Gemähls oder Figur”, exposition and explanation of the painting or figure. Five pages follow, and they take the picture apart part by part, printing a planetary sign in the margin against each metal and its colour. At the head of the device a sun and a moon pour into one cup, and the Tablet on the facing page has already said whose they are: “Pater eius est Sol, Mater eius Luna”, its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon.
Khunrath carved it into a rock. His plate of the triumphal stone pyramids gives the text on the face of a pyramid with a flame at its apex, headed Verba secretorum Hermetis, the secret words of Hermes, and it opens: “Verum sine mendacio, certum et verissimum: quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius; et quod est superius, est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.” True, without lying, certain and most true: what is below is as what is above, and what is above is as what is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing.
He puts the short form on his title page and splits it in two. Id quod inferius is cut in the ground under one obelisk and Sicut quod superius under the other, with Sol and Luna lettered beneath them, so a reader crossing the page assembles the sentence and is handed the two luminaries as the demonstration. The famous half of the tablet is used there as a caption to a picture rather than as a motto on a wall.
Knapp painted the object itself for Manly Hall in 1928, a green tablet held out over Hermes' left hand while his right holds the caduceus and his feet stand on the dragon. Hall's own line under it refuses every mystical reading of the thing: “The Smaragdine, or Emerald Tablet found in the valley of Ebron and generally accredited to Hermes, is in reality a chemical formula of a high and secret order.” A recipe, in other words, and Hall says so in the same breath in which he calls it emerald.
A printer at Frankfurt in 1678 did the most literal thing anybody has done with it. He set the tablet entire in letterpress under a folding engraving of a sun, headed “SMARAGDINA HERMETIS TABVLA”, and gave one sentence of it larger capitals than the rest: “SIC MUNDUS CREATUS EST.” Thus the world was created. Then the text ends where it always ends, “Completum est quod dixi de Operatione Solis”, what I have said of the operation of the sun is complete, and a reader looking up from that line meets a picture of a sun filling the whole sheet above it. Nothing printed there joins the two. The joining is the layout.
Set the three printings side by side and they stop agreeing. Where Khunrath’s rock and the Frankfurt letterpress have the correspondence working ad perpetranda miracula, to carry the miracles through, the Rorschach book of 1598 has ad præparanda, to prepare them. Where those two have all things coming from the one by adaptatione, an adapting, Rorschach has adoptione, an adopting, and it holds that word to the end of the text, printing adoptiones mirabiles where Frankfurt prints adaptationes. And where both carry a clause on the father of all the telesm of the whole world, Rorschach runs straight from the nurse to “Hîc est vis totius mundi”, here is the force of the whole world, with no telesm in it anywhere. All three readings were taken off the page images in 2026 rather than from any edition.
Five makers, five ways to put a text into a picture, and not one of them treats the sentence as a slogan. The Rorschach book prints it whole and then explains its own drawing of it. Khunrath cuts it into a rock and splits its famous half across the feet of two obelisks. The Frankfurt printer sets it under a sun and lets the last line do the work. Knapp hands it to Hermes as an object. In every one of them the picture does the arguing.
Contested
As above, so below is a translation of four words out of a text of about fifteen sentences, and it has travelled a very long way from them. The tablet is a Hermetic text with no author, no original and no agreed date, known in Arabic before it is known in Latin, and Khunrath is quoting a Latin version already centuries old when he cuts it into his rock. What this collection can show is what its makers carved and printed, in the words they used, in 1598 and 1602 and 1609 and 1678 and 1928. It cannot show an original, because there is not one to show. Nor is it one text. The three printings held here part company at three places, set out in the reading above, and that is a fact about these three books rather than a claim about which reading came first: the archive holds no manuscript to put them against.
Sources
- Salomon Trismosin, attributed, Aureum Vellus, oder Guldin Schatz und Kunstkammer, 1598: The Latin of the Tablet on page 238, the woodcut and its heading on page 239, and the exposition that runs from there to page 243, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy of the Rorschach printing. The English is the archive's.
- Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, 1609: The text cut into the face of the pyramid on the plate of the triumphal stone pyramids, in Latin and in German, and the short form split between the two obelisks of the engraved title, read off the plates at the size of the archive's own images.
- Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928: Hermetic Pharmacology, Chemistry and Therapeutics, on the Smaragdine Tablet as a chemical formula; and the plate of Hermes standing on Typhon, painted by J. Augustus Knapp.
On the same plate
Where it appears · 5
5 works in the archive carry the Emerald Tablet. First the 5 where it has been read, with the Emerald Tablet itself picked out.
