As above, so below

Original source · Historical tradition

Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina), attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: Isaac Newton's English translation, Keynes MS. 28, fol. 2r (King's College, Cambridge); Newton Project catalogue ALCH00017

“That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below”Translation: Isaac Newton (transcription: The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, Indiana University, ed. W. R. Newman)

The Tablet is a short, cryptic text presented as the secret of creation and of the alchemical work. It states that what is below corresponds to what is above, that all things arise from one thing by adaptation, and it describes the 'one thing' in images of sun, moon, wind and earth.

Read the full passage at the source (an equivalent, reliable source; the originally listed link was unavailable).

Edition: Isaac Newton’s own English translation (Keynes MS. 28, King’s College, Cambridge), quoted from the transcription by The Chymistry of Isaac Newton project at Indiana University.

Historical context

Historical context

The earliest known versions are Arabic, found in texts such as the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa (Book of the Secret of Creation), attributed to 'Balinas' (pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana), and later in the pseudo-Aristotelian Sirr al-Asrar. Scholars date these roughly to the late 8th–10th centuries CE; estimates vary. Claims of a Greek or Syriac original are unconfirmed (no such manuscript is known), and Latin translations from the 12th century onward spread it in Europe.

Interpretations differ

Within the tradition

Medieval and early modern alchemists read it as a coded guide to the alchemical work. Renaissance Hermeticists read it as cosmological philosophy. 19th–20th-century esotericists and Jungian psychology treated it as spiritual or psychological symbolism. These are different traditions with different aims, not one unified reading.