The Figures
Balinas
Balinas is the Arabic name for Apollonius of Tyana — and the pen-name under which an unknown Arabic author wrote the Kitab sirr al-khaliqa ('Book of the Secret of Creation'), compiled in the late 8th or early 9th century and certainly finished before 833. At its end sits the earliest documented text of the Emerald Tablet. The 'discovery' in a vault beneath a statue of Hermes is a literary device — but it launched a thousand years of alchemy.
The most influential page in Western alchemy first appears at the end of a book signed by a man who could not have written it. “Balinas” is the Arabic rendering of Apollonius of Tyana, the first-century Greek sage — which is why scholars call the actual author, an unknown Arabic writer working seven centuries later, pseudo-Apollonius. His book is where the Emerald Tablet enters history.
The Book of the Secret of Creation
The Kitab sirr al-khaliqa wa-san‘at al-tabi‘a — “Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature” — is an Arabic cosmological treatise, and the Tablet stands embedded at its end. The three landmark datings frame it tightly: Julius Ruska (1926) allowed underlying material from as early as the 6th-8th centuries; Paul Kraus (1943) placed the compilation under Caliph al-Ma’mun (813-833); Ursula Weisser (1980), author of the standard critical study, settled on c. 750-800. The safe formulation: compiled in Arabic in the late 8th or early 9th century, certainly before 833.
The vault under the statue
Inside the book, Balinas tells how he found the Tablet: in a vault beneath a statue of Hermes in Tyana, where an old man seated on a golden throne held the emerald slab (Kraus 1942, p. 303; Asl 2016, p. 444). It is a superb scene — and a standard literary topos, the “discovery narrative” that Hermetic and alchemical texts routinely use to give new writing ancient authority. It is not a historical report, any more than the attribution to Apollonius is a byline.
What the book teaches
Another of its titles says what it is about: Kitab al-‘ilal, the “Book of Causes”. After a prologue on the unity of God and on creation, it lays out a cosmology that runs from the heavenly spheres through minerals, plants and animals down to man, and it traces every phenomenon to its material cause: a fitting mixture of the four elements, or “natures” as the book calls them (Paul Kraus, Jâbir et la science grecque, Cairo 1942, pp. 272, 303, and on the term p. 282, note; Mohammad Karimi Zanjani Asl, Al-Qantara 37 (2016), pp. 442-443). Its mineralogy holds the oldest known statement of the idea that metals form in the earth from sulphur and mercury mixed in due proportion. The Jabirian corpus took the idea over, and through Arabic sources it reached the alchemy of the Latin Middle Ages, where it appears in the Summa ascribed to Geber (Kraus 1942, p. 1, note 1, and p. 283).
The book presents itself as a commentary, in which a priest of Nablus explains the words of Balinas. The manuscripts do not give his name clearly: Kraus read it, with a question mark, as Sajiyus and also considered [He]sychius, while older scholars took him for Sergius (Kraus 1942, p. 272, note, and pp. 273, 280; Asl 2016, p. 442). Martin Plessner and Julius Ruska took him for an invention of the author; Kraus found the detail plausible enough to look for the book’s roots in the Hellenising circles of Syria (Kraus 1942, pp. 272-273, 280). The Tablet comes only after the formal close of the book (Kraus 1942, p. 302). The book’s own introduction ties the two halves of its full title to two objects found in the vault: the emerald tablet bears the words “this is the art of nature”, and the book found with it “this is the secret of creation and the science of the causes of things” (Kraus 1942, p. 303; Asl 2016, p. 444, translating Weisser’s 1979 edition, p. 7). Kraus read this as a division of labour, and from here on it is his interpretation, not something the text says: the book is the open theory of causes, while the Tablet says in veiled terms what the book never spells out, the making of the elixir. Its few lines, he wrote, are “the key” to the book (Kraus 1942, pp. 302-303); Asl accepts this reading (2016, pp. 443-444).
Versions of the Tablet
The Tablet did not stay inside this book. The table lists only the versions whose dates and editions we could check.
| Version | Language and date | Edition, and what to notice |
|---|---|---|
| Sirr al-khaliqa | Arabic, pseudo-Apollonius; late 8th or early 9th century; at least two recensions (Kraus 1942, p. 272, note), a long one and an abridged one (Weisser, as summarised by Asl 2016, pp. 442-443; Mandosio 2004, p. 317) | Arabic text: Ursula Weisser (ed.), Aleppo 1979. Study: Ursula Weisser, Das “Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung” von Pseudo-Apollonios von Tyana, Berlin, De Gruyter, 1980. |
| Jabirian corpus | Arabic, in the Kitab ustuqus al-uss al-thani; later than the Sirr al-khaliqa, and Kraus dates the oldest layers of the corpus to the 9th century at the earliest | A shortened text, which Jabir, by his own account, knew from Balinas’s book (Asl 2016, pp. 444-445). Arabic text: E.J. Holmyard (ed.), The Arabic Works of Jabir ibn Hayyan, Paris 1928, p. 90; Holmyard first drew attention to it in Nature 112 (1923). Kraus argued, against the earlier view of Ruska and Plessner, that it is not older than the version in the Sirr al-khaliqa (Kraus, vol. I, Cairo 1943, pp. lvii-lviii; vol. II, 1942, pp. 280-281, note). |
| Sirr al-asrar | Arabic, pseudo-Aristotle; usually dated to the 10th century; it took the Tablet over, probably from the Sirr al-khaliqa | Arabic text: ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi (ed.), Cairo 1954. Dating: Mahmoud Manzalaoui, Oriens 23-24 (1974), pp. 147-257. The borrowing: Kraus 1942, p. 272, note. |
| Hugo of Santalla | Latin, first half of the 12th century: De secretis nature, translated from the abridged Arabic recension of the book | Two manuscripts survive: Paris, BnF lat. 13951 (first half of the 12th century) and lat. 13952 (a 17th-century copy of it). Edition: Françoise Hudry, Chrysopoeia 6 (1997-1999, printed 2000), pp. 1-154 (review by Jean-Marc Mandosio, 2004). |
| The Latin vulgate | Latin, medieval | The version most widely circulated among alchemists. Its translator did not recognise the Arabic tilasm, “talisman”, and simply transcribed it: pater omnis telesmi (Jean-Marc Mandosio, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 63, 2005, p. 140). Edition: Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1928), pp. 485-501. |
| Secretum secretorum | Latin, first half of the 13th century: Philip of Tripoli’s translation of the Sirr al-asrar | Hermes appears as “Hermogenes”, and the worker of miracles is “one God alone” (unus solus est Deus). Latin text: Robert Steele (ed.), Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, Oxford 1920, pp. 115-117; transcription in the Arabic and Latin Corpus (Würzburg). |
Why this card matters
Because it fixes the Emerald Tablet’s real coordinates, and with them the origin of the line later shortened to as above, so below. No Greek or Egyptian original of the Tablet is known to exist; its earliest attested language is Arabic, and every later version — the shorter recension in the Jabirian corpus, the one framed as Aristotle’s letter to Alexander in the Sirr al-asrar, the medieval Latin — descends from this tradition. Whether lost Greek or Syriac sources stand behind parts of the Sirr al-khaliqa is an open scholarly question; the Tablet as a text is documented only from the Arabic tradition onward. The physical emerald slab of vast antiquity, the Great Pyramid find, the “Atlantean tablets” of 1930s channeling — all reception, no evidence. The pseudonym, meanwhile, is the tradition in miniature: like Hermes Trismegistus himself, Balinas is a borrowed name lending old authority to new thought — and the borrowing worked for a thousand years.
Later alchemists kept using the name of Hermes: the Musaeum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1625), an anthology of Latin alchemical treatises, contains no ancient Hermetica.
| Name | Balinas = Arabic for Apollonius of Tyana; actual author unknown ('pseudo-Apollonius') |
|---|---|
| Work | Kitab sirr al-khaliqa ('Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature') |
| Date | Late 8th–early 9th century CE; certainly before 833 (Ruska 1926; Kraus 1943; Weisser 1980) |
| Claim to fame | Contains the earliest documented text of the Emerald Tablet |
| Earliest language of the Tablet | Arabic — no Greek or Egyptian original is known |
Fair questions
Was Balinas a real person?
The name refers to a real person — Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century sage — but the book's actual author was an unknown Arabic writer of the 8th-9th century using that name, hence 'pseudo-Apollonius.'
Is the Emerald Tablet ancient Egyptian?
No evidence supports that. Its earliest documented text is Arabic, in the Sirr al-khaliqa (before 833 CE). The Egyptian and Atlantean origin stories are later legend and modern invention.
Did Balinas really find a tablet in a vault?
The vault, the old man on the golden throne and the emerald slab are a literary discovery-narrative — a standard device for granting new texts ancient authority — not a historical report.
Listen & watch
Sources & further reading
- Julius Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina (1926); Paul Kraus (1943); Ursula Weisser, critical study of the Sirr al-khaliqa (1980).
- Paul Kraus, Jâbir ibn Hayyân: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, vol. I, Le corpus des écrits jâbiriens (Cairo, 1943), pp. lvii-lviii, and vol. II, Jâbir et la science grecque (Cairo, 1942), pp. 1, 272-283, 302-303 (Mémoires de l’Institut d’Égypte 44-45); scans at the Internet Archive: vol. I, vol. II.
- Mohammad Karimi Zanjani Asl, “Sirr al-khaliqa and its influence in the Arabic and Persianate world: ‘Awn b. al-Mundhir’s commentary and its unknown Persian translation”, Al-Qantara 37.2 (2016), pp. 435-473, doi:10.3989/alqantara.2016.015 (open access).
- Ursula Weisser (ed.), Kitab sirr al-khaliqa wa-san‘at al-tabi‘a (Aleppo: Institute for the History of Arabic Science, 1979); Ursula Weisser, Das “Buch über das Geheimnis der Schöpfung” von Pseudo-Apollonios von Tyana (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980; Ars medica III.2).
- E.J. Holmyard, “The Emerald Table”, Nature 112, no. 2814 (6 October 1923), pp. 525-526; E.J. Holmyard (ed.), The Arabic Works of Jâbir ibn Hayyân, vol. I (Paris: Geuthner, 1928).
- ‘Abd al-Rahman Badawi (ed.), al-Usul al-yunaniyya li-l-nazariyyat al-siyasiyya fi l-islam (Cairo, 1954), with the Arabic Sirr al-asrar; Mahmoud Manzalaoui, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitâb Sirr al-asrâr: Facts and Problems”, Oriens 23-24 (1974), pp. 147-257.
- Robert Steele (ed.), Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi V (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), pp. 115-117; transcription by Leandra Fuchs in the Arabic and Latin Corpus, ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse et al. (Würzburg).
- Françoise Hudry (ed.), “Le De secretis nature du ps.-Apollonius de Tyane, traduction latine par Hugues de Santalla du Kitâb sirr al-halîqa”, Chrysopoeia 6 (1997-1999 [2000]), pp. 1-154; review: Jean-Marc Mandosio, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 62 (2004), pp. 317-321, Persée.
- Jean-Marc Mandosio, “La création verbale dans l’alchimie latine du Moyen Âge”, Archivum Latinitatis Medii Aevi 63 (2005), pp. 137-147, Persée.
- Robert Steele and Dorothea Waley Singer, “The Emerald Table”, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21.3 (January 1928), pp. 485-501, PubMed Central.
- U.S. National Library of Medicine, Islamic Medical Manuscripts, catalogue entry “Kitâb Sirr al-asrâr” (MS A 57), on the two Latin translations (consulted 27 October 2026).
- Steele & Singer, “The Emerald Table” (1928), full text at PubMed Central, the critical edition we quote.