The Texts — close reading
The Emerald Tablet,
clause by clause
Fourteen clauses. For each one: the Latin as it circulated, a plain English rendering, the claim it actually makes, and the question it leaves open. The famous second clause is here — together with the half of it that is almost never quoted.
The Emerald Tablet is short enough to fit on a postcard and has carried more weight than any text of its length has a right to. It circulates as a block of thirteen or fourteen sentences, usually without an edition, usually without a date, and almost always without the awkward question each sentence raises.
Below is the Latin as it circulated in the medieval West — the vulgate — divided into its conventional clauses. The English is ours, kept deliberately flat: this is not a literary translation but a check on what the Latin says. Under each clause sit two lines. What it claims. And what it does not settle — because the second line is the one the tradition usually leaves out.
On where the text came from, and why there is no emerald and no Greek original, see the main entry.
Verum, sine mendacio, certum et verissimum.
True, without falsehood, certain and most true.
What it claims. A formula of authority, not a claim about the world. The text opens by asserting its own reliability — which is what a text does when it cannot appeal to a known author.
What it does not settle. It settles nothing about who wrote it, when, or on what evidence.
Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below, to accomplish the wonders of the one thing.
What it claims. The sentence everyone quotes. Note the clause almost nobody quotes: ad perpetranda miracula — the correspondence is stated as a working instruction for producing an effect, not as a law of the universe.
What it does not settle. It does not say the two levels are identical, and it names no mechanism by which one acts on the other.
Et sicut omnes res fuerunt ab uno, meditatione unius, sic omnes res natae fuerunt ab hac una re, adaptatione.
And as all things came from one, by the mediation of one, so all things are born from this one thing, by adaptation.
What it claims. An origin claim: plurality descends from a single source, and the process is adaptatio — fitting, adjustment.
What it does not settle. It does not identify the one thing. Every later commentator supplies a different candidate.
Pater eius est Sol, mater eius Luna; portavit illud ventus in ventre suo; nutrix eius terra est.
Its father is the Sun, its mother the Moon; the wind carried it in its belly; the earth is its nurse.
What it claims. Four parents, read by alchemists as four operations or four substances. This is the clause that made the text usable as a recipe.
What it does not settle. It names no substance. The alchemical reading is laid on top, and the text does not authorise any particular one.
Pater omnis telesmi totius mundi est hic.
The father of all perfection of the whole world is here.
What it claims. Telesma is a Greek word left standing in the Latin — a sign that the Latin is a translation, and that the translator did not know what to do with it.
What it does not settle. The meaning of telesma is contested: completion, talisman, initiation. Translations diverge here more than anywhere else.
Vis eius integra est, si versa fuerit in terram.
Its power is whole if it is turned toward earth.
What it claims. A condition: the power is complete only when directed downward, into matter.
What it does not settle. It does not say what turning toward earth consists of.
Separabis terram ab igne, subtile a spisso, suaviter, cum magno ingenio.
You shall separate earth from fire, the subtle from the dense, gently, with great skill.
What it claims. The one operational instruction in the whole text, and the origin of the alchemical solve. Note suaviter — gently. The instruction is about restraint as much as about separation.
What it does not settle. It gives no apparatus, no temperature, no duration. As a laboratory procedure it is unusable, which is why readings of it are always allegorical.
Ascendit a terra in coelum, iterumque descendit in terram, et recipit vim superiorum et inferiorum.
It ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the power of things above and below.
What it claims. The circuit. This is the sentence that turns the correspondence of clause two into a movement — something travels, and is changed by the journey.
What it does not settle. It does not say what ascends. Distillation, the soul, and the philosophers’ stone have all been proposed.
Sic habebis gloriam totius mundi. Ideo fugiat a te omnis obscuritas.
So you will have the glory of the whole world. Therefore all obscurity will flee from you.
What it claims. The promised result, stated as knowledge rather than wealth: what leaves is obscuritas.
What it does not settle. No criterion is given by which you would know you had arrived.
Hic est totius fortitudinis fortitudo fortis, quia vincet omnem rem subtilem omnemque solidam penetrabit.
This is the strong strength of all strength, for it overcomes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid.
What it claims. A claim about range: the agent acts on both the subtle and the solid — the two categories separated in clause seven, now rejoined.
What it does not settle. Overcoming and penetrating are asserted, never demonstrated.
Sic mundus creatus est.
Thus the world was created.
What it claims. The operation just described is claimed to be the same one by which the cosmos was made. This is the hinge that turns a procedure into a cosmology.
What it does not settle. It offers no account of creation beyond the analogy.
Hinc erunt adaptationes mirabiles, quarum modus est hic.
From this come wonderful adaptations, whose manner is this.
What it claims. A pointer forward that never arrives: the manner is this — meaning what has just been said.
What it does not settle. Nothing further is specified. Readers who expected a method stop here.
Itaque vocatus sum Hermes Trismegistus, habens tres partes philosophiae totius mundi.
Therefore I am called Hermes Thrice-Great, holding the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
What it claims. The signature, and the source of the epithet. The three parts were later read as alchemy, astrology and theurgy — a division the text does not make.
What it does not settle. It does not say what the three parts are. That reading is Renaissance, not ancient.
Completum est quod dixi de operatione Solis.
What I have said of the operation of the Sun is complete.
What it claims. A closing formula. Operatio Solis was read as the making of gold — sol being both the sun and, in alchemical usage, gold.
What it does not settle. The pun is available in Latin. Whether the Arabic original supports it is a separate question.
The pattern
Read the last two lines of each clause together and one shape emerges: the Tablet asserts a great deal and specifies almost nothing. That is not a defect of the text — it is the reason it survived. A text that specified would have been refuted. A text that gestures can be filled by every century that picks it up, and every century has.
Fair questions
Is this the original text?
No. This is the Latin vulgate that circulated in the medieval West. The oldest known version is Arabic, from the 8th–9th century, inside the Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa. There is no Greek original and no emerald.
Whose translation is the English?
Ours, made deliberately plain to expose the claim rather than to read well. For a scholarly English rendering with the textual history, see Steele and Singer (1928) in the sources.
Why fourteen clauses and not thirteen?
The division into clauses is editorial, not part of the text. Editions cut it differently; we follow the conventional division of the Latin vulgate. Nothing depends on the count.
Sources & further reading
- Steele, R. & Singer, D. W., ‘The Emerald Table’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1928), pp. 485–501 — the standard scholarly treatment of the Latin text and its Arabic background; freely available via PubMed Central.
- Ruska, J., Tabula Smaragdina: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der hermetischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1926) — the study that established the Arabic origin.
- Principe, L. M., The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) — on how alchemists actually read instructions of this kind.