Emerald Tablet

The Emerald Tablet, frequently known by its Latin title, Tabula smaragdina, is one of the most important documents in the history of alchemy. While most alchemical texts are centered on the actual work of the alchemist in the laboratory, the Emerald Tablet makes a theoretical, even theological, statement of the basic principles of alchemy. Composed anonymously at the end of the Greek alchemical tradition in Egypt sometime between the years 500 and 700 CE, the Emerald Tablet was translated into Arabic in the early ninth century and became a foundational document of Islamic alchemy during the Middle Ages. Part of the Emerald Tablet’s appeal came from its attribution to Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian philosopher who supposedly lived before the biblical Flood and whose writings carried immense authority in late antiquity and the Middle Ages; at the end of the Renaissance, however, in 1614, the humanist Isaac Casaubon proved these writings to be much later pseudepigrapha. The Emerald Tablet was next translated into Latin in twelfth-century Spain, together with the greater bulk of Arabic scholarship and ancient Greek texts known in the Muslim world, and it again became a key text for the development of alchemy, this time in western Europe. In this case alchemy finally led to the development of scientific chemistry, and in the seventeenth century the doctrine of occult sympathy taught by the Emerald Tablet gave Isaac Newton an imaginative basis for conceiving of the operation of force at a distance, allowing him to develop the theory of gravity.