Tabula Smaragdina/en

The Tabula Smaragdina (in English Emerald Tablet) is one of the foundational texts of the European hermetic and alchemical tradition. Extremely brief — just over a dozen propositions — it is pseudepigraphically attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and serves, from the medieval Latin translation onward, as the code-text of alchemical doctrine: in it, tradition has read, century after century, the condensed formula of the work. Its first documented attestation is in Arabic (Kitāb sirr al-ḫalīqa by Bālīnās, 8th-9th century); the Latin translation circulated from the 12th century and became canonical in the Renaissance.

The axiom of correspondence

Only one line of the Tablet has survived, traversing Western culture as an independent maxim: «Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius» — what is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below. The formula establishes the principle of correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, between heaven and earth, between inner and outer, on which all hermetic epistemology and a significant part of European magnetic and alchemical practice rests. In the Paret Method this principle is operationally translated into the correspondence between the internal state of the fascinator and the state of the subject, and between the typological structure of the person and the configuration of their autonomous system.

Structure of the text

The Tablet articulates, in a few propositions, a programmatic sequence:

• The enunciation of the principle of correspondence between levels (above / below).
• The reference to the generation of a single thing through adaptation.
• The description of the Sun as father, the Moon as mother, the Wind as carrier, the Earth as nurse.
• The operational indication of separating the subtle from the coarse (separabis terram ab igne, subtile a spisso, suaviter cum magno ingenio).
• The ascent to heaven and the descent, receiving the power of things above and below.
• The proclamation of power over every subtle thing and the penetration of every solid thing.

This sequence, in the operational tradition, is read as the condensed formula of the four stages of the work and as the program of the inner work — the labor of separation, sublimation, and recomposition that the Paret Method inherits in the axis of alchemical presence.

Transmission and reception

The text has been commented on by Paracelsus, the Rosicrucians, Athanasius Kircher, Oswald Wirth, and numerous operative alchemists. It is the shared basic reference for all lines of Western hermeticism, and serves as a threshold text between the Mediterranean, Arabic, and European traditions.

Related entries

• Presenza, Alchimia dell'uomo, Ermetismo — Introduzione — the second axis of the Method
• 4 Stadi dell'Opera Alchemica — the articulation of the work
• Tria Prima — the three Paracelsian principles
• VITRIOL / HARA — the complementary condensed operative formula
• The Kybalion — the 20th-century synthesis of the seven hermetic principles
• Caduceo ermetico — the accompanying symbol
• Mercurio Filosofico
• Arcana Arcanorum