The Emerald Tablet of Hermes · 1 of 8

Compilation and History

About this compilation

This anthology brings together twelve English renderings or adaptations of the Emerald Tablet, excerpts from its interpreters, and two Middle English versions. Jon Marshall assembled the source compilation from an unfinished collaborative project. Its numbers were supplied for comparison: gaps, repeated numbers and letter suffixes do not by themselves indicate lost text. Some versions include a discovery narrative or a commentator’s concluding words alongside the Tablet.

The history below is the compiler’s summary of older scholarship, chiefly Needham and Holmyard. Its proposed dates, identities and routes of transmission are hypotheses rather than an established biography of an ancient author. The discovery stories belong to the texts’ literary frames. The conjectural Chinese version in the next chapter is explicitly a modern reconstruction. The historical quotations retain their authors’ alchemical and spiritual claims; inclusion does not establish those claims as facts.

This reading edition corrects identified transcription damage and supplies the omitted bibliography. Newton’s English was checked against the scholarly transcription of Keynes MS 28; Holmyard’s Arabic-derived version against his 1923 article. Historical spellings are retained. The appendix identifies editorial emendations where a complete independent witness was unavailable.

The compiler’s historical survey

History of the Tablet (largely summarised from Needham 1980, & Holmyard 1957)

The Tablet probably first appeared in the West in editions of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum which was actually a translation of the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar, a book of advice to kings which was translated into Latin by Johannes Hispalensis c. 1140 and by Philip of Tripoli c.1243. Other translations of the Tablet may have been made during the same period by Plato of Tivoli and Hugh of Santalla, perhaps from different sources.

The date of the Kitab Sirr al-Asrar is uncertain, though c.800 has been suggested and it is not clear when the tablet became part of this work.

Holmyard was the first to find another early Arabic version (Ruska found a 12th-century recension claiming to have been dictated by Sergius of Nablus) in the Kitab Ustuqus al-Uss al-Thani (Second Book of the Elements of Foundation) attributed to Jabir. Shortly after Ruska found another version appended to the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa wa San`at al-Tabi`a (Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature), which is also known as the Kitab Balaniyus al-Hakim fi’l-`Ilal (book of Balinas the wise on the Causes). It has been proposed that this book may have been written as early as 650, and was definitely finished by the Caliphate of al-Ma’mun (813-33).

Scholars have seen similarities between this book and the Syriac Book of Treasures written by Job of Edessa (9th century) and more interestingly the Greek writings of the bishop Nemesius of Emesa in Syria from around 400 CE. However though this suggests a possible Syriac source, none of these writings contain the tablet.

Balinas is usually identified with Apollonius of Tyana, but there is little evidence to connect him with the Kitab Balaniyus, and even if there was, the story implies that Balinas found the tablet rather than wrote it, and the recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi texts suggest that hiding texts in caves is not impossible, even if we did not have the pyramids before us.

Ruska has suggested an origin further east, and Needham has proposed an origin in China.

Holmyard, Davis and Anon all consider that this Tablet may be one of the earliest of all alchemical works that survive.

It should be remarked that apparently the Greeks and Egyptians used the term translated as `emerald’ for emeralds, green granites, “and perhaps green jasper”. In medieval times the emerald table of the Gothic kings of Spain, and the Sacro catino- a dish said to have belonged to the Queen of Sheba, to have been used at the last supper, and to be made of emerald, were made of green glass [Steele and Singer: 488].