As above, so below
As Above, So Below: The Emerald Tablet and the Messy History Behind the Phrase
I’ve heard the phrase “As Above, So Below” for years. It’s one of those phrases that gets tossed around in witchcraft, occult spaces, spirituality, and especially Western New Age circles like everyone is supposed to automatically know where the hell it came from.
It never really occurred to me to mind.
That changed when I went to buy a new witch’s hat and found one with “As Above, So Below” on it. And, as y’all already know, I am not a fan of New Age anything—especially Western New Age bullshit dressed up as ancient occult wisdom.
So when someone told me, “Oh, that is actually an old phrase,” my immediate thought was basically: Is it?
And that sent me digging.
And digging.
And digging some more
The phrase “As above, so below.” It gets tossed around in witchcraft, occultism, astrology, ceremonial magic, New Age spirituality, and about a thousand social-media graphics featuring moons, stars, candles, and somebody standing dramatically in a forest. Mostly it just gets repeated like word vomit: printed on a hat, a candle, or a tattoo, with no explanation of what it means or where it came from.
Yeah. About that.
The phrase does have a genuinely old history, but that history is considerably messier, and frankly a hell of a lot more irritating, than the endless context-free repetition makes it sound.
The phrase is associated with the Emerald Tablet (top of fucking rabbit hole), a short and extremely cryptic Hermetic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
The problem is that the surviving textual history does not begin with an ancient Egyptian emerald tablet sitting in some forgotten temple, or in some massive museum (I checked. 🙂). The earliest known appearances of the text are in Arabic works dating to roughly the eighth or early ninth century CE. The Tablet is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which is where the Egyptian association comes from, and it may have been translated from an older Greek text, but no Greek original has ever surfaced. Whatever came before the Arabic is a theory, not something we can point to. At least not at this time.
We do not have an authenticated physical emerald tablet, a surviving ancient Egyptian original, or a surviving Greek manuscript. What we have is a fascinating textual trail: Arabic manuscripts, medieval Latin translations, alchemical interpretations, Renaissance occult philosophy, early modern scholarship, nineteenth-century occultism, and eventually the modern occult phrase most people recognize today. And that trail matters, because “As above, so below” is not actually in the Emerald Tablet as a four-word slogan. It is pieces of one sentence within a much larger text.
The Tablet Itself: Latin and English
The Latin version that became particularly influential opens with a declaration of truth and then gives the famous correspondence: Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius. In English: “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.” Notice that the sentence does not simply say “as above, so below.” The Emerald Tablet is not merely a poetic statement about everything in the universe being spiritually connected; it describes a process of transformation involving one thing, adaptation, the relationship between the subtle and the dense, ascent and descent, and the interaction of earth, fire, air, the Sun, and the Moon. Here is the full medieval Latin version, followed by the corresponding English translation. I do not speak Latin, so do not come for me if something is off; I used other sources.
The Medieval Latin Tablet
Verum, sine Mendacio, certum et verissimum:
Quod est Inferius est sicut quod est Superius,
et quod est Superius est sicut quod est Inferius,
ad perpetranda Miracula Rei Unius.
Et sicut res omnes fuerunt ab Uno,
meditatione unius,
sic Omnes Res natae ab hac una Re, adaptatione.
Pater eius est Sol. Mater eius est Luna.
Portavit illud Ventus in Ventre suo.
Nutrix eius Terra est.
Pater omnis Telesmi totius Mundi est hic.
Virtus eius integra est si versa fuerit in Terram.
Separabis Terram ab Igne, subtile ab spisso,
suaviter, magno cum ingenio.
Ascendit a Terra in Coelum,
iterumque descendit in Terram,
et recipit Vim superiorum et inferiorum.
Sic habebis Gloriam totius Mundi.
Ideo fugiet a te omnis Obscuritas.
Haec est totius Fortitudinis Fortitudo fortis,
quia vincet Omnem rem subtilem,
Omnemque Solidam penetrabit.
Sic Mundus creatus est.
Hinc erunt Adaptationes Mirabiles,
quarum Modus est hic.
Itaque vocatus sum Hermes Trismegistus,
habens tres partes Philosophiae totius Mundi.
Completum est quod dixi de Operatione Solis.
The English Translation
True, without falsehood, certain, most certain.
What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like that which is above. To make the miracle of the one thing.
And as all things were made from contemplation of one, so all things were born from one adaptation.
Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon.
The wind carried it in its womb, the earth breastfed it.
It is the father of all “works of wonder” (Telesmi) in the world. Its power is complete.
If cast to earth, it will separate earth from fire, the subtle from the gross.
With great capacity it ascends from earth to heaven. Again it descends to earth, and takes back the power of the above and the below.
Thus you will receive the glory of the distinctiveness of the world. All obscurity will flee from you.
This is the whole most strong strength of all strength, for it overcomes all subtle things, and penetrates all solid things.
Thus was the world created.
From this comes marvelous adaptations of which this is the procedure.
Therefore I am called Hermes, because I have three parts of the wisdom of the whole world.
And complete is what I had to say about the work of the Sun.
That translation shows exactly how much information disappears when we isolate four words and call them the Emerald Tablet. The famous phrase sits inside a much larger discussion about unity, generation, correspondence, transformation, subtle and gross matter, ascent, descent, and the forces of the cosmos. Its closing line, Completum est quod dixi de Operatione Solis, simply means “It is complete, what I have said concerning the operation of the Sun.” So when someone reduces the Emerald Tablet to “As above, so below,” they’re not exactly wrong; they’re just leaving out most of the fucking Tablet.
Where the Tablet Actually Enters the Historical Record
The oldest known appearance of the Emerald Tablet is tied to the Arabic Kitab sirr al-khaliqa, the Book of the Secret of Creation, generally dated somewhere around the eighth to early ninth century CE. The work presents itself as a work of Apollonius of Tyana, known in Arabic as Balinas, though the attribution is pseudonymous. Even here, things aren’t tidy. The date of one important related work, the Kitab Sirr al-Asar, is uncertain; a date around 800 CE has been suggested, but we don’t know exactly when the Tablet became part of it. The history is not a straight line running Ancient Egypt → Emerald Tablet → medieval Europe → witchcraft. It is closer to: Arabic manuscript → another Arabic manuscript → another version → Latin translation → another Latin translation → alchemists arguing over terminology → Renaissance occultists → Newton → nineteenth-century occultism → modern occultism, and some of those versions don’t even say exactly the same thing.
There is more than one early Arabic version. One appears in the Kitab Ustuqus al-Uss al-Thani (the Second Book of the Elements of Foundation), attributed to the eighth-century alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan; Holmyard identified it as an early Arabic version, while Ruska found a twelfth-century recension claiming to have been dictated by Sergius of Nablus. Another appears as an appendix to the Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa wa San’at al-Tabi’a (the Book of the Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature), also known as the Kitab Balaniyus al-Hakim fi’l-’Ilal, or Book of Balinas the Wise on Causes. That work has been proposed as possibly dating as early as the seventh century, although it was definitely complete by the caliphate of al-Ma’mun, 813–833 CE. Scholars have noticed similarities between this tradition and the Syriac Book of Treasures, associated with Job of Odessa, and with writings by Nemesius of Emesa, a fourth-century bishop in Syria, but none of those works actually contain the Emerald Tablet. They may point toward influences; they are not an earlier surviving copy. That is the difference between “this may have influenced it” and “we found the original.” We didn’t find the original.
Balinas himself is a shaky anchor. The Arabic tradition commonly identifies him with Apollonius of Tyana, a first-century Greek philosopher and religious figure, but there is little evidence actually connecting Balinas with the Kitab Balaniyus, and within the story he is portrayed as finding the Tablet rather than necessarily writing it. That is a very common literary device in esoteric literature: give the text an ancient authority, have a famous sage discover it, and suddenly you have a secret teaching that supposedly predates everybody currently reading it. It doesn’t make the text worthless, but it does mean we need to separate the story about the text from the evidence for the text.
Was there an even older source? Possibly. Ruska suggested an origin farther east, and Joseph Needham proposed a possible Chinese origin, while Holmyard, Davis, and Anon considered the Tablet potentially one of the earliest surviving alchemical works. But “possible” is doing a lot of work: we don’t have a Chinese, Syriac, or Greek Emerald Tablet. We have theories about influences, transmission routes, and lost predecessors, which are fascinating but are not evidence we can turn into a definite origin story. The actual history is better than the bullshit version anyway. People were already arguing over this text’s origins, translating it, copying it, and treating it as an ancient secret long before modern witchcraft existed, and that is plenty interesting without inventing a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian emerald slab.
So Where the Hell Did the “Emerald” Come From?
The name makes it sound like we should be able to walk into a museum and point at a large green slab behind glass. Hell, I thought that was the case at the beginning of this. But we can’t; there is no authenticated physical Emerald Tablet in any archaeological collection. The Tablet is real as a text. The emerald slab is a legend, and those are not the same thing. The discovery stories belong to the literary tradition surrounding the text. In the framing narrative of the Book of the Secret of Creation, the sage finds a crypt beneath a statue of Hermes and discovers the tablet there. In one Arabic version, Balinas enters the hidden chamber, approaches an old man seated on a golden throne holding an emerald tablet, and sees the writing, described as being in Syriac, identified within the story as the primordial language. Later versions expanded and altered the story, including accounts of a discovery in a valley after the Flood. These legends helped establish the authority and mystery of the text, but a legend about finding a text is evidence that people told the legend, not that the object was physically found. (Ancient texts do survive in hidden places, as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi discoveries show, so “an ancient text was hidden away” isn’t automatically impossible.)
There is another wrinkle: the word “emerald” did not always carry the narrow modern mineralogical meaning. Ancient Greek and Egyptian terminology could apply the word to various green materials, including green jasper and even green granite, and medieval traditions could call objects made of colored glass “emerald.” That doesn’t prove there was a physical tablet of some other green stone; it just means the word has its own history, and the internet loves turning legends into archaeological facts.
Hermes Trismegistus and Where Egypt Actually Fits
If the Tablet first shows up in Arabic, why does everybody call it Egyptian? Because Egypt really is part of the story. Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Great Hermes,” is not simply the Greek god Hermes in an Egyptian costume, nor is he an identifiable historical Egyptian priest whose writings survive. He is a Greco-Egyptian religious and literary figure who emerged from the blending of Greek and Egyptian traditions in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The Egyptian deity most closely associated with him is Thoth, god of writing, knowledge, wisdom, and measurement, whom the Greeks identified with aspects of their own Hermes. Ancient texts were often attributed to legendary authorities rather than identifiable human authors, so “Hermes Trismegistus” on the Emerald Tablet is an attribution that invokes divine wisdom, not a surviving author’s signature.
The Tablet is also not part of the Corpus Hermeticum, the collection of Hermetic writings that emerged from the Greco-Egyptian intellectual world of late antiquity. There is no single giant book containing all this material; there are multiple bodies of literature produced and transmitted at different times, and calling the Tablet "an ancient Egyptian text from the Corpus Hermeticum" combines several related things into one thing that never existed in that form. Egypt became part of the Tablet's reputation through Hermes: once a text is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, and Hermes is associated with Egypt, the text acquires an Egyptian aura, which European occultists inherited and modern writers amplified. The surviving evidence for the Tablet itself begins much later, in Arabic sources, and that stage isn't a detour but the point where the trail actually becomes visible. The text may preserve older Greek, Syriac, or oral material that no longer survives, but a possible lost predecessor isn't evidence, and the earliest copies we can point to are medieval Arabic.
The Tablet Changes Depending on Which Version You Read
There is no single English Emerald Tablet that everybody translated from one original. There are several Arabic versions and several Latin ones, and the wording changes from one to the next, sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. One Arabic version of the famous line says, "That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one." Another says, "The above from the below, and the below from the above—the work of the miracle of the One." Neither one matches the Latin line most people know. The rest of the text shifts too. One version says the thing comes from a single primal source and calls it the main principle and keeper of the world. It still has the Sun as the father, the Moon as the mother, the wind carrying it, and the earth feeding it, but it also has a line that matters a lot for occultists: "The structure of the microcosm is in accordance with the structure of the macrocosm." That idea became huge in later Western occultism. People read the Tablet as being about matter, the cosmos, correspondence, alchemy instructions, or a metaphysical principle, and later occultists did all of those.
Even with all the differences, the same basic pieces keep showing up. There is one thing. Above and below are connected. The Sun and Moon are the parents. The wind carries it and the earth feeds it. Something goes up from earth to heaven and comes back down. The powers of above and below get combined, the fine stuff gets separated from the heavy stuff, and that process changes it and is tied to how the world was made. The modern slogan strips almost all of that out. The original isn't just saying heaven looks like earth. It describes something that rises, comes back down, gets separated, gets put back together, and gets transformed, and that's exactly why alchemists were obsessed with it.
From Arabic Into Latin Europe
The Book of the Secret of Creation was translated into Latin as the Liber de secretis naturae (Book of the Secret of Nature) around 1145–1151, associated with Hugh of Santalla. Latin translations and transmission are also associated with John of Seville and Philip of Tripoli, although these belong to different works and textual traditions, and there are possible translations by Plato of Tivoli and Hugh of Santalla during roughly the same period, perhaps working from different sources. The transmission is messy because the Tablet appeared in or alongside works that were themselves being translated, abridged, recopied, and circulated. Arabic scientific, philosophical, magical, astrological, and alchemical writings were flowing into Latin, and the Tablet entered that new intellectual ecosystem, where it stopped being a quiet little paragraph and became a fucking obsession.
One of the stranger words in the Latin version is Telesmus. It shows up in the Tablet as the "father of all Telesmi of the whole world." The Arabic word tilasm can mean talisman, but it looks like the Latin translator didn't know what to do with it and just spelled it the way it sounded, so you get telesmus or telesmum. That made-up Latin word then picked up its own meanings over the years. This is why I get twitchy when people talk about old occult texts like they were copied perfectly from language to language for thousands of years. Words get misunderstood, spelled out phonetically, and turned into something that looks familiar, and then later writers inherit the weird new word and assume it had a deep secret meaning all along. Sometimes the mystery really is ancient. Sometimes it's a medieval translator going, "Fuck, I don't know what this word means, so I'm going to spell it the best I can."
The Alchemical Reading and the “One Thing”
The Tablet's language made it irresistible to alchemists. It has the Sun, the Moon, earth, fire, wind, the fine stuff and the heavy stuff, separating, changing, going up, coming back down, combining, a mysterious "one thing," a power that goes through solid matter, and a process tied to how the world was made. Medieval and early modern alchemists connected it to changing matter, the Philosopher's Stone, and making gold. But it isn't a lab manual with a step-by-step recipe for gold. It's short and cryptic, and that's why it was so useful: an alchemist could read it as changing matter, a philosopher as a statement about levels of reality, an occultist as correspondence, and a magician as symbolic rising and falling. It survived because it was vague enough to be reinterpreted again and again.
One piece of that language is worth stopping on, because the Tablet says the Sun is the father and the Moon is the mother, and that isn't how every culture sees it. It matches the Greeks and Romans, who had Helios and Selene or Sol and Luna, but plenty of others flip it. In Old Norse, the word for sun (sól) is feminine, and the word for moon (máni) is masculine, and the Prose Edda has Sól as the sister of Máni, both children of Mundilfari. In Japan, Amaterasu is the sun goddess and is often considered the chief deity of the Shinto pantheon, and her brother Tsukuyomi is the moon god. The Baltic sun is the goddess Saulė, and the moon is the god Mėnuo. Egypt doesn't fit the Tablet's pairing either, because Ra is a male sun god and the moon gods, Khonsu and Thoth, are male too.
The Arabic is the part that really stands out to me. In Arabic grammar, the word for sun, shams, is feminine and the word for moon, qamar, is masculine, so the Arabic text wasn't getting its male Sun and female Moon from its own language. That pairing comes from alchemy. The Sun and Moon are major symbols in alchemy, standing for gold (Sun) and silver (Moon) and also for sulphur and mercury, and alchemy is built on the union of opposites, so the two are shown as a King and Queen in a "chemical wedding." The Sun is the masculine principle and the Moon is the feminine one, and their royal wedding is what creates the Stone. So "Sun is father, Moon is mother" is alchemical shorthand for two opposites combining to make something new, not a reflection of any culture's actual sun and moon myths. I feel like I am writing about A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness.
The "one thing" is another part that gets lost in the modern version. The Latin doesn't stop at "what is below is like what is above"; it keeps going with "…to accomplish the wonders of the one thing," and the text keeps coming back to unity: all things come from one, and what look like different levels are part of a bigger whole. That's one reason the phrase later became so damn useful. Once you strip away the alchemy, "as above, so below" can be applied to the macrocosm and microcosm, spirit and matter, heaven and earth, gods and humans, inner and outer worlds, and eventually magical practice itself. But those later uses are interpretations, not necessarily what every early reader meant.
Renaissance Occult Philosophy
By the Renaissance, the Tablet was part of a much larger body of Hermetic and occult philosophy in which Hermeticism, astrology, alchemy, natural philosophy, magic, Christian theology, and the idea of the microcosm and macrocosm were all being mixed, argued over, translated, and reinterpreted. The microcosm was the small world, the human being; the macrocosm was the greater world, the universe; and the premise was that they weren’t separate: the human reflected the larger structure of the cosmos, and the cosmos could be understood through the human. That idea wasn’t invented by the Emerald Tablet, which was one text that could support and reinforce it within a correspondence tradition with its own history. The modern understanding of “as above, so below” is closer to “the same underlying patterns operate at different levels of reality” than to “whatever happens in heaven happens on earth.”
Marsilio Ficino was a major figure in the Renaissance revival of Hermetic and Platonic philosophy. His De vita, published in 1489, dealt with celestial influence, health, human life, and the relationship between humanity and the cosmos, helping establish an environment in which celestial and terrestrial things were understood through correspondences and the individual was part of a larger cosmic system.
He wasn’t simply copying the Emerald Tablet; the Tablet was one piece of a much larger body of material Renaissance thinkers drew on. Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy), published in 1533, took correspondence much further into an organized system covering the elemental, celestial, and intellectual or divine worlds, with forces moving between them and correspondences the magician could work with. The Tablet wasn’t the entire foundation of that system, but its language about above and below, Sun and Moon, earth and heaven, ascent and descent fit it like a fucking glove.
Isaac Newton
Yes, that Isaac Newton, the gravity guy, the man most people picture as the ultimate rational scientist, translated the Emerald Tablet. His interest in alchemy was no hobby picked up on a rainy Tuesday; he produced extensive alchemical writings and worked seriously with the literature. His translation is generally dated to around 1680 and opens: “Tis true without lying, certain & most true.” It then gives the familiar correspondence, “That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below…”, and continues, as the Latin does, into the purpose of the correspondence and the wonders of the one thing, then through the same sequence: the Sun as father, the Moon as mother, the Wind carrying it, the Earth nourishing it, the separation of earth from fire and subtle from gross, the ascent to heaven, the descent back to earth, and the acquisition of the powers of both above and below. Newton’s version makes it painfully obvious that the famous phrase is one tiny piece of a much larger alchemical text.
Newton matters because he is a useful reality check. We tend to divide history into neat boxes (science here, magic there, religion over there, alchemy somewhere in the medieval dumpster), but people living through those periods didn’t divide knowledge the way we do. That Newton translated the Tablet doesn’t make the Tablet scientific, and it doesn’t make modern witchcraft secretly Newtonian. It shows that the boundaries between science, philosophy, religion, magic, and alchemy were far more porous in his world, and that he was one more reader in a chain: not the first, not the last, and certainly not the person who invented “as above, so below.”
The Nineteenth Century Changes the Game
By the nineteenth century, the Tablet had been through centuries of translation, commentary, and reinterpretation, and the occult revival began using it less as a specialized alchemical text and more as a compact statement of occult philosophy. Éliphas Lévi, a nineteenth-century French occultist who helped shape the modern Western occult revival, regarded the Tablet as an extraordinarily condensed statement of ancient magical philosophy, describing the few sentences attributed to Hermes as a summary of the doctrines of the old world and essentially “all of magic on a single page.” By then it had become an authority, a short, mysterious, supposedly ancient text that could be invoked as evidence for an entire magical worldview. That authority rested partly on beliefs about its age and origins: the older the text appeared, the more weight its statements carried. But the record is messier than the mythology. We have no Egyptian emerald slab, no surviving Greek original, and no evidence that Hermes Trismegistus personally engraved this thing into a giant gemstone; we have a textual tradition whose earliest surviving witnesses are Arabic.
And then insert the slimming hands of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She is one of the most important figures in modern esotericism, and one of the people most responsible for turning older occult ideas into a new nineteenth-century spiritual fuckery. But she did not invent the Emerald Tablet, Hermeticism, the concept of correspondence, or the idea that macrocosm and microcosm reflect one another; all of that predates her by centuries. Discussions of her tend to swing between two bad extremes: “Blavatsky discovered all this ancient wisdom” and “Blavatsky made the whole thing up.” Both are wrong. She drew on a gigantic pile of Hermetic, Neoplatonic, occult, mystical, Eastern religious, and Western esoteric material and combined it into her own framework, the Theosophical system, and the Tablet was one of the things available to her.
Something subtle also happens here: the phrase becomes a standalone idea. In the original, the correspondence sits inside a very specific sentence with a purpose, the operation of the one thing, but over time that sentence gets pulled out of the Tablet and begins functioning independently as an axiom, a motto, a philosophical principle that can be slapped onto everything from ceremonial magic to astrology to modern witchcraft. I can see why; it’s a fucking useful phrase. The problem isn’t using it, but pretending the four-word modern slogan is the entire historical meaning of the original text.
One more person who belongs in this story is Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist. In the 1900s, Jung read the Emerald Tablet as a symbol rather than a lab recipe, and to him, the movement between above and below was really about the mind: bringing the conscious and unconscious parts of a person together until they become whole. He saw the alchemists’ dream of turning lead into gold in much the same way, as a picture of individuation, the inner work of becoming a complete, fully developed self. What is interesting to me is how many pots Jung had his hands in. He wrote about alchemy, astrology, the I Ching, and synchronicity, and he gave us ideas like archetypes and the shadow, which is where so much of the shadow work witches do today comes from. So even if somebody has never heard his name, there’s a damn good chance they’re using something he helped shape, and yet he gets left out of the conversation quite often.
The Kybalion
Then, in 1908, comes The Kybalion, one of the biggest turning points in the modern history of this phrase and the source of a lot of timeline confusion. It was not an ancient Egyptian manuscript, not a medieval Hermetic text, and not secretly written by Hermes Trismegistus. It was published in Chicago in 1908 and attributed to the mysterious “Three Initiates,” and it belongs to the world of New Thought, not ancient Egypt, even though it presents itself in the language of ancient wisdom. It sets out seven supposed Hermetic principles, the second of which is the Principle of Correspondence, which gives the now-familiar formulation: “As above, so below; as below, so above.” That double-sided formulation is cleaner and more symmetrical than the medieval Latin, and the Kybalion applies it much more broadly, describing correspondence as a relationship between planes of existence and encouraging the student to use what is understood at one level to reason about another. That is a very different use from the original alchemical context: the Tablet talks about the operation and transformation of the one thing, while the Kybalion turns correspondence into a general law of the universe.
Is the Kybalion Hermetic? That depends on what you mean. It uses Hermetic material and presents itself as part of a Hermetic tradition, but historically it is a twentieth-century New Thought work, a modern interpretation of Hermetic ideas that draws on much older histories. If somebody quotes it and says “this is what the ancient Egyptians believed,” the historical evidence doesn’t support that. If they say it is a modern interpretation of Hermetic ideas, now we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t make it worthless; it just means date the fucking book correctly.
The Timeline
Put together, this is the history we are actually dealing with, and it is not “Ancient Egypt → witches.” It is closer to late antique Hermeticism → medieval Arabic transmission → Latin Europe → alchemy → Renaissance occult philosophy → early modern occultism → nineteenth-century occult revival → New Thought → modern occultism and witchcraft:
Arabic Emerald Tablet tradition. The earliest surviving versions appear in medieval Arabic sources, with the oldest known appearance generally placed around the late eighth or early ninth century.
Medieval Latin transmission. The Tablet is translated and transmitted into Latin Europe during the twelfth and later centuries.
Medieval alchemy. It becomes an important authority in alchemical literature, associated with transformation, the Philosopher’s Stone, and the production of gold.
Renaissance occult philosophy. Thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Cornelius Agrippa work within broader systems of correspondence, microcosm and macrocosm, and celestial influence.
Isaac Newton. He translates the Tablet in the seventeenth century (around 1680) as part of his serious engagement with alchemical literature.
Nineteenth-century occult revival. Éliphas Lévi and Helena Blavatsky bring older occult material into new esoteric systems and popular discourse.
1908, The Kybalion. The phrase becomes part of a modern New Thought framework as the Principle of Correspondence.
Modern occultism and witchcraft. “As above, so below” becomes a broad magical maxim, detached from much of the original Tablet’s specific alchemical context.
What the Hell Does the Emerald Tablet Have to Do With Witchcraft?
The short answer is nothing, and a lot. The Emerald Tablet is not a witchcraft text. It isn't a spellbook; it has no ritual system, and it says nothing about casting circles, calling deities, making offerings, reading cards, or working with herbs. What it does have is an idea: that different levels of the universe are connected and mirror each other. Later Western occultists took that idea and built whole systems on it, matching up planets, metals, plants, colors, stones, and parts of the body, and Ficino's De vita and Agrippa's De occulta philosophia are two big examples. Modern witchcraft picked up that way of thinking from that larger occult tradition, not straight from the Tablet.
Here's what that looks like in practice. Say you're doing a prosperity spell and you pick a color, an herb, a stone, a day, a time, and a symbol. You're not doing that because the Tablet tells you to; you're working in a tradition where things are symbolically linked, so you put together things that all point at the same goal. That's all correspondence is, and it's symbolism, not physics. When an occultist says Mars goes with iron, that's a traditional symbol system, not a claim that science found a secret Mars-to-iron connection, and a witch doesn't need to say NASA accidentally proved ceremonial magic. This stuff is interesting on its own without fake quantum physics stapled onto it.
The same goes for "as above, so below" today. It's a modern reading of the old texts, and remember there are several versions of those, so it isn't what any one original said. A lot of witches use it as a personal philosophy: what's inside you affects what's outside, what's outside affects what's inside, and your intention shapes your actions while your actions back up your intention. That works for ritual, divination, planetary magic, spellcraft, personal change, and even shadow work, but it's you using the phrase your own way, not the worldview of the medieval Arabic text. The actual Tablet isn't a fucking Pinterest quote; it's an alchemical text about something made from one thing, carried by wind, fed by earth, separated, moved between heaven and earth, and changed, with the Sun as father and the Moon as mother. So if the phrase fits your practice, great. If it doesn't, then it doesn't. Period.
So Is “As Above, So Below” Legitimate Witchcraft?
If you mean “can a modern witch reasonably use this phrase?”, absolutely; modern witchcraft has absorbed ideas from many historical traditions. If you mean “is this an ancient Egyptian witchcraft teaching that survived unchanged for thousands of years?”, Fuck no, and that’s the part we need to stop repeating. The phrase became important through Hermeticism, alchemy, Renaissance occult philosophy, nineteenth-century occultism, New Thought, and modern magical practice. That doesn’t make it fake; it makes it have historical ties.
You don’t have to throw the phrase away because its history isn’t what TikTok says it is. You can use it while understanding where it came from: that the Emerald Tablet is a short Hermetic text with a complicated transmission history, that its surviving trail begins in Arabic, that medieval Latin translators and alchemists gave it enormous importance, that Renaissance occult philosophers expanded the concept of correspondence, that nineteenth-century occultists repackaged those ideas, and that the Kybalion gave the phrase another modern incarnation. And you can still say, as above, so below, because something having been interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries doesn’t make it necessarily meaningless; it means people kept finding something useful in it. The Emerald Tablet survived not because an ancient emerald slab sits in a museum, but because people kept picking up the idea and finding a new way to use it: from Arabic alchemy to Latin manuscripts, from medieval alchemists to Renaissance occult philosophers, from Newton’s laboratory papers to Blavatsky’s Theosophy, from the Kybalion to modern occultism, and from modern occultism into witchcraft. That’s the actual journey of “as above, so below.” Not a straight line, and not an unchanged ancient secret, but a fucking relay race in which every person who picked it up left fingerprints on it.
So What Was the Point of the Tablet? Nobody Really Knows
Here's the part nobody likes to admit: nobody knows what the original point of the Emerald Tablet was. We don't have the original, we don't know who wrote it or why, and the oldest copies we do have are medieval Arabic. Even those changed over time, because Ruska thought a few lines were probably added later. And the people who read it never agreed on what it meant. Medieval alchemists like Albertus Magnus and Hortulanus read it as lab instructions for making the Philosopher's Stone, Newton read it as being about sulphur and quicksilver joining like husband and wife, and other writers read it as being about God, the soul, or a spiritual path. Everything in this post, the alchemy, the correspondences, and "as above, so below" in witchcraft, is someone reading the Tablet and finding something in it. That's why I say that if the phrase fits your practice, great, and if it doesn't, then it doesn't. Period.
I originally planned to list all the different translations here, but there are so many that it would run about 20 pages. So if you're curious, you can read them yourself in the PDF "Various Translations and Interpretations of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes" at https://www.alchemymuseum.info/library/Various_Interpretations_of_Emerald_Tablet.pdf. It has the early Arabic versions, the Latin, Newton's translation, and a lot of others, and you can see how much the wording changes from one to the next. It also has commentaries from alchemists, so you can see how differently people read the same short text. Fair warning: a few of the translations in there are labeled as coming "allegedly" from Chaldean or Phoenician originals, so don't treat those as ancient sources.
- Wikipedia, s.v. "Hermeticism," accessed October 5, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism.
- The Hermeticum, "As Above, So Below," accessed October 5, 2026, https://thehermeticum.com/ideas/as-above-so-below/.
- The Hermeticum, "Emerald Tablet," accessed October 5, 2026, https://thehermeticum.com/texts/emerald-tablet/.
- The Hermeticum, "Emerald Tablet: Clauses," accessed October 5, 2026, https://thehermeticum.com/texts/emerald-tablet/clauses.
- Occult Wiki, "Emerald Tablet," accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.occult.wiki/index.php/Emerald_Tablet.
- Hermetism.org, "As Above, So Below," Hermetism.org Encyclopedia, accessed October 5, 2026, https://hermetism.org/encyclopedia/as-above-so-below.
- Alchemy Museum, "Various Translations and Interpretations of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes," accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.alchemymuseum.info/library/Various_Interpretations_of_Emerald_Tablet.pdf.
- Joshua J. Mark, "Thoth," World History Encyclopedia, July 26, 2016, https://www.worldhistory.org/Thoth/.
- Irina-Maria Manea, "The Sun & the Moon in Norse Myth," World History Encyclopedia, January 5, 2022, https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1911/the-sun--the-moon-in-norse-myth/.
- Wikipedia, s.v. "List of Lunar Deities," accessed October 6, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lunar_deities.
- Wikipedia, s.v. "Máni," accessed October 6, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1ni.
- Wikipedia, s.v. "Sól (Germanic Mythology)," accessed October 6, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B3l_(Germanic_mythology).
- Ethan Teekah, "Emerald Tablet," Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Emerald-Tablet.
Comments
Post a Comment