prior to his untimely death at age 37, Hermann Rorschach was at work developing a psychological test in which abstract images or ink blots were used to reveal the otherwise unknown or hidden dimensions of the unconscious mind. The original 10 cards, from black and white blots to colorful abstractions, were thought to provide a secret passageway into the emotional and psychological states of the patient, thus revealing to the analyst patterns of disordered emotions or thought patterns. This test has gone on to great fame and use, and has also been derided as a pseudoscience and no different than the old con of cold reading. In my years of studying hermetic and occult literature, I found that certain texts seem to function a bit like the Rorschach test. Their obscurity, brevity, and gravity invite enormous intellectual and spiritual attention, and into just that obscurity, brevity, and gravity, the would-be initiate projects their own philosophical and religious concerns, commitments, biases, and desires. Into this hermetic

hall of mirrors. Their own image is actually reflected back to them, though because of the distortion, they can't or won't recognize it as just themselves. Many such texts immediately jump to mind that have such a power: the enigmatic Dao De Jing, the Sefer Yetzirah or the Book of Formation, the mysterious letters at the beginning of some surahs of the Quran, the channeled text of the Book of the Law revealed to Aleister Crowley in April of 1904. Though this effect is nowhere more clearly present to me than in the famed Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus. This text, only a dozen or so lines, is said to contain all of the wisdom of Hermetic philosophy, from alchemy to cosmology, to the creation of the transformational philosopher's stone, to the spiritual transformation of the initiate. The text has spawned numerous volume-length commentaries over the centuries, and there are as many interpretations as there are versions of the text itself. The Emerald Tablet is perhaps the single

greatest and poorest understood of all text in the hermetic and occult philosophies. In this collaboration with Philip Holm over at Let's Talk Religion, I'll be exploring this most famous hermetic text, while Philip will be diving into the historical religious philosophy of hermeticism more generally. If you haven't checked out Philip's channel, make sure to take a look. He shares his expertise on a wide range of topics in religious studies, and his content on Islam and Sufism are especially wonderful and enlightening. Also, if you want to dive deeper into hermetic philosophy, make sure to check out my playlist on just that topic. Further, if you're interested in magic, the occult philosophy, alchemy, kabbalah, or similar topics, make sure to subscribe and check out my other content on topics in esotericism. Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, consider supporting my work on Patreon.

with a one-time donation, you can find those links below, and I really appreciate your consideration of supporting the channel. But now let's turn to explore the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the most famous, mysterious, and perplexing statement of Hermetic philosophy. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion. [Music] As I've explored at length in my episodes on the Corpus Hermeticum, the religious philosophy ascribed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus can be analyzed into two somewhat artificial groupings. The first are the so-called philosophical Hermetica, which are the texts that have survived from late antiquity and describe a salvific religious philosophy whereby an initiate is reunited with the divine noose or mind through a process of spiritual education, ritual observance, and it seems at least alterations of consciousness. The second group of Hermetic texts have gotten much less attention and remain pretty

difficult to access even to this day. These are the so-called technical hermetic texts and cover a wide range of topics, especially including astrology, alchemy, and magic. These texts are preserved in various pretty confused forms and were still quite popular through the late classical period into the Islamic period, and of course through the Christian Middle Ages, and of course even then into the early modern period as well. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus seems to sit directly between these two groups, and that it seems to both have a religious philosophical dimension and the cosmogenesis aspect has largely been understood as alchemical in nature. So already we have our first enigma about this text: what kind of text is this and what does it mean? That's a really good question, but to hazard even a preliminary answer, we need to unpack the tortured textual history, especially the origins of the Emerald Tablet. The oldest example of the text appears in the Arabic book Kitab Sirr al-Khaliqa or The Secret of Creation and the Art of Nature.

ascribed to the famed first-century miracle worker Apollonius of Tyana or Balinus as he's known in the Arabic world. This work is an encyclopedia of various topics, including natural philosophy, especially one of the earliest mentions of the sulfur-mercury theory of the metals, a foundational notion in later alchemy. The Arabic text, as we have it, dates to around the early 9th century of the Common Era, but the text itself claims to have been a translation from Syriac of an original text in Greek. At this point, at least, there is considerable disagreement on this question. A previous generation of scholarship basically accepted this textual history, with more recent scholarship seeing the work being composed of some amount of earlier material, though largely being composed originally in Arabic, probably in esoteric Ismaili circles for whom Hermes Trismegistus was a kind of prophetic figure for whom revealed wisdom took the form of scientific literacy. Of course, the natural question here is whether or not the Emerald Tablet, which

is sort of tacked on to the end of that text. Is it from a more remote period in antiquity, or was it originally composed in Arabic? Now I'm going to come back to that very thorny question in just a moment. Don't worry. Two other versions of the Emerald Tablet are also known in Arabic. One from about a century later. This one is preserved primarily in the Jaberian alchemical corpus and seems to be somewhat truncated and perhaps even rather corrupt. Though often shorter variants of text are sometimes indicator of a kind of ur-text, but frankly, that's impossible to know here. The other is from the 10th century and comes from the pseudo-Aristotelian text Kitab Asrar, known in the Latin West as the Secretum Secretorum. More on this text in just a moment as well. It's really important in the European environment. Now to that really thorny question: Is the Emerald Tablet a text more ancient than its appearance in the Arabic Hermetic philosophy of the 9th century?

to be sure, there are no references to the text. And either the late classical sources, either in Greek or a Syriac version, has never been found or even referenced, for that matter. Secondly, the text is so brief and enigmatic that evidence of translation from one language to another doesn't really seem to appear. For instance, if we could find a clear example of a Hellenism or a transcribed Greek word, that would be more solid evidence of greater antiquity for the text. None immediately jump out, but there might be an exception to that. Actually, in both the Seer Al-Khalika versions, there is an important line missing from the Jaberian text with an important technical term. That is the Arabic word for a talisman. In fact, it's the Arabic word talisman. The line reading something like father of talisman's protector of wonders all-powerful. Now, this can cut in two different directions. The first direction is that this line has a survival of the Greek word telesma, which by the late classical

especially the Byzantine period had in fact taken on the notion of a religious or occult significance. Something like our modern word talisman or charm. If so, this technical word may be evidence of a late classical Greek substratum for the Emerald Tablet. Certainly, the text reads like something that could be found in the alchemical literature of people at the time. Someone like Pseudo-Democritus, Zosimos of Panopolis, Stefanos of Alexandria. Especially the problem for this theory is one, there's just an overall lack of evidence for the Emerald Tablet in antiquity. And two, the Arabic word talisman is very well attested in exactly the period that we're talking about. There's even an entire book on talismans written at this time by Tabit ibn Qura, which only survives in Latin but is almost exactly contemporary with the Kitab Sirr al-Khalika, the earliest attestation of the Emerald Tablet. Such a talisman reference really just makes a lot of sense.

in the Arabic hermetic milieu of the 9th century, in just such as nightly circles as the Emerald Tablet appears in, so which is it? Late classical Greek survival or novel 9th-century Arabic use? Frankly, without other evidence, I think it's impossible to settle this question. It seems to me perfectly possible that the Emerald Tablet is a late antique text translated from Greek to Syriac to Arabic, having gained the attention of folks in that esoteric Ismaili milieu. The problem is that we simply lack any evidence for that. Of course, we can point to other more circumstantial notions. For instance, there is an oblique reference in one of the Stobayan fragments to Hermes Magistas having had his teachings, quote, engraved on a tablet and on an obelisk. And in the Nakamati hermetic text, the discourse on the 8th and the 9th, there is, in fact, an admonition to copy out his teachings on, quote.

stelis of turquoise in hieroglyphic characters, though in neither of those documents are the teachings mentioned anything like those found in the emerald tablet. Furthermore, as I've mentioned earlier, no surviving hermetic texts really resemble the emerald tablet. So, is it possible that the emerald tablet predates its appearance in the 9th century Arabic context? Sure, it's possible, perhaps in some form, but is there evidence to back up this claim? No. We have to be honest here and admit that while absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, logically speaking, any argument at this point for the greater antiquity of the emerald tablet must necessarily, at least at this point, rely on speculation and arguments from silence, neither of which I'm willing to put much trust in. And just to be honest, I questioned the motivations behind this intense desire for the emerald tablet to predate its 9th century Arabic appearance. I mean, it's not like some people out there are more comfortable with the

insane notion that aliens built the pyramids, rather than, you know, African people. And also, this is just a good time to make it clear that any claims of the emerald tablet being from Atlantis, ancient Sumeria, China, Phoenicia, aliens, the secret records under the Sphinx, Martian spirits, or the ascended master Kimmy Gibbler are, well, complete and total nonsense. While the early history of the emerald tablet is admittedly rather mysterious, the transmission of the text into Europe is much better understood. In the 12th century, there was an explosion of translation work, mainly from Arabic into Latin. Most importantly for our purposes are three of those translators and scholars: Hermann of Corinthia, whose day ascenties may contain the earliest mention of the emerald tablet and its discovery in European literature generally. There's also an anonymous translator that we think may have been Plato of Tivoli, who made perhaps the very first translation of the emerald tablet itself and to Latin, and Hugo of Santala, who rendered the

kitab seer al-kalika from arabic into latin, including the emerald tablet. There's also an early anonymous version, again perhaps rendered by plato of tivoli, which would go on to be used by many luminaries such as albert the great, the teacher of thomas aquinas, and arnold of villanova, one of the greatest alchemists of his day. Another translation of the text would also appear around this time from the pseudo-aristotelian seir al-asurar, or the secretam secretorium, or the secret of secrets, first translated by john of seville, and then in a more full edition by philip of tripoli in the early 13th century. The secretam secretary was, and I'm not exaggerating here, probably the single most read book in the middle ages after the bible. It's something like an encyclopedia covering topics from medicine, physiogamy, astrology. There's some political advice in there, and by about the 13th century, it would also come to include some alchemy.

though weirdly enough, the Hebrew translation of the text actually argues that alchemy is a nonsense false science, and that transmutation is impossible. Even more weird, the Hebrew translation of the Secretam Secretorium became the basis for the Russian translation of the text, which is just these texts really get around in weird ways. Regardless, the popularity of the Emerald Tablet probably has a lot, maybe even most, to do with the general popularity of the Sacretum Secretorum more generally. Though oddly, none of the versions I just mentioned would actually go on to become the most popular translation and edition of the Emerald Tablet in the Middle Ages. Until now, the most popular version of the Emerald Tablet, also known as the Vulgate version, was introduced in another anonymous translation of the text with the first extensive commentary to enter Europe, simply known as the Libre Hermetis de Alchemia, from an unknown Arabic original, which by the way tells us that already Arabic alchemists were using this text and were already perplexed by it.

and were composing extensive commentaries to try to elucidate what in the world this book meant. Something that would absolutely continue into the European context. What's also curious about this version is that the translator from Arabic to Latin didn't really understand. Or there was already a kind of corruption of the Arabic word talisman. And that line, which we mentioned earlier, that line got rendered as pater omnis teles me tortillos with the Arabic word talisman being mutilated in the transcription or translation into telesmi. What's funny, if that's the right word, is that alchemists worked for centuries trying to grasp the hidden depths of this mysterious term. And poured a great deal of lab work and commentary onto its mysteries. And all the while it was basically a translation error. Not that the Arabic original, something like father of talismans, is all that clear. Also, I should point out, this isn't the only problem of this kind in the translations of this text. Other texts can't sort out if it's pater.

Thesaurus miraculorum in the Secretam Secretorium translation, literally the father of the storehouse of wonders. Or in Hugo's rendering, it's Prestigiorum Filie, literally the sons of talismans, fathers or sons, or which one. Of course, the problem here is rendering the word abu in the Arabic and the mysterious use of the term talisman that we've already mentioned. This whole line is honestly just a big mess regardless. The version in the Libra Hermentis de Luchemia becomes the standard or vulgate version used through the entire medieval period into the early modern period and up till now. If you've ever studied the Emerald Tablet, it's probably either this version in Latin or a translation into whatever vernacular language you speak. Okay, I know what you might be thinking at this point, like look, I'm watching this video to learn about what the Emerald Tablet means, not about the origin or the translation transmission history of this text. But I bet you can see the problem I'm

going to mention obviously defective translations into Latin from multiple different obscure Arabic versions profoundly compromise any understanding of the text. Remember that Pater Omnis Teles Me Tortillos Mundy Hicks line that sent alchemists on a wild goose chase for hundreds of years? Yeah, that's a real, real big problem. Secondly, to attempt any understanding of the Emerald Tablet, you gotta pick a version. And if you read Latin, you're still reading a translation and very likely a compromised translation at that. And if you read Arabic, well, you're in a bit better shape, but then there are still three different versions to pick from, all of which differ somewhat substantially from one another. The shorter one in the Jiberian corpus doesn't even have the whole complicated talisman line, and honestly its brevity and corruption might even be an indicator of translation, potentially making it closer to the original text of the tablet. Who knows? What I'm saying is that before you can offer any interpretation of the text at all

you gotta pick some version in some language and go from there so and a very important question here is on what rational grounds does one pick a version as more or less authoritative or authentic. I really have no idea but I can't help but to grin when I see definitive interpretations about the emerald tablet what it really means and wonder how long until someone in the comments says look it's all really simple it's just blah blah blah blah blah. No none of this is simple and we haven't even read the text or the text of the emerald tablet yet. Further european scholars didn't even know about the persistence of the arabic texts into the early 20th century which means that all those alchemists and all those hermetic philosophers from the translators of the 12th century to the scholars of the early 20th century labored for nearly 900 years with multiple defective translations with many of those people producing substantial commentaries on the text likely attempting to uncover mysteries that just as might likely had to do with.

garbled Latin translations of an obscure Arabic text. As much as anything else, so with all that in mind, what does the Emerald Tablet actually say, and what might it mean? Many versions of the text are framed with a kind of discovery legend where various figures from Sarah, the wife of Abraham, to Apollonius of Tyana, to Alexander the Great, discover an underground tomb, usually thought to be the tomb of Hermes Trismegistus himself. This tomb is sometimes located near Hebron, where a skeleton is said to be holding a tablet engraved on a green stone, very often interpreted to be emerald, hence the name, containing the brief text, which is often described as being written in some kind of ancient language, often some form of Aramaic, even Phoenician. Sometimes this theme of finding various kinds of treasures and ancient tombs was pretty popular in antiquity, but because it probably happened sometimes, and this even reaches back to Plato's Ring of Gyges myth.

in some sense survives even into Ridley Scott's famous scene with the engineer and alien. The text itself is really brief. The Vulgate Latin version is only 151 words, and amazingly, the shortest Arabic text is only about 50 words. And it seems to describe a cosmos as linked with a macrocosm-microcosm structure. This is pretty common to the alchemical text of the Hellenistic period and beyond, where something, again it's not clear what it is, ascends and descends the scale of being, including passing through the various elements, and appears to be perfected somehow. Vague enough for you? Yeah, me too. So you might be wondering, why don't you add more of an interpretation to what you think the text says or what you think it might even mean? Well, all those problems I just mentioned a minute ago, it's so difficult to even know which text is authentic or authoritative that the more you begin to project your ideas of what the text means, you can only do that once you pick a text. And as I mentioned earlier.

i'm not even sure how to picked one text to be the emerald tablet of hermes tres megistas. we just don't have the one now. despite the fact that i'm not going to say more about what i think, the text means i can, however, say a bit more about how the text has been interpreted historically. it may very well be that the text appears in those ismaili circles because they read or wrote the text as describing the being of hermes tris megistas as what actually does the ascending and descending the scale of being. recall that in those circles, hermes was a kind of quasi-angelic prophet of natural science linked in some way with idris or enoch who had ascended to heaven and been come transformed into an angel. as early as some of the hekhalet literature, this might explain why at the end of many versions of the text, hermes tris magistas claims that his greatness flows from this process. so in this first interpretation, the text might be

describing the mystical transformation of no one less than hermes himself. Of course, the alchemical interpretation followed very quickly after, with the tablet describing the creation of reality and its perfection in the stone of the philosophers, which in turn has the ability to perfect nature, as such as the ability to transform base metals into gold. Here, the tablet is an extremely succinct description of the production of the famed stone of the philosophers, the lapis philosophorum. This was, of course, the dominant read of the text through the middle ages, starting with the earliest commentaries, such as the ones that accompanied the Vulgate from the Arabic when it was translated into Latin, and most early European translations by people such as Hortolanus. His commentary was incredibly important, and then followed by virtually all major intellectuals interested in natural science or alchemy, including folks like well Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus, and it even appears, of course, in the Aurora Consurgens, one of the most important alchemical texts prior to the

15th century. Now in Europe, the Emerald Tablet absolutely exploded, especially in the Vulgate edition, in popularity in the late 15th and 16th centuries. For a couple of different reasons. The first is probably the rediscovery and publication of the Corpus Hermeticum by Marcelio Ficino and the enormous uptick in interest of all things related to Hermes Trismegistus or even Egypt more generally. Secondly, the printing of the text for the first time with the commentary of Ortolanos and the popular compilation De Alchemia of 1541 also made the text widely available and significantly cheaper to obtain. A third factor is that the Emerald Tablet was at this time increasingly being set into a mythological framework where the text became a kind of Hermetic version of Genesis, thus forging a bridge between the patriarchs of the Bible and the later wisdom of the Greeks, with the Emerald Tablet serving as the tie that bound them together. Thus, the Emerald Tablet becomes a source

of primordial wisdom surviving even the flood and bridging athens in jerusalem was the text becoming more and more thought of as the compressed source of all wisdom cosmological alchemical metaphysical etc. You can find all the things in the emerald tablet. A third school of interpretation of the emerald tablet would emerge primarily with Johannes Trithemius and his fellow hermetic philosophers. Folks of course like John D. and Cornelius Agrippa who understood the text as more of something of a metaphysical speculation on the nature of reality rather than as a set of laboratory instructions for producing the philosopher's stone. Echoes of this interpretation can be found in John D.'s 1564 monas hieroglyphica itself one of the most enigmatic texts ever produced and later in both rosicrucian and paracelsion literature. It was also featured first and foremost in the popular and somewhat avant-garde alchemical text Atalantia Fugiens.

though dark clouds were forming for all of the hermetica by the 17th century. In 1614, Isaac Cowzaban had definitively argued that the Corpus Hermeticum was not nearly as old as once thought. In the 1650s, Athanasius Kirker carried out a similar attack on the Emerald Tablet, arguing that the text of the tablet was really just a few centuries old and it was kind of a fraud. Despite this somewhat terminal condition for the hallowed antiquity of the Emerald Tablet, Isaac Newton himself composed a translation of the text which survives to this day in his papers. He was working from the vulgate version found in the 1541 Day Alchemia printed in Duremberg that I mentioned earlier. Beginning in the late 16th century, the text is also associated with a special emblem, likely of Paracelsian origin, which serves as a kind of interpretation of the text but were also grounds for deeper alchemical speculation despite the attack by the historicist camp.

the emerald tablet would remain a mainstay in virtually all schools of hermetic or occult thought. Of course, it goes without saying that the text remained deeply influential through the occult revival, with lfs levy claiming that all mystical and occult wisdom was contained within it. Blavatsky quotes the text as authoritative in her monumental theosophical text, isis unveiled, and perennialists such as titus brookhart have seen the emerald tablet as part of such a perennial philosophy. The text is even kind of cribbed into one of the manifestos of the surrealist andrei breton, and of course received enormous attention from the psychoanalyst carl jung. The imran tablet has somewhat come around full circle from its possible ismaeli origins to the new age movement, where they read the text as perhaps a testament to metaphysical transformation of hermes trismegistus. The more new age interpretation individualizes that experience and sees the text as a kind of alchemy.

of the self whereby one is transformed into a higher being. From cryptic mystical origins to mystic individualist consumerism, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus seems to be evergreen in its potential for interpretation, innovation, and is always somewhere between concealing and revealing. Despite enduring interest in the Emerald Tablet, there's not much in the way of contemporary literature on the text, and even when it does exist, it's a bit of a mess. It receives very little treatment, and otherwise incredibly important texts like those of von Blatto are safe where one might honestly expect otherwise. This basically means that the only substantial study of the origins of the Emerald Tablet remained the Ruska text of 1926, which is, to my mind, never been translated from German and is pretty difficult to find. Just the same, a recent text in French by Khan provides an updated account of the reception and commentary tradition on the text through the Middle Ages, but again only in French. To my knowledge, there has been no major

academic study of the emerald tablet in English for almost a century. Please let me know if I'm wrong in the comments. I kind of hope that I'm wrong, and the few recent articles on the emerald tablet are downright inaccessible. I tried to find some of these articles and had no luck whatsoever. Further, a major desire on my part would be a volume which contains all the major versions of the emerald tablet with textual notes, very similar to what Ruska did about a century ago, but with the vast commentary literature flanking at least the vulgate version. I sort of imagine a format very much like the Babylonian Talmud with a dozen or so commentaries on every line, or hell, every word of this thing, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. One can wish. I've included some links to some helpful articles that are somewhat dated but still quite interesting if you want to take a look at those in the description below for a bit of a deeper dive into the emerald tablet. Again, if you're

interested in alchemy, hermetic philosophy, and mysticism. I hope you'll subscribe and check out my other content. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge. Thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.

What is the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus - Origins of Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy

What is the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus - Origins of Alchemy and Hermetic Philosophy

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