The most famous sentence in alchemy was never written the way it is usually quoted. "As above, so below" is a modern compression of a medieval Latin rendering of an Arabic line whose original says something slightly, and interestingly, different.
The sentence comes from the Emerald Tablet, a text short enough to fit on an index card and dense enough to have kept commentators busy for a thousand years. Its real history is better than its legend, and it runs through the Arabic-speaking world long before it reaches a European laboratory.
A tablet in a tomb
The legend first. In the oldest known telling, a seeker named Balinus finds a statue with an inscription hinting at hidden knowledge. He digs beneath it and enters a dark vault, where an old man sits on a golden throne holding a tablet of emerald. With the tablet comes a book containing the secrets of creation.
Balinus is the Arabic form of Apollonius of Tyana, a Greek sage of antiquity. The attribution is a literary device, and so is the tablet. Other versions of the story move the discovery elsewhere, including one that has Alexander the Great finding it in a cave near Hebron. No account describes anyone examining an actual green slab outside the frame of a story.
What exists is the text. And the text first appears in Arabic.
The Arabic sources
The earliest known version sits at the end of the Book of the Secret of Creation (Kitab sirr al-khaliqa), an encyclopedic work on nature credited to Balinus. Scholars have argued over its date for a century. Julius Ruska placed it between the sixth and eighth centuries, Weisser around 750 to 800, and Kraus about 813 to 833. The book presents itself as a translation, and modern scholars generally agree it was compiled at least in part from older Greek or Syriac material. No Greek text of the Tablet has ever been found.
A second, shorter version appears in a work from the vast body of writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan, the half-legendary father of Arabic alchemy. It lacks several lines found in the Balinus version. A third turns up in the tenth-century Secret of Secrets, framed as advice from Aristotle to Alexander.
For most of European history none of this was known. The Arabic sources were recovered in the 1920s, when the English chemist Eric Holmyard identified the Jabirian version and Ruska published the one from the Secret of Creation.
What the famous line says
The Tablet is roughly a dozen sentences long; the exact count depends on the version and on where an editor chooses to break the lines. It declares itself true, describes a single thing whose father is the sun and whose mother is the moon, which the wind carried in its belly and the earth nursed, and which rises from earth to heaven and descends again, gathering the power of both. It closes by naming its author as Hermes, threefold in wisdom.
The second line is the one that became a slogan. In the Arabic of the Secret of Creation it reads, in one scholarly translation, that "the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost."
From, not like. The Arabic describes derivation: the upper and lower worlds come out of each other, one substance in circulation. It reads less like a statement about mirrors and more like a statement about a process, which suits a text preoccupied with something rising and falling.
Lost and found in Latin, then in English
The Tablet reached Latin readers in the twelfth century, when translators were turning Arabic learning into Latin. Hugo of Santalla translated the Secret of Creation around 1145 to 1151, and he kept the sense of the Arabic: higher things from lower, lower from higher. His version did not circulate widely.
The version that did, known to scholars as the vulgate, is by an uncertain hand, possibly Plato of Tivoli, though that attribution is conjecture. It opens with the sonorous declaration that the text is true, without falsehood, certain and most true. And it changes the preposition. In the vulgate, what is above is like what is below.
That one word turned a claim about origin into a claim about resemblance, and resemblance is what European readers ran with. The cosmos and the human being, the stars and the metals, the heavens and the flask: each could now be read as an image of the other. The Tablet was first printed at Nuremberg in 1541 with a medieval commentary attached, and it became the creed of European alchemy.
The four-word version is later still. The clipped phrasing owes its modern popularity to nineteenth-century occultism, notably the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, and then to The Kybalion of 1908, which made it the motto of a "Principle of Correspondence."
Among the Tablet's readers was Isaac Newton. A manuscript now at King's College, Cambridge, catalogued by the Newton Project as Keynes MS 28 and dated to the early 1680s or 1690s, contains his English translation, a Latin text and a Latin commentary of his own, about a thousand words in all.
His version begins "Tis true without lying, certain and most true." He follows the Latin tradition, so his above and below are alike, and he renders one notoriously obscure Latin word as perfection.
Newton was not dabbling. The Newton Project catalogues dozens of alchemical manuscripts in his hand, from laboratory notes to long compilations of extracts. Whether the Tablet shaped his physics is debated; that he took it seriously is not.
One clarification is worth making. The "Emerald Tablets of Thoth" sold today are a channeled composition of the 1940s by Maurice Doreal and have nothing to do with the medieval text beyond the borrowed name.
Why a dozen lines lasted
The Emerald Tablet survived because it is short, confident and impossible to pin down. A chemist could read it as a recipe, a philosopher as a cosmology, a mystic as a map of the soul, and each generation found its own concerns in it.
Its real lesson may be in its travels. A text possibly drawn from Greek or Syriac sources, preserved in Arabic, reshaped in Latin and annotated by Newton is not the property of any single civilization. And the line everyone knows is a reminder that translation is itself a kind of alchemy: a single preposition changed, and a different idea came out of the vessel.