The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean

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The Tablet teaches that "All is One," and that direct experience of the Divine is possible through meditation and psychological exercise. In its several Western recensions, the Tablet became a mainstay of medieval and Renaissance alchemy. In many ways, the “Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean” are a New Age parallel to the Book of Mormon, supposedly a translation from a now-lost language from a now-lost original text.

Contrary to what you may know about Thoth, in the tablets he is the son of an Atlantean priest - Thothme - and later becomes an initiate. This motif is frequently used in Renaissance prints and is the visual expression of the myth of the rediscovery of ancient knowledge—the transmission of this knowledge, in the form of hieroglyphic pictograms, allows it to escape the distortions of human and verbal interpretation.Alchemical traditions, whether European, Middle Eastern, or Asian, pursue the same prize—the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone.

From another perspective, Wilhelm Christoph Kriegsmann [ de] publishes in 1657 a commentary in which he tries to demonstrate, using the linguistic methods of the time, that the Emerald Tablet was not originally written in Egyptian but in Phoenician. I wanted to believe this text was coming from somewhere deeper than that, but further investigation confirmed it is an invention. An imaginative 17th-century depiction of the Emerald Tablet from the work of Heinrich Khunrath, 1606. The introduction to the Book of the Secret of Creation is a narrative that explains, among other things, that "all things are composed of four elemental principles: heat, cold, moisture, and dryness" (the four qualities of Aristotle), and their combinations account for the "relations of sympathy and antipathy between beings.Despite some small differences, the 16th-century Nuremberg edition of the Latin text remains largely similar to the vulgate (see above). He wrote a brief work (which reproduces the beginning of the Emerald Tablet), which passed to his disciple Pythagoras, then to Plato, Aristotle, and finally to Alexander the Great.

This version of the Emerald Tablet is also found in the Kitab Ustuqus al-Uss al-Thani (Elementary Book of the Foundation) attributed to the 8th-century alchemist Jâbir ibn Hayyân, known in Europe as by the latinised name Geber. In his third incarnation, Thoth appeared as Hermes, and was given the honorific Trismegistus—the Thrice Born. Regarding the copious attention on the numbers three to nine, I found much of it to be completely confusing and don't know what to make of it. The Spiritual, Occult and Historical significance of the "Emerald Tablets" is almost beyond belief of modern man. It has been asserted that the original meaning was in fact in reference to talismanic magic, and that this was lost in translation from Arabic to Latin (source: Mandosio 2005).In his 1143 treatise, De essentiis, Herman of Carinthia is one of a few European 12th century scholars to cite the Emerald Tablet. The core of the work is primarily an alchemical treatise that introduces for the first time the idea that all metals are formed from sulfur and mercury, a fundamental theory of alchemy in the Middle Ages.