Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Tablet: The Roots of the Hermetic Art

When the Greek and Egyptian worlds met in antiquity, two gods merged into one figure: Hermes, messenger of the gods and guide of souls, and Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of writing, wisdom and the moon. From them came Hermes Trismegistus — the “thrice-great Hermes”. Tradition says he bore the title because he knew the three parts of the wisdom of the whole world: alchemy, astrology and the art of inner transformation.

Under his name, in the first centuries of our era, arose the Corpus Hermeticum — a collection of Greek teaching dialogues on cosmos, spirit and matter. When one of its manuscripts reached Florence in the 15th century, Cosimo de’ Medici had his translator Marsilio Ficino set aside even the works of Plato: Hermes was to speak first. Hardly any text shaped the thought of the Renaissance more deeply.

The most famous legacy of Hermes is also the shortest: the Tabula Smaragdina, the Emerald Tablet — a text of a few enigmatic lines, transmitted first in Arabic manuscripts, later rendered into Latin. Its core sentence became the motto of all alchemy: that which is below is like that which is above — and that which is above is like that which is below. And of the one work it goes on to say: “Its father is the sun, its mother the moon; the wind carried it in its belly, its nurse is the earth.”

Generations of alchemists read the tablet as an encrypted guide to the Great Work. Isaac Newton, father of modern physics, was among its readers: his papers contain an English translation of the Emerald Tablet in his own hand.

The alchemists called their craft the hermetic art — after their legendary forefather. And they left language a word everyone knows: whoever fused a glass vessel airtight, so nothing could escape and nothing intrude, gave it the “Seal of Hermes” — sealed it hermetically. Every time something is “hermetically sealed” today, the alchemists’ workshop echoes.

We take this inheritance literally: every one of our bottles is filled by hand into violet glass and hermetically sealed, so the charge of the colloids is preserved — the Seal of Hermes, translated into the present.

One need not be an alchemist to see the hermetic correspondence in a colloidal solution. The gold in the bottle was born in colliding stars — above — and now floats as finest dust in water — below. The sun and moon of the Emerald Tablet bear, with us, the names of the two oldest metals: Sol, the gold, and Luna, the silver. And as the planets trace their orbits in the great, the particles dance their Brownian motion in the small — each a mirror of the whole.