11. Hinc admiranda evadunt opera, quæ ad eundum modum instituantur.
12. Mihi vero ideo nomen Hermetis Trismegisti impositum fuit, quod trium mundi sapientiæ partium doctor deprehensus sum.
13. Hæc sunt quæ de chemicæ artis prestantissimo opere consignanda esse duxi.
1. I speak not fictitious things, but what is true and most certain.
2. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
3. And as all things were produced by the meditation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation.
4. Its father is _Sol_, its mother _Luna_; the wind carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
5. It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole world.
6. Its power is perfect, if it be changed into earth.
7. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
8. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and things inferior. Thus you will possess the glory of the whole world; and all obscurity will fly far away from you.
9. This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself; because it will overcome every subtile thing, and penetrate every solid thing.
11. Hence proceed wonderful things, which in this wise were established.
12. For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I possess three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
13. What I had to say about the operation of _Sol_ is completed.
Such is a literal translation of the celebrated inscription of Hermes Trismegistus upon the emerald tablet. It is sufficiently obscure to put it in the power of commentators to affix almost any explanation to it that they choose. The two individuals who have devoted most time to illustrate this tablet, are Kriegsmann and Gerard Dorneus, whose commentaries may be seen in the first volume of Mangetus’s Bibliotheca Chemica. They both agree that it refers to the _universal medicine_, which began to acquire celebrity about the time of Paracelsus, or a little earlier.
This exposition, which appears as probable as any other, betrays the time when this celebrated inscription seems to have been really written. Had it been taken out of the hands of the dead body of Hermes by Sarah (obviously intended for the wife of Abraham) as is affirmed by Avicenna, it is not possible that Herodotus, and all the writers of antiquity, both Pagan and Christian, should have entirely overlooked it; or how could Avicenna have learned what was unknown to all those who lived nearest the time when the discovery was supposed to have been made? Had it been discovered in Egypt by Alexander the Great, would it have been unknown to Aristotle, and to all the numerous tribe of writers whom the Alexandrian school produced, not one of whom, however, make the least allusion to it? In short, it bears all the marks of a forgery of the fifteenth century. And even the tract ascribed to Albertus Magnus, in which the tablet of Hermes is mentioned, and the discovery related, is probably also a forgery; and doubtless a forgery of the same individual who fabricated the tablet itself, in order to throw a greater air of probability upon a story which he wished to palm upon the world as true. His object was in some measure accomplished; for the authenticity of the tablet was supported with much zeal by Kriegsmann, and afterwards by Olaus Borrichius.