[cover: The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, 1609.]

(H.P. Blavatsky, The Theosophycal Glossary, p. 302, 1892.)

"As expressed by Eliphas Lévi, “this Tablet of Emerald is the whole of magic in a single page”; but India has a single word which, when understood, contains “the whole of magic”. This is a tablet, however, alleged to have been found by Sarai, Abraham’s wife (!) on the dead body of Hermes. So say the Masons and Christian Kabbalists. But in Theosophy we call it an allegory. May it not mean that Sarai-swati, the wife of Brahmâ, or the goddess of secret wisdom and learning, finding still much of the ancient wisdom latent in the dead body of Humanity, revivified that wisdom? This led to the rebirth of the Occult Sciences, so long forgotten and neglected, the world over. The tablet itself, however, although containing the “whole of magic”, is too long to be reproduced here."

♦

EMERALD TABLET

(English translation of the Emerald Tablet by Isaac Newton, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton.)

"Tis true without lying, certain and most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracle of one only thing. And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father, the moon its mother, the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth. Separate thou the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross sweetly with great industry. It ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth and receives the force of things superior and inferior. By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created. From this are and do come admirable adaptations where of the means is here in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended."

♦

(H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled - Vol. I, pp. xxx-xxxii, 1877.)

EVOLUTION

"The development of higher orders of animals from the lower. Modern, or so-called exact science, holds but to a one-sided physical evolution, prudently avoiding and ignoring the higher or spiritual evolution, which would force our contemporaries to confess the superiority of the ancient philosophers and psychologists over themselves. The ancient sages, ascending to the UNKNOWABLE, made their starting-point from the first manifestation of the unseen, the unavoidable, and from a strict logical reasoning, the absolutely necessary creative Being, the Demiurgos of the universe. Evolution began with them from pure spirit, which descending lower and lower down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and became matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the Darwinian method, but on a far more large and comprehensive basis.

In the Rig-Veda-Sanhita, the oldest book of the World{33} (to which even our most prudent Indiologists and Sanscrit scholars assign an antiquity of between two and three thousand years B.C.), in the first book, "Hymns to the Maruts," it is said:

"Not-being and Being are in the highest heaven, in the birthplace of Daksha, in the lap of Aditi" (Mandala, i, Sukta 166).

"In the first age of the gods, Being (the comprehensible Deity) was born from Not-being (whom no intellect can comprehend); after it were born the Regions (the invisible), from them Uttânapada."

"From Uttânapad the Earth was born, the Regions (those that are visible) were born from the Earth. Daksha was born of Aditi, and Aditi from Daksha" (Ibid.).

Aditi is the Infinite, and Daksha is dakska-pitarah, literally meaning the father of gods, but understood by Max Müller and Roth to mean the fathers of strength, "preserving, possessing, granting faculties." Therefore, it is easy to see that "Daksha, born of Aditi and Aditi from Daksha," means what the moderns understand by "correlation of forces"; the more so as we find in this passage (translated by Prof. Müller):

"I place Agni, the source of all beings, the father of strength" (iii., 27, 2), a clear and identical idea which prevailed so much in the doctrines of the Zoroastrians, the Magians, and the mediæval fire-philosophers. Agni is god of fire, of the Spiritual Ether, the very substance of the divine essence of the Invisible God present in every atom of His creation and called by the Rosicrucians the "Celestial Fire." If we only carefully compare the verses from this Mandala, one of which runs thus: "The Sky is your father, the Earth your mother, Soma your brother, Aditi your sister" (i., 191, 6),{34} with the inscription on the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, we will find the same substratum of metaphysical philosophy, the identical doctrines!

"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation: 'Its father is the sun; its mother is the moon'. . . . etc. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross. . . . What I had to say about the operation of the sun is completed" (Smaragdine Tablet).{35}

Professor Max Müller sees in this Mandala "at last, something like a theogony, though full of contradictions."{36} The alchemists, kabalists, and students of mystic philosophy will find therein a perfectly defined system of Evolution in the Cosmogony of a people who lived a score of thousands of years before our era. They will find in it, moreover, a perfect identity of thought and even doctrine with the Hermetic philosophy, and also that of Pythagoras and Plato.

In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form — a supposition clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindu philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher's tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of "the Unknowable"; the Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved — or, as the word means, unwombed or born — except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life is from a spiritual potency above the whole."

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{33} Translated by Max Müller, Professor of Comparative Philology at the Oxford University, England.
{34} "Dyarih vah pitâ, prithivi mâtâ sômah bhrâtâ âditih svasâ."
{35} As the perfect identity of the philosophical and religious doctrines of antiquity will be fully treated upon in subsequent chapters, we limit our explanations for the present.
{36} "Rig-Veda-Anhita," p. 234.