The Emerald Tablet is believed to be the work of Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Egyptian god also identified as Thoth, the god of writing. For centuries, alchemists believed that the Emerald Tablet contained the secret formula for personal and spiritual transformation. Concerned that these secrets could fall into the wrong hands, they disguised the formula with cryptic symbols and coded phrases. In his book, The Emerald Tablet: Alchemy for Personal Transformation (New York: Penguin Compass 1999),Dennis William Hauck explains what these 7 secrets are and what can be achieved through them.
Secret 1: Calcination or Working with and Moving beyond Suffering and Despair
An alchemical process in which a substance is heated until it is reduced to ashes, calcination is the beginning of the journey toward personal transformation. It is marked by suffering and despair which bring about the death of the ego. Calcination is working with fire to burn away illusions about the self’s position in the world.
Secret 2: Dissolution or Releasing the Power of Emotions
Dissolution is the process of dissolving in water the ashes left over from calcination. While calcination works on mind and ego to destroy illusions, dissolution works on the heart to release buried and repressed emotions. This surfacing of buried material allows new power to be accessed by the individual.
Secret 3: Separation or Discarding Negative Beliefs
In alchemy, separation refers to the filtration process that separates the essence of dissolution from its wastes. In psychological terms, separation retrieves energies released by the dissolution of negative beliefs, prejudices and emotional blockages.
Secret 4: Conjunction or Staying Open to the Invisible
Conjunction unites the power of the unconscious with the power of the conscious. In personal transformation, it is the union of the masculine and feminine aspects of personality into a new belief system. This process is usually experienced as a profound awareness of the invisible realm and its connections beyond the material world. It is also expressed as an increase in intuitive insights and synchronicities.
Secret 5: Fermentation or Cultivating a Deep Knowing of One’s Purpose and Potential
Fermentation raises the product of conjunction to a new level of being through a second application of fire. In terms of personal transformation, fermentation is experienced as mystical experiences, creative vision, psychic engagement or simply a deep knowing and activation of one’s purpose and potential in life.
Secret 6: Distillation or Loving and Being Loved
This process of boiling fermented solution to increase its purity results in a soft amalgam that will be hardened into stone in the next step. Distillation purifies the soul from passion so that it becomes One Mind, One Spirit. Distillation is the experience of genuine and transformative love or one-ness for all that exists.
Secret 7: Coagulation or Becoming a Maker of Destinies
This final secret is the hardening of the amalgam into the Philosopher’s Stone which alchemists have long proclaimed to be the source of magical powers; from this Stone comes an elixir that heals all wounds. Coagulation is the highest state in the evolution of man’s consciousness. It is accessing the creative power that can transform all life and situations, the Great Work that man is urged to undertake in order to change his reality on all levels.
Embedded in the Emerald Tablet are these 7 secrets of alchemy by which man can tap into the creative power of personal transformation.
