The Tabula Smaragdina, or Emerald Tablet, is the foundational text of the Hermetic tradition in alchemy. Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage identified with both the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, the Emerald Tablet is a brief text of approximately fifteen lines that purports to contain the entire secret of the alchemical art in compressed, oracular form. According to legend, the tablet was discovered in the tomb of Hermes Trismegistus, inscribed on a single plate of emerald. The text's actual origin lies in the Arabic alchemical tradition, probably composed between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, and it entered Latin Europe through a twelfth-century translation.

The Emerald Tablet's most famous maxim, quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius (that which is above is like that which is below), established the fundamental principle of Hermetic philosophy: the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm, between celestial and terrestrial processes, between the great world and the small. This principle of cosmic sympathy provided the theoretical foundation for the entire alchemical enterprise, justifying the alchemist's claim that operations performed on matter in the vessel participate in and recapitulate the cosmic processes of creation, dissolution, and regeneration. The Tablet also contains the cryptic instruction that the wind carried it in its belly, which Maier takes as the starting point for the entire Atalanta Fugiens.

Maier opens the Atalanta Fugiens by deriving the mottos of Emblems I and II directly from the Tabula Smaragdina. Emblem I, depicting Boreas (the North Wind) carrying an embryo in his belly, literalizes the Tablet's phrase about the wind carrying the philosophical child. Emblem II develops the Tablet's teaching about the union of inferior and superior things. De Jong demonstrates that this deliberate placement at the very beginning of the emblem sequence signals Maier's allegiance to the Hermetic tradition and establishes the Hermetic cosmological framework as the foundation for everything that follows.

De Jong notes that Maier discusses the Tabula Smaragdina at length in his Symbola Aureae Mensae, alongside the Poimandres and the Asclepius of the Hermetic Corpus, demonstrating his deep engagement with the full range of Hermetic literature. The Emerald Tablet's cosmological framework, in which earthly processes mirror celestial ones, structures the entire Atalanta Fugiens: every emblem presents an earthly scene (a woman nursing a toad, a man striking an egg, lions fighting) that simultaneously encodes a cosmic process (the interaction of elements, the regulation of heat, the struggle of planetary forces).

The Dutch article by De Jong in the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art provides additional detail on the Tabula Smaragdina's role, noting that Maier discusses it in connection with the reunion of inferior and superior things that constitutes the goal of the alchemical work. Tilton identifies the Emerald Tablet as one of the medieval alchemical works that Maier draws upon most fundamentally, connecting his use of it to the broader prisca sapientia tradition in which Hermes Trismegistus stands as the originator of all wisdom.

For the modern reader, the Emerald Tablet is the single most important source text for understanding the cosmological framework of the Atalanta Fugiens. Its principle of cosmic correspondence, its image of the wind carrying the philosophical child, and its compressed description of the entire alchemical process in a few oracular lines provide the interpretive key to the emblem sequence that follows.