The Emerald Tablet of Hermes (Tabula Smaragdina)

This introduction is ours, not the books'.

The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina), a dozen lines said to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus, is the founding text of Western alchemy and the source of the saying "as above, so below". This site is named after it.

Legend says it was found in the tomb of Hermes, cut on a slab of emerald; the stories of its finding are themselves late. The oldest known versions are in Arabic, in works of about the 8th to 10th centuries attributed to Balinas (Apollonius of Tyana) and to Jabir; the Latin translation every European alchemist read dates from the 12th century. Nothing shows it to be older. Here it is given as English books printed it before 1931, each line cited to its book, page and scan, so the translations can be read side by side.

This is the medieval Hermetic text. It has nothing to do with The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, a 20th century book by "Doreal" that borrowed the name.