I am surprised no one in this thread have mentioned the Emerald Tablet. Manly P. Hall 33rd Degree M.M. wrote about it in his book: The Lost Keys of Freemasonry. A short description of this tablet:
The Emerald Tablet is one of the most revered documents in the Western World, and its Egyptian author, Hermes Trismegistus, has become synonymous with ancient wisdom. His tablet contains an extremely succinct summary of what Aldous Huxley dubbed the "Perennial Philosophy," a timeless science of soul that keeps popping up despite centuries of effort to suppress it. The basic idea is that there exists a divine or archetypal level of mind that determines physical reality, and individuals can access that realm through direct knowledge of God.
The teachings of Hermes -- the Hermetic tradition -- is one of the oldest spiritual traditions in the world, and while no direct evidence links the Emerald Tablet to Eastern religions, it shares uncanny similarities in concepts and terminology with Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In the West, the tablet found a home not only in the pagan tradition but also in all three of the orthodox Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and many of the most heretical beliefs of the Gnostics are also openly expressed in it. Like the authors of the tablet, the Gnostics believed that direct knowledge of reality could be attained through psychological discipline and meditative exercises. They also shared a common view of the universe in which "All Is One," a pattern of creation and decay symbolized by the Ouroboros (the snake eating its own tail).
Without doubt, the Emerald Tablet was the inspiration behind many other esoteric traditions, including over 1,700 years of alchemy. Most medieval alchemists hung a copy of the tablet on their laboratory wall and constantly referred to the "secret formula" it contained. In fact, during the sixteenth century, Hermes Trismegistus was such a revered figure that there was a movement to have his teachings replace those of Aristotle in European schools.
Five hundred years later, the tablet's words are still held in the highest regard. "The Emerald Tablet is the cryptic epitome of the alchemical opus," noted Jungian analyst Dr. Edward Edinger, "a recipe for the second creation of the world." Ethnobotanist and consciousness guru Terence McKenna agrees, calling the tablet "a formula for a holographic matrix" that is mirrored in the human mind and offers mankind its only hope for future survival. "Whatever one chooses to believe about it," sums up John Matthews in The Western Way (Penguin 1997), "there is no getting away from the fact that the Emerald Tablet is one of the most profound and important documents to have come down to us. It has been said more than once that it contains the sum of all knowledge -- for those able to understand it."
However, there is one nagging problem with the Emerald Tablet: Nobody seems to know for sure where it came from, or who really wrote it.
Timeless Myths and Church Politics
Part of the problem trying to figure out the origins of the Emerald Tablet comes from the many legends that cloud its history. In one of the earliest of these fabled scenarios, Hermes was a son of Adam and wrote the tablet to show mankind how to redeem itself from his father's sins in the Garden of Eden. Jewish mystics identify the tablet's author with Seth, who was the second son of Adam. They credit him with writing the Emerald Tablet, which was taken aboard the ark by Noah. After the Flood, Noah supposedly hid the tablet in a cave near Hebron, where it was later discovered by Sarah, wife of Abraham. Another version describes Hermes giving the tablet to Miriam, daughter of Moses, for safekeeping. She allegedly put it in the Ark of the Covenant, where it remains to this day. Occult historians generally agree that the tablet was found in a secret chamber under the pyramid of Cheops around 1350 BC. Another interesting legend describes Hermes as a philosopher traveling in Ceylon in the fifth century BC. He found the Emerald Tablet hidden in a cave, and after studying it, learned how to "travel in both heaven and earth." This Hermes spent the rest of his life wandering throughout Asia and the Middle East teaching and healing. Oddly, the Hindu sacred book Mahanirvanatantra states that Hermes was the same person as Buddha, and each is referred to as the "Son of the Moon" in other Hindu religious texts.
Probably the only constant in all these legends is what the Emerald Tablet looked like. It is always described as a rectangular green plaque with bas-relief lettering in a strange alphabet similar to ancient Phoenician. It is made of emerald or green crystal, and the workmanship is exquisite. Caves, corpses, ancient Egypt, and secret wisdom are common themes in many of the stories.
The history of the tablet was further complicated when its alleged author became associated with the Corpus Hermeticum in the Middle Ages. The seventeen treatises of the Corpus expand on the principles of the Emerald Tablet and appear to be records of intimate conversations between Hermes and his disciples. For over three centuries, they were thought by the Catholic Church to be very ancient and held in the highest esteem. The church fathers believed the Corpus Hermeticum lent support to Christian doctrines, and the documents were required reading for European scholars. Images of Hermes adorned cathedrals all over Europe, and to this day, a giant fresco dominates the Borgia Apartments of the Vatican that shows Hermes, adorned with Hermetic symbols, walking in the company of Moses.
So it caused a great scandal in 1614 when Protestant scholar Isaac Causabon declared these documents forgeries written by "semi-Christians" sometime between 200 and 300 AD. He based his conclusion on a linguistic analysis that dated the writings to that era. For the next two hundred years, the Hermetic literature, which had been embraced by the early followers of Christ, was condemned by Christians everywhere. Although it was not officially part of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Emerald Tablet suffered the fate of all writings attributed to Hermes and went underground in a variety of secret organizations such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasonry.
The reverence with which these diverse groups continued to hold the Emerald Tablet is exemplified in the following paragraph from the Morals and Dogma of Freemasonry: "He who desires to attain the understanding of the Grand Word and the possession of the Great Secret, ought carefully to read the Hermetic philosophers, and will undoubtedly attain initiation, as others have done; but he must take, for the key of their allegories, the single dogma of Hermes, contained in his Table of Emerald." There are other more veiled references to the Hermetic tradition in Freemasonry. For instance, their sacred name "Hiram Ibif" refers to the first Hermes (Hermes Ibis or Thoth), who, according to Masonic tradition, arrived "in the year of the world 2670."
Today, most scholars agree that the Emerald Tablet is separate from or predates the Corpus Hermeticum and was probably the inspiration for them, and in this sense, the Corpus really does contain ancient writings. "In the mystic sense," summarized the nineteenth-century French scholar Artaud, "Thoth or the Egyptian Hermes was the symbol of the Divine Mind; he was incarnated Thought, the Living Word -- the Logos of Plato and the Word of the Christians. So the Corpus Hermeticum really does contain the ancient Egyptian doctrine of which traces can be discovered from the hieroglyphics which still cover the monuments of Egypt."
Link to the rest of this information may be found: here
The Emerald tablet's writing contains:
True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, for the performance of the miracles of the One Thing. And as all things are 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, and the Wind carries it in its belly, its nurse is the Earth. This is the father of all perfection, or consummation of the whole world. Its power is integrating, if it be turned into earth.
Thou shalt separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross, suavely, and with great ingenuity. It ascends from earth to heaven and descends again to earth, and receives the power of the superiors and of the inferiors. So thou hast the glory of the whole world; therefore let all obscurity flee before thee. This is the strong force of all forces, overcoming every subtle and penetrating every solid thing. So the world was created. Hence were all wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner. Therefore am I called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. What I have to tell is completed, concerning the Operation of the Sun.
Translate this as you feel nessessary. I am just offering abit of enlightenment. Its location is beneath the Great Sphinx in Egypt inside the ancient library.
