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Another term he uses is xērion, which originally meant a medicine in the form of a powder to be sprinkled on wounds.
This term may have been chosen for its relation to the word pharmakon (drug, salve, poison), occasionally used by pseudo-Democritus for various substances able to color metals. But the term xērion suggests another parallel, namely, that just as medicine heals and improves sick human beings, chemeia heals and impr...
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Khālid’s youth, the caliphate was then given to a relative by the name of Marwan, with the condition that Khālid would succeed him. But Marwan then married Khālid’s widowed mother, promised the line of succession to his own sons, and declared Khālid a bastard. Khālid’s mother’s response was to smother her new husband with a pillow while he slept (some sources say she poisoned him). Given such a loving family, Khālid fled to Egypt. There, to put his lost caliphate behind him, the young prince began to study Greek learning, and found alchemy most to his liking.
That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one thing. As all things were from one. Its father is the Sun and its mother the Moon. The Earth carried it in her belly, and the wind nourished it in her belly, as Earth which shall become fire.
This anecdote is of special importance, because it is an early account of two transmuting agents, a white one for making silver and a red one for making gold. These two forms of the Philosophers’ Stone would become standard parts of transmutational alchemy.
A persistent problem facing historians of alchemy is figuring out if an author really is who he says he is, and if he lived when and where he claims. Anonymity, pseudonymity, secrecy, mysteries, false trails, and subterfuge fill the entire subject from beginning to end.
among the booksellers have affirmed that this man, Jābir, did not exist at all.”17 But al-Nadīm rejects this claim on the grounds that no one would write so many books—he lists about three thousand—and put another’s name on them. (Authoring three thousand books is not as absurd as it sounds, since these “books” [kutub] were akin to chapters or short essays of a few pages, not whole volumes.)
the bulk of Jābir’s writings show the influence of a Shi’ite movement dating to the end of the 800s.
Thus, the Jābirian corpus represents the evolving production of a “school” of alchemists.
Jābir, states simply that all metals are compounds of two principles called Mercury (akin to Aristotle’s moist exhalation) and Sulfur (akin to the smoky exhalation).
The Mercury-Sulfur theory proved astonishingly long-lived. It was accepted (in various forms and to various degrees) by most chemical workers until the eighteenth century, almost a thousand years after it was first proposed.
When almost any organic substance—for example, wood, flesh, hair, leaves, eggs—is gradually heated, various materials are driven off sequentially by the heat, leaving behind a solid residue. Jābir interprets this practical experiment as the separation of a compound substance into its component elements. The “fire” distills off as a flammable and/or colored substance, the “air” as an oily one, and the “water” as a watery one; the “earth” remains behind as the residue.
A patient experiencing congested sinuses, runny nose, and depressed activity clearly suffers from an excess of phlegm, an illness that we commonly call—preserving to this day the doctrine of humors and qualities—a “cold,” which many (unconsciously Galenic) mothers still believe is caused simply by exposure to cold and wet, rather than by a microorganism.
but transliterated into Arabic as al-iksīr.
three levels of elixirs, distinguished by how well the alchemist has purified the qualities (or “natures,” as Jabir calls them)
The purer the qualities, the more powerful the elixir.
because the proper combination of those ultrapure qualities would produce al-iksīr al-a ‘ẓam, the Greatest Elixir, the Philosophers’ Stone itself, able to convert any metal into gold.
Jābir’s Books of the Balance (Kutub al-Mawāzīn) apply a modified version of this system to transmutation.
People today and people of the past often do not share the same vision or expectations of the world, nor do they necessarily approach the world in the same way.
what seems an insight into the design of the cosmos to one appears as mere trivia to the other.
This initiatic style is evident in portions of the Jābirian corpus where it arises partly from casting the works as teachings of Imam Ja‘far, and partly—like the enhanced secrecy—from characteristics of contemporaneous Isma‘ili groups.
Often reading almost like a laboratory manual, it begins with a systematic classification of naturally occurring substances—volatile substances (“spirits”), metals, stones, vitriols, borax, and salts—and the different varieties of each.
The restriction of the word alchemy to the context of making gold is a development dating many centuries after al-Rāzī’s time. In fact, that narrow definition which now seems so natural did not emerge until the
alchemy referred to all the processes and concepts we might today consider broadly “chemical.”
Like al-Rāzī, ibn-Sīnā was a Persian, and wrote medical texts, most notably his authoritative treatise The Canon (al-Qānūn), which became a fundamental authority for European medical schools until the seventeenth century.
What is clearer is that his better-known Book of the Remedy (Kitāb al-shifā’) comes to a different conclusion. This unquestionably authentic work contains a section about minerals where ibn-Sīnā discusses the formation of minerals and metals, adopting the Mercury-Sulfur theory that by his time had become standard.
human industry is simply weaker than nature: “Alchemy falls short of nature . . . and cannot overtake her.”49 Or, as he states in another book, “Whatever God created through natural powers cannot be imitated artificially; human industry is not the same as what nature does.”
Regarding human ignorance, ibn-Sīnā claims that what we sense and identify as the differences between metals—that is, what alchemists endeavor to alter—are not their true, essential differences, merely superficial ones.
In other words, alchemical gold might very well look like gold, have all the apparent characteristics of gold, and convince at least some people that it is indeed gold, but it is not really true gold. Ibn-Sīnā’s denial of the possibility of true transmutation turned out to be extremely influential, for this section of his Book of the Remedy would later be translated into Latin and widely circulated in Europe, often under the weighty name of Aristotle himself (see chapter 3).
Tales of the charlatan alchemist are not uncommon in the Arabic world, though the earlier Greek world shows almost no sign of such stories.
Around the year 1220, al-Jawbari wrote a book called The Revelation of Secrets that details a variety of cheats and swindles. He recounts the sleights of hand used by false alchemists to dupe the unwary—gold hidden inside charcoals, under the false bottom of a crucible, or within metal implements that is made to appear at the right moment as if produced by transmutation.
They stink of sulfur, and assemble nightly at the chief mosque to debate their processes.
Alchemy, we are told, arrived in Latin Europe on a Friday, the eleventh of February, 1144.
Amid descriptions of various kinds of gold, Theophilus includes a recipe for “Spanish gold . . . compounded from red copper, basilisk powder, human blood, and vinegar.”7 Copper, vinegar, and human blood are easy to obtain (although the last perhaps rather unpleasantly), but
But Theophilus explains that the “gentiles” (that is, Muslims) have commendable skill in making basilisks. They lock up two old roosters in a narrow place and overfeed them until they copulate and lay eggs. The eggs are given to toads, who hatch them into chicks that soon grow serpents’ tails and mature into basilisks. The basilisks are raised underground in kettles and later incinerated, their ashes mixed with vinegar and blood, and the paste smeared onto plates of copper. Exposure to fire then turns this copper into fine gold.
In one passage, he claims that there was a lower limit of size that any piece of a substance could have and still maintain its identity. A lump of gold, repeatedly divided in half, would eventually become so small that one further cut would no longer result in two smaller pieces of gold; the particle would have become too small to support the properties of gold.
According to the Summa, the metals are produced from the coalescence of minute “parts” of the metallic principles Mercury and Sulfur.
Take for example the fact that a piece of gold is far heavier than an equally sized piece of tin; in modern terms, gold has a much higher density.
Geber explains this observation based upon the way the constituent particles of Mercury and Sulfur are packed. In gold, they are very small and packed as tightly together as they can be—in what he calls “the strongest putting-together” (fortissima compositio)— while in tin they are larger and poorly packed.
The decretal goes on to say that when the alchemists repeatedly fail in making gold, “in the end they feign true gold and silver with a false transmutation,” since the possibility of a real transmutation into gold and silver “does not exist in the nature of things.”26 Then they counterfeit coins and pass them off on honest people. In punishment, the decree stipulates, anyone selling or using alchemical metal as if it were natural gold or silver is sentenced to surrender an equal weight of true gold or silver to the public treasury for distribution to the poor.
Unfortunately for the alchemists, their art was rarely far from such criminal practices in the public mind. The kings of France and England issued similar regulations banning the practice of transmutational alchemy, as did the ruling council of the Republic of Venice.
Similar thoughts led the Arab historian ibn-Khaldūn in 1376 to argue against the possibility of chrysopoeia on the grounds that if true, it would foil God’s plan for maintaining economic stability in the world—namely, His divinely wise choice to create only a limited quantity of gold and silver.28 Lawyers continued to debate the licitness of alchemy and the legality of its products from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century.29
by the awarding of licenses from the Crown to practice alchemy,
The same concern about the coming of the Antichrist lay behind much of what Roger Bacon—also a Franciscan friar—wrote to the pope about sixty years earlier: the church will need mathematical, scientific, technological, medical, and other knowledge to resist and survive the assault of the Antichrist.
If this is the case, then it is significant that the end of De confectione includes a rather out-of-place paragraph describing the general importance of table salt (sal cibi, or “salt of food”), its ubiquity, its use in purifying metals, and so forth, and then states that “the whole secret is in salt.” Is this an example of the dispersion of knowledge?
Such close observation and monitoring of the weights of materials indicate a degree of clearheadedness and care in the laboratory that is often not attributed to alchemists.
There is also the possibility that the author’s ingredients had a different composition from our modern equivalents, and so gave results we could not predict.
Philosophers’ Stone is to be prepared starting with mercury.
Recall that centuries earlier, Zosimos had envisioned his own processes as “tortures” of the metals.) Given the usual repertory of chemical operations involving melting, corroding, grinding, vaporizing, hammering, and burning, it does not require a huge imaginative leap to envision them as “painful torments” of material substances.
This format continued to be used until the seventeenth century, even as other—and ultimately more popular—styles emerged. One new literary form was the florilegium. The word literally means a “gathering of flowers,” and it refers to a text that picks the choicest excerpts from a wide variety of books and arranges them into a “book of books.”
