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Islamic Alchemy - 26/april/2024
🕑 Added 2024-04-26 16:27:13 +0000 UTCISLAMICATE ALCHEMY
EMERALD TABLET
Just give us a page on this bad boy maybe
CORUPUS JABIRIANUM (died 806)
Sulfur Mercury Theory
Organic Matter
Proto-Iatrochemistry
Panacea
Transmutation of base metals into noble metals
(Alexandrian alchemy created this divide between esoteric and exoteric alchemy. This carries over to the ISlamicate world. Rhazes is the exoteric one, Zadith is the Esoteric one.)
RHAZES (864-935)
Liber Secretorum
Exoteric
AL FARABI (873-950)
Father of islamic Neoplatonism
IBN UMAYL / SENIOR ZADITH (900-960)
Esoteric Alchemy
Tabula Chemica
“Epistola Solis ad Lunam Crescentem” (Translation of an arabic work named Letter of the Sun to the New Moon. By Ibn Umayl.)
[Transition: Alchemy and mysticism]
AVICENNA (980-1037)
Book of Remedy
Denies Transmustation
Anticipated Iatrochemistry
[Now lets get mystical]
ISLAMICATE ALCHEMY AND GNOSTICISM
Brethren of Purity from Basra
[Transition: Alchemy and philosophy]
ALCHEMY AND ASTROLOGY
Here’s where we talk about the Secretum Secretorum
Pesudo-Aristotelian
[Transition: The SS was hella influential on everyone who came after]
THE BIG FIVE: JABIR IBN-HAYYAN
First and most prolific of the Big Five, Jabir Ibn-Hayyan is the foundation of Islamic alchemy. The man himself probably died around 816, but his students and other scholars continued writing under the name of their departed teacher. As such, more than three thousand texts carry the name Jabir Ibn-Hayyan. This body of work–The Jabirian Corpus–introduces a litany of occult and scientific concepts, the most important being the Sulfur Mercury Theory, the introduction of organic matter, full transmutation of base metals into noble metals, and the first medical applications of alchemy. This collection of ideas are what draw the line between Byzantine alchemy, and the much more complex, systematic, Islamic alchemy.
JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: MERCURY-SULFUR THEORY
Jabir introduces two new important concepts: Sophic Mercury, (meaning “mercury of the philosophers”) and Sophic Sulfur (meaning sulfur of the philosophers). Every physical thing has a Sophic Mercury that can be extracted through fermentation, and a Sophic Sulfur through distillation.
To explain what these are, lets pretend that you are an islamic alchemist, and you want to use alchemy to make a rose from the ground up. You’re gonna need two ingredients: sophic mercury of rose, and sophic sulfur of rose.
Let’s say you have a rose, and you want to extract its sophic mercury. To do this, you would seal it in a vessel to ferment it into a spirit. (As in an alcoholic spirit.) The fluid left over would be a form of ethyl alcohol, but the alchemists would call it “spirit of rose” or “sophic mercury” If you want to extract some sophic sulfur of rose, you would put the flower in an oil still and distill it into rose essential oil.
Ferment a rose, you get sophic mercury of rose. In this case, you get ethyl alcohol. Ferment some lavender, you also get ethyl alcohol. Islamicate alchemists noticed that when you ferment most plant matter, it gives you more or less the same substance. Therefore, ethyl alcohol must be some essential component of plant-ness.
But! Distill a rose, you get rose essential oil. Distill some lavender, you get lavender essential oil. The sophic sulfurs of these substances are unique! The rose oil smells distinctly of rose, the lavender of lavender. Therefore, the sophic sulfur of a substance must be a unique essence.
To Arab alchemists, sophic mercury was what made substances similar, and sophic sulfur was what made substances unique. Theoretically, you could mix-and-match mercuries and sulfurs to “breed” new substances. Mercury is often referred to as feminine, and sulfur as masculine.
(Learned readers may be expecting a discussion of sophic salt here, but that doesn’t show up until Paracelsus. Give it a few centuries.)
JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: ORGANIC ALCHEMY
The One-Hundred and Twelve Books (of which only thirty survive) are a series of short, vaguely-related treatises on alchemy. A notable innovation here is the introduction of organic materials like plant and animal products. To many previous alchemists, the human body was higher on the divine ladder of being than things like rocks and stones. The idea that something as special as the human body would be subject to the exact same rules as lowly lumps of metal was a dramatic change from established alchemical logic.
Previously, the closest alchemists would get to living tissue was old eggshells. Now, alchemists were theorizing about the alchemical effects of all sorts of plants and fluids. This was a significant paradigm shift for alchemy. Now semen could be involved. Which was important. Don’t laugh. It was important. In the medieval world, there was a hard, hard line between living things and dead things, and this was one of the first cracks in that boundary. This was also one of the first steps towards iatrochemistry, the idea that alchemy could be used to cure diseases. Jabir barely dipped a toe into the pool of iatrochemistry, but that toe was a pioneer.
JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: BALANCE AND TRANSMUTATION
If a pre-Jabir alchemist wanted to make some gold, they needed some gold to act as a “seed” to transmute the base metal. It was ibn-Hayyan who introduced the idea that you could transmute lead into gold. This was a radical departure from established alchemical logic. Jabir placed no limits on what the alchemist could theoretically achieve. According to Jabir, if you had a big enough flask, a big enough furnace, and a big enough chunk of time, you could make your own tiny planet earth. You just had to get the ratios right.
The key to this new theory of transmutation was what Jabir called “The Science of Balances.” If you’ve ever tried your hand at baking, you understand Jabirian balance. It’s all about ratios. You need the right ratio of flour to water, sugar to salt, milk to butter, etc. When all the ingredients coalesce in the oven into something delicious, its because you have achieved Jabirian balance.
To Jabir, all non-gold material are simply improperly baked cakes. Tin needs another cup of elemental air, iron has too much elemental earth, lead is burned to a crisp, etc etc. Transmutation was the process of rebalancing, adding what your substance lacked.
Readers might compare this concept to balancing chemical equations in a high school chemistry course. While Jabir formed the bedrock of modern chemistry, his idea of balance extended beyond gold. To Jabir, everything –and I mean everything– affected Jabirian balance. The position of the stars and planets affected Balance. The numerical values of letters in the Arabic word for gold affected balance. Additionally, if medicine healed a sickness, it is because it rebalanced the condition of your humors to a ratio similar to gold.
None of this is layed out systematically. If you are looking for some grand philosophical system of harmony between the heavens, the body, the world, and God, you will need to wait a few centuries. These concepts are divided across dozens of books, likely written decades apart, that repeatedly contradict and argue with each other. It's messy as all hell.
Western esotericism is also messy as hell. It is built on harmonies, associations between the four elements, the seven classical planets, the twelve zodiacs, and the letters of the alphabet. In the Jabirian corpus, the keen reader can see the unrefined, jurassic ancestors of western esotericism, yet to walk upright.
JABIR: TRANSMUTATION
Byzantine alchemists didn’t think you could make gold from scratch. You needed some starter gold that could be “fed” base metals until they were transmuted into gold. Jabir was different. Jabir theorized that you could cook yourself some gold from scratch.
Imagine that you live in the 10th century. Most of your world is made of living things. Your clothes are made from plant or animal fibers. Common tools are made from wood or bone or other animal products. Even the earthen bricks and clay that make up your home have a biological element to them. Most of the physical objects in your life are either alive, or were at one point alive.
The idea that you can just manufacture gold, without needing to “breed” it from some existing gold, was quite radical. Its also correct. Modern physics understands that if you could assemble atoms by hand out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, you can in fact make yourself some gold.
Except the Jabirian alchemists didn’t know about protons, neutrons, and electrons. Their basic building blocks were the four elements, Sophic Mercury and Sophic Sulfur. If you wanted to make gold, and all you had was some lead, you needed to distill that lead down to its separate essences, and then recombine them in the right ratios.
The language Jabir uses to describe transmutation is explicitly medical. To Jabir, the balancing of elemental essences in a metal and the balancing of humors in a body are similar processes.
According to Jabir, an alchemist can create any material simply by manipulating the physical world, and this extends to the human body. So theoretically, if the alchemist wanted to, they could make a tiny human from scratch inside their alchemical vessel. The Jabirian corpus stops just short of discussing whether or not this homunculus would have a soul, but the implications were not lost on later alchemists and theologians.
That said, there is little evidence that any religious authority ever took the alchemists seriously enough to consider this a threat. Imagine if a theoretical physicist in this day and age claimed they could manufacture a human soul: the reaction would be a series of polite nods and a quick changing of the subject. The Abbasid Caliphate had more important things to deal with, and the alchemists never did manufacture a homunculus with a soul, but they did lay the groundwork for modern chemistry.
THE BIG FIVE: RHAZES
If you’ve ever read a chemistry textbook, you can thank Rhazes. He invented them.
Rhazes was a teacher. His primary goal was to teach. He writes in a straightforward, no-nonsense, easy-to-understand way. He is not interested in the broader religious and philosophical implications of alchemy. He is interested in his students avoiding death by smoke inhalation. As such, his major work “The Book of Secrets” is one of the most grounded and straightforward alchemical texts ever written.
“Secrets” in this context essentially means “technical knowledge.” Rhazes is not making claims to occult knowledge; quite the opposite. Rhazes took the fire hose of the Jabirian Corpus, and pruned it down to something more practical.
Practical is the key word when it comes to Rhazes. His biggest addition to alchemical history is a focus on reproducibility. All the theory in the world doesn’t do you much good unless you can produce reliable, useful results. Reproducibility requires standards, and Rhazes introduced standards for laboratory alchemy that formed the foundation of modern laboratory chemistry.
If you’re ever read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, you were probably a bit surprised by how common-sense Mr. Tzu’s advice was. Of course you need to feed your army. What idiot wasn’t feeding his army? The truth was, nobody had actually written this stuff down in one place yet.
Think of Rhazes like the Sun Tzu of Alchemy. The Kitab al-Asrar is full of ancient occult wisdom like “make sure the room you’re doing alchemy in has windows so you don’t inhale metal fumes and die.” Rhazes assumes the would-be alchemist has access to five things: Literacy, technical knowledge, space, financing, and reproducibility. These standards would become so influential, people would quote Rhazes as an authority on alchemy and medicine well into the 17th century.
Like many academics of his day, Rhazes was an alchemist, but he was also a doctor and an astrologer. Academics often separate his work into chemistry and medicine, but this can flatten the broader picture. Rhazes was a systematic thinker, a combiner of ideas. Through the course of his work, he draws comparisons between the heavens, the body, and the flask. The connections are not as strong as some of the thinkers he would later inspire, but the groundwork for thinkers like Paracelsus, who we will discuss at length in a later section.
THE BIG FIVE: AVICENNA
Avicenna, the great doctor Ibn-Sina, is widely regarded as the greatest scholar of the Islamic golden age. We cannot do him justice in a text like this -we have magic to discuss- but suffice to say that modern science would not exist without him. He was educated on alchemy, but he was not an alchemist. Though dozens of later alchemical texts claim they were penned by his hand, they are only pretenders. In reality, Avicenna was famously critical of alchemy, specifically the Jabirian corpus. His work was so influential that his criticisms of alchemical doctrine would be cited for nearly 600 years.
We return to the “by art or by nature” debate. Can materials created by alchemists ever measure up to the same quality as materials created by nature? The Jabirian Corpus says yes. There are no limits on what alchemists can theoretically recreate, given the time and materials. Avicenna says no. Materials created by alchemists cannot ever match natural materials, and base metals can never be transmuted into noble metals.
Crucially, he cedes one important point to alchemy. He believed that if alchemy had some genuine, practical, use, it was in the creation and preparation of medicines.
https://archive.org/details/the-metaphysics-of-the-book-of-Healing/page/52/mode/2up
THE TURBA PHILOSOPHORUM
One of the most enduring and popular alchemical texts in history, the Turba Philosophorum, or “convention of the philosophers” is what happens when you try to fit Greek philosophy into an islamicate-shaped hole. The text itself is a neat little summary of Greek alchemical theory, framed as a sharing of knowledge between several pre-socratic Greek philosophers. In the Plessner translation, the ultimate conclusion the Greek sages reach is “[One:] The creator of the World is Allah, the God of Islam;[two] The world is of a uniform nature; [three] All creatures of the upper as well as of the lower world are composed of all four elements.”
[Martin Plessner, The Place of the Turba Philosophorum in the Development of Alchemy]
NOTES
“The most valuable “secrets” in the Kitāb al-Asrār are
written specifications for proportions, temperature, timing, and endpoints, the
same tools for achieving reproducibility that laboratories use today.” (Taylor, 14)
Even in the tenth century alchemy was controversial and al- Rāzī
wrote energetic defenses of the controversial art of transforming the state of
metals under artificial conditions. The debate centered on feasibility, rather
than theory. (taylor, 15)
Theres a great anecdote about him teaching student on (taylor 31)
Medical schools in Holland continued to require al-
Rāzī’s medical books into the seventeenth century.[83] Alchemy was not a
university subject, but the wide distribution of Rhazes’ medical works may
have contributed to his reputation as an alchemist, especially since many
European alchemists were themselves university-educated physicians and
Clerics. (taylor 34)
he Romance of the Rose, a thirteenth-century poem by
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, enjoyed in both France and England
for 300 years, includes Rhazes among medical authorities: “And we have not
seen any of the physicians themselves escape from her [Death], not
Hippocrates or Galen, no matter how good physicians they were. Rhases,
Constantine, and Avicenna have left her their skins.”(taylor 34)
From a historical perspective, the Kitāb al-Asrār had an
enduring presence throughout the Middle Ages and then retired to the
manuscript libraries. Its scope was limited, its goals outdated. Yet its content
has a characteristic style that makes it read like a laboratory manual even
Today. (taylor 46)
Absolutely influenced Paracelsus. People tend to see him as either a chemist or a doctor, but when you look at the whole of his work, they’re not all that different. There really isnt a conflict between the two.
By the 17th century, nobody cited Rhazes anymore. But, damn near every alchemical and chemical manual had a focus on reproducibility of results.
Is there a connection between the legions of
testing laboratories in existence today and the confined inner world of the
Kitāb al-Asrār? I argue that what links these laboratory environments is their
ability to impose a controlled template upon the vagaries of nature in order to
produce repeatable and credible results. (taylor 47)
Laboratory manuals depend on certain underlying principles. A
full description of every step of every procedure would overwhelm the
worker with gratuitous information and interfere with the simplicity that
reproducibility demands. These requirements remain unstated just as a road
map ignores the physical composition of streets and bridges. (taylor 48)
Literacy, technical knowledge, space, financing, and
Reproducibility. (taylor 48)
The end point is the most important verification requirement in
laboratory procedures. (taylor 77)
