It is really no accident that our word for alchemy derives from the Arabic language, for it was to be in the lands conquered by the first four caliphs (between 632 and 661), that Hermes Trismegistos - and his Art - were to undergo a return to intellectual prominence in both the east and, subsequently, in the west as well.
In AD 830, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mún, (son of the illustrious Harun ar-Rashíd of Arabian Nights fame), was passing through Harran, about 40 miles south of Edessa. According to the Christian author Abú-Jusúf Abshaa'al-Qathíí18, writing 70 years later, the caliph observed some men in unfamiliar costume :
“To which of the peoples protected by law do you belong?”
“We are Harranians.”
“Are you Christians?”
“No.”
“Jews?”
“No.”
“Magians?”19
“No.”
“Have you a holy scripture or a prophet?”
The men offered an evasive answer. The caliph, running out of options, and patience, came to the inevitable point : “You are infidels and idolaters then, and it is permitted to shed your blood. If you have not, by the time when I return from my campaign [against the Byzantines], become either Moslems or adherents of one of the religions recognised in the Koran, I will kill you to a man.”
On the departure of the caliph al-Ma'mún of Baghdad, these learned, pagan Harranians consulted with a lawyer as to a way of escape. The lawyer in turn consulted Koran II.59 which made it clear that Islam tolerated Christians, Jews - and Sabians :
Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabians, whoso believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness - their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.
Fortunately for the Harranian pagans, nobody seems to have been too sure what the Prophet intended by the word ‘Sabian’20, so they took the name. However, the law also required a divinely recognised prophet and a book to support the new nomenclature. In this regard, the learned pagans of Harran settled on the Hermetica (in either Greek or Syriac versions) as their scripture, with Hermes as their prophet. This timely ruse was to bring Hermetic gnosis to the very heart of eastern and western intellectual, practical and spiritual experience : a momentous decision whose ramifications reverberate to this day.
By 898, a disinterested Arabic writer could describe the doctrine of the ‘Sabians’ (that is, Harranian pagans), as a philosophy taught by Hermes and Agatho-daimon (a patron deity of ancient Alexandria and a teacher of Hermes in the Hermetica). Since the Koran did not recognise these latter names as prophets, Agatho-daimon was identified with Seth, son of Adam, (an Egyptian Gnostic patriarch), while Hermes was identified as Idris, or Enoch, (a name identified with Jewish astrological gnosis). Justification came from Koran sura 19.57 and 21.85.
From 830 onwards, the Arabs got the greater part of their knowledge of Greek science and philosophy from the pagans of Harran. According to the philosopher-historian al-Farabi (d.950) : “Under Omar son of Abd-el-Aziz [AD 705-710] the chief seat of teaching was transferred from Alexandria to Antioch; and later on, in the reign of Mutawakkil, it was transferred to Harran.” In about 856, al-Mutawakkil, in a reign characterised by a combination of rigidity and debauch, re-established the Baghdad library and and translation school. From that time to about 1050, the Harranian Hermetists played a conspicuous rôle in the intellectual life of Baghdad. This period produced a brilliant crop of Hermetic stars, the most renowned of whom must be the extraordinary sage, Thabit ibn Qurra (835-901).
Thabit began his professional life as a money-changer, (a job familiar to cultural outsiders) but, fortunately for us, a quarrel with other Sabians led to his expulsion from Harran. Fortunately for Thabit, he found favour with the caliph of Baghdad, Muthadid, along with 500 dinars a year for his scientific work. Thabit even got the government to recognise himself and his companions as an independent and separate community of Sabians. The most learned Harranians followed him to Baghdad, a move which resulted in a kind of school of pagan Neoplatonism, the like of which had not been seen since the Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian had closed down the Athens philosophy school 450 years previously; this time the Hermetica were regarded as master-texts.
Thabit certainly made his mark. It was said that he wrote 166 books in Syriac and Arabic. It was also said that “no-one would have been able to get any benefit from the philosophic writings of the Greeks, if they had not had Thabit's translations.” He was a convinced and enlightened pagan, a conviction well underlined in the following quotation taken by Barhebraeus from Thabit's Liber de confirmatione religionis ethnicorum:
We are the heirs and propagators of Paganism. Happy is he who, for the sake of Paganism, bears the burden [of persecution?] with firm hope. Who else have civilised the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbours and the rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, [quite an audacious statement to make under a Moslem government], given oracles, and told about the future, if not to the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.
Thabit's works include commentaries on Plato, Pythagoras, Proclus, Aristotle, Music, the Hermetica, works on local cultic practice and belief, astrology, mathematics, geometry, the occult sciences, and a treatise on the cryptic significance or magical efficacy of the alphabet. Thabit compiled a ‘pandect’ : a recapitulation of the whole of medicine in thirty-one scrupulously researched sections, in clear and succinct language. The Sabian master-mind also did pioneering work on the principles of balance, specific gravity, and the specific weight of alloys. He translated an Introduction to Arithmetic by Nichomachus, a work which also deals with music. Often regarded as the greatest Arab geometer, Thabit did science the service of translating into Arabic seven of the eight books of the conic sections of Appolonius, thus preserving three now lost in the original. His work on the shadows of the gnomon (sundial) is the earliest known on the subject.
Thabit made meticulous astronomical observations in Baghdad to determine the attitude of the sun and the length of the solar year. He not only elucidated ancient works on astronomy and geometry but also invented new propositions and contributed annotations to facilitate study. Nothing of scientific value appears to have been beyond his scope. He improved the translation of Euclid's Elements by Ishak b. Hunain, as well as the latter's weak translation of the Almagest. It was Thabit's work on Euclid which brought Gérard of Cremona (1114-1187) to Toledo in search of the Almagest over two hundred years later. Indeed, many of the Sabian works finally reached the minor-renaissance of the West in the 12th and 13th centuries in Latin translations, made at the Toledo school founded by Archbishop Raymond under Archdeacon Dominico Gundisalvi. Gérard of Cremona also translated other works by Thabit, including the Liber Carastonis sive de Statera, on the physics of balance, and it is by virtue of these transmissions that Gérard of Cremona became known as the “father of Arabism in Europe” : an influence which would later fortify the scientific aspect of the Renaissance. As late as the mid-sixteenth century, the great Elizabethan mathematician and magus, John Dee, when compiling his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), used Thabit's De imaginibus : a treatise on planetary images, reflecting the talismanic type of Neoplatonic celestial magic. According to the late Professor Max Meyerhof : “Belonging to the pagan sect of the Sabians and at heart deeply attached to paganism, this scholar is one of the most eminent representatives in the Middle Ages of the tradition of classical culture.”
Thabit ibn Qurra's son, Sinán, a physician of high repute, continued the family tradition. He was appointed head of the medical profession in Baghdad, fortifying his medicine with a thorough knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, logic, metaphysics, as well as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Sinán's generation also provided another influential Sabian : al Battáni (877-918), the famous astronomer and mathematician, born in Persia and known to medieval Europe as Albategnus. The Zij of al-Battáni was translated by Plato of Tivoli two and a half centuries later. According to Carra de Vaux21, al-Battáni was “one of the most illustrious scholars of the East, perhaps the one whom Latin scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance most admired and eulogised.” He compiled astronomical tables with more accurate computations regarding the first appearance of the new moon, the inclination of the ecliptic, the length of the tropic and sidereal year, lunar anomolies, eclipses, parallaxes, than had ever been seen before. His greatest claim to fame was that if he did not discover, then at the very least he popularised the first notions of trigonometrical ratios as used today. Al-Battáni substituted the sine for Ptolemy's clumsy chords; he used the tangent and co-tangent and was acquainted with two or three fundamental relations in trigonometry. His work on trigonometry and algebra brings us, according to de Vaux, “far beyond the point reached by the Greeks and really opens the era of modern science.”
Perhaps the most obvious legacy of the Harranian Hermetists can be seen in the cathedrals and abbeys which have dignified the western catholic world from the time of the construction of the Abbey of Conques (c.1030-1080) onwards. Works translated by Thabit ibn Qurra were central to the understanding of forces and forms which made the Gothic explosion possible. According to the renowned medievalist Jean Gimpel22: “The remarkable Arab contribution to our culture is often underestimated, and yet it was this that made the full flowering of the Middle Ages possible. Without it, the Renaissance could barely have developed and the 20th century might still be technically and scientifically in the nineteenth.” And at the very heart of the Arab contribution were the Hermetic Sabians of Baghdad.
It is, furthermore, difficult to escape the conclusion that Sabian influence in some way helped to shape the mythology of medieval freestone masons : originators of what we now call Freemasonry. The earliest masonic documents recognised by English Freemasons today, the so-called Old Charges, date from around the year 1400, and attribute the survival of the masonic sciences after the Flood to Hermes Trismegistus and to Euclid, operating in Egypt. Such knowledge of these two figures as existed in the western Middle Ages derived, as far as we know, from Harran and Baghdad. It is also recorded in the varied lore of the crusading years that some knights returned from the east with Saracen masons23. A learned mason from the Holy Land would almost certainly have obtained his Arabic translations of Greek technical works on geometry from the Sabian intellectuals of Harran and Baghdad.
It is curious that in the earliest extant copies of (late seventeenth/early eighteenth century) Scottish masonic catechisms24, the master mason's secret word is given as Mahabyn, in association with the teaching of points of masonic fellowship. The origin of this word has always been a mystery to Freemasons. In the context of this study, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the word is derived from mahabba, the Arabic word for love used by Sufi brethren in greeting. The development of Sufic mysticism, or rather gnosis, is linked to the work and beliefs of the Baghdad Sabians.
It seems more than a mere possibility that the translation-work of Thabit has influenced one of the most significant works of European literature and spiritual mythology, and along the way has given us at least one key interpretation of that mysterious phenomenon known as the Holy Grail. The document in question is Wolfram von Eschenbach's (fictional) account of a celestial Gral guarded by ‘templars’ in his Parzifal, written between circa 1200 and 1220. Wolfram's account of how he received the Gral story for his Parzifal is undoubtedly intriguing, as there is the whiff of some historical actuality underlying the fantasy. Wolfram states that one of his sources, “the heathen Flegetanis”, who left a document in Toledo (famous for its translation school), was an astronomer who was both Jewish and, on his father's side, a heathen (he “worshipped a calf as though it was his god”) and that he had seen the Gral, its name spelled out in the stars, and left on earth by a “a troop” who then “rose high above the stars, if their innocence drew them back again”. Wolfram states that the document of Flegetanis had been discovered by “the wise Master” Kyot of Provence, thus tying Wolfram's work into the vogue and status of the Languedoc troubadours for whom there was such a vogue in the courts of Germany. In spite of there having been a historical person called Gyot of Provins, a troubadour, the weight of scholarship falls against the idea that Wolfram is presenting a true story as regards his primary source.
Wolfram's sources, other than the highly catholic Arthurian stories of Chrétien de Troyes, are obscure25. Von Eschenbach was exceptionally well-read, and alchemical sources cannot be ruled out. For example, his account of the Gral bears little conceptual analogy to the idea of it being the cup in which Joseph of Arimathaea collected Christ's blood - as in Robert de Boron's Joseph ou l'Estoire dou Graal (c.1210). Wolfram's setting for his Gral account is almost wholly alchemical. The Gral is identified with the Stone :
‘It is well known to me,’ said his host, ‘that many formidable fighting-men dwell at Munsalvaesche with the Gral. They are continually riding out on sorties in quest of adventure. Whether these same Templars reap trouble or renown, they bear it for their sins. A warlike company lives there. I will tell you how they are nourished. They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called “Lapsit exillis”26. By virtue of this Stone the Phoenix is burned to ashes, in which he is reborn. - Thus does the Phoenix moult its feathers!27 Which done, it shines dazzling bright and lovely as before! Further : however ill a mortal may be, from the day on which he sees the Stone he cannot die for that week, nor does he lose his colour. ..Such powers does the Stone confer on mortal men that their flesh and bones are soon made young again. This Stone is called “The Gral”.
'Today a Message alights upon the Gral governing its highest virtue, for today is Good Friday, when one can infallibly see a Dove wing its way down from Heaven. It brings a small white Wafer to the Stone and leaves it there. The Dove, all dazzling white, then flies up to Heaven again. Every Good Friday, as I say, the Dove brings it to the Stone, from which the Stone receives all that is good on earth of food and drink, of paradisal excellence - I mean whatever the earth yields. The Stone, furthermore, has to give them the flesh of all the wild things that live below the aether, whether they fly, run, or swim - such prebend does the Gral, thanks to its indwelling powers, bestow on the chivalric Brotherhood.
'As to those who are appointed to the Gral, hear how they are made known. Under the top edge of the Stone an inscription announces the name and lineage of the one summoned to make the glad journey. Whether it concerns girls or boys, there is no need to erase their names, for as soon as a name has been read it vanishes from sight! Those who are now full-grown all came here as children. Happy the mother of every child destined to serve there! Rich and poor alike rejoice if a child of theirs is summoned and they are bidden to send it to that Company! Such children are fetched from many countries and forever after are immune from the shame of sin and have a rich reward in Heaven. When they die here in this world, Paradise is theirs in the next28.
'When Lucifer and the Trinity began to war with each other, those who did not take sides, worthy, noble angels, had to descend to earth to that Stone which is forever incorruptible.29
I do not know whether God forgave them or damned them in the end : for if it was His due He took them back. Since that time the Stone has been in the care of those whom God appointed to it and to whom He sent his angel. This, sir, is how matters stand regarding the Gral.'
‘If knightly deeds with shield and lance can win fame for one's earthly self, yet also Paradise for one's soul, then the chivalric life has been my one desire!,’ said Parzifal. ‘I fought wherever fighting was to be had, so that my warlike hand has glory within its grasp. If God is any judge of fighting He will appoint me to that place so that the Company there know me as a knight who will never shun battle.’ (From Parzifal, Chapt.9)
Had von Eschenbach's ‘Flegetanis’, (used here as a cover-name for some of Wolfram's alleged oriental sources), seen Libellus IV.25 of our present Corpus Hermeticum, he would have read there the story of a dish or bowl sent down to earth by God. This account, linking this mythical image directly to gnosis, was probably written in Greek in Alexandria (c.200-300AD), and is of course attributed to the mythic sage, Hermes Trismegistos.
HERMES : ..it is man's function to contemplate the works of God; and for this purpose was he made, that he might view the universe with wondering awe, and come to know its Maker. ..Now speech, my son, God imparted to all men; but mind [nous] he did not impart to all.
TAT : Tell me then father, why did God not impart mind [nous] to all men?
HERMES : It was his will, my son, that mind should be placed in the midst as a prize that human souls may win.
TAT : Where did he place it?
HERMES : He filled a great bowl with nous [mind], and sent it down to earth; and he appointed a herald, and bade him make proclamation to the hearts of men : “Hearken, each human heart; baptize yourself in this bowl, if you can, recognising for what purpose you have been made, and believing that you shall ascend to Him who sent the bowl down.” Now those who gave heed to the proclamation, and dipped themselves in the bath of mind, these men got a share of gnosis; they received mind, and so became complete men… as many as have partaken of the gift which God has sent, these, my son, in comparison with the others, are as immortal gods to mortal men. They embrace in their own mind all the things that are, the things on earth and the things in heaven, if there is aught above heaven; and raising themselves to that height, they see the Good.
This amusing account is plainly a gnostic allegory on the theme of free-will and spiritual predisposition. Acquaintance with the ‘bowl’ (Greek : κρατηρ= krater, origin of our ‘crater’) is a goal well worth seeking30. Are there any grounds for thinking von Eschenbach had access to Hermetic sources? Such access might be considered unlikely until the name of Thabit ibn Qurra emerges from Wolfram's text. Thabit ibn Qurra, the Sabian polymath who took Hermes as his prophet and the Hermetica as his holy book, is mentioned by name in chapter thirteen of Parzifal as a “philosopher” and one who “fathomed abstruse arts”. When Wolfram has cause to list the planets, he gives their names in Arabic. Indeed, the whole of Parzifal is drenched in Germanicisations of oriental lore, which, we may surmise, was exactly what his readers wished to be stimulated by - and he makes it plain that the source for such information was Toledo, which indeed it was. Toledo was where Sabian translations of Greek and Syriac works into Arabic came to be translated into Latin.
This is a timely moment to look at what else came to the minds of western medieval scholars as a result of the Hermetic impulse in the east.
One very important magical text extant in the Middle Ages was that compendium known as Picatrix. This was a Latin version of the Arabic treatise Ghayat al-hakim (The Aim of the Sage), which appeared in Spain in the eleventh century and which was translated in about 1256. The work emanated from the Sabian school of Harran. Picatrix exercised an immense influence, being, according to Ernesto Garin, a major conduit of Neoplatonist thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In it we see a conflation of Hermetic, Jewish, Neoplatonic and vulgar magic, and through it we catch a glimpse of the mind which saw all these strands as related and conceptually inseparable.
Picatrix is a comprehensive treatise on sympathetic and astral magic with particular reference to the making of talismans. The work explains how to draw down the influences of the stars by establishing chains of correspondences with the celestial world. The author or authors perhaps recognised something which has only recently re-entered scientific speculation : that the universe may be considered as an ‘holistic’ system of interdependent activity where all things relate implicitly to all other things, that we isolate things for perceptual convenience by rationation. Picatrix maintains that the whole art of magic consists in “capturing” and guiding the influence of spiritus, (something like the souls of the celestial world, below intellectus, or the Greek nous) into materia. The method consisted in making talismans : images associated with the stars, inscribed on the correct materials at the most propitious times (astrology played a part), and in the right state of mind31. The practice demanded a deep knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, music and metaphysics, and formed a kind of mirror to the practice of alchemy. Talismanic magic aimed to get spiritus into material form, while alchemy aimed at extracting spiritus from matter in order to change the matter and the mind of the operator.
The book also contains an account of one of the first metropolitan utopias, the city of Adocentyn, (Arabic : al-Asmunain), built by Hermes and kept under good influences by astral magic. This idea was to reappear in the ideal schemes of Thomas More in the 16th century and in the ideal visions of both Francis Bacon (New Atlantis. 1627) and the founder of the Rosicrucian idea, Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), and is central to the history of European utopianism. Furthermore, Picatrix contained a description of an underground vault which may have influenced Johann Valentin Andreae's conception of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz in the Fama Fraternitatis (pub. 1614) :
When I wished to bring to light the science of the mystery and nature of creation, I came upon a subterranean vault full of darkness and winds. I could see nothing because of the darkness, nor could I keep my lamp alight because of the many winds. Then a person appeared to me in my sleep in a form of the greatest beauty. He said to me : “Take a lamp and place it under a glass and shield it from the winds : then it will give thee light in spite of them. Then go into the vault; dig in its centre and from there bring forth a certain talismanic image, artfully made. When you have drawn out this image, the winds will cease to blow through the vault. Then dig in its four corners and you will bring to light the knowledge of the mysteries of creation, the causes of nature, the origins and qualities of things.” At that I said to him : “Who art thou?” He replied : “I am thy Perfect Nature. If thou wishest to see me, call me by my name.”32
From Baghdad via Spain came Thabit ibn Qurra's De imaginibus on talismanic, Neoplatonist celestial magic, and al-Kindi's important De radiis or Theorica artium magicarum : talismanic and liturgical magic in the context of a philosophy of causation based on the emanation of rays. The author, Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, (born in 850 in the southern Arabian peninsular and educated in Baghdad), also translated the “Theology” (Uthulujiyya) of Aristotle. This work was not by Aristotle but was in fact a commentary by Porphyry on books iv to vi of the Enneads of Plotinus, and was known in the west as the Liber de causis or Book of Causes. The book represents a kind of gnosticising of Plotinus, describing the descent of the soul, from the pure incorporeal realm of “intelligence” into the world of sense and corporeality. Very much like the second-century Gnostic Valentinian myth of the yearning Sophia (Wisdom), the soul produces the world of perception out of its pain and desire to give form to the ideal or intellectual forms which are present to it, and which derive from its origin in the active intellect of God the One. The soul or spirit (intellectus to the Latins in this context), creates reality. This gnostic theory of perception was to have great impact in the West for centuries and something like it is currently being revived in the world of quantum physics as well as in the continental philosophy of perception and optics. These ideas were directly to affect al-Kindi's work on light, rays, mirrors and the whole field of optics and were to colour that area of study for Latin scholars interested in the physics of light.
Al-Kindi's de radiis was highly influential on two medieval geniuses: Friar Roger Bacon (c.1214/20-c.1292) and Robert Grosseteste (1168/70-1253). It was particularly influential because it tried to explain through a natural philosophy that astral and other magical effects could be explained without demonology, through the propagation of astral and other ‘natural’ rays. In other words, it was a work of natural, not supernatural, science.
The theory of this ‘natural magic’ (there is of course no distinction between science and magic in this period) runs as follows. The nature and condition of a star is emitted as a ray. All terrestrial events are the product of a total harmony of rays in the heavens, a view which was often blended with both geometry and the more mystical light metaphysics, and served against the imputation of vulgar magic levelled at the ‘scientist’. Robert Grosseteste interpreted al-Kindi's work as grounds for believing that the essence of light is the formative and structural principle of the universe. According to Grosseteste, in a striking conceptual premonition of Einstein's famous formula (E=mc2), the universe is the result of the union of formless prime matter and ‘light’, of which visible light is only an aspect. Our word ‘radiation’ of course derives from the idea of astral rays. Grosseteste believed that a point of ‘light’ can produce a sphere of any size - again a striking premonition of the hidden potential within the atom - and that light formed the basis of spacial dimension and physical extension. Thus, man's essential being was light : a somewhat gnostic view. For Grosseteste, light was the principle and model for all natural operations, including the emanation of species and the virtues of things; as with light, all causes of natural effects operate by lines, angles and figures. The differences between phenomena depend on the laws of optics and perspective. Geometric optics thus became the basis for a mathematical philosophy of nature, affecting and effecting everything, including astrology. For example, a stellar virtue was understood to act more strongly when concentrated rather than when diffused through refraction or reflection, or when striking perpendicularly rather than obliquely, due to the numerically lower angles of incidence of those rays when reaching the earth. Astral influences were regarded not as occult forces or demonic powers but as rays which behaved as light. Thus, mathematics had become a divine science, or science of the divine. The full implications of this shift in perspective would have to wait until the seventeenth century for its fulfillment in the scientific revolution33. Nevertheless, Grosseteste's universe was still magical, but the magic was determined by an understanding of mathematical and physical laws. The deterministic power of the stars had been theoretically overcome by the illumination gained by knowledge of their mathematical nature. Hermetically-influenced manuscripts oversaw the birth of Natural Magic : the critical stage before the birth of modern science, the latter rejecting its mother in infancy.34
The Sabians lived on at Baghdad as a separate sect until about 1050, seeing out the decline of the Golden Age inaugurated by the great caliphs (al-Mansur, ar-Rashíd and al-Ma'mún). Shortly before 950, the Buwayhids took over the governance of Baghdad and a period of strictly enforced Islamic orthodoxy took place, lasting until the coming of the Seljuks in 1055. Explicit Hermetism went underground - or perhaps devotees simply changed their hierophant's name from Hermes to Muhammad.
It is certainly strange that at the very time the Sabians seem to disappear from Baghdad, the Hermetic documents known to us as the Corpus Hermeticum appear in Constantinople - after a 500 year interval - in the hands of the Platonic scholar, Psellus. As Walter Scott (d.1925), a translator of the Hermetica, wrote in his introduction to that work : “Is there not something more than chance in this?” What we now know as the Corpus Hermeticum may be no more than a chance collection of what was brought to Constantinople by a Sabian to escape destruction. Although conjectural, “there is nothing to prevent us from supposing that it was the arrival in Constantinople of a few such Sabian Neoplatonists from Baghdad, and the writing which they brought with them, that first started the revival of Platonic study in which Psellus took the leading part.” (Scott). Such an occurrence would certainly be strikingly similar to that by which the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence from Macedonia with such epoch-marking momentousness in 1460, following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 (see chapter four). And can it be complete external co-incidence that the disappearance of the Baghdad Sabians also coincides with the appearance of the first great Sufi order, in Baghdad, in the form by which the turuq (paths) of Sufi mysticism are now known?
The alchemist known to medieval westerners as Geber has been identified as Jabir ibn Hayyan, called as-Sufi (‘the Mystic’), but it is highly unlikely that much of the material which bears his name has anything to do with this eighth century sage. The works attributed to him are now thought to have been put together in the tenth century by some kind of secret society. There certainly was a Jabir, famous as the father of Arabic alchemy, born at Kufa and who practised as a physician to the family of the Barmecides, the viziers of Harun ar-Rashíd, caliph of Baghdad. Implicated in the downfall of the Barmecides, Jabir died in exile from Baghdad at Kufa in 803, where it is said his laboratory was discovered 200 years later.
There are about one hundred works of Jabir extant. Many are, in the words of Professor Max Meyerhof (no sympathiser with mysticism) “confused jumbles of puerile superstition”. Others suggest the profound need for experiment, a unique trait of the Geber literature. His greatest fame lies in his practical scientific advances. He improved methods for evaporation, filtration, sublimation, melting, distillation and crystallisation. He described the preparation of, for example, cinnabar (sulphide of mercury), arsenious oxide and others. He knew how to obtain almost pure vitriols, alums, alkalis, sal-ammoniac, saltpetre, and ‘liver’ and ‘milk’ of sulphur by heating sulphur and alkali. He prepared fairly pure mercury oxide and sublimate, acetates of lead and other metals, sometimes crystalised. He obtained crude sulphuric and nitric acids as a mixture of them (aqua regia=kingly water), and explored the solubility of gold and silver in this acid. Several technical terms of alchemy were derived from Jabir's Arabic writings : realgar (red sulphide of arsenic), tutia (zinc oxide), alkali, antimony (Arabic : ithmid), alembic (for the upper) and aludel for the lower part of the distillation vessel. His Book of the Seventy was known from the Middle Ages in an inferior and incomplete Latin version, translated by Gérard of Cremona (d.1187). His Book of the Composition of Alchemy was translated by the Englishman Robert of Chester in 1144. Albertus Magnus (c.1206-1280), a thinker saturated in Neoplatonic learning, repeated Geber's teachings in his De Mineralibus, and Geber had a very pronounced influence on the encyclopaedic Speculum Naturale of Vincent of Beauvais. The large number of alchemical tracts ascribed to Arnald of Villanova and to Raymond (Ramon) Lull (c.1232-1315), the Majorcan mystic, are brimming with quotations from the works of Geber.
Geber's work also gave his followers clues as to the critical question of the state of mind of the alchemist when undergoing alchemical operations. Alchemy was a psychic experience for the successful operator. As Jung puts it : “what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious35.” The making of the Stone transcends reason - as we should expect of a noetic, out of the ‘body’ (ego) experience. Geber's Liber perfecti magisterii demands that the operator, or artifex, be of a most subtle mind, with an adequate knowledge of metals and minerals. He must not have a coarse or rigid mind, nor should he be greedy or avaricious, irresolute or vacillating. He must not be hasty or vain. Firmness of purpose, perseverence, patience, mildness, a capacity for long-suffering, good-temper will be rewarded by God's enlightening the artifex and making Himself known. Morienus, said to have been the teacher of the Omayyad prince Khalid ibn-Jazid ibn-Muawiyah (635-706 AD), is quoted with approval : “This is the science that draws its master away from the suffering of this world and leads to the knowledge of future good.”
Another Moslem who passed on the Greek and Graeco-Egyptian alchemical inheritance was al Rhazi, known to the west as Rhazes (c.865-925). His immediate sources were Christian and Sabian Syriac translations of Greek texts, made at the heyday of the Sabian presence in Baghdad. Al-Razi, a Persian Muslim born at Rayy near Teheran, is known as the greatest physician of the Islamic world, having studied alchemy as a youth. This connection between medicine and alchemy, noted also in respect of Jabir is a most significant one, and is central to the early seventeenth century conception of the ‘Rosicrucian Brother’ as a healer, using the divine powers hidden in nature for the good of humanity : an image partly based on the example of Paracelsus (d.1541) who followed, somewhat belatedly, these oriental sages in stressing the need for observation, experiment and sensible classification37. Although partly dependent on the same Greek sources as Jabir, al Razi excelled in exact classification of substances with clear descriptions of chemical processes and apparatus, consistently devoid of unnecessary mystical elements. This is demonstrated in his great Book of the Art (of alchemy) discovered in the library of an Indian prince in the 1920s. While Jabir and other Arabian alchemists divided mineral substances into ‘Bodies’ (gold, silver &c.), ‘Souls’, (sulphur, arsenic &c.), and ‘Spirits’ (mercury and sal-ammoniac), al Razi classified the alchemical substances as vegetable, animal or mineral - now a well-known division, and opened the way for a more objective chemistry. His classification did however allow for a restated concept of spirits and bodies. He divided minerals into spirits, bodies, stones, vitriols, boraxes, and salts, and distinguished volatile ‘bodies’ from non-volatile ‘spirits’, placing among the latter, sulphur, mercury, arsenic and salmiac.
The second half of the fifteenth century saw an explosion of interest in Europe in the newly printed works of Graeco-Arabic alchemy, but this movement had abated by 1550, partly as a result of the catastrophically divisive effects of the Reformation, (the dissolution of the greater and lesser monasteries in England in the 1530s may well have been injurious to the movement), and the growth of Aristotelian and Platonic classicism, along with a high-brow Ciceronian complacency and Averroistic scepticism.
One figure in particular stands at the twilight of the high Middle Ages, testifying to the power of medieval alchemy before Christendom finally broke apart. That figure was Sir George Ripley.
Ripley was an Augustinian monk and sometime canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire, born at about the time of Agincourt. In 1471 he compiled the Compound of Alchemie and was also the author of the Medulla Alchimiae (1476). His works were collected into the Opera omnia chemica38 (from which the quotations following have been taken), a work central to that of his pupil, the more famous Thomas Norton39, author of the Ordinall of Alchemy (in English verse) which was to be included wholesale in Elias Ashmole's ground-breaking Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652), and a work subject to the intense study of no less a personage than Isaac Newton, alchemical enthusiast.
It is highly significant that Ripley was part of the monastic system in England, for it is now clear that it was this system which provided the major conduit of Hermetic alchemical lore throughout the Middle Ages. The prime reason that this picture has taken so long to become clear is simply the criminal wastage of monastic libraries which took place during the Dissolution in England. According to J.C Dickinson, before the Dissolution “Some large monastic libraries had about 2000 manuscripts and many houses must have had several hundred. Hence it does not seem rash to estimate the total books in the 900 English monasteries existing in the opening of the sixteenth century as several hundred thousand. If this were so the surviving element [about 3600 works] cannot represent more than a very minute percentage - perhaps 5% would over-estimate it.”40 It is not uncommon to see the Dissolution of the Monasteries as a final (if cruelly brusque) clearing-away of the detritus of an age which had - as the vulgar phrase has it - ‘passed its sell-by date’. The question is too great a one to be gone into in this particular work41, but one thing is clear, that if Ripley's alchemical work is anything to go by, a flame of spiritual inspiration was still bright at least in some quarters of the English monastic world as that age (later) called medieval passed into that period posthumously called the Renaissance42.
Ripley's work seems to bear out the modern view, first established by Professor Carl Jung,43 that while transformation as a principle was the chief aim of the alchemist, it was transformation of the ‘wet’, earth-bound soul into spirit which was held in greatest esteem by those ‘chymists’ who so fervently distinguished themselves from the vain seekers of “vulgar gold” : spiritual gold was their primary aim; material benefits were regarded as parergons or by-products of the spiritual opus.44 Again, one must bear in mind the sitz in leben of the spiritual alchemist : the cloistered, sacral life.
The alchemist projects his purified mind (imagination) into the natural world : “The aerial soul is the secret fire of our philosophy, our oil, our mystic water.”45 Into the vision of the natural world - and in particular into the world of chemical change - the alchemist actualised the contents of his unconscious - the archetypal world ‘outside’ of nature - which are constellated on seeing analagous processes in the chemical vase. Of course, the alchemists did not use concepts such as the ‘unconscious’ and as a result held their perceptions as emanating from a divine source. Ripley was aware that he was employing imagery, that is the imaginative life : the creative principle of the mind. He says that all his secrets are formed from an “image” (imago) 46. The alchemist begins the operation with the ‘first matter’ or prima materia : something of the world - the first ‘stone’ of the work (recall Ostanes' stone of the Nile in chapter 2). This ‘stone’ can be found everywhere; it passes unnoticed by worldly eyes : “The philosophers tell the inquirer that birds and fishes bring us the lapis [stone], every man has it, it is in every place, in you, in me, in everything, in time and space.”47 “It offers itself in lowly form. From it there springs our eternal water [aqua permanens].”48
The implicit identification of the stone's mercurial secret with Christ is clear enough. Christ the lowly messenger was “in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.” (John I.10). By taking the alchemical root to spiritual awareness, Ripley automatically found himself (though probably unbeknownst to himself) in the gnostic territory where the “living Jesus” is actualised in himself. The Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas (unknown to Ripley of course) elucidates this mysterious territory with remarkable clarity:
From Me did the All come forth, and unto Me did the All extend. Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find Me there. (46.25)
It [the Kingdom of the Father] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘Here it is’ or ‘There it is.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it. (50.14ff.)
According to Jung, “Ripley belonged to an age when God and his mysteries still dwelt in nature, when the mystery of redemption was at work on every level of existence, therefore unconscious happenings still lived in untroubled, paradisal participation with matter and could be experienced there.”49
Ripley was content to use Christian typology for the alchemical work in a way which when seen by uncomprehending eyes would certainly have appeared blasphemous : one of several reasons why the alchemist worked in secret.
Christ said : “If I be lifted up, I will draw all men unto me.” From that time forward, when both parts, having been crucified and exanimated [souls separated], are betrothed to one another man and wife shall be buried together and afterward quickened again by the spirit of life. Then must they be raised to heaven, so that body and soul may be there transfigured and enthroned on the clouds; then they will draw all bodies to their own high estate. (Opera omnia chemica. p. 81).
The life and passion of Christ is clearly taken here as the archetypal alchemical process : something to be enacted both by and within the being of the artifex himself. Substances could be ‘redeemed’ through transformation of their inner life. That inner life was normally called the mercurius, a word not necessarily denoting the chemical of that name (mercury) but the animating spirit which alchemists believed to be diffused throughout nature. In the words of the alchemist Paracelsus (who was born when Ripley was in his sixties) “There are as many mercuries as there are things.” Mercurius is usually the penetrating agent of the transformative work : the spirit which acts upon the ‘souls’ of lesser substances.
This concept of the alchemical mercurius50 is directly linked to the ancient Egyptian god Thoth who as the communicative, transformative and binding deity was worshipped by the ancients in his Roman form of Mercury and Greek form as Hermes at particular geographical features such as hills, streams, wells, springs and groves. These were the places where the unhappy wanderer might experience panic, that is to say an experience of the god Pan : the All - Nature as an immeasurable and overwhelming immensity. Such a place could put ‘the fear of god’ into the uninitiated51. When Hermes Trismegistos in Libellus I of the Corpus Hermeticum encounters the “authentic Nous”, this being (called Poimandres) is described as “a Being of vast and boundless magnitude.” The gnostic faculty of nous (mind or spirit) is thus identified with the substance of the All : in Ripley's alchemy the source of the “All” is clearly identified with Christ, to whom “all bodies” are drawn (cf : “from Me did the All come forth, and unto me did the All extend.” - Gospel of Thomas).
It is remarkable how the essence of gnostic psychology was so well preserved within the polyvalent traditions of Hermetic alchemy, without the benefit of the explicitly Gnostic texts now known to us.