Arabic alchemy: from al-kīmiyā' to the Emerald Tablet

In the article on The Kybalion we saw that the book, which presents itself as the wisdom of Hermes, names nothing Arabic or Islamic, when the oldest known versions of the Emerald Tablet are Arabic. This article goes there: the alchemy written in Arabic between the 8th and 11th centuries that then passed into Latin.

This is the second version of the article. The first rested entirely on Wikipedia; this one goes, wherever I could, to the sources Wikipedia cites. I read in Arabic the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadim, the catalogue of books that a Baghdad bookseller completed in 987; passages of al-Tabari and of Ibn Abi Usaybi'a; and the chapter on alchemy of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. I read in French the description Silvestre de Sacy published in 1799 of the Book of the Secret of Creation, translated from an Arabic manuscript; in German, Julius Ruska's study of the Emerald Tablet (1926); in Latin, the preface of Robert of Chester; and in English, Newton's manuscript. The rest still comes from Wikipedia, and I say so each time. The translations into English of the Arabic, French, German and Latin are mine.

A word that travels

The word "alchemy" comes from the Arabic الكيمياء (al-kīmiyā'), which may in turn come from the Egyptian kemi ("black") or the Greek khumeia ("fusion"). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Islamic conquest of Roman Egypt, the centre of alchemy moved to the Caliphate.¹

It is worth understanding "Arabic" properly. Here it names a language, not an origin. For the historian A. I. Sabra, "Arabic science" is that of people who lived between the 8th century and modern times, from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa to the Indus valley, and whose results were expressed mostly in Arabic. Al-Razi was Persian; Ibn Umayl, Egyptian; and the fragments of the Cairo Genizah show Jews writing alchemical recipes in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic.¹

Hermes becomes Idris

The Greek texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Hermetica, appeared in Graeco-Roman Egypt from the 1st century BC and were translated into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Middle Persian before Islam. After the Arab conquests of the 630s, a group of intellectuals writing in Arabic received them, translated them and began to produce Hermetica of their own. By the 10th century, some Arabic-speaking Muslims had come to identify Hermes with the prophet Idris, which raised those texts to the rank of other prophetic revelations.²

The pieces of that identification can be seen in the sources. In the early 10th century the historian al-Tabari, listing the descendants of Adam, writes: "Yared begat Akhnukh, who is the prophet Idris" —Akhnukh is Enoch, the one in the Bible.³ A century later al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik takes the missing step, as the physician Ibn Abi Usaybi'a quotes him: Hermes, "which is the name of Mercury, is called among the Greeks Trismegistus, among the Arabs Idris and among the Hebrews Akhnukh".⁴ And the Fihrist, in 987, shows how little was known of him: under the heading "Hermes the Babylonian" it says that "there has been disagreement about him", that he was one of the seven guardians of the seven temples, the one of Mercury, whose name in Chaldean is Hermes, and that he went to Egypt, ruled there and is buried in one of the pyramids.⁵

Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian psychologist, describes the process like this: in the 7th and 8th centuries Islamic scholars devoted themselves mainly to translating Hermetic and Gnostic texts without changing them; little by little they confronted them with Islam, adding the emphasis on the oneness of God (tawḥīd), more poetic language and more stress on the union of opposites, such as sun and moon.¹ It is one reading among others.

The Emerald Tablet, in Arabic

The oldest version of the Tablet is at the end of a treatise on natural philosophy meant as a cosmogony, the Book of the Secret of Creation (Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa), which presents itself as a work of Apollonius of Tyana, whom the Arabs called Balīnūs.²

Its opening was translated into French by Silvestre de Sacy in 1799. Balinus speaks: he was a poor orphan, and where he lived there was a stone statue on a wooden column. On the column an inscription of Hermes said that knowledge had been given to him; and on the statue's chest one read: "If anyone wishes to know the secret of the creation of beings, and in what manner nature was formed, let him look beneath my feet". Everyone looked and no one saw anything. He, once grown, understood, dug beneath the column and found an underground passage so dark, and with a wind so strong, that it blew out his torches. He fell asleep in sorrow, and in a dream an old man who looked like him told him to place the light under a transparent vessel; when Balinus asked who he was, he answered: "I am your creator". So he went in, and saw "an old man seated on a throne of gold, who held in one hand a tablet of emerald", and before him a book: the one of the secret of creation.⁶

Ruska, in 1926, translated into German the end of the book from another manuscript, and there the verses of the tablet appear. They are introduced by "the priest Sagijus of Nablus", who says he found them at the end of the book, and the text explains that they were written "in Syriac, in the original language".⁷ The second verse says, in Arabic:

إنّ الأعلى من الأسفل والأسفل من الأعلى — Inna l-aʿlā min al-asfal wa-l-asfal min al-aʿlā.

The highest is from the lowest, and the lowest is from the highest. The key word is min, "from, out of".² Ruska, with another manuscript, reads the same: "Das Oberste (kommt) vom Untersten, und das Unterste vom Obersten", "the highest (comes) from the lowest, and the lowest from the highest".⁷ Keep it in mind, because further down it changes.

When is it from? Ruska dated it at the latest to around 750, because he believed Jabir already knew the book, and did not think it earlier than the 6th century.⁷ Today it is believed to have been compiled in the late 8th or early 9th century, wholly or partly from earlier Greek or Syriac materials.² From where, no one knows. Ruska wrote that its story of creation "is neither Islamic, nor Persian, nor Christian", but "astrological through and through", and he wondered whether to call it Chaldean, Gnostic or Harranian, or whether it might come from the great oases of the Oxus and the Jaxartes —Merv, Balkh, Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand— which since antiquity had linked West and East.⁷ Chang Tzu-Kung went as far as proposing a Chinese origin; Joseph Needham rejected it as unproven.²

Jabir, who may not have existed

Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān is the supposed author of an enormous body of work, the Jabirian corpus: according to modern scholars, some 215 surviving treatises on alchemy and chemistry, magic and Shi'i religious philosophy, tentatively dated between c. 850 and c. 950. It contains the oldest known systematic classification of chemical substances and one of the first versions of the sulfur–mercury theory: metals form in the earth by the union of sulfur, which gives the hot and dry, with mercury, which gives the cold and moist, and which metal results depends on purity and proportion. That sulfur and that mercury are not the ordinary ones, but ideal substances.¹⁸ Much of the writing deals with the "science of the balance" (ʿilm al-mīzān), which sought to reduce every phenomenon to measures and proportions; and alongside it there is a numerology of letters, which is not chemistry and should not be mixed with it.⁸¹

And no one knows whether he existed. The first to tell of him is Ibn al-Nadim, in the Fihrist. He calls him "Abu Abdallah Jabir ibn Hayyan ibn Abdallah al-Kufi, known as the Sufi", and says at once that "people disagreed about him": the Shi'a held him to be one of their great men and a companion of the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq; some philosophers claimed him as a philosopher; and the people of the art of gold and silver said that leadership in the subject had reached him in his time, and that he lived in hiding, from city to city, for fear of the authorities. He also reports what an informant told him: that in Kufa, in the time of the emir 'Izz al-Dawla, a gold mortar weighing some two hundred raṭl was found in a vault, and that the place had been Jabir's house.⁵

And then: "A group of scholars and of the leading booksellers said that this man, Jabir, has no origin and no reality". Others, that if he did exist he wrote only the Book of Mercy, and that the rest were written by people and attributed to him. Ibn al-Nadim disagrees: that a man of merit should sit and toil to write a book of two thousand leaves and then attribute it to someone else, existing or not, seems to him "a kind of ignorance"; and he adds that al-Razi, in his books on alchemy, writes "our master Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan said".⁵ Modern scholars, by contrast, think "Jabir" was the pseudonym of an anonymous school of Shi'i alchemists of the late 9th and early 10th centuries.⁸

Four centuries later, Ibn Khaldun still saw him as the master: "the imam of those who wrote on it is Jabir ibn Hayyan, so much so that they attribute it to him alone and call it the science of Jabir; he has seventy epistles on it, all of them like riddles". Though he himself did not believe in alchemy as a craft: whoever pursues it that way, he writes, "wastes his money and his work".⁹ Some of Jabir's works were translated into Latin under the name Geber, and in the 13th century an anonymous author, "pseudo-Geber", began to write under that name.⁸

Al-Razi, who believed in it

Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (c. 865–925), born in Rayy, was above all a Persian physician.¹⁰ The first version of this article presented him as someone who doubted he could make gold, on the strength of an anecdote that Wikipedia takes from a modern biography. The oldest source I read says the opposite.

The Fihrist, written some sixty years after his death, says that al-Razi "held the Art to be true" —kāna yarā ḥaqīqat al-ṣanʿa— and that he wrote many books on it: a series of twelve and, after that, others, among them al-Asrār ("The Secrets") and Sirr al-asrār ("The Secret of Secrets"). One of the twelve is titled That the Art of Alchemy Is Closer to the Necessary than to the Impossible. And in discussing the origin of alchemy, Ibn al-Nadim records an even stronger opinion of his: that philosophy is not sound, nor can anyone be called a philosopher, unless he masters alchemy, with which he needs no one and everyone needs him.⁵

The anecdote of doubt —a general called Simjur asks him in public whether he treats the sick for free because he knows how to make gold, and he answers that he has long studied metals and very much doubts that copper can be transmuted into gold— is told by Khosro Moetazed in a modern biography, according to Wikipedia.¹⁰ I found no ancient source for it, and I leave it at that: a story that circulates, against what the catalogue closest to him says.

Doubt did exist, but in others. Among the books of the philosopher al-Kindi (801–873), the Fihrist records an Epistle on the Falsity of the Claim of Those Who Say They Make Gold and Silver, and Their Deceptions; and among al-Razi's, a Refutation of al-Kindi in His Refutation of the Art.⁵¹⁰ In other words: in the 9th century, in Baghdad, two of its great thinkers argued over whether gold could be made, and al-Razi was on the side of those who said yes.

Al-Razi lists operations (distillation, calcination, dissolution, evaporation, crystallisation, sublimation, filtration, amalgamation) and apparatus, with Arabic names that travelled: the alembic (anbīq), the aludel (al-uthāl) and the athanor furnace, from the Arabic al-tannūr. He follows Jabir's mercury–sulfur theory and adds a third component, salt.¹

From Arabic to Latin

Hermann of Carinthia quotes the Emerald Tablet in 1143, in his treatise De essentiis.² His friend Robert of Chester translated in 1144 the Book of the Composition of Alchemy, generally considered the first Latin translation of an Arabic treatise on alchemy; he worked in Segovia, on a peninsula divided between Muslim and Christian rulers.¹¹

His preface says it in so many words: "what alchemy is, and what its composition is, your Latin world does not yet know". He confesses that his wit is young and his Latin "very modest", and he begins with Hermes: there were three. The first was Enoch, "who by another name was called Hermes, and by another, Mercury"; the second, Noah; and the third, the one who reigned in Egypt after the flood, whom they called "Threefold".¹² It is the same chain seen in al-Tabari and al-Mubashshir: the Enoch who in Arabic is Idris and Hermes reached Latin on the first page of the book held to be the first translation of Arabic alchemy.

The Tablet had its own Latin translation in the first half of the 12th century, by an unknown translator. That translator did not understand the Arabic word ṭilasm ("talisman, enigma") and transcribed it as telesmus: an accidental neologism that commentators interpreted in a thousand ways and that ended up as one of the most distinctive and ambiguous words of alchemy.² It was first printed in 1541, in Nuremberg, with the commentary of Hortulanus, in Johannes Petreius's volume De Alchemia.⁷

One verse, three eras

Newton did not translate from Arabic but from Latin: his English translation is in a manuscript now held by King's College, Cambridge, and at the foot he refers to the French Bibliothèque des philosophes and to the Theatrum Chemicum.¹³ You can see the three versions verse by verse in the block below. Choose the second, "Above and below".

The change is in one word. The Arabic says that the high comes from the low. The Latin says that the low is like the high, and Newton writes: "That which is below is like that which is above".¹³ "As above, so below" is a paraphrase of the second verse of the Latin version, popularised by Helena Blavatsky and also used by The Kybalion.² That is: one of the most quoted maxims of the Hermetic tradition comes from a translation, not from the oldest text.

Other verses change too. In the fifth, the Arabic of Weisser's edition gives an order ("separate the earth from the fire") and, in a separate sentence, a valuation: "the subtle is nobler than the gross". The Latin of 1541 fuses them into one operation: "you will separate the subtle from the thick". And the manuscript Ruska read says something else again: take the earth away from the fire, "and the fine will become more adherent to you than the coarse".⁷ It is nobody's mistake: it is what happens when a text changes language, and manuscript.

What I could not read

I did not read Ursula Weisser's edition of the Secret of Creation (1979): I take the Arabic of the second verse from Wikipedia and check it against Ruska's translation, which agrees. I did not read Paul Kraus, who catalogued Jabir's corpus, nor any of its treatises: the figures on the corpus and the anonymous-school thesis come from Wikipedia. I did not read al-Razi's books: what I say of them comes from their titles and from what the Fihrist reports, which I read in the Arabic text on Wikisource without collating it with Flügel's edition (1871–1872). Al-Mubashshir's words I know through Ibn Abi Usaybi'a's quotation. Of Robert of Chester I read the preface as Manget printed it in 1702, which gives no date: the years 1143 and 1144 come from Wikipedia. The Encyclopaedia Iranica, which would be an ideal source, cannot be read from this server. If you read Arabic and want to correct us or add sources, this Journal needs you.

What we do with this

What this verse teaches is how something is lost and gained in each translation, and how a famous phrase can come from one version and not another. And what al-Razi teaches is that an article can also go wrong if it stays with the most convenient source. That is why sources here are cited with their language, we say what was read, and when something is corrected, we say so.

Anima Mundis claims no ancient wisdom. What it can count, at the Observatory, is how many times someone said how they were and at what hour UTC. It is a modest count, and it can be checked.