Persian alchemy: copper, gold and the soul in Ghazali

After Chinese alchemy, Arabic and Indian, this article goes to Persia. It is not about the Persian texts that teach how to work metals, which I did not read, but about what Persian did with the word. I read in Persian Ghazali's Kīmiyā-yi saʿādat ("The Alchemy of Happiness"): I downloaded the whole text published by Ganjoor, 443 pages, and searched it for the word "alchemy". The passages I cite I read in context; the rest, which is a lot, I did not, and I say so at the end. The translations are mine and may contain mistakes; that is why the Persian sentences are given.

A word that enters Persian

The Persian Wikipedia explains that kīmiyā entered Persian from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ, which is in turn related to late Greek forms (khēmeía), although there are different views on the ultimate origin. It adds that the large number of Arabic and Persian alchemical manuscripts shows that alchemy interested people both as theory and as a set of techniques.¹ The Arabic side we have already seen: Jabir, al-Razi, the Emerald Tablet. What follows is something else: what someone writing in Persian does with that word.

Who and when

Ghazali was born in Tus in the year 450 of the Hijra and died in the same place in 505 (about 1058–1111). The biography Ganjoor gives presents Ghazali as a theologian, jurist and one of the great figures of eleventh-century Sufism. Ghazali taught at the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, left teaching because of illness and doubts born of the study of philosophy, travelled, and returned to Tus, where, according to that biography, the best-known works were written.² The Kīmiyā-yi saʿādat is written in Persian, in the last years of the fifth century of the Hijra, as a summary of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, the large work, with four "headings" (knowing oneself, knowing God, knowing the world, knowing the last things) and four "pillars" (the practices, dealings between people, what destroys and what saves).³

The preface: two alchemies

The preface says this about the soul (which Ghazali calls gowhar, "jewel, essence"): at first it is imperfect, and only through striving and cure can it reach perfection. And goes on:⁴

و چنان که آن کیمیا که مس و برنج را به صفای زر خالص رساند دشوار بود و هر کس نشناسد همچنین این کیمیا که گوهر آدمی را از خشت بهیمیت به صفا و نفاست ملکیت رسانید تا بدان سعادت ابدی یابد هم دشوار بود و هر کسی نداند.

"And just as that alchemy which brings copper and brass to the purity of pure gold is difficult, and not everyone knows it, so this alchemy which brings the jewel of the human being from the brick of animality to the purity and preciousness of the angelic, so that with it eternal happiness is reached, is also difficult, and not everyone knows it."

And it explains why the book has that name: the difference between copper and gold "is no more than yellowness and weight", and the fruit of that alchemy "is no more than the comfort of this world", and how long does the world last?; whereas the distance between the qualities of beasts and those of angels is that between "the lowest of the low and the highest of the high", and its fruit is eternal happiness. It ends:⁴

پس نام کیمیا جز بدین کیمیا عاریت است.

"So the name of alchemy, for any other than this one, is a loan."

The two sit side by side in the block below, with the book's own sentences.

Two clarifications. The first: Ghazali does not say that the alchemy of metals is false. Ghazali speaks of it as an art that exists and is difficult, and in chapter 15 of the first heading adds a sceptical historian's judgment: books of alchemy, talk of it and its seekers are many, but "its truth, over a long time, does not reach just anyone's hand, and of most of those who set out to seek it, what comes out is false" (qallābī, like a coin of bad alloy).⁵ The second: in the "Method" row there is only one column. Ghazali describes no procedure for metals; for the soul, yes, in words of the trade.

The formula

In the second section of the preface the alchemy of the soul has a formula (noskha). Ghazali says God sent the prophets, "a hundred and twenty-four thousand" of them, the text says, to teach it: how the jewel must be put "in the crucible of striving" (mujāhada), how the reprehensible habits, from which come "the dross and turbidity" of the heart, must be removed from it, and how the praiseworthy qualities must be applied to it. The aim is that it be clean and stripped of all it should not have, the qualities of lack, and adorned with all it should have, those of perfection. And the essential: to turn the face away from the world and set it on God.⁴

Here is a religious claim that it is not for me to check: that this alchemy is found only in the "treasury" of the divine, which in the sky is the jewels of the angels and on earth the hearts of the prophets, and that whoever seeks it by another road "will have taken the wrong road and in the end will turn out false".⁴ I report it because the book says it.

What is transformed: the heart

The first heading begins with a sentence that Ghazali presents as something that "has been said": man ʿarafa nafsahu faqad ʿarafa rabbahu, "whoever knows their soul knows their Lord", together with a verse promising to show signs "on the horizons and in themselves". And goes on: nothing is nearer to you than you; if you do not know yourself, how will you know another? Whoever believes they know themselves because they know they have a head, hands and skin and eat when hungry knows of themselves what an animal knows of its own.⁵

What Ghazali calls "the heart" (del) is not the flesh on the left side of the chest, which animals and the dead also have. It is the inner meaning of the person, which "is known with the inner sight and not with the eye", and which came to this world "in passing".⁵ And it is described with images:

• A kingdom. The body is a city; the hands and feet, its craftsmen; appetite, the tax collector, a liar and meddler; anger, the chief of police, violent; the heart, the king; and reason, the vizier. If the king governs with the vizier and keeps the other two subdued, the city goes well; if reason becomes the captive of appetite and anger, the kingdom is ruined.⁵
• Four in one skin. In a person's skin there are four things: dog, pig, demon and angel. The pig is appetite and greed; the dog, anger; the demon, cunning and deceit; the angel, reason. What is reprehensible in the dog and the pig, Ghazali says, is not their shape but their quality, and that quality is what can live in a person.⁵
• An iron that can be a mirror. The heart, at first, is like an iron from which a burnished mirror can come, in which the whole world fits; if it is not looked after, rust eats it. And this is not for prophets only: no iron by nature fails to be able to become a mirror, unless rust enters its substance; so with every heart, as long as the greed for the world does not dominate it.⁵
• A pool. The heart is a pool and the five senses are five streams bringing it water from outside. For clear water to rise from the bottom, the outside water must be drained, the mud removed and the streams closed. That is why Ghazali defends, with nuances, the Sufi saying that "knowledge is a veil".⁵

Other alchemies

The word returns throughout the book, and in the rest it is not a single operation. Fasting is "the alchemy of benefits" (kīmiyā-yi favāʾid), because all sins are born of appetite and all appetite of satiety. Constant remembrance of God "would also be the alchemy of happiness". And fear, after certainty and knowledge, is "the alchemy of happiness".⁶ And at the end of the first heading the account is this: the person is in this world at the height of lack and helplessness, and market day will be tomorrow, "if the alchemy of happiness is cast upon the jewel of the heart".⁵

In chapter 15 there is also a parable. Someone heard that alchemy is better than gold, because endless gold comes from it. When heaps of gold are put before them, they do not touch it: "what is gold for? What is needed is alchemy, which is the origin". They take no gold, never knew alchemy, and stay poor and hungry, happy to have said "alchemy is better than gold". Ghazali says it against certain false Sufis who despise knowledge and scholars without having any experience themselves. Alchemy is here the unveiling of prophets and saints, and gold, the knowledge of scholars.⁵

What is not measured

And here is what matters most to us. Ghazali says that the law does not permit explaining what the truth of the spirit (ruḥ) is, and that for this reason the Prophet did not explain it: Ghazali cites the verse in which the Prophet is asked about the spirit and the answer is "the spirit is of the command of my Lord". The spirit belongs to the "world of command" (ʿālam-e amr), not to the "world of creation" (ʿālam-e khalq): what has extension, measure and quantity is of the world of creation, and the heart has neither measure nor quantity.⁵

And gives an argument. If the heart could be divided, one part could ignore something and another part know that same thing, and it would at once be knowing and ignorant, which is impossible. So it is not a body (which divides), nor an accident (which does not stand alone), nor something eternal; it is "a jewel of the kind of the angels' own", whose truth is hard to know and which it is not permitted to explain. And it warns that at the start of the road that knowledge is not needed: first comes striving, and whoever strives as they should receives it without hearing it from anyone.⁵

You do not have to believe it to see what it marks. This Diary began by asking whether the soul of the world can be measured. In the Persian text I read, the answer is that what is measured is not the soul, but the world of things with size and quantity. It is a theological claim, and I do not adopt it. But it draws a border that we respect: count what can be counted and say no more.

What I could not read

I read in Persian the whole preface; of the first heading (knowing oneself), chapters 1 to 12, 15 and the end of 18; and the passages where the word "alchemy" appears in the rest of the book, in context. I did not read chapters 13, 14, 16 and 17 of that heading nor the other three headings: out of nearly a million and a half characters in 443 pages, that is a small part, so I do not know what the rest says. I could not identify the edition Ganjoor follows, and its text may have modernised spelling. I did not read the Iḥyāʾ, nor Persian texts on metals (the Persian Wikipedia says there are many manuscripts), nor the Persian poets (Rumi, Attar, Hafez, among others), who I believe use kīmiyā as an image, though I did not check it here, nor Ibn Sina nor Suhrawardi. Two old English translations exist on Wikisource (Homes, 1873; Field, 1909): I did not use them and do not know which version they translate.⁷ And my Persian is a reader's, not a specialist's: if you read Persian and see a mistake, this Diary needs you to say so.

What we do with this

The earlier articles in this series showed alchemy as a promise that something will last: cinnabar, the Emerald Tablet, mercury. The Persian text moves it elsewhere: what has to be transformed is the person, and the work is one of crucible, dross and coating, with words of the trade for things that are not weighed.

Anima Mundis promises to transform no one and does not play the alchemist. What it can tell, in the Observatory, is how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour. It belongs to the world of what is counted, and in that Ghazali and this Diary agree.