Metals and soul in the Marifetname, without saying "alchemy"

After the Chinese, Arabic, Indian and Persian, this article goes to the Turkish tradition. With a warning: I did not find a Turkish treatise on alchemy that I could read. What I could read, in Turkish, is an Ottoman encyclopedia of 1757 that deals with metals, the soul and the cosmos. And the striking thing is what it does not say: in the 43 parts of the book that exist on Wikisource, kimya, simya, iksir (elixir) and kimyager (alchemist) do not appear once. I report what it does say, and with what guarantees.

Who and what book

Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı (1703–1780) was a Sufi and scholar from Erzurum. İbrahim Hakkı finished the Marifetname ("the book of knowledge") in 1757. According to the Turkish Wikipedia it is written in plain language that ordinary people could follow; according to the author, as that Wikipedia reports, it drew on some 400 books; and, according to that Wikipedia, it is where a scholar describes the solar system of the "new astronomy" for the first time.¹ It is an encyclopedia of some 600 large pages, with a preface, three books and a closing section on ethics, printed in Cairo (1836, 1864) and Istanbul (1868, 1889, 1914), and translated into Arabic and Persian.²

With what guarantees. The text I read is the Turkish Wikisource one. It is a version in present-day Turkish, with no author or translator identified, and I could not compare it with the Ottoman original (which the Turkish Wikipedia links on HathiTrust, and which I cannot read). Wikisource's own discussion page has said since 2013 that it is "very incomplete" compared with the whole book. It has 43 parts with text, about 950,000 characters; parts 32 and 44 of its index do not exist. What I quote is therefore what that version says, and it may differ from the original.³

A book of science without the word "alchemy"

I searched the 43 parts for kimya, kîmyâ, simya, iksir, kimyager and "making gold": none appears. This does not mean the Ottoman world had no alchemy. A study by İrfan Elmacı (2018) says that in the empire's first centuries medieval Islamic science weighed heavily, chemistry included; that Ottoman scholars worked in chemistry and experimented (İznikli Fazıl Ali Bey, d. 1609, appears as a well-known name of the Ottoman alchemical tradition); and that in the eighteenth century Ottoman chemistry lived mostly inside medicine, with physicians such as Ömer Şifâî (d. 1742 or 1746) and Bursalı Ali Münşi (d. 1734).⁴ The Marifetname is another genre: natural philosophy in order to know God. It says so in the second book, on anatomy: whoever does not know it is careless about medicine, wisdom and knowing oneself, and is far from knowing God.⁵ It is the same motive with which Ghazali opened his book in the Persian article: knowing oneself is the key.

The world begins with the soul

The book tells the origin of the cosmos twice, and does not reconcile the two.

In the first (part 1), God was a "hidden treasure" at the stage of unity and, wishing to be known, first created a green, sparkling "substance", which they call the first substance, the light of Muhammad, the Cevh-i mahfuz ("guarded substance"), the universal intellect (akl-ı kül) and the "relative spirit". From it came first the küllî nefs, the universal soul, and then the souls of the angels, of the plants and of the natures: fourteen kinds of souls. The middle region, that of the souls, is called the "world of meanings" and the "world of commands" (emirler âlemi), which corresponds to the ʿālam-e amr that Ghazali named in Persian (the comparison is mine). Two thousand years later, it says, God created the world of bodies.⁶

In the second (part 6), which the book attributes to "the philosophers", God first created the universal intellect and gave it three kinds of knowledge: knowing God, knowing itself and knowing its need. From each came one thing: from the first, a second intellect; from the second, a soul, "which they call the universal soul"; from the third, a body, the greatest sphere. And so, from intellect to intellect, up to nine intellects, nine souls and nine spheres.⁷

It is what the article on the anima mundi called the soul of the world: here it is among the first things created: in one account, right after the intellect; in the other, before the other souls. I do not know by what paths that idea reached this book, and I claim no lineage: the text says only "the philosophers".

Metals: mercury and sulphur

In the part on minerals, the text says that the seven famous bodies (gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead and bronze) "are formed only from the differences and mixtures of mercury and sulphur in quantity and quality".⁸ And it gives six rules, according to whether the mercury and the sulphur are pure or "damaged" and to the cooking: gold comes from pure mercury and sulphur, well measured, with sulphur that dyes, cooked "for many thousands of years"; silver, from the two pure ones with white sulphur; lead, from the two damaged ones; and so on. It is the sulphur–mercury theory we saw in Jabir, with more detail on purity and cooking time.

Two things. The first: the text says that the difference among metals "is known by experience" (tecrübe ile bilinmiştir) to come from sulphur and mercury. Today we know it does not: they are elements. The rule is a text's, not a laboratory result.

The second: in the paragraph on copper is the closest the passage comes to alchemy. Copper, it says, is close to silver: the difference is only the redness of its colour, the abundance of dirt, the dryness of its nature, the rough taste and the smell. And it adds:⁸

Şu halde onu, beyazlatmaya ve yumuşatmaya gücü yeten kimse, her ihtiyacına zafer bulmuştur.

"So whoever has the power to whiten it and soften it has found triumph for every need." There is no method, no name, no promise. Ghazali, in Persian, said that between copper and gold the difference "is no more than yellowness and weight". There is a resemblance underneath: both see, between metals, differences of colour, weight or dryness, and not of essence. The comparison is mine; nothing suggests that either knew the other.

A ladder of perfection

Metals are the first rung of a ladder. The text (part 28) says that the first ranks of the cosmos are dense earth, and the last, the pure soul, very subtle. Minerals, at their beginning, touch earth and water, and at their end, plants; plants touch animals; animals, humans; and humans, at their end, reach the pure souls of the angels. A poem by İbrahim Hakkı follows, and its gloss in prose: the perfection of the earth is the plant, that of the plant is the animal, that of the animal is the human, and that of the human is "to reach the love of the Glorious"; love contemplates things and revolves ceaselessly, and generation and corruption are at every instant "a new creation".⁸

The body as a small world

In the second book, in the section that means to apply the human to the world (part 43), "those who know" say that God created the two worlds and everything in them for the human being, so that the human, finding their likeness in their own body, may know themselves and thereby know God. And that the human body is the small world and the human spirit is the great world. What there is in the world, they say, has its likeness in the body: as there are mountains on earth, there are bones in the body; as there are rivers, there is blood in the veins; as there are earthquakes, there are tremors and sneezes. The body has twelve openings and the sky twelve signs; the sky has 360 degrees and the body 360 blood vessels; the four mixtures of the body correspond to the four elements. And the seven planets have their organ: the lung, the Moon; the stomach, Mercury; the kidney, Venus; the heart, the Sun; the bile, Mars; the liver, Jupiter; the spleen, Saturn.⁹

In the article on melancholy, Saturn was the planet of Ficino and Dürer; here Saturn has the spleen. The correspondence is one more list: I could not check it against another source, and what it says at bottom (that the body copies the cosmos) has no support in what is measured today.

The text knows the list does not close: "it does not fit in this book, nor in a hundred thousand books; it only fits in the heart of the knowing". And the preceding passage, on the same theme, ends with these lines, which I translate from the present-day Turkish version:⁹

Bil ey insan / Elbet sen kâinatın toplamısın

"Know, human: you are, surely, the sum of the cosmos."

What I could not read

I read in Turkish, in the Wikisource version, passages from parts 1, 6, 28, 29 and 43 of the Marifetname (not the whole parts) and searched words in all 43. I did not read the rest. I could not compare it with the Ottoman original or identify who made this version, and that version is incomplete. I did not read the "philosophers" the text invokes without naming them, nor do I know where İbrahim Hakkı takes those sources from (according to the Turkish Wikipedia, it says 400 books). Of the historical context I only read Elmacı's study, and only its Ottoman part; I did not read Fazıl Ali Bey, nor Ömer Şifâî, nor Bursalı Ali Münşi. In the Wikisource search I saw Turkish verses that use kîmyâ as an image (a Bektashi poem by Husrev and Fuzûlî's Leylâ vü Mecnûn, among others), but I did not read them in context. My Turkish is a reader's, not a specialist's: if you read Ottoman Turkish and see a mistake, this Diary needs you to say so.

What we do with this

In this series alchemy has appeared in three ways: as a craft on things (cinnabar, mercury), as work on the person (Ghazali) and here, without a name, as part of a natural philosophy that goes from the universal soul down to copper and back to the body. The Marifetname promises to transform nothing: it wants the reader to know themselves and, with that, to know God.

The soul of the world, in this book, is a place in a scheme: among the first things created. It is not something that can be measured. Anima Mundis neither measures nor declares it. What it can tell, in the Observatory, is how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour. It is a modest count and can be checked.