Islamicate Alchemy - 13/march/2024

ISLAMICATE 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 it was fairly common for one’s students to carry on 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 too many new ideas to cover in a text like this, but the most important are the Sulfur Mercury Theory, the introduction of organic matter, full transmutation of base metals into noble metals, and the first inklings of medical applications for alchemy. This collection of ideas are what draw the line between Byzantine alchemy, and Islamic alchemy.

JABIR IBN-HAYYAN: MERCURY-SULFUR THEORY

Jabir introduces two new important concepts: Sophic Mercury, and Sophic Sulfur. (Sophic means “of the philosophers.”) Every physical thing has a Sophic Mercury and a Sophic Sulfur that can be extracted from it. You get sophic mercury by fermenting something. You get sophic sulfur by distilling something down to its essential oil.“

Let us play alchemist for a moment. Let’s say you have a rose, and you want to extract its sophic mercury. You would seal it in a vessel to ferment down to a spirit. (As in an alcoholic spirit.) The fluid left over would be some form of ethyl alcohol, but the alchemists would call it something like “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 down to rose essential oil.

But hey, that sophic mercury seems real similar to other plant sophic mercuries. If you reduce down any flower, you’re probably gonna end up with some sort of ethyl alcohol. Arab alchemists noticed this, and thought “well then, this spirit must be a shared, common essence to all plants. What we have here is a jar of plant-ness.” The same thing happened for essential oils. Arab alchemists noticed “well hey, this rose juice still smells quite strongly of rose. This essence must be a distilled form of rose-ness.”

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. Of course it was, we have things like language, and an immortal soul. Rocks don’t have those things. 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. This was one of the first steps alchemy took towards iatrochemistry, the idea of using alchemy to cure disease.

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 actually 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 to correctly season a big pot of soup, you understand the Jabirian balance. If the pot is too spicy, you might need to add cream or acid to cut it. If the pot is too salty, you need more food. A properly seasoned broth is not necessarily about the amount of an ingredient, it’s about the ratios. When all your flavors and textures taste “right” you have achieved Jabirian balance.

To Jabir, all non-gold materials are simply improperly seasoned broth. Tin might have too little elemental air, iron might have too much elemental earth, etc etc. Transmutation was a process of adding what your base substance “lacked.”

Chemically literate 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. Balance was how the body worked. Balance was how the universe worked. Balance was how language worked. According to Jabir, the balance of elements in alchemical gold was related to the balance of numerical values of letters in the Arabic word for gold. Additionally, if medicine healed a sickness, it is because it rebalanced the condition of your humors to a ratio similar to gold. The positions of the stars and the planets also had some effect on Jabirian Balance.

It should be noted that 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. Its messy. But damn if it isn't compelling.

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, for a moment, 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. You understand that the earth itself exists on a complex continuum between alive and dead, and that relationship has serious consequences for the harvest this year. Stones and ores are a bit of an outlier in how not-alive they are.

The idea that you can just manufacture gold, soup-to-nuts, without needing to “breed” it from some existing gold, is quite radical. From a modern atomic physics perspective, it also happens to be true. Lasso yourself enough protons, neutrons and electrons, and you can theoretically cook yourself up some gold. Chalk up one more point for the alchemists.

Except, for Jabirian alchemists, they didn’t have protons, neutrons, and electrons. They had Sophic Mercury and Sophic Sulfur. If you wanted to make some 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 to make yourself some gold.

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 fundamentally a similar process.

So, 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 Seljuk empire 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

Abu Bakr al-Razi was an asshole. He was critical of everything. He was a doctor who criticized Galen’s theories of disease. He was an alchemist who criticized Greek alchemical theories. He was a muslim who criticized the very notion of prophethood. People did not like him. In fact, many of his works only survive because people wrote treatises about how he was an arrogant asshole who was wrong about everything. And, like history's greatest assholes, he had enough good points that we still remember his name 1000 years later.

Rhazes took the fire hose that was the Jabirian Corpus, and systemized it.