How Alchemy changed the World #2

Part Two: The Spagyric Arts reborn as Al-kimia

130 years after the fall of Roman Alexandria in 772CE, with Europe deep into the Dark Ages, one Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān, more commonly known as Geber or Jabir, was born in Tus, Khorasan (present day Iran). As Hermes was the father of Alchemy, Jabir would become known as the Father of Chemistry, and this is where we can find the root of the word Alchemy in the Arabic, al-kimia - the art of transformation, which up until then had been called the Spagyric Arts, to separate and to join together, by the Greeks. Among the many discoveries attributed to Jabir from his well-documented and preserved texts. Perhaps one of the most important was not what he discovered, but how. Building on Aristotle’s idea of systematic thought, Jabir laid out a new technique of methodical and systematic experimentation, that would in time form the foundation of the standard mode of modern scientific experimentation.

"The first essential in chemistry, is that you should perform practical work and conduct experiments, for he who performs not practical work nor makes experiments will never attain the least degree of mastery." -Jabir

Historians on the subject of alchemy have noted that compared to Jabir’s texts, the surviving Ancient Roman, Greek, and Egyptian alchemical texts seemed to be unintelligible allegoric fantasies that defied interpretation. This was not to say Jabir, just as paranoid as all the alchemists before him, did not encode his texts, he did in fact write them in an esoteric code that could only be read by the initiated. However, once decoded his very method of methodical experimentation lent itself to highly detailed notes and explanations. It was Jabir’s approach to alchemy that would one day see it rise from the ranks of superstition. He is also credited with the discovery of Sulphuric, Nitric, Hydrochloric, Citric, Acetic, and Tartaric Acid. The discovery and isolation of Arsenic, Antimony, and Bismuth. The first isolation and purification of Sulphur and Mercury. And invented and/or perfected numerous chemical processes such as pure distillation and filtration, and theorised about various chemical substances such as distilled alcohol.

Another of Jabir’s creations was Aqua regia, the first known reagent that could dissolve gold and thereby form part of a purification process. The resulting acid liquid mixture could then be precipitated into solid gold. Sound familiar, it should as this could also be described as an external transmutation of base metals into gold. One of the prime goals of alchemists since Hermes Trismegistus. Jabir was also very interested and theorised about an al-iksir, the elusive elixir, However, Jabir’s al-iksir contrary to the immortality elixir Waidan mentioned in Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic and then The Kinship of the Three by Wei Boyang in 142CE. Was a substance, which according to its method of use could re-arrange the basic properties of any one metal so another metal could be formed. However, when taken within the mystic context, Jabir’s al-iksir, somehow became a more than a thousand-year search, for a substance that could not only change base metals, but also grant the alchemist immortality. This being the decidedly elusive Philosophers Stone, which would in the end, turn out to be a very dead Albatross for Alchemy.

The importance of Middle Eastern Alchemy did not end with Jabir; fourteen years old when Jabir died, al-Kindi whose life marked the beginning of the Islamic Golden Age took up the mantle just a few years later. Although Al-Kindi was indeed the first to actually decry certain Alchemic practices, specifically the quest to transmute any base metals into precious metals with the still elusive al-iksir. He was a huge proponent of Jabir’s new scientific methodology and added his own ideas on quantification extrapolated from the still rather mysticism obscured Aristotelian logic. Al-Kindi was greatly influenced by the Ancient Greeks and was in fact charged by the Abbasid Caliph’s as supervisor, for the translation of scientific and philosophic Greek texts into Arabic. With his own genius, and Jabir and the Greeks as his shoulders to stand on, al-Kindi achieved several landmarks for alchemy, and what it was to become.

“We must not hesitate to recognize the truth and to accept it no matter what is its origin, no matter if it comes to us from the ancients or from foreign people... My purpose is first to write down all that the ancients have left us on a given topic and then, using the Arabic tongue and taking into account the customs of our time and our capacities, to complete what they have not fully expressed.”- Al-Kindi, A Precursor of the Scientific Revolution.

Al-Kindi is considered one of the first true chemists, but he also collected another title along the way. Although well respected as a philosopher in his own right, when it came to his widespread research and experimentation with plants and other ingredients, he created that most intangible of qualities in the 800’s, the ability to smell good, with perfume. For this, he is known as the Father of Perfume for inventing a vast array of perfume and scent base products and then elaborating with a huge number of specific recipes. This also led to his invention of numerous pharmaceuticals, including how to substitute certain costly ingredients with others. Moreover, in doing so perhaps initiated the idea of generic pharmaceuticals, in terms of medications being not only secret formulas but also tied to resource locations.

In difference, to al-Kindi, Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, or Razi a man of his own contrasts who was eight when al-Kindi died, later championed the al-iksir and even publically refuted al-Kindi’s improbability statement of such a substance. Yet when questioned by his peers, who believed he had succeeded in transmuting iron and copper into gold, because he was willing to treat patients for free, he replied:

"I understand alchemy and I have been working on the characteristic properties of metals for an extended time. However, it still has not turned out to be evident to me, how one can transmute gold from copper. Despite the research from the ancient scientists done over the past centuries, there has been no answer. I very much doubt if it is possible..."-Razi, in Mohammad Zakaria Razi by Khosro Moetazed.

Therefore, if Razi did succeed, well he kept it to himself. There were however many other groundbreaking studies he did share, but perhaps more importantly was the way he chose to share them. For the first time ever in the history of Alchemy, an alchemist refused to wholly adhere to the ludicrously complex esoteric and allegorical encoding systems that had plagued oral, written, and depicted Alchemic texts for the last 2800 years. A system that up until Razi, had quite successfully prevented all non-initiate access to alchemical knowledge. Instead, Razi wrote in clearly understandable Arabic, countless books on Alchemy, medicine, philosophy and religion. Including the first known description and diagnosis of the smallpox with symptoms and visual identity, accompanied by the understanding that it was contagious. Nevertheless, perhaps his greatest contribution to Alchemy was the cementing of truly empiric observation and experimentation combined with detailed and clearly written documentation, into Alchemical thought, development and research. Amongst his many claims to fame Razi was the first to distil petroleum and with it invent kerosene and kerosene lamps, soap bars and modern recipes for soap, so perhaps Razi could be called the Father of the Petro-Chemical industry. He also produced reliable antiseptic ointments and invented copious chemical processes and instruments such as sublimation and glass phials. Middle Eastern Alchemy and its growing diversity would continue to flourish for the next 259 years after Razi. However, this abruptly ended in 1218CE, with the invasion and massacre of nearly half of Iran’s population by Genghis Khan. But not before one on-the-run surviving alchemist would amongst other accomplishments prepare the ground along with Epicurus before him, for the birth of modern chemistry like a phoenix from the ashes of Alchemy.

Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī or just Tusi was born in Tus, Iran just like Jabir but 386 years later. Tusi may have been only 17 when Genghis Khan invaded but he was already a gifted scholar having studied far and wide with some of the great Alchemists of the time, which included mathematicians, astronomers, and philosophers at the height of the Islamic Golden Age. It would take more than an invasion to deter Tusi from his own studies, which he doggedly pursued even as he sought refuge with the Ismaili, and their fortified strongholds. It was during this time that Tusi re-identified and clarified Epicurus’s statement that:

"The sum total of things was always such as it is now, and such it will ever remain,"-Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus.

With:

"A body of matter cannot disappear completely. It only changes its form, condition, composition, colour and other properties and turns into a different complex or elementary matter.” -Tusi.

Two statements that would ring down the ages until they were transformed into the Law of conservation of mass/matter. A law that would prove to be a keystone to the survival and transformation of Alchemy itself. But getting back to Tusi, who whilst still on the run from Ismaili stronghold to stronghold, which were gradually but surely falling to the Mongols. He managed to also be the first to class trigonometry as its own mathematical discipline and greatly advanced it with spherical trigonometry. This also gave rise to Tusi being the first to empirically observe the earth’s rotation and present these observations as evidence. Perhaps inspired by Ibn al-Shatir’s extensive astronomic studies and invention of the first astrolabe and compendium. Tusi provided proof based on the detailed empirical observation in the location of comets being relative to the Earth’s own rotations. These details would be strongly echoed some 296 years later by a Prussian fellow called Copernicus.

Though stalled by Tusi, he marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age as the last Ismaili stronghold, Alamut Castle, fell to Hulagu Khan, Genghis’s grandson in 1256CE. Even then, Tusi remained undeterred and he convinced Hulagu Khan himself, to build an observatory that soon established very accurate Astronomic tables. Though primarily made for predicting astrological events they also mapped out the movement of major planetary bodies, and formed an astronomic standard that would remain almost unchanged until Copernicus. After Tusi, Alchemy would only come back to prominence in the Middle East when it had been altogether changed, renamed, and returned to the purity of a true modern science it had just started to become.

"The Greeks (so far as we know) were confined to industrial experience and vague hypothesis, the Saracens introduced precise observation, controlled experiment, and careful records. They invented and named the alembic (al-anbiq), chemically analyzed innumerable substances, composed lapidaries, distinguished alkalis and acids, investigated their affinities, studied and manufactured hundreds of drugs. Alchemy…inherited from Egypt, contributed to chemistry by a thousand incidental discoveries, and by its method, which was the most scientific of all medieval operations.” - Will Durant, The Story of Civilization IV: The Age of Faith.

Next... Al-kimia transformed to Alchemie.

Previously... The Ancients.

How Alchemy changed the World was written By Ivor W. Hartmann.