The respect in which
Physical et mystical was held by the Greek alchemists was bestowed by the Arabs
on a different work, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos,
the reputed Hellenistic author of various alchemical, occultic, and theological
works.
Beginning 'That which
is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to
that which is above,' it is brief, theoretical, and astrological. The Emerald
Tablet, comes from a larger work called Book of the Secret of Creation, which
exists in Latin and Arabic manuscripts and was thought by the Muslim alchemist ar-Razi to have been written during the reign of Caliph al-Ma'mun (AD 813¨C833), though it has been attributed to the
1st-century-AD pagan mystic Apollonius of Tyana.
Some scholars have
suggested that Arabic alchemy descended from a western Asiatic school and that
Greek alchemy was derived from an Egyptian school. As far as is known, the
Asiatic school was not Chinese or Indian. What is known is that Arabic alchemy
was associated with a specific city in Syria, Harran, which seems to have been
a fountainhead of alchemical notions. And it is possible that the distillation
ideology and its spokeswoman, Maria, as well as Agathodaimon,
represented the alchemy of Harran, which presumably migrated to Alexandria and
was incorporated into the alchemy of Zosimos.
The existing versions
of the Book of the Secret of Creation have been carried back only to the 7th or
6th century but are believed by some to represent much earlier writings,
although not necessarily those of Apollonius himself. He is the subject of an
ancient biography that says nothing about alchemy, but neither does the Emerald
Tablet nor the rest of the Book of the Secret of Creation. On the other hand,
their theories of nature have an alchemical ring, and the Book mentions the
characteristic materials of alchemy, including, for the first time in the West,
sal ammoniac. It was clearly an important book to the
Arabs, most of whose eminent philosophers mentioned alchemy, although sometimes
disapprovingly. Those who practiced it were even more interested in literal
gold making than had been the Greeks. The most well-attested and probably the
greatest Arabic alchemist was ar-Razi (c.
850¨C923/924), a Persian physician who lived in Baghdad. The most famous was
Jabir ibn Hayyan, now believed to be a name applied
to a collection of 'underground writings' produced in Baghdad after the
theological reaction against science. In any case, the Jabirian
writings are very similar to those of ar-Razi.
Ar-Razi
classified the materials used by the alchemist into 'bodies' (the metals),
stones, vitriols, boraxes, salts, and 'spirits,'
putting into the latter those vital (and sublimable)
materials, mercury, sulfur, orpiment and realgar (the arsenic sulfides), and sal ammoniac. Much is made of sal
ammoniac, the reactive powers of which seem to have given Western alchemy a new
lease on life. Ar-Razi and the Jabirian
writers were really trying to make gold, through the catalytic action of the
elixir. Both wrote much on the compounding of 'strong waters,' an enterprise
that was ultimately to lead to the discovery of the mineral acids, but students
have been no more able to find evidence of this discovery in the writings of
the Arabic alchemists than in those of China and India. The Arabic strong
waters were merely corrosive salt solutions.
Ar-Razi's
writing represents the apogee of Arabic alchemy, so much so that students of
alchemy have little evidence of its later reorientation toward mystical or
quasi-religious objectives. Nor does it seem to have turned to medicine, which
remained independent. But there was a tendency in Arabic medicine to give
greater emphasis to mineral remedies and less to the herbs that had been the
chief medicines of the earlier Greek and Arabic physicians. The result was a
pharmacopoeia not of elixirs but of specific remedies that are inorganic in
origin and not very different from the elixirs of ar-Razi.
This new
pharmacopoeia was taken to Europe by Constantine of Africa, a Baghdad-educated
Muslim who died in 1087 as a Christian monk at Monte Cassino (Italy). The
pharmacopoeia also appeared in Spain in the 11th century and passed from there
to Latin Europe, along with the Arabic alchemical writings, which were
translated into Latin in the 12th century. In the 12th century the Christian
West began to shed its habit of indifference or hostility to the secular
literature of ancient and alien civilizations. Christian scholars were
particularly attracted to Muslim Spain and Sicily and there made translations
from both Arabic and Greek works, many of which were in some degree familiar,
but some of which, including the literature of alchemy, were new.
The Greek alchemy of
the Venice-Paris manuscript had much less impact than the work of ar-Razi and other Arabs, which emerged among the voluminous
translations made in Spain about 1150 by Gerard of Cremona. By 1250 alchemy was
familiar enough to enable such encyclopedists as Vincent of Beauvais to discuss
it fairly intelligibly, and before 1300 the subject was under discussion by the
English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon and the German philosopher,
scientist, and theologian Albertus Magnus. To learn about alchemy was to learn
about chemistry, for Europe had no independent word to describe the science of
matter. It had been touched upon in works concerned with other forms of change
e.g., the motion of projectiles, the aging of man, and similar Aristotelian
concepts. On the practical side there were also artists' recipe books; but for
the first time in the works of Bacon and Albertus Magnus change was discussed
in a truly chemical sense, with Bacon treating the newly translated alchemy as
a general science of matter for which he had great hopes.
But the more familiar
alchemy became, the more clearly it was understood that gold making was the
almost exclusive objective of alchemy, and Europeans proved no more resistant
to the lure of this objective than their Arabic predecessors. By 1350,
alchemical tracts were pouring out of the scriptoria (monastic copying rooms),
and the Europeans had even taken over the tradition of anonymity and false
attribution. One authority wrote at length about supposed disagreements between
two Arabs, Iahiae Abindinon
and Geber Abinhaen, who were probably two versions of
the name of Jabir ibn Hayyan. The most famous Jabirian work in Europe, The Sum of Perfection, is now
thought to have been an original European composition. At about this time
personal reminiscences of alchemists began to appear. Most famous was the Paris
notary Nicolas Flamel (1330¨C1418), who claimed that
he dreamed of an occult book, subsequently found it, and succeeded in
deciphering it with the aid of a Jewish scholar learned in the mystic Hebrew
writings known as the Kabala. In 1382 Flamel claimed
to have succeeded in the 'Great Work' (gold making); certainly he became rich
and made donations to churches. By 1300 alchemists had begun the discovery of
the mineral acids, a discovery that occupied about three centuries between the
first evidence of the new strong water (aqua fortis'ªi.e.,
nitric acid) and the clear differentiation of the acids into three kinds:
nitric, hydrochloric, and sulfuric. These three centuries saw prodigious
efforts in European alchemy, for these spontaneously reactive and highly
corrosive substances opened a whole new world of research. And yet, it was of
little profit to chemistry, for the experiments were inhibited by the old
objectives of separating the base metals into their 'elements,' concocting
elixirs, and other traditional procedures.
The 'water of life'
(aqua vitae; i.e., alcohol) was probably discovered a little earlier than
nitric acid, and some physicians and a few alchemists turned to the elixir of
life as an objective. John of Rupescissa, a
Catalonian monk who wrote c. 1350, prescribed virtually the same elixirs for
metal ennoblement and for the preservation of health. It only awaited
christening by its great publicist, Paracelsus (1493-1541), who was the sworn
enemy of the malpractices of 16th-century medicine and a vigorous advocate of
'folk' and 'chemical' remedies. By the end of the 16th century, medicine was
divided into warring camps of Paracelsians and anti-Paracelsians, and the alchemists began to move en masse into pharmacy.
“These medicines
consist of a certain quintessence separated from their earthly impurities by
Distillation, through which there is a singular and almost divine efficacy in
the cure of diseases. In all the great abundance of medicines presently known,
there are scarcely any that during these days the Chemists do not distill or otherwise
make more strong and effectual than they were before.”- French surgeon Ambroise Pare, Oeuvres(1575)
During the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the quintessence became a key concept in
the assimilation of alchemical techniques and materials into medical
therapeutics. But as it entered the mainstream of early modem medicine, the
quintessence carried with it much more of Rupescissa'
s innovative and reformist tendencies than historians have realized. Rupescissa and his quintessence redirected not only the
development of early modem medicine but also the very core of naturalist
inquiry.
Rupescissa's alchemy was eagerly assimilated by distillation
authors such as Hieronymous Brunschwig
and Conrad Gesner, from whom it passed into early modem materia
medica texts, including that of Ambroise Pare quoted
above.( Ambroise Pare, Oeuvres completes d'Ambroise
Pare, ed. by J.-F. Malgaigne, 3 vols. Paris,
1840-1841, III: 614.)
According to Pare, by
the late sixteenth century - fully two hundred years after the composition of Rupescissa's De quinta essentia - the idea of the distilled quintessence had
become so pervasive that nearly all medicines seemed to be manufactured by this
method. The promise of the quintessence - of prodigiously healthy and
long-lived bodies, of the "divine efficacy" of alchemy - continued to
exert a strong influence over the human imagination. Aside from the writings of
Pare, one can find numerous mentions of the quintessence or its descendents in early modem medical and distillation texts.
Moreover, the Paracelsian alchemical revolution of
the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which challenged the
Aristotelian-Galenic understanding of the body, was predicated upon the idea of
the quintessence, to which the iconoclastic Paracelsus (1493-1591) devoted his Archidoxies.( Debus, Chemical Philosophy; Man and Nature in
the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978, 101-130; Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical
Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 1982).
Even now, we often
speak of the "quintessence" to denote the vital or distilled
principle of something, demonstrating the enduring presence of this term in the
modem lexicon. Historians have long recognized Rupescissa
as the inventor of the quintessence and a precursor of early modem medical
alchemy. But if we examine the roots of the quintessence in the textual sources
and religious climate of the fourteenth century, we can better understand both
its originality and its continuing appeal. There is a causal relationship
however between Rupescissa's apocalyptic ideas and
his naturalist research. In fact his alchemy bears the mark of an
eschatological reading of nature and history.
But only by
understanding the foundations of Rupescissa's
quintessence can we recognize the novelty and the cogency of his theory and,
consequently, how it came to be such an idee fixe in early modem therapeutics.
In Rupescissa's works, the horror of transformation and the
dream of immutability are constant motifs. Yet his writings contained within
them the seeds of great historical change: from the quintessence arose the Paracelsian revolution, an episode that altered history in
a manner far removed from the apocalyptic end anticipated by Rupescissa. But the Paracelsian
vision of the future had a distinctly radical Joachite
flavor: Paracelsus and his followers advocated no harmonious compromise between
old and new; instead, they insisted upon the supercession
of previous authorities and bodies of knowledge by the new scientia
and the new age. (See Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World
of Renaissance Magic and Science, 2006.)
Their assault
heralded the overthrow of the Aristotelian-Galenic hegemony, the same system of
thought that had provided the basis for Rupescissa's
theories and to which he had been unfailingly faithful. Perhaps we should see
John of Rupescissa as an unwitting agent of
intellectual reform, whose alchemy and prophecy were applied to purposes far
beyond what he had imagined, and whose quintessence ultimately undermined the
most basic assumptions of the late medieval world that he knew. The history of
John of Rupescissa and of the quintessence - like all
histories - is thus one of change, the very coming into being and passing away
that Rupescissa had tried so fervently to suppress.
Rupescissa’s successors multiplied elixirs, which lost their
uniqueness and finally simply became new medicines, often for specific
ailments. Medical chemistry may have been conceived under Islam, but it was
born in Europe.
Next Paracelsian pharmacy was to lead, by a devious path, to
modern chemistry, but gold making still persisted, though methods sometimes
differed. SalomonTrismosin, purported author of the
Splendor Soils, or 'Splendour of the Sun' (published
1598), engaged in extensive visits to alchemical adepts (a common practice) and
claimed success through 'kabalistic and magical books in the Egyptian
language.' The impression given is that many had the secret of gold making but
that most of them had acquired it from someone else and not from personal
experimentation. Illustrations, often heavily symbolic, became particularly
important, those of Splendor Solis being far more complex than the text but
clearly exercising a greater appeal.
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