---
title: "Alchemy"
chunk: 4/12
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:25.858667+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

To form an idea of the historical place of Jabir's alchemy and to tackle the problem of its sources, it is advisable to compare it with what remains to us of the alchemical literature in the Greek language. One knows in which miserable state this literature reached us. Collected by Byzantine scientists from the tenth century, the corpus of the Greek alchemists is a cluster of incoherent fragments, going back to all the times since the third century until the end of the Middle Ages.
The efforts of Berthelot and Ruelle to put a little order in this mass of literature led only to poor results, and the later researchers, among them in particular Mrs. Hammer-Jensen, Tannery, Lagercrantz, von Lippmann, Reitzenstein, Ruska, Bidez, Festugière and others, could make clear only few points of detail ....
The study of the Greek alchemists is not very encouraging. An even surface examination of the Greek texts shows that a very small part only was organized according to true experiments of laboratory: even the supposedly technical writings, in the state where we find them today, are unintelligible nonsense which refuses any interpretation.

It is different with Jabir's alchemy. The relatively clear description of the processes and the alchemical apparati, the methodical classification of the substances, mark an experimental spirit which is extremely far away from the weird and odd esotericism of the Greek texts. The theory on which Jabir supports his operations is one of clearness and of an impressive unity. More than with the other Arab authors, one notes with him a balance between theoretical teaching and practical teaching, between the 'ilm and the amal. In vain one would seek in the Greek texts a work as systematic as that which is presented, for example, in the Book of Seventy.
Islamic philosophers also made great contributions to alchemical Hermeticism. The most influential author in this regard was arguably ibn Hayyan. ibn Hayyan's ultimate goal was takwin, the artificial creation of life in the alchemical laboratory—up to and including human life. He analysed each Aristotelian element in terms of four basic qualities of hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness. According to ibn Hayyan, in each metal two of these qualities were interior and two were exterior. For example, lead was externally cold and dry, while gold was hot and moist. Thus, ibn Hayyan theorized, by rearranging the qualities of one metal, a different metal would result. By this reasoning, the search for the philosopher's stone was introduced to Western alchemy. Ibn Hayyan developed an elaborate numerology whereby the root letters of a substance's name in Arabic, when treated with various transformations, held correspondences to the element's physical properties. The atomic theory of corpuscularianism, where all physical bodies possess an inner and outer layer of minute particles or corpuscles, also has its origins in the work of ibn Hayyan.
From the 9th to 14th centuries, alchemical theories faced criticism from a variety of practical Muslim chemists, including Al-Kindi, Abū al-Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, Avicenna and Ibn Khaldun. In particular, they wrote refutations against the idea of the transmutation of metals. From the 14th century onwards, many materials and practices originally belonging to Indian alchemy (Rasayana) were assimilated in the Persian texts written by Muslim scholars.

=== East Asia ===

Researchers have found evidence that Chinese alchemists and philosophers discovered complex mathematical phenomena that were shared with Arab alchemists during the medieval period. Discovered first in China before the Common Era, the "magic square of three" was propagated to followers of Jabir ibn Hayyan at some point over the proceeding several hundred years. Other commonalities shared between the two alchemical schools of thought include discrete naming for ingredients and heavy influence from the natural elements. The Silk Road provided a clear path for the exchange of goods, ideas, ingredients, religion, and many other aspects of life with which alchemy is intertwined.