Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān

Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (born c. 721, Ṭūs, Iran—died c. 815, Al-Kūfah, Iraq) was a Muslim alchemist known as the father of Arabic chemistry. He systematized a “quantitative” analysis of substances and was the inspiration for Geber, a Latin alchemist who developed an important corpuscular theory of matter.

The historical figure

According to tradition, Jābir was an alchemist and possibly an apothecary or physician who lived mostly in the 8th century. Some sources claim that he was a student of the sixth Shīʿite imam, Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad. As the historian Paul Kraus showed in the 1940s, however, the almost 3,000 works attributed to this Jābir cannot possibly have been written by one man—they contain too much disparity, in both style and content. Additionally, the Jabirian corpus displays numerous indications linking it to the Ismāʿīlite movement of Fāṭimid times; most of the works attributed to Jābir were probably written in the 9th and 10th centuries.

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The Jabirian corpus

Perhaps the most original aspect of the Jabirian corpus is a type of arithmology (numerology) referred to as the “method of the balance” (mīzān). In essence, this consisted of determining the quantity of the “four natures” (hot, cold, wet, and dry) in a substance by means of its name. Each letter of the Arabic alphabet was given a numerical value, and depending on the order of the letters, they were applied to the different “natures.” The Jabirian texts also argue that all things contain a “hidden” (bāṭin) reality as well as the “manifest” (zāhir) one arrived at in the way described. The hidden natures were thought to fall into the proportionality 1:3:5:8, which always added up to 17 or a multiple of 17.

Despite the more fanciful aspects of the Jabirian method of the balance, the corpus attributed to Jābir contains much of value in the realm of chemical technology. The Jabirian corpus was an important vector for the long-lived theory that the known metals are composed of sulfur and mercury, and it provides metallurgical evidence to support this claim. The works give detailed descriptions for alloying, purifying, and testing the metals, in which considerable use is made of fractional distillation in order to isolate the different “natures.” The chemistry of sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) forms a particular focus for the Jabirian writings. This substance was of interest primarily for its ability to combine with most of the metals known in the Middle Ages, rendering the metals soluble and volatile in varying degrees. Since volatility was viewed as a sign of a pneumatic or “spiritual” nature, the Jabirian alchemists viewed sal ammoniac as a particular key of the art.

The Latin Geber

Only a tiny fraction of the Jabirian works made their way into the medieval West. Jābir’s Seventy Books was translated into Latin as the Liber de septuaginta by Gerard of Cremona in the 12th century. A mutilated version of this work was known to the Latin pseudepigrapher who called himself Geber (transliterated from the Arabic Jābir), who wrote the Summa perfectionis magisterii (The Sum of Perfection or the Perfect Magistery), possibly the most famous alchemical book of the Middle Ages. Probably composed in the late 13th century by a Franciscan monk known as Paul of Taranto, the Summa contains no trace of Jābir’s arithmological method of the balance. The Summa is sometimes accompanied by four other works also attributed to Geber: De investigatione perfectionis, De inventione veritas, De fornacibus construendis, and Testamentum. Despite this attribution, these works are all substantially later than the Summa and could not have the same author. Like his Arabic models, the author of the Summa was unaware of two key developments in medieval technology—the distillation of ethyl alcohol and the fabrication of the mineral acids, although mineral acids do appear in the later works attributed to Geber.

The Summa contains the first clear statement of the “mercury alone” theory, according to which quicksilver (mercury) is the “pure substance” of the metals, and sulfur is primarily a corruptor. In an attempt to imitate the operations of nature itself, Geber advised other alchemists to rely on quicksilver and its compounds for transmutational agents and to eschew organic materials such as blood, hair, and eggs.

A second innovation of the Summa lies in its groundbreaking theory of three orders of medicines. According to this theory, which owes something to vague comments found in Jābir’s Liber de septuaginta, transmutative agents occur in a threefold order of increasing effectiveness. A medicine of the first or second order leads to superficial and temporary change in the base metals, whereas a medicine of the third order produces genuine and permanent silver or gold. The Summa gives a corpuscular explanation to the varied perfection of the medicines, arguing that a medicine’s perfection increases as the corpuscles from which it is made decrease in size. This corpuscular theory of matter is used by Geber to explain a host of processes, including sublimation, distillation, calcination, cupellation, cementation, and the production of minerals within mines. Geber’s corpuscular theory was to have a major impact in the history of science: it was influential even in the 17th century, when it conditioned the corpuscular philosophy of the German physician Daniel Sennert, English scientist Kenelm Digby, British natural philosopher Robert Boyle, and others.

A further influential aspect of the Summa lies in its explicit appeal to the technique of literary concealment—called in Arabic tabdīd al-ʿilm, or “the dispersion of knowledge.” This technique, employed widely in the Jabirian corpus, refers to the practice of splitting up a discourse and separating the respective parts so that they could not be read sequentially. The dispersion of knowledge technique was borrowed by famous magical and esoteric writers of the Renaissance, such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, author of the famous De occulta philosophia (c. 1533), and still found an echo in the discursive works of Boyle.