These archetypal dream-figures appear to embody or symbolise technical, alchemical processes. (Hence, for example, the ‘steps’ to be taken to the bowl/altar.) The dismembering, flaying, apparent death, resurrection and piercing would return in graphic form in seventeenth century Rosicrucian-inspired works such as Atalanta Fugiens (1618), by Count Michael Maier, to baffle the uninitiated.
Unlike modern science, which hopes to objectify the world through the disciplines of rational logic, alchemy, through meditation and imagination, brings the soul and the spirit directly into a vision of the creative process, creating an almost intermediate visionary plane of meaning, tending, adepts believe, towards psychic wholeness. This is why, among other reasons, Carl Jung (who saw himself as a kind of descendent of the Gnostics) took to alchemy with such passion and purpose. (“If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” says the gnostic Gospel of Thomas -and much of Jung's psychology has to do with this drawing-out process, though it should be added that Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy is not shared by all scholars).
Zosimos held the magical view that the material and spiritual find their kinship in a universal pattern of powerful sympathetic links, with the corollary that spiritual experiences may be expressed in material metaphors and, more precisely, that disciplined understanding of the properties of matter is an indispensable aid for liberation of the soul from the ‘body-tomb’. The paradox of the human experience, from this point of view, is that although the body is an expression of the soul, the body can become the prison of the soul. The tendency of man, according to the gnostic alchemical tradition, is to sink into what is, in the profoundest sense, his material projection. Our present plight, according to gnostic theory, represents the outflow of this fall. The spiritual alchemist, the divine operator, tries to redress the catastrophe.
Man's deepest problem, from the Hermetic point of view, is one of perception, ignorance : a-gnosis. For Zosimos, gnosis is linked to the image of the baptism in the Hermetic bowl of nous : mind or spirit, found in chapter IV of the Corpus Hermeticum. This chapter is mentioned by name in Zosimos' treatise, ‘ητελευταια’αποχη, (=he teleutaia apoche), a work devoted to the history of alchemical techniques in Egypt, and the primary role played by Hermes in their formulation. This work was addressed to a woman alchemist called Theosebia and contains a beautiful account of how to wait on God, and how to call Him :
So do not allow yourself to be pulled back and forth like a woman, as I have already told you in my books According to energy. Do not roam about searching for God; but sit calmly at home, and God, who is everywhere, and not confined in the smallest place like the daemons, will come to you. And, being calm in body, calm also your passions, desire and pleasure and anger and grief and the twelve portions of death. In this way, taking control of yourself, you will summon the divine [to come] to you, and truly it will come, that which is everywhere and nowhere. And without being told, offer sacrifices to the daemons, but not offerings, nor [the sacrifices] which encourage and entice them, but rather the sacrifices that repel and destroy them, those of which Membres spoke to Solomon king of Jerusalem, and especially those that Solomon himself wrote as the product of his own wisdom. So doing, you will obtain the true and natural [tinctures] that are appropriate to certain times. Perform these things until your soul is perfected. When you realise that you have been perfected, and have found the natural [tinctures], spit on matter, and, hastening towards Poimenandres [sic. “the mind of the sovereignty”; possibly a word of Egyptian origin] and receiving baptism in the mixing-bowl [κρατηρ], hasten up towards your own race. [the race of perfected souls]
For Zosimos, conventional alchemy is a preparation for the subsequent purification and perfecting of the soul (cf : Iamblichus' Theurgy), information concerning which Zosimos takes wholesale from the Hermetica. On apparatus and furnaces : authentic commentaries on the letter ω, is Zosimos's considered treatise on alchemy's spiritual aspect. The work is concerned to show the poverty of the fatalistic approach; the power of the stars can be transcended by fully realising man's spiritual dimension. Those who do not acknowledge this possibility are warned that : “Hermes calls such people mindless, only marchers swept along in the procession of fate.” This is very similar to the plight of those who refuse to be baptized in the bath of nous in Corpus Hermeticum IV.4-5,7 :
just as processions pass into the crowd, unable to achieve anything themselves, but getting in the way of other people, so these men make their procession in the world, led astray as they are by the pleasures of the body.
Hermes divides humankind up into those who seek God and those who ignore Him. Zosimos follows Hermes and Zoroaster in believing those philosophers to be superior who are mastered neither by grief nor joy. He says that Zoroaster asserts that man can overcome fate by magic (possibly a reference to Neoplatonic Theurgy), but that Hermes declares magic to be unnecessary for the spiritual man. According to Zosimos, Hermes suggests a kind of cosmic quietism, reminiscent of the approach of the Zen Master : “nor must he [the spiritual man] use force upon necessity; but rather he should allow necessity to work in accordance with his own nature and judgement.” Fate (the heimarmene, or ‘night-cloak’ of the stars), we are told, controls only the body, not the divine part of man. Man has the power to rise above the familiar sphere which is subject to zodiacal control. Hermetic man is forever breaking free.
Chapter Three
Hermes meets Islam
It is really no accident that our word for alchemy derives from the Arabic language, for it was to be in the lands conquered by the first four caliphs (between 632 and 661), that Hermes Trismegistos - and his Art - were to undergo a return to intellectual prominence in both the east and, subsequently, in the west as well.
In AD 830, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mún, (son of the illustrious Harun ar-Rashíd of Arabian Nights fame), was passing through Harran, about 40 miles south of Edessa. According to the Christian author Abú-Jusúf Abshaa'al-Qathíí18, writing 70 years later, the caliph observed some men in unfamiliar costume :
“To which of the peoples protected by law do you belong?”
“We are Harranians.”
“Are you Christians?”
“No.”
“Jews?”
“No.”
“Magians?”19
“No.”
“Have you a holy scripture or a prophet?”
The men offered an evasive answer. The caliph, running out of options, and patience, came to the inevitable point : “You are infidels and idolaters then, and it is permitted to shed your blood. If you have not, by the time when I return from my campaign [against the Byzantines], become either Moslems or adherents of one of the religions recognised in the Koran, I will kill you to a man.”
On the departure of the caliph al-Ma'mún of Baghdad, these learned, pagan Harranians consulted with a lawyer as to a way of escape. The lawyer in turn consulted Koran II.59 which made it clear that Islam tolerated Christians, Jews - and Sabians :
Surely they that believe, and those of Jewry, and the Christians, and those Sabians, whoso believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness - their wage awaits them with their Lord, and no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow.
Fortunately for the Harranian pagans, nobody seems to have been too sure what the Prophet intended by the word ‘Sabian’20, so they took the name. However, the law also required a divinely recognised prophet and a book to support the new nomenclature. In this regard, the learned pagans of Harran settled on the Hermetica (in either Greek or Syriac versions) as their scripture, with Hermes as their prophet. This timely ruse was to bring Hermetic gnosis to the very heart of eastern and western intellectual, practical and spiritual experience : a momentous decision whose ramifications reverberate to this day.
Gnosis in Harran and Baghdad
By 898, a disinterested Arabic writer could describe the doctrine of the ‘Sabians’ (that
is, Harranian pagans), as a philosophy taught by Hermes and Agatho-daimon (a patron deity of ancient Alexandria and a teacher of Hermes in the Hermetica). Since the Koran did not recognise these latter names as prophets, Agatho-daimon was identified with Seth, son of Adam, (an Egyptian Gnostic patriarch), while Hermes was identified as Idris, or Enoch, (a name identified with Jewish astrological gnosis). Justification came from Koran sura 19.57 and 21.85.
From 830 onwards, the Arabs got the greater part of their knowledge of Greek science and philosophy from the pagans of Harran. According to the philosopher-historian al-Farabi (d.950) : “Under Omar son of Abd-el-Aziz [AD 705-710] the chief seat of teaching was transferred from Alexandria to Antioch; and later on, in the reign of Mutawakkil, it was transferred to Harran.” In about 856, al-Mutawakkil, in a reign characterised by a combination of rigidity and debauch, re-established the Baghdad library and and translation school. From that time to about 1050, the Harranian Hermetists played a conspicuous rôle in the intellectual life of Baghdad. This period produced a brilliant crop of Hermetic stars, the most renowned of whom must be the extraordinary sage, Thabit ibn Qurra (835-901).
Thabit
Thabit began his professional life as a money-changer, (a job familiar to cultural outsiders) but, fortunately for us, a quarrel with other Sabians led to his expulsion from Harran. Fortunately for Thabit, he found favour with the caliph of Baghdad, Muthadid, along with 500 dinars a year for his scientific work. Thabit even got the government to recognise himself and his companions as an independent and separate community of Sabians. The most learned Harranians followed him to Baghdad, a move which resulted in a kind of school of pagan Neoplatonism, the like of which had not been seen since the Christian Byzantine Emperor Justinian had closed down the Athens philosophy school 450 years previously; this time the Hermetica were regarded as master-texts.
Thabit certainly made his mark. It was said that he wrote 166 books in Syriac and Arabic. It was also said that “no-one would have been able to get any benefit from the philosophic writings of the Greeks, if they had not had Thabit's translations.” He was a convinced and enlightened pagan, a conviction well underlined in the following quotation taken by Barhebraeus from Thabit's Liber de confirmatione religionis ethnicorum:
We are the heirs and propagators of Paganism. Happy is he who, for the sake of Paganism, bears the burden [of persecution?] with firm hope. Who else have civilised the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbours and the rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, [quite an audacious statement to make under a Moslem government], given oracles, and told about the future, if not to the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.
Thabit's works include commentaries on Plato, Pythagoras, Proclus, Aristotle, Music, the Hermetica, works on local cultic practice and belief, astrology, mathematics, geometry, the occult sciences, and a treatise on the cryptic significance or magical efficacy of the alphabet. Thabit compiled a ‘pandect’ : a recapitulation of the whole of medicine in thirty-one scrupulously researched sections, in clear and succinct language. The Sabian master-mind also did pioneering work on the principles of balance, specific gravity, and the specific weight of alloys. He translated an Introduction to Arithmetic by Nichomachus, a work which also deals with music. Often regarded as the greatest Arab geometer, Thabit did science the service of translating into Arabic seven of the eight books of the conic sections of Appolonius, thus preserving three now lost in the original. His work on the shadows of the gnomon (sundial) is the earliest known on the subject.
Thabit made meticulous astronomical observations in Baghdad to determine the attitude of the sun and the length of the solar year. He not only elucidated ancient works on astronomy and geometry but also invented new propositions and contributed annotations to facilitate study. Nothing of scientific value appears to have been beyond his scope. He improved the translation of Euclid's Elements by Ishak b. Hunain, as well as the latter's weak translation of the Almagest. It was Thabit's work on Euclid which brought Gérard of Cremona (1114-1187) to Toledo in search of the Almagest over two hundred years later. Indeed, many of the Sabian works finally reached the minor-renaissance of the West in the 12th and 13th centuries in Latin translations, made at the Toledo school founded by Archbishop Raymond under Archdeacon Dominico Gundisalvi. Gérard of Cremona also translated other works by Thabit, including the Liber Carastonis sive de Statera, on the physics of balance, and it is by virtue of these transmissions that Gérard of Cremona became known as the “father of Arabism in Europe” : an influence which would later fortify the scientific aspect of the Renaissance. As late as the mid-sixteenth century, the great Elizabethan mathematician and magus, John Dee, when compiling his Monas Hieroglyphica (1564), used Thabit's De imaginibus : a treatise on planetary images, reflecting the talismanic type of Neoplatonic celestial magic. According to the late Professor Max Meyerhof : “Belonging to the pagan sect of the Sabians and at heart deeply attached to paganism, this scholar is one of the most eminent representatives in the Middle Ages of the tradition of classical culture.”
Thabit ibn Qurra's son, Sinán, a physician of high repute, continued the family tradition. He was appointed head of the medical profession in Baghdad, fortifying his medicine with a thorough knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, logic, metaphysics, as well as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Sinán's generation also provided another influential Sabian : al Battáni (877-918), the famous astronomer and mathematician, born in Persia and known to medieval Europe as Albategnus. The Zij of al-Battáni was translated by Plato of Tivoli two and a half centuries later. According to Carra de Vaux21, al-Battáni was “one of the most illustrious scholars of the East, perhaps the one whom Latin scholars of the Middle Ages and Renaissance most admired and eulogised.” He compiled astronomical tables with more accurate computations regarding the first appearance of the new moon, the inclination of the ecliptic, the length of the tropic and sidereal year, lunar anomolies, eclipses, parallaxes, than had ever been seen before. His greatest claim to fame was that if he did not discover, then at the very least he popularised the first notions of trigonometrical ratios as used today. Al-Battáni substituted the sine for Ptolemy's clumsy chords; he used the tangent and co-tangent and was acquainted with two or three fundamental relations in trigonometry. His work on trigonometry and algebra brings us, according to de Vaux, “far beyond the point reached by the Greeks and really opens the era of modern science.”
Perhaps the most obvious legacy of the Harranian Hermetists can be seen in the cathedrals and abbeys which have dignified the western catholic world from the time of the construction of the Abbey of Conques (c.1030-1080) onwards. Works translated by Thabit ibn Qurra were central to the understanding of forces and forms which made the Gothic explosion possible. According to the renowned medievalist Jean Gimpel22: “The remarkable Arab contribution to our culture is often underestimated, and yet it was this that made the full flowering of the Middle Ages possible. Without it, the Renaissance could barely have developed and the 20th century might still be technically and scientifically in the nineteenth.” And at the very heart of the Arab contribution were the Hermetic Sabians of Baghdad.
It is, furthermore, difficult to escape the conclusion that Sabian influence in some way helped to shape the mythology of medieval freestone masons : originators of what we now call Freemasonry. The earliest masonic documents recognised by English Freemasons today, the so-called Old Charges, date from around the year 1400, and attribute the survival of the masonic sciences after the Flood to Hermes Trismegistus and to Euclid, operating in Egypt. Such knowledge of these two figures as existed in the western Middle Ages derived
, as far as we know, from Harran and Baghdad. It is also recorded in the varied lore of the crusading years that some knights returned from the east with Saracen masons23. A learned mason from the Holy Land would almost certainly have obtained his Arabic translations of Greek technical works on geometry from the Sabian intellectuals of Harran and Baghdad.
It is curious that in the earliest extant copies of (late seventeenth/early eighteenth century) Scottish masonic catechisms24, the master mason's secret word is given as Mahabyn, in association with the teaching of points of masonic fellowship. The origin of this word has always been a mystery to Freemasons. In the context of this study, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the word is derived from mahabba, the Arabic word for love used by Sufi brethren in greeting. The development of Sufic mysticism, or rather gnosis, is linked to the work and beliefs of the Baghdad Sabians.
Thabit and the Gral
It seems more than a mere possibility that the translation-work of Thabit has influenced one of the most significant works of European literature and spiritual mythology, and along the way has given us at least one key interpretation of that mysterious phenomenon known as the Holy Grail. The document in question is Wolfram von Eschenbach's (fictional) account of a celestial Gral guarded by ‘templars’ in his Parzifal, written between circa 1200 and 1220. Wolfram's account of how he received the Gral story for his Parzifal is undoubtedly intriguing, as there is the whiff of some historical actuality underlying the fantasy. Wolfram states that one of his sources, “the heathen Flegetanis”, who left a document in Toledo (famous for its translation school), was an astronomer who was both Jewish and, on his father's side, a heathen (he “worshipped a calf as though it was his god”) and that he had seen the Gral, its name spelled out in the stars, and left on earth by a “a troop” who then “rose high above the stars, if their innocence drew them back again”. Wolfram states that the document of Flegetanis had been discovered by “the wise Master” Kyot of Provence, thus tying Wolfram's work into the vogue and status of the Languedoc troubadours for whom there was such a vogue in the courts of Germany. In spite of there having been a historical person called Gyot of Provins, a troubadour, the weight of scholarship falls against the idea that Wolfram is presenting a true story as regards his primary source.
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