Background
Jabir ibn Hayyan was born c. 721 in Tus, Persia (modern day Iran). E. J. Holmyard believed that his father was an apothecary named Hayyan who lived in Kufa and was sent as a Shiite agent to Khurasan at the beginning of the 8th century.
1166
Jabir ibn Hayyan from a 15th century European portrait of Geber, Codici Ashburnhamiani, 1166.
1929
Geber, Chimistes Celebres, Liebig's Extract of Meat Company Trading Card, 1929.
European depiction of Jabir ibn Hayyan, or Geber.
1166
Jabir ibn Hayyan from a 15th century European portrait of Geber, Codici Ashburnhamiani, 1166.
1929
Geber, Chimistes Celebres, Liebig's Extract of Meat Company Trading Card, 1929.
European depiction of Jabir ibn Hayyan, or Geber.
https://www.amazon.com/Alchemical-Works-Geber-Jabir-Hayyan/dp/0877288119/?tag=2022091-20
1994
https://www.amazon.com/Dix-trait%C3%A9s-dalchimie-J%C3%A2bir-Hayy%C3%A2n/dp/2742710612/?tag=2022091-20
1996
جابر بن حيان
chemist scientist author alchemist Polymath
Jabir ibn Hayyan was born c. 721 in Tus, Persia (modern day Iran). E. J. Holmyard believed that his father was an apothecary named Hayyan who lived in Kufa and was sent as a Shiite agent to Khurasan at the beginning of the 8th century.
Jabir’s teacher, Ja'far as-Sadiq, inspired his interest in alchemy. He wrote: "My master Ja'far as-Sadiq taught me about calcium, evaporation, distillation and crystallization and everything I learned in alchemy was from my master."
The study of all the printed texts of Jabir and of the manuscripts partly discovered by M. Meyerhof in Cairo libraries led Paul Kraus to the following conclusions: that the corpus of the writings attributed to Jabir is not the work of a single man but, rather, that of a school; that the degree of scientific knowledge shown and the terminology employed presuppose the translations from the Greek produced by Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his school; that the references in these works to the theology of Mu'tazila suggest that the writings are of the same period, at the earliest; that the earliest mention of the books appears in Ibn Wahshlya and in Ibn Umail; and, above all, that the writings reveal the same more or less veiled lsmaili propaganda as that of the epistles of the Brethren of Purity, who were closely connected with the establishment of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt - in short, that the works were not written until the tenth century and that Jabir was really the Shiite imam, the name of whose eldest son, Ismail, was the eponym of Ismailiya.
The corpus of Arabic Jabir texts comprises both individual books and groups of books. The latter are in part designated according to the number of individual writings they contain; the largest are entitled Seventy, One Hundred Twelve, and Five Hundred. The Seventy includes seven groups of ten, well distinguished from each other; One Hundred Twelve is the product of four - the number of the basic qualities, the elements, the humors - and twenty-eight, the number of the mansions of the moon and of the letters of the Arabic alphabet, which is itself equal to four times seven. The Five Hundred are not, in contrast with the One Hundred Twelve and the Seventy, individually enumerated in the Fihrist; since only some of them are known and shown to belong to the group, there exists no certainty concerning their character or the meaning of the number in the title.
Other writings gathered into groups are the ten supplementary books (mudafa) to the Seventy; ten books of corrections (musahhahat) of the teachings of mostly ancient philosophers (including Homer) and physicians; the Twenty; the Seventeen; the 144 Books of the Balances; and the books of the seven metals.
Besides the Latin translation of the Liber de septuaginta, only one other book is available in Latin, the Liber misericordiae, edited by E. Darmstaedter in 1925.
The writings of the corpus are copiously cited in the Arabic literature, and long sections from them have been copied by other authors. The long list of quotations from Jabir in Arabic works given in Kraus has long been out of date. Since most books of the corpus are still unedited, the presentation of Jabir's doctrines must be based on the previously published material and on Kraus, who gives many quotations from the manuscripts.
For full appreciation of Jabir’s achievement, a philologically based elucidation of his relationship to the Greek alchemists is the foremost requirement. In contrast with the later works, the One Hundred Twelve contains many quotations from the Greek alchemists and references to them. Since a portion of the Greek alchemical corpus must have been translated into Arabic, as is apparent from the numerous word-for-word quotations from such writings, especially in the Turba philosophorum, one of the chief problems is how Jabir freed himself from the confusion in the occult writings of the Greek authors and succeeded in constructing the system represented in the Seventy. It is also not inconceivable that the quotations from the Greek could contribute to the textual criticism of the original passages.
Two of the writings contained in the corpus, which Kraus edited and placed at the beginning of his volume of texts, permitted him to reconstruct Jabir's system of the sciences: Book of the Transformation of the Potential Into the Actual and Book of Definitions. This system is divided into sections on the religious and the secular sciences. Within the secular sciences, alchemy and its dependent sciences occupy one side of the genealogical tree; all the others constitute the second side. Among the former, medicine plays a major role; Jabir's remarkable knowledge in this area is displayed in his book on poisons. As for the religious sciences, it is remarkable that here the intellectual disciplines are on the same footing. A valuable project would be the comparison of this ranking with that developed by al-Farabi, who in his De scientific likewise sought to place the religious sciences into a total system.
Jabir ibn Hayyan's importance for the history not only of alchemy but also of science in general, and for the intellectual history of Islam, has by no means been sufficiently examined. He paved the way for most of the later alchemists, including al-Kindi, al-Razi, al-Tughrai and al-Iraqi, who lived in the 9th-13th centuries. His books strongly influenced the medieval European alchemists and justified their search for the philosopher's stone. In the Middle Ages, Jabir's treatises on alchemy were translated into Latin and became standard texts for European alchemists. These include the Kitab al-Kimya, translated by Robert of Chester, and the Kitab al-Sab'een by Gerard of Cremona. Marcelin Berthelot translated some of his books under the fanciful titles Book of the Kingdom, Book of the Balances, and Book of Eastern Mercury. Several technical Arabic terms introduced by Jabir, such as alkali, have found their way into various European languages and have become part of scientific vocabulary.
The historian of chemistry Erick John Holmyard gives credit to Jabir for developing alchemy into an experimental science, and he writes that Jabir's importance to the history of chemistry is equal to that of Robert Boyle and Antoine Lavoisier. The historian Paul Kraus, who had studied most of Jabir's extant works in Arabic and Latin, summarized the importance of Jabir to the history of chemistry by comparing his experimental and systematic works in chemistry with that of the allegorical and unintelligible works of the ancient Greek alchemists. The word gibberish is theorized to be derived from the Latinised version of Jabir's name, in reference to the incomprehensible technical jargon often used by alchemists, the most famous of whom was Jabir.
Jabir was affiliated with Shia Islam. The religious side of his world view is based on the appearance of the word mizan in the Koran, where it is used both in the sense of the balance in which deeds are weighed at the Last Judgment, and an eternal, essential part of heaven itself, along with the stars. The allegorical interpretation of the Koranic balance, which also appears in Islamic gnosis, unites Jabir's scientific system with his religious doctrine.
Jabir drew inspiration from a range of people, including Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Socrates, as well as Egyptian and Greek alchemists.
Alchemy takes a commanding position both in theory and in actuality in Jabir's corpus, but all the writings belonging to it are by no means concerned with this subject. Rather, all the sciences - philosophy, linguistics, astrology, the science of talismans, the sciences of the quadrivium, metaphysics, cosmology, and theology - are represented, as are fields which do not belong to the sciences, such as medicine, agriculture, and technology. The philosophical writings include notes on various pre-Socratics, a work attacking Plato’s Laws, another against Aristotle’s De anima, and a commentary on his Rhetoric and Poetics. A series of writings is based on Balinas or Balinus, that is, Apollonius of Tyana. The writings of the corpus are full of quotations from ancient authors whose works are partly preserved elsewhere in Arabic translations.
According to Jabir’s developed theory, the ingredients of the elixir are not exclusively mineral; rather, some are vegetable and animal. The substances of all three kingdoms of nature can be combined so as to arrive at a mixture in which the basic qualities contained in all natural objects are represented in the proposition sought. The theoretical interest of this procedure is at least as strong as the practical interest in the transmutation of metals. The ideal goal is a catalog of all natural objects in which the basic qualities and peculiar properties of each substance, which are to be determined experimentally, are numerically specified. The scientific principle of such research Jabir called mizan (balance); its all-encompassing importance results from the wealth of its applications. The word represents the Greek zygon (balance), also in the sense of specific weight; but it also stands for the stathmos (weight) of the Greek alchemists, in the sense of the measurement in a mixture of substances.
Beyond this purely scientific meaning, the term constitutes a basic principle of Jabir's world view: mizan al-huruf the balance of the letters, concerns the relationship of the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet (four times seven) to the four qualities (warm, cold, moist, and dry), a relationship which also embraces the metaphysical hypostases of Neoplatonism - intellect, world-soul, matter, space, and time. The concept thus becomes a principle of Jabir's scientific monism, in opposition to the dualistic world view of Manichaeism - the struggle against this religion was one of the chief concerns of Islam at that time.
Jabir finds an expression of this world view in the theory, already developed by the Greeks, of the specific properties (proprietates) of things, of their sympathies and antipathies, and of their specific suitabilities in practical applications, especially in medicine. Finally, this theory leads him to conceive of the possibility of the artificial production of natural objects, and therefore also of the homunculus; this conception expressly places the activity of his ideal scholar in parallel with that of the Demiurge.
Jabir's rationalism is not obscured by this theory; rather, it is here that he finds the working of natural law, as he sees it. The same is true of his treatment of arithmetic; the significance of number in nature, a notion developed by the Pythagoreans and Plato, is for him at once an empirical fact and a principle.
For authors of Jabir's time, it is obvious that the astrological world view played a prominent role in the entire theory. The stars are not only a constituent of the world of which they are a part; their unique position in the cosmos also makes them of decisive importance in terrestrial events. This view is expressed in Jabir's very detailed talisman theory. The talisman bears the powers of the stars and, according to him, is for this reason called tilasm (tlsm in vowelless Arabic script), because it is given domination (musallat, without vowels, mslt) over events in the world. But Jabir did not stop with the importance of the stars for the creation of talismans; rather, he believed that they can be made directly subservient through sacrifice and prayer. The character of such sacrifices and prayers can be gathered from the extensive chapters dealing with similar matters in the Picatrix, which is traditionally attributed, incorrectly, to the Spanish mathematician and astronomer Maslama al-Majrlti. This portion of his teachings is one of the most prominent pieces of evidence for the survival of the belief in the stars as divine beings, as they were originally viewed, even though the monotheistic religions had officially removed them from this status. The Hebrew and Latin translations of the Picatrix show that the lingering on of this "idolatry" was not confined to the Islamic world.
Hayyan probably was married, but no precise information about his family is available.
