ABSTRACT
We have now ascertained with all necessary fullness that which was Alchemy at its first beginning in the West, amidst the expanding light of the early Christian centuries. It was not a spiritual experiment and much less an attainment of the soul in God, illustrated by symbolism and veiled by a strange language: it was not on any quest of the spirit, and there is not one single word which betokens its connection with any form of Instituted Mysteries. Its highest aspiration was to accomplish such a tingeing of metallic substances that they would become penetrated with the essential principle of gold and not merely coloured on the surface, as in the processes which had been inherited from the practical metallurgists of Egypt, Greece and Rome. The Byzantine alchemists may or may not have understood these artifices in the plenary trade sense; but in either case it is certain that as to the higher and imagined Art they had no key of procedure. In dream and in thought therefore they looked upon it as a possible gift of God, remembering the inspired teaching that omne datum optimum et omne donum perfectum, desursum est. 1 Hence their invocations of the Holy Trinity, their allusions to the saving work of Christ and their occasional counsels of perfection as practical aids in the work which they desired to perform. The next point in our inquiry takes us, still under the auspices of Berthelot, to a very different collection of texts, being those of the early Syriac and early Arabian alchemists. As the French chemist collaborated with a textual scholar for the production of the Byzantine collection, so in these later undertakings he had the assistance of Rubens Duval and of O. Houdas. The Byzantine tradition of Alchemy came down, as it has been seen, to the Latin writers of the middle ages through the mediation of Arabian successors; but Arabia, according to Berthelot, was not the sole channel. “Latin Alchemy has other foundations even more direct, though till now unappreciated…. The processes and even the notions of ancient alchemists passed from Greeks to Latins before the time of the Roman Empire and, up to a certain point, were preserved through the barbarism of the first mediaeval centuries by means of technical traditions of the arts and crafts.” The keepers and transmitters of this old tradition were glass-makers, metallurgists, potters, dyers, painters, jewellers and goldsmiths, from the days of the Empire to and throughout the Carlovingian period, and so forward. The evidences are found in various old technical Latin treatises, such as Compositiones ad Tingenda, Mappœ Clavicula, De Artibus Romanorum, Schedula Diversarum Artium, Liber Diversarum Artium and some others. It is to be noted, however, that these are anything but alchemical treatises in the sense of pseudo-Democritus and Zosimus, or any other sense; they connect with the Theban Papyrus rather than with the Byzantine Collection: in a word, they were the craft-manuals of their period. Some of them deal largely in the falsification of precious metals. It will be seen that the distinction is valuable: on the one hand, mediaeval craftsmen in metals derived from Greeks through Latins, while mediaeval alchemists proper derived through Arabia from the Byzantine fountain-head. Arabia, however, did not mediate directly, for it was indebted on its own part to Syriac alchemists: it was these only who drew at first hand from the source in Greek.
