For the Love of the Gods: The History and Modern Practice of Theurgy - Brandy Williams 2016
Geber
Stories from the Ancestors
When Christian persecution drove Pagan philosophers out of Alexandria, Athens, and Rome, Byzantion formed a refuge. This city continued the tradition of Greek literate culture—Homer’s Iliad was taught in the schools—and Platonic and Neo-Platonic commentaries continued to be studied and written there.
While Paganism survived in Christian Constantinople, one Hellenistic city remained openly Pagan. Harran, a trade route crossroads in the scorching desert and one of the stops on the Silk Road, had been the city of the moon god since Akkadian rule in 2000 BCE. The last Pagan emperor Julian offered a sacrifice at the temple of the moon god in Harran. Early medieval Harran had seven gates and seven temples, each dedicated to one of the planetary deities, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon and sun, considered planets by the ancients.
The last Pagan city certainly included Christians, Jews, and Muslims among its population, drawn to the learned atmosphere of the city. In the eighth century, the Muslim caliph Umar II founded a Neo-Platonic academy in the city and invited persecuted Hermetic scholars from Athens and Alexandria to move there. The Neoplatonist Simplicius, who had studied with Damascius at the Academy in Athens before it closed, wrote his treatise on physics there.
The man who is credited with founding Arabic alchemy is thought to have studied at the university in Harran. Known in Western Europe as Geber, Jabir ibn Hayyan was born about 721 CE. An alchemist and Sufi, he studied Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic texts; numerous commentaries bear his name.
SILVER FOR THE MOON GOD
Jabir finished the last line, set his pen aside on the pad, and sprinkled sand on the parchment. The script seemed to move on the page; was it his tired eyes, or did the words themselves dance with knowledge? It was done, praise be to Allah, a fair copy. He glanced over at the long-necked alembic and the small box holding a mound of powder. He had made the silver nitrate, and he had recorded how it was made.
He had been working so long the light had started to fade. He reached for the tray near his elbow to pick up a slice of cheese or a bit of flatbread. The tray was empty. He must have eaten them all, although he had no memory of having done so or how long ago that had been.
Gathering up his notes, he threw on his cloak and stepped outside. His little beehive house made of clay sat a small distance from his neighbors—no one wanted to live too close to the odors and explosions that resulted from his experiments. A few minutes of walking brought him deeper into the city where the streets were filled with people.
A passerby jostled Jabir’s elbow. Automatically he clutched the manuscript close against his chest.
“Apologies,” a young woman murmured, and stopped. “Jabir ibn Hayyan? It’s really you! We haven’t seen you in months.”
“Layla,” Jabir said turning to her with a smile. It always gave him a lift to see her. Today she wore a bright red robe worked with intricate embroidered designs and was scented with a floral perfume. “What’s your errand?”
She lifted a basket. “I’m taking an offering to the temple of the moon god.”
They both looked up reflexively to the great stone temple on the hill at the center of town. “It’s an ancient thing,” Jabir murmured. “Ehulhul, home of Sin, god of the moon.”
“Women of my family have brought offerings there since time began,” Layla said.
Jabir laughed. “Since time began? It has been destroyed and rebuilt many times.”
“Just so, it still stands,” she said serenely. “Will you walk with me? I would appreciate the company.”
“I will walk with you as far as I can,” he responded readily. “My destination is the university.”
They fell into step together. She said, “How are your studies in al-chemya?”
“I have created a salt of silver,” he said, happy to share his discovery. “It’s a white powder but it turned my hand black. It sealed a cut on that hand, too,” he said. “It’s a lunar caustic. I believe it will have many beneficial medical uses.”
“Well then, you should make an offering at the temple,” she urged him. “Since silver is the metal of the moon god.”
“The work is my offering,” he said piously. “And this,” tapping the manuscript still tight in his hands. “I’m taking a copy for the library.”
Just then his stomach growled. Layla laughed. “You devotees of Hermes always neglect your health!”
“I know Hermes as Idris,” he said mildly.
Layla did not let him lead her off her point. “When did you last eat?”
“It might have been yesterday,” he confessed.
Layla lifted the basket. “Here, take one.”
“I’m not a god,” he said uncomfortably.
“No, you’re just a scholar, but you’re a hungry one,” she said. “And it’s a long way to the university.”
The scent of the honey cakes made his mouth water. Layla handed him one, and he took a bite, savoring the burst of sweetness on his tongue. “Did you make this? It’s delicious!”
She laughed. “That’s the hunger talking.” She stopped and pointed down the street. “This is where we part company. Unless you change your mind and come to the temple with me.”
He sighed. “I am anxious to deliver this to the library. My regards to your father.”
“Please come to dinner soon,” she said cheerfully, waved, and was swallowed up in the crowd.
It was a good omen to have a honey cake from the hand of a devotee of the moon god. He breathed a quick prayer, “May all the gods look with favor on my work.” Then he pushed on toward the university. Layla was right, it really was a long walk.
Harran and Bagdad
Jabir ibn Hayyan died about 851 CE. If he did live in Harran, he witnessed the destruction of the great temple of the moon god and the construction of a mosque on the site. Even while replacing temples with mosques, for centuries successive Islamic rulers tolerated the city’s Pagan ways. The city’s luck finally ran out when the last functioning Pagan temple was destroyed by an ally of the Turks in 1081 CE. In 1271 Mongols deported the population and walled off the city, which was left to fill up with sand.
Contemporary theurgist Don Frew, along with Anna Korn, toured Harran’s temple ruins in the late 1990s, a trip documented in “Harran: Last Refuge of Classical Paganism.” Frew noted that population pressure had brought irrigation farming and permanent settlement to the area. Archaeological investigation of the ancient temple sites remains an urgent need for the study of medieval Pagan religion.
Jabir’s work was so highly respected that numerous subsequent authors borrowed his name for their writings, establishing a Jabirian tradition of Hermetic alchemy in Islamic philosophy.
In The Hermetic Link: From Secret Tradition to Modern Thought, Jacob Slavenburg traces a connection between Harran and Baghdad. Hermetic and other scholars migrated to Baghdad when that city established its House of Wisdom in the ninth century. At its height, the city held a million people and drew multilingual intellectuals from around the Islamic world—Spain, Egypt, the Near East, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and Afghanistan.
Today, scholars refer to this time period as the Golden Age of Islam. The university in Baghdad imported printing press technology from China and preserved numerous works from the ancient Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic academies. The ready availability of texts containing the scientific and philosophic knowledge of the ancient world inspired numerous Islamic Neo-Platonists.
Jabir’s work inspired a secret society that met in Baghdad, the Ikhwan al-Safa or Brethren of Purity. The Ikhwan compiled an encyclopedia of fifty-two epistles summarizing science, philosophy, metaphysics and theology. In An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes the works of the Ikhwan al-Safa contain many Hermetic and Pythagorean elements. He calls them the “guardians and propagators of Hermeticism in the Islamic world,” the spiritual descendants of the Harranians, heirs to the religion of the prophet Idris. They cited four sources for their knowledge: the scientific works of the ancient world; the religious texts, Torah, Gospels, and Quran; the study of nature; and divine books accessible only to angels and purified humans. They met three times a month to sing hymns to Plato, Aristotle, and Idris, the Islamic version of Hermes. In this they remind us of the theurgists of Alexandria and Rome who revered teachers as divine beings and began their meetings by singing hymns to the gods.
THE LESSONS OF GEBER
Eurocentric versions of history lament the dark ages of the West and the loss of precious knowledge in the gap between the classical world and the Renaissance. That gap did not exist in the Islamic world, where the same time period is known as a great flowering of knowledge and culture. The cities of Harran and Baghdad were impressively large and supported universities that preserved works that had been destroyed in Western Europe. While medieval monks labored to hand copy a few precious works on animal skin vellum, printing technology imported from China allowed many copies of scrolls to be struck from carved woodprints on durable linen paper. The history of civilization takes a decided detour from Athens and Rome through the great Islamic cities.
The Ikhwan al-Safa form a critical link in the transmission of Hermetic knowledge through the centuries. They are followers of Jabir ibn Hayyan within the Islamic mystic tradition, but the group also bears a resemblance to the circles that surrounded the Pagan philosophers. With their hymns to the great teachers, they form another example of the worship that surfaces whenever students commit to Neoplatonism.
Notes on the Story
While some scholars place Geber in Harran, this is purely speculative, although any history written about Jabir ibn Hayyan is at least partly fiction. The clay houses of Harran are called “beehive” houses for their conical shape, resembling medieval conical skeps.
In A Treatise on Chemistry, Volume 2, Henry Enfield Roscoe and Carl Schorlemmer note that Geber first made silver nitrate. They describe the process for doing so. It is still used today for numerous purposes, including cauterizing wounds.