informs us, that Egypt was sometimes called Chemia.8 This name is supposed to be derived from Chanaan (ןענכ); thence it was believed that Chanaan was the true inventor of alchymy, to which he affixed his own name. Whether the Hermes (Ἑρμης) of the Greeks was the same person with Chanaan or his son Mizraim, it is impossible at this distance of time to decide; but to Hermes is assigned the invention of alchymy, or the art of making gold, by almost the unanimous consent of the adepts.
Albertus Magnus informs us, that “Alexander the Great discovered the sepulchre of Hermes, in one of his journeys, full of all treasures, not metallic, but golden, written on a table of zatadi, which others call emerald.” This passage occurs in a tract of Albertus de secretis chemicis, which is considered as supposititious. Nothing is said of the source whence the information contained in this passage was drawn: but, from the quotations produced by Kriegsmann, it would appear that the existence of this emerald table was alluded to by Avicenna and other Arabian writers. According to them, a woman called Sarah took it from the hands of the dead body of Hermes, some ages after the flood, in a cave near Hebron. The inscription on it was in the Phœnician language. The following is a literal translation of this famous inscription, from the Latin version of Kriegsmann:9
1. I speak not fictitious things, but what is true and most certain.
2. What is below is like that which is above, and what is above is similar to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
3. And as all things were produced by the meditation of one Being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation.
4. Its father is Sol, its mother Luna; the wind carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
5. It is the cause of all perfection throughout the whole world.
6. Its power is perfect, if it be changed into earth.
7. Separate the earth from the fire, the subtile from the gross, acting prudently and with judgment.
8. Ascend with the greatest sagacity from the earth to heaven, and then again descend to the earth, and unite together the powers of things superior and things inferior. Thus you will possess the glory of the whole world; and all obscurity will fly far away from you.
9. This thing has more fortitude than fortitude itself; because it will overcome every subtile thing, and penetrate every solid thing.
10. By it this world was formed.
11. Hence proceed wonderful things, which in this wise were established.
12. For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I possess three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
13. What I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed.
Such is a literal translation of the celebrated inscription of Hermes Trismegistus upon the emerald tablet. It is sufficiently obscure to put it in the power of commentators to affix almost any explanation to it that they choose. The two individuals who have devoted most time to illustrate this tablet, are Kriegsmann and Gerard Dorneus, whose commentaries may be seen in the first volume of Mangetus’s Bibliotheca Chemica. They both agree that it refers to the universal medicine, which began to acquire celebrity about the time of Paracelsus, or a little earlier.
This exposition, which appears as probable as any other, betrays the time when this celebrated inscription seems to have been really written. Had it been taken out of the hands of the dead body of Hermes by Sarah (obviously intended for the wife of Abraham) as is affirmed by Avicenna, it is not possible that Herodotus, and all the writers of antiquity, both Pagan and Christian, should have entirely overlooked it; or how could Avicenna have learned what was unknown to all those who lived nearest the time when the discovery was supposed to have been made? Had it been discovered in Egypt by Alexander the Great, would it have been unknown to Aristotle, and to all the numerous tribe of writers whom the Alexandrian school produced, not one of whom, however, make the least allusion to it? In short, it bears all the marks of a forgery of the fifteenth century. And even the tract ascribed to Albertus Magnus, in which the tablet of Hermes is mentioned, and the discovery related, is probably also a forgery; and doubtless a forgery of the same individual who fabricated the tablet itself, in order to throw a greater air of probability upon a story which he wished to palm upon the world as true. His object was in some measure accomplished; for the authenticity of the tablet was supported with much zeal by Kriegsmann, and afterwards by Olaus Borrichius.
There is another tract of Hermes Trismegistus, entitled “Tractatus Aureus de Lapidis Physici Secreto;” on which no less elaborate commentaries have been written. It professes to teach the process of making the philosopher’s stone; and, from the allusions in it, to the use of this stone, as a universal medicine, was probably a forgery of the same date as the emerald tablet. It would be in vain to attempt to extract any thing intelligible out of this Tractatus Aureus: it may be worth while to give a single specimen, that the reader may be able to form some idea of the nature of the style.
“Take of moisture an ounce and a half; of meridional redness, that is the soul of the sun, a fourth part, that is half an ounce; of yellow seyr, likewise half an ounce; and of auripigmentum, a half ounce, making in all three ounces. Know that the vine of wise men is extracted in threes, and its wine at last is completed in thirty.”10
Had the opinion, that gold and silver could be artificially formed originated with Hermes Trismegistus, or had it prevailed among the ancient Egyptians, it would certainly have been alluded to by Herodotus, who spent so many years in Egypt, and was instructed by the priests in all the science of the Egyptians. Had chemistry been the name of a science, real or fictitious, which existed as early as the expedition of the Argonauts, and had so many treatises on it, as Suidas alleges existed in Egypt before the reign of Dioclesian, it could hardly have escaped the notice of Pliny, who was so curious and so indefatigable in his researches, and who has collected in his natural history a kind of digest of all the knowledge of the ancients in every department of practical science. The fact that the term chemistry (χημεια) never occurs in any Greek or Roman writer prior to Suidas, who wrote so late as the eleventh century, seems to overturn all idea of the existence of that pretended science among the ancients, notwithstanding the elaborate attempts of Olaus Borrichius to prove the contrary.
I am disposed to believe, that chemistry or alchymy, understanding by the term the art of making gold and silver, originated among the Arabians, when they began to turn their attention to medicine, after the establishment of the caliphs; or if it had previously been cultivated by Greeks (as the writings of Zosimus, the Panapolite, if genuine, would lead us to suppose), that it was taken up by the Arabians, and reduced by them into regular form and order. If the works of Geber be genuine, they leave little doubt on this point. Geber is supposed to have been a physician, and to have written in the seventh century. He admits, as a first principle, that metals are compounds of mercury and sulphur. He talks of the philosopher’s stone; professes to give the mode of preparing it; and teaches the way of converting the different metals, known in his time, into medicines, on whose efficacy he bestows the most ample panegyrics. Thus the principles which lie at the bottom of alchymy were implicitly adopted by him. Yet I can nowhere find in him any attempt to make gold artificially. His chemistry was entirely devoted to the improvement of medicine. The subsequent pretensions of the alchymists to convert the baser metals into gold are no where avowed by him. I am disposed from this to suspect, that the theory of gold-making was started after Geber’s time, or at least that it was after the seventh century, before any alchymist ventured to affirm that he himself was in possession of the secret, and could fabricate gold artificially at pleasure. For there is a wide distance between the opinion that gold may be made artificially and the affirmation that we are in possession of a method by which this transmutation of the baser metals into gold can
