The House of Wisdom (18 page)

While Stephen at first concentrated on matters of the lowly human body, Adelard reached for the heavens. As a young student in France, he had confidently predicted that the knowledge available in the Arab East could help cure the ills of the West—a decidedly unorthodox view in the era of the anti-Muslim Crusades. But not even Adelard could have anticipated what he would find in the
studia Arabum
. Among his trophies were the geometric system of Euclid; an elaborate Arab table of the movements of the stars; techniques for using that powerful computer, the astrolabe; several major works of Arab astrology; and a book of alchemy revealing ways to dye leather, tint glass, and produce green pigment—Adelard’s favorite color. The man from Bath plunged headfirst into the world of astronomy, philosophy, and magic.

In all, about a dozen surviving works can be traced directly to the restless Englishman. The scope of his interests is breathtaking, from the royal art of falconry to applied chemistry, from geometry to mathematical astronomy and cosmology—the text often written in the accessible style of the natural-born teacher and raconteur. Adelard’s works also offer a useful window onto the state of Western borrowings from the Arabs, for his original works can be neatly broken down into those completed before his intellectual encounter with the East and those that followed it.

Upon his return to Bath, Adelard found himself besieged by friends and family, all eager to learn of his seven years abroad. “Among those paying their calls was a certain nephew of mine, who, in investigating the causes of things, was tying them in knots rather than unraveling them. He urged me to put forward some new item of the studies of the Arabs,” Adelard recounts.
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The result is
Questions on Natural Science
, a series of queries and responses on what the classical authors call natural philosophy. The Western-educated nephew does the asking, and the learned Adelard, this time speaking for the Arabs, responds. “This is how the causes of things work,” the well-traveled scholar declares at the outset, in what might serve as the motto for his long career as a scientist and scholar. “So let us start from the lowest objects and end with the highest.”
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Among the first Arabic texts to capture Adelard’s imagination was a classic work on
tilasm
, or the art of “talismans”—elaborate charms thought to invoke celestial influence—horoscopes, and astrological images by Thabit ibn Qurra, one of the leading lights of medieval science. Thabit ibn Qurra was a member of the star-worshipping Sabean sect, whose religious practices engendered a close affinity for astronomy, astrology, and mathematics. The Sabeans were also well grounded in Greek philosophy. According to Arab tradition, Thabit was a former money changer in the bazaars of Harran, with an impressive facility for languages. He caught the eye of a prominent Baghdad aristocrat and scholar, who arranged for him to study and work at the House of Wisdom. While the Sabeans were viewed with suspicion by many Muslims, the sect’s advanced Greek learning and invaluable skills afforded them a considerable measure of influence and status during the early Abbasid years.

The talented Thabit flourished in the learned environs of Baghdad, and he went on to serve as royal astrologer in the late ninth century. One of the empire’s great scholars and linguists, Thabit revised and corrected Arabic versions of the
Almagest
and other Greek classics and produced original works on number theory, calculus, and mechanics. He also wrote several texts on the philosophical and religious views of his fellow Sabeans and was regarded among the Arab scholars as an expert on talismans.
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In the preface to his own translation of Thabit’s text on magic, the twelfth-century Latin scholar John of Seville suggests that Adelard, the only other Westerner to have seen the original Arabic work, procured a copy while in Antioch: “This book, then, I, with the help of God’s spirit, obtained from my Master—a book which no Latin other than a certain Antiochene, who once obtained a part of it, ever had.” That “certain Antiochene” is none other than Adelard of Bath, who earlier published an abridged version of the same text.
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Where others feared the influence of Saracen sorcery, Adelard celebrated the notion that man might aspire to understand and even conquer nature. He also directly linked the practice of magic to other scientific endeavors, noting that the study of talismans first requires the mastery of astronomy and astrology. “Whoever is skilled in geometry and philosophy but without experience of the science of the stars is useless; for the science of the stars is, of all the arts, both the most excellent in its subject matter and the most useful because of the effects of talismans,” Adelard tells us in his own version of Thabit ibn Qurra’s work.
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The text, known as
The Book of Talismans
, includes incantations for driving away mice and techniques for rekindling love between husband and wife. There is even a talisman for ridding a town of scorpions. First, an image of a scorpion is fashioned from metal while Scorpio is in the ascendant. Next, the name of this constellation and other astronomical details are inscribed on the talisman. Finally, it is buried in the place to be protected—or better yet, in all four corners of the place—while one recites, “This is the burial of it and of its species, that it may not come to that one and to that place.”
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Adelard leavened his translation with a liberal use of Arabic phrases, giving it a mysterious appeal in a Latin world starved for both novelty and basic information. In the prescription for a wife seeking to regain her husband’s affections, he spells out the required incantation: “O fount of honor, joy and light of the world! Mix together the loves of these two people, o spirits, using your knowledge of mixing, and being helped toward this end by the greatest power and the might of
al-malik al-quddus wa al-hayah al-da
’
ima
” an Arabic phrase that Adelard translates as “the king, the holy and eternal life.”
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This noble appeal to God or his intercessors, not to demons, is in keeping with Islamic tradition and sets it apart from the notion of black magic in Christian Europe.
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At one point, Adelard gives us a rare hint as to what might have compelled a young man from the English West Country to push deep into uncharted intellectual territory, alone in a strange and distant land. The practitioner of magic, he writes, must remain focused on the task at hand, and he should always act with confidence. For “lack of hope is the mother of hesitation, and hesitation is the mother of ineffectiveness.”
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Under the influence of Thabit ibn Qurra and other such thinkers, Adelard developed a lifelong fascination with the occult as part and parcel of his science. As far as many of the Muslim scholars were concerned, astrology and magic fit right in with astronomy, medicine, chemistry, and weather forecasting, a convention that Adelard did much to popularize among early Western scientists. Arab doctors, for example, routinely consulted the stars to identify the best time to draw blood or conduct surgery, matching parts of a patient’s body with an astrological map of the heavens. This system was first propagated by ancient Greek medical practice: Aries was associated with the head, and one continued down the body and around the signs of the zodiac to Pisces, which corresponded to the feet.
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The University of Bologna, one of the medieval West’s great centers of medical training, had a special master dedicated to teaching future doctors how to assess the influence of the stars on the human body.
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Adelard, it seems, also dabbled in alchemy, an important incubator of early experimental science and the forerunner to modern chemistry. Although its origins lay in the philosophical investigation into the nature of substance and reality, much of medieval alchemy came more and more to comprise specific techniques for manipulating materials with solvents and reactive agents or creating metal alloys and dyes, all basic processes that would one day find a home in the chemist’s laboratory. Today, the word
alchemy
mostly conjures up the secretive, even mystical, pursuit of ways to create gold from lesser metals. One surviving medieval reference ascribes to Adelard a lost twelfth-century manuscript of alchemical recipes and techniques, known as
A Little Key to Drawing
. An extant version—without attribution to Adelard or anyone else—features a series of instructions for refining gold and silver, working in precious metals, tinting glass, and coloring leather, many dating back to the alchemical traditions of Hellenistic Egypt. In all, it presents 382 chapters, or recipes, about one third of which appear to be relatively recent additions.
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One salient feature of
A Little Key to Drawing
is its complete lack of reliance on Latin sources for the central material—there is, for example, no hint of the canonical works of Vitruvius in its architectural sections—making it one of the earliest examples of technology transfer to the Christian West.
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A number of clues suggest that Adelard may have augmented the older core text based on his own research and personal interests. These hints include a reliance on Arabic terminology similar to that found in his translation of Thabit,
The Book of Talismans;
the introduction into the Latin text of two English words in a section on techniques for producing green pigment, a color Adelard adopted as his trademark; a pair of recipes for making candy from sugarcane, a plant unknown at the time in northern Europe but familiar to one who had traveled as widely as he had done; and, finally, some passages that mirror text from Adelard’s known writings, including his earliest work,
On the Same and the Different
.
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The alchemical manuscript’s innocuous title may have been selected to obscure its true contents from casual curiosity, for
A Little Key to Drawing
is a gold mine of medieval technology, containing the industrial secrets of contemporary artisans making glass, leather, and other products, as well as the fundamental techniques and methods of early Western science.
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Among its treasures is a recipe, written in code, for the distillation of alcohol—a key ingredient in many alchemical procedures. Such works reveal a great deal about the underlying state of knowledge passed along by the Arab masters of the day, for the art of Muslim alchemy was dedicated, in part, to the search for pure “essences” through distillation, crystallization, reduction, and other fundamental chemical processes. Arab authorities on the subject taught that mixing particular distillates together could create a rarefied substance, the elixir, capable of curing disease, purifying lesser materials, and even prolonging life. This was later known in Europe as the fifth essence—the source, literally, of our word
quintessence
—and was a complement to the classical Greek schema of the four basic elements: air, water, earth, and fire.

The great ninth-century Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan taught that each of the earth’s metals consisted of different mixtures of sulfur and mercury, allowing for the possibility that they could be “transmuted” if one broke them down into these two intermediate elements and then rearranged the proportions and relative purities. This provided a theoretical basis for many of the alchemists’ early scientific investigations, a search that proved equally popular in the East and the West—not least for the expectation that one could ultimately produce gold from more common, base metals.
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Jabir, known in Latin as Gaber, to whom countless European alchemical texts were later spuriously ascribed, was closely associated with Shi’ite and mystical Sufi teachings, and his alchemical practice mirrored those sects’ spiritual quest to penetrate natural phenomena and reach the inner, revealed meaning. Here, then, was the philosophical basis for the now-discredited art of alchemy, and any change in material substance in the laboratory was, for Gaber and his like-minded colleagues, symbolic of a transformation of the soul.
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In the hands of some later Arab alchemists, this vital symbolic component was gradually stripped away, easing the transition from the spiritual discipline of alchemy to the practical science of chemistry. The works of such scientists covered the classification of mineral substances, basic processes and techniques, and discussions of apparatuses and other equipment—all easily assimilated into an emerging Western scientific language.
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The arrival in the Latin world of Arab alchemy stimulated centuries of research into chemical properties and experimental procedures, very much as the geocentric worldview contained in Arabic studies of the
Almagest
helped push back the boundaries of mathematical astronomy. The thirteenth-century English scientist and philosopher Roger Bacon, who shared Adelard’s enthusiasm for magic, saw great promise in what he termed a practical approach to the discipline: “But there is another alchemy, operative and practical, which teaches how to make the noble metals and colors and many other things better and more by art than they are made in nature. And science of this kind is greater than all those proceeding because it produces greater utilities.”
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