The Golden Builders Read online

  Wolfram's sources, other than the highly catholic Arthurian stories of Chrétien de Troyes, are obscure25. Von Eschenbach was exceptionally well-read, and alchemical sources cannot be ruled out. For example, his account of the Gral bears little conceptual analogy to the idea of it being the cup in which Joseph of Arimathaea collected Christ's blood - as in Robert de Boron's Joseph ou l'Estoire dou Graal (c.1210). Wolfram's setting for his Gral account is almost wholly alchemical. The Gral is identified with the Stone :

  ‘It is well known to me,’ said his host, ‘that many formidable fighting-men dwell at Munsalvaesche with the Gral. They are continually riding out on sorties in quest of adventure. Whether these same Templars reap trouble or renown, they bear it for their sins. A warlike company lives there. I will tell you how they are nourished. They live from a Stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called “Lapsit exillis”26. By virtue of this Stone the Phoenix is burned to ashes, in which he is reborn. - Thus does the Phoenix moult its feathers!27 Which done, it shines dazzling bright and lovely as before! Further : however ill a mortal may be, from the day on which he sees the Stone he cannot die for that week, nor does he lose his colour. ..Such powers does the Stone confer on mortal men that their flesh and bones are soon made young again. This Stone is called “The Gral”.

  'Today a Message alights upon the Gral governing its highest virtue, for today is Good Friday, when one can infallibly see a Dove wing its way down from Heaven. It brings a small white Wafer to the Stone and leaves it there. The Dove, all dazzling white, then flies up to Heaven again. Every Good Friday, as I say, the Dove brings it to the Stone, from which the Stone receives all that is good on earth of food and drink, of paradisal excellence - I mean whatever the earth yields. The Stone, furthermore, has to give them the flesh of all the wild things that live below the aether, whether they fly, run, or swim - such prebend does the Gral, thanks to its indwelling powers, bestow on the chivalric Brotherhood.

  'As to those who are appointed to the Gral, hear how they are made known. Under the top edge of the Stone an inscription announces the name and lineage of the one summoned to make the glad journey. Whether it concerns girls or boys, there is no need to erase their names, for as soon as a name has been read it vanishes from sight! Those who are now full-grown all came here as children. Happy the mother of every child destined to serve there! Rich and poor alike rejoice if a child of theirs is summoned and they are bidden to send it to that Company! Such children are fetched from many countries and forever after are immune from the shame of sin and have a rich reward in Heaven. When they die here in this world, Paradise is theirs in the next28.

  'When Lucifer and the Trinity began to war with each other, those who did not take sides, worthy, noble angels, had to descend to earth to that Stone which is forever incorruptible.29

  I do not know whether God forgave them or damned them in the end : for if it was His due He took them back. Since that time the Stone has been in the care of those whom God appointed to it and to whom He sent his angel. This, sir, is how matters stand regarding the Gral.'

  ‘If knightly deeds with shield and lance can win fame for one's earthly self, yet also Paradise for one's soul, then the chivalric life has been my one desire!,’ said Parzifal. ‘I fought wherever fighting was to be had, so that my warlike hand has glory within its grasp. If God is any judge of fighting He will appoint me to that place so that the Company there know me as a knight who will never shun battle.’ (From Parzifal, Chapt.9)

  Had von Eschenbach's ‘Flegetanis’, (used here as a cover-name for some of Wolfram's alleged oriental sources), seen Libellus IV.25 of our present Corpus Hermeticum, he would have read there the story of a dish or bowl sent down to earth by God. This account, linking this mythical image directly to gnosis, was probably written in Greek in Alexandria (c.200-300AD), and is of course attributed to the mythic sage, Hermes Trismegistos.

  HERMES : ..it is man's function to contemplate the works of God; and for this purpose was he made, that he might view the universe with wondering awe, and come to know its Maker. ..Now speech, my son, God imparted to all men; but mind [nous] he did not impart to all.

  TAT : Tell me then father, why did God not impart mind [nous] to all men?

  HERMES : It was his will, my son, that mind should be placed in the midst as a prize that human souls may win.

  TAT : Where did he place it?

  HERMES : He filled a great bowl with nous [mind], and sent it down to earth; and he appointed a herald, and bade him make proclamation to the hearts of men : “Hearken, each human heart; baptize yourself in this bowl, if you can, recognising for what purpose you have been made, and believing that you shall ascend to Him who sent the bowl down.” Now those who gave heed to the proclamation, and dipped themselves in the bath of mind, these men got a share of gnosis; they received mind, and so became complete men… as many as have partaken of the gift which God has sent, these, my son, in comparison with the others, are as immortal gods to mortal men. They embrace in their own mind all the things that are, the things on earth and the things in heaven, if there is aught above heaven; and raising themselves to that height, they see the Good.

  This amusing account is plainly a gnostic allegory on the theme of free-will and spiritual predisposition. Acquaintance with the ‘bowl’ (Greek : κρατηρ= krater, origin of our ‘crater’) is a goal well worth seeking30. Are there any grounds for thinking von Eschenbach had access to Hermetic sources? Such access might be considered unlikely until the name of Thabit ibn Qurra emerges from Wolfram's text. Thabit ibn Qurra, the Sabian polymath who took Hermes as his prophet and the Hermetica as his holy book, is mentioned by name in chapter thirteen of Parzifal as a “philosopher” and one who “fathomed abstruse arts”. When Wolfram has cause to list the planets, he gives their names in Arabic. Indeed, the whole of Parzifal is drenched in Germanicisations of oriental lore, which, we may surmise, was exactly what his readers wished to be stimulated by - and he makes it plain that the source for such information was Toledo, which indeed it was. Toledo was where Sabian translations of Greek and Syriac works into Arabic came to be translated into Latin.

  The Sabian Inheritance in the West

  This is a timely moment to look at what else came to the minds of western medieval scholars as a result of the Hermetic impulse in the east.

  One very important magical text extant in the Middle Ages was that compendium known as Picatrix. This was a Latin version of the Arabic treatise Ghayat al-hakim (The Aim of the Sage), which appeared in Spain in the eleventh century and which was translated in about 1256. The work emanated from the Sabian school of Harran. Picatrix exercised an immense influence, being, according to Ernesto Garin, a major conduit of Neoplatonist thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In it we see a conflation of Hermetic, Jewish, Neoplatonic and vulgar magic, and through it we catch a glimpse of the mind which saw all these strands as related and conceptually inseparable.

  Picatrix is a comprehensive treatise on sympathetic and astral magic with particular reference to the making of talismans. The work explains how to draw down the influences of the stars by establishing chains of correspondences with the celestial world. The author or authors perhaps recognised something which has only recently re-entered scientific speculation : that the universe may be considered as an ‘holistic’ system of interdependent activity where all things relate implicitly to all other things, that we isolate things for perceptual convenience by rationation. Picatrix maintains that the whole art of magic consists in “capturing” and guiding the influence of spiritus, (something like the souls of the celestial world, below intellectus, or the Greek nous) into materia. The method consisted in making talismans : images associated with the stars, inscribed on the correct materials at the most propitious times (astrology played a part), and in the right state of mind31. The practice demanded a deep knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, music and metaphysics, and formed a kind of mirro
r to the practice of alchemy. Talismanic magic aimed to get spiritus into material form, while alchemy aimed at extracting spiritus from matter in order to change the matter and the mind of the operator.

  The book also contains an account of one of the first metropolitan utopias, the city of Adocentyn, (Arabic : al-Asmunain), built by Hermes and kept under good influences by astral magic. This idea was to reappear in the ideal schemes of Thomas More in the 16th century and in the ideal visions of both Francis Bacon (New Atlantis. 1627) and the founder of the Rosicrucian idea, Johann Valentin Andreae's Christianopolis (1619), and is central to the history of European utopianism. Furthermore, Picatrix contained a description of an underground vault which may have influenced Johann Valentin Andreae's conception of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreuz in the Fama Fraternitatis (pub. 1614) :

  When I wished to bring to light the science of the mystery and nature of creation, I came upon a subterranean vault full of darkness and winds. I could see nothing because of the darkness, nor could I keep my lamp alight because of the many winds. Then a person appeared to me in my sleep in a form of the greatest beauty. He said to me : “Take a lamp and place it under a glass and shield it from the winds : then it will give thee light in spite of them. Then go into the vault; dig in its centre and from there bring forth a certain talismanic image, artfully made. When you have drawn out this image, the winds will cease to blow through the vault. Then dig in its four corners and you will bring to light the knowledge of the mysteries of creation, the causes of nature, the origins and qualities of things.” At that I said to him : “Who art thou?” He replied : “I am thy Perfect Nature. If thou wishest to see me, call me by my name.”32

  From Baghdad via Spain came Thabit ibn Qurra's De imaginibus on talismanic, Neoplatonist celestial magic, and al-Kindi's important De radiis or Theorica artium magicarum : talismanic and liturgical magic in the context of a philosophy of causation based on the emanation of rays. The author, Abu Yusuf Ya'qub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, (born in 850 in the southern Arabian peninsular and educated in Baghdad), also translated the “Theology” (Uthulujiyya) of Aristotle. This work was not by Aristotle but was in fact a commentary by Porphyry on books iv to vi of the Enneads of Plotinus, and was known in the west as the Liber de causis or Book of Causes. The book represents a kind of gnosticising of Plotinus, describing the descent of the soul, from the pure incorporeal realm of “intelligence” into the world of sense and corporeality. Very much like the second-century Gnostic Valentinian myth of the yearning Sophia (Wisdom), the soul produces the world of perception out of its pain and desire to give form to the ideal or intellectual forms which are present to it, and which derive from its origin in the active intellect of God the One. The soul or spirit (intellectus to the Latins in this context), creates reality. This gnostic theory of perception was to have great impact in the West for centuries and something like it is currently being revived in the world of quantum physics as well as in the continental philosophy of perception and optics. These ideas were directly to affect al-Kindi's work on light, rays, mirrors and the whole field of optics and were to colour that area of study for Latin scholars interested in the physics of light.

  Al-Kindi's de radiis was highly influential on two medieval geniuses: Friar Roger Bacon (c.1214/20-c.1292) and Robert Grosseteste (1168/70-1253). It was particularly influential because it tried to explain through a natural philosophy that astral and other magical effects could be explained without demonology, through the propagation of astral and other ‘natural’ rays. In other words, it was a work of natural, not supernatural, science.

  The theory of this ‘natural magic’ (there is of course no distinction between science and magic in this period) runs as follows. The nature and condition of a star is emitted as a ray. All terrestrial events are the product of a total harmony of rays in the heavens, a view which was often blended with both geometry and the more mystical light metaphysics, and served against the imputation of vulgar magic levelled at the ‘scientist’. Robert Grosseteste interpreted al-Kindi's work as grounds for believing that the essence of light is the formative and structural principle of the universe. According to Grosseteste, in a striking conceptual premonition of Einstein's famous formula (E=mc2), the universe is the result of the union of formless prime matter and ‘light’, of which visible light is only an aspect. Our word ‘radiation’ of course derives from the idea of astral rays. Grosseteste believed that a point of ‘light’ can produce a sphere of any size - again a striking premonition of the hidden potential within the atom - and that light formed the basis of spacial dimension and physical extension. Thus, man's essential being was light : a somewhat gnostic view. For Grosseteste, light was the principle and model for all natural operations, including the emanation of species and the virtues of things; as with light, all causes of natural effects operate by lines, angles and figures. The differences between phenomena depend on the laws of optics and perspective. Geometric optics thus became the basis for a mathematical philosophy of nature, affecting and effecting everything, including astrology. For example, a stellar virtue was understood to act more strongly when concentrated rather than when diffused through refraction or reflection, or when striking perpendicularly rather than obliquely, due to the numerically lower angles of incidence of those rays when reaching the earth. Astral influences were regarded not as occult forces or demonic powers but as rays which behaved as light. Thus, mathematics had become a divine science, or science of the divine. The full implications of this shift in perspective would have to wait until the seventeenth century for its fulfillment in the scientific revolution33. Nevertheless, Grosseteste's universe was still magical, but the magic was determined by an understanding of mathematical and physical laws. The deterministic power of the stars had been theoretically overcome by the illumination gained by knowledge of their mathematical nature. Hermetically-influenced manuscripts oversaw the birth of Natural Magic : the critical stage before the birth of modern science, the latter rejecting its mother in infancy.34

  The Sabians lived on at Baghdad as a separate sect until about 1050, seeing out the decline of the Golden Age inaugurated by the great caliphs (al-Mansur, ar-Rashíd and al-Ma'mún). Shortly before 950, the Buwayhids took over the governance of Baghdad and a period of strictly enforced Islamic orthodoxy took place, lasting until the coming of the Seljuks in 1055. Explicit Hermetism went underground - or perhaps devotees simply changed their hierophant's name from Hermes to Muhammad.

  It is certainly strange that at the very time the Sabians seem to disappear from Baghdad, the Hermetic documents known to us as the Corpus Hermeticum appear in Constantinople - after a 500 year interval - in the hands of the Platonic scholar, Psellus. As Walter Scott (d.1925), a translator of the Hermetica, wrote in his introduction to that work : “Is there not something more than chance in this?” What we now know as the Corpus Hermeticum may be no more than a chance collection of what was brought to Constantinople by a Sabian to escape destruction. Although conjectural, “there is nothing to prevent us from supposing that it was the arrival in Constantinople of a few such Sabian Neoplatonists from Baghdad, and the writing which they brought with them, that first started the revival of Platonic study in which Psellus took the leading part.” (Scott). Such an occurrence would certainly be strikingly similar to that by which the Corpus Hermeticum arrived in Florence from Macedonia with such epoch-marking momentousness in 1460, following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 (see chapter four). And can it be complete external co-incidence that the disappearance of the Baghdad Sabians also coincides with the appearance of the first great Sufi order, in Baghdad, in the form by which the turuq (paths) of Sufi mysticism are now known?

  Alchemy in the Middle Ages

  The alchemist known to medieval westerners as Geber has been identified as Jabir ibn Hayyan, called as-Sufi (‘the Mystic’), but it is highly unlikely that much of the material which bears his name has anything to do with this eighth century sage. The works attributed to him are
now thought to have been put together in the tenth century by some kind of secret society. There certainly was a Jabir, famous as the father of Arabic alchemy, born at Kufa and who practised as a physician to the family of the Barmecides, the viziers of Harun ar-Rashíd, caliph of Baghdad. Implicated in the downfall of the Barmecides, Jabir died in exile from Baghdad at Kufa in 803, where it is said his laboratory was discovered 200 years later.

  There are about one hundred works of Jabir extant. Many are, in the words of Professor Max Meyerhof (no sympathiser with mysticism) “confused jumbles of puerile superstition”. Others suggest the profound need for experiment, a unique trait of the Geber literature. His greatest fame lies in his practical scientific advances. He improved methods for evaporation, filtration, sublimation, melting, distillation and crystallisation. He described the preparation of, for example, cinnabar (sulphide of mercury), arsenious oxide and others. He knew how to obtain almost pure vitriols, alums, alkalis, sal-ammoniac, saltpetre, and ‘liver’ and ‘milk’ of sulphur by heating sulphur and alkali. He prepared fairly pure mercury oxide and sublimate, acetates of lead and other metals, sometimes crystalised. He obtained crude sulphuric and nitric acids as a mixture of them (aqua regia=kingly water), and explored the solubility of gold and silver in this acid. Several technical terms of alchemy were derived from Jabir's Arabic writings : realgar (red sulphide of arsenic), tutia (zinc oxide), alkali, antimony (Arabic : ithmid), alembic (for the upper) and aludel for the lower part of the distillation vessel. His Book of the Seventy was known from the Middle Ages in an inferior and incomplete Latin version, translated by Gérard of Cremona (d.1187). His Book of the Composition of Alchemy was translated by the Englishman Robert of Chester in 1144. Albertus Magnus (c.1206-1280), a thinker saturated in Neoplatonic learning, repeated Geber's teachings in his De Mineralibus, and Geber had a very pronounced influence on the encyclopaedic Speculum Naturale of Vincent of Beauvais. The large number of alchemical tracts ascribed to Arnald of Villanova and to Raymond (Ramon) Lull (c.1232-1315), the Majorcan mystic, are brimming with quotations from the works of Geber.