Astrology and alchemy were the two medieval magical sciences, but both led to real science. We have a number of mathematical and scientific words that start with “A” because they are from Arabic’s definite article “al.” Astrology, of course, is of Greek derivation: the study of the stars. Alchemy is an odd blended word, since Arabic “al” prefaces a Greek word, “chemia.” (The Greek word is obscure, with some suggesting it’s from Egyptian “kemet,” black earth, although there’s a similar native word for combining things.)
Astrology came to us from Arabic sources, despite its Greek name. People had tracked the stars since our earliest written records (Babylonian and Egyptian), but the new Arabic “science” consisted of working out how the stars did natural magic, not just where they would be an hour from now. Astrology meant everything about the stars, though: their positions, how to use them for navigation, how to tell time, and how to avoid unlucky constellations.
On the scientific side, a Greek device for tracking star positions was much improved to create the Arabic astrolabe. It was made of brass and consisted of several flat plates and some arms and pointers. It divided the day/night time period into 24 units before mechanical clocks were in use. Most astrolabes were marked in Arabic, so most science students had to learn at least some Arabic, the way students today must learn English. Many of our modern star names are either Persian or Arabic, or some garbled medieval version of a name that used to be Persian or Arabic, probably written into Latin letters during those years.
On the magic side, they believed strongly that stars and planets looked down on earth and exerted influences, good and malign. The stars were not good or evil, they just took part in a celestial weather system that wise men took into account, just as they might not start a journey in storm season. The most scientific European king, Frederick II of Germany, paid a royal astrologer to give him reports on the influence of the stars! The astrologer may well have also kept an observatory with accurate records of stars’ time of rising. Frederick II would have been astonished to learn that his descendants would consider astrology superstition. The separation of astronomy and astrology came about mainly after the Galilean-Copernican revolution that transferred the stars from a “fixed sphere” with the earth at its center to the universe we envision today, in which our sun is merely one of trillions of other stars.
Alchemy began as an Arabic project to translate some Greek philosophy; we know that the first Abbasid Caliphs who built Baghdad provided a generous budget to translate all of the world’s literature into Arabic, which was a fairly new written script. Some of the philosophy came from mystical sects like the Hermetics and Gnostics, who pondered the unity of all matter and spirit, and things like that. The translators became interested and wrote their own books, fusing these Greek ideas with Muslim monotheistic theology. In Baghdad’s center of learning, alchemists not only suggested ways that matter and spirit interacted, but also experimented with how specific forms of matter, such as spices or metals, interacted.
In 1144, an Englishman named Robert translated some important scientific texts into Latin. He was living and working in Spain, where Arabic books flowed freely, on the frontier of the Latin-scholarship region of the north. He translated both al-Khwarismi’s book about mathematics and an important alchemical text by Jabir ibn Hayyan, a doctor and philosopher. Jabir’s works were deliberately written in an obscure way, so that your best shot at understanding him was to have been his student, that is, to learn his code. Reading them years later in Latin, they were certainly mysterious enough.
Yet Jabir’s works mixed esoteric mysteries with basic scientific advances, such as basic classification of substances. He explained how to extract an inorganic substance, like ammonia, from an organic one, like urine, using another chemical agent. Europe already had a layer of budding chemists in its art industry, since mixing paint was a type of experiment. Perhaps leaning on Jabir’s work in Latin, European artists extracted chemicals by exposing metals to ammonia, producing salts that made uniquely strong and stable blues and greens.
During the 12th century, there was a boom of translation into Latin from Arabic. It’s when we received Ptolemy, Euclid, and much of Aristotle back into Western knowledge. With the fall of Rome and the destruction of Alexandria’s library, the only Greek texts that came back to us had either been stored successfully in Constantinople or sold to Baghdad for translation. The medieval time was a succession of book transfers just in time, as each leading city was crushed by a conqueror and its library burnt or scattered.
Two leading European scholars wrote prominent encyclopedias or commentaries on the new knowledge bases. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, who were Dominican and Franciscan friars, both wrote books that were, in turn, copied and distributed around Northern Europe. Bacon composed a giant textbook at the Pope’s request, so that European universities would have the most up to date scientific discoveries.
The esoteric spiritualism of these early texts came to dominate the tone of early European alchemy. One could only learn their secrets by studying long hours without divulging the esoteric, secret knowledge. We can see both the magical wizard legends and modern chemistry developing: the initiated practiced combining substances, trying to purify both the soul and gold. Man could learn how the universe was put together while uniting mankind with God’s truth.
Meanwhile, mineral deposits were found in Hungary and Germany that began to change industrial history. Alchemists had a real role to play there, working out how to use new minerals in alloys or to purify other minerals from their natural state. Gunpowder began to be used in Europe around 1350, and then the arms race was on. Every king wanted to produce the metals and chemicals needed to create stronger and better firearms. Making gunpowder was itself a skilled art of alchemy, since each element had to be made from other materials and then combined just right. The charcoal in it, for example, was often made from obscure plants like grapevines, not from the sturdy oaks used in iron-making. Why grapevine charcoal? It was a mystery of natural magic.
And so chemistry began to pull away from alchemy as it moved in a pragmatic direction. Pure alchemy continued to exist as a sort of philosophical blend of magic and chemistry. Its basis in esoteric mysteries of the soul kept some focused on higher goals, often in the purifying soul/or/gold direction. One of its famous searches was for the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could transform one thing into another, like a Google Translate of matter. We get our word “elixir” from this search: like alchemy, it’s a Greek word borrowed into Arabic, so it’s el-ixir (kserion, in Greek). Legends and rumors flew about saying that Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon had discovered the Philopher’s Stone but had encoded the knowledge in a mystical text. The elixir, if it existed, could bring life to the dead or it could translate one substance of no value into another of great value. From this, of course, we get the lasting modern rumor that alchemy was the practice of turning lead into gold.