ISLAMIC Alchemy

What is known for certain from assaying the alchemical work attributed to Jabir is that he or who ever wrote it was familiar with Greek alchemy theory. He divided substances into three categories:

Spirits: volatile bodies such as camphor, sal ammoniac, mercury, arsenic, and sulphur.
Metallic bodies: the metals.
Bodies: non-volatile, pulverizable solids such as substances other than "spirits" or metallic bodies.

As can be seen, this resembles the Greek classification. The Greeks believed metals were comprised of a body, soul, and spirit. In fact, Jabir's categories could have came straight from Aristotle whose "moist" and "dry" vapors now become vapors of mercury and sulphur.

Like the Greeks, Jabir spoke of different sulpurs, at the time sulphur was thought to be a fusible, volatile, combustible body, such as yellow sulphur, white sulphur, green sulphur, black sulphur, and so on. But the sulphur referred to in modern chemistry also was known. Jabir's varieties of sulpurs might have been compounds containing sulphur, which some miners call iron pyrites. The notion that metals contained mercury and sulphur-the latter being an inflammable principle (before oxygen was discovered)-remained a part of alchemy and chemistry even into the 18th century. The idea that this inflammable principle-sulphur-was in metals, if not all bodies, was the progenitor of the notion of phlogiston.

Jabir shared Aristotle's conception of the four elements, fire, air, water, earth, but developed it along different lines. He states the first essence or natures of the four elementary qualities were hotness, coldness, dryness, and moistness. When these natures unite with the substance they form a compound of the first degree namely hot, cold, dry, moist. The union of two compounds produces an element: fire (hot + dry + substance); air (hot + moist + substance); water (cold + moist + substance); and earth (cold + dry + substance). He said all metals had two external natures and two internal. The diagram below shows how he viewed gold and silver: