| Themes > Science > Chemistry > About Chemistry Generalities > Alchemy in Islamic Times > The Sources of Achemy Among Muslims > Bolos the Democritean of Mendes |
Bolos the Democritean lived in the second century before Christ. The work of this scholar is varied: alchemy, astrology, medicine. He is probably at the origin of the alchemic tradition transmitted by the work of pseudo-Democritus: Physika kai Mystika. He expounds there the four traditional branches of alchemy: gold, silver, precious stones, dyes. One can find the famous formula which aims to synthesize the quintessence of the alchemic art: 'one nature is charmed by another nature, one nature overcomes another nature, one nature dominates another nature'. How can this axiom be explained in practical terms? Zosimus, commentator of the fourth century, explains: 'we can proceed with the transmutation of common metal into noble metal by working alloys or by purifying the metals, basing ourselves on the affinity between metals, knowing their "sympathies and antipathies". Raw material, sympathy, transmutation by qualitative change (of the colours), we have thus the principles that constitute alchemy.' Thus the school of Bolos brings to the Egyptian technique a philosophical reasoning which will open the way to the science of the Great Work. 'Once again', says Festugiere, 'we see the union of the Greek spirit and the Oriental art.' The art exists, from ancient times; the goldsmiths of Egypt work metals, stones and purple. But although they have innumerable recipes transmitted from father to son and kept in temple archives, they lack a reasoning method. No-one has yet joined these practices with the principles which explain and justify them. There is practice but not theory. This is what the Greek spirit provides. The merit of Bolos of Mendes was to join theory and experiment and thus found a pseudoscience which would cross the ages up to modern chemistry. About the same time alchemy was practiced in most Egyptian towns. This first alchemy is a mixture of hermetic or Gnostic elements and old Greek philosophy: Heraclitus, Empedocles and their speculations about the four elements, Parmenides with his theory on the unity of the whole, the Platonic cosmogony of Timaeus. |
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