Alchemy encoded in poetry: the diwan of Ibn Arfa' Ra's

Ibn Arfa’ Ra’s. Shudhur al-dhahab [The Splinters of Gold].

€ 15,000.00

The "Splinters of Gold": a manuscript of alchemical poems in Arabic by the Andalusian alchemist Ibn Arfa’ Ra’s (fl. 12th century CE). This influential alchemical diwan opens with the most famous poem of the collection, known as al-Kawkabiyya ("The Planetary Poem"). Both medieval commentators and modern scholarship focus most heavily on this poem, especially on the two opening verses, whose literal meaning describes a seemingly astrological conjunction of Mars and Venus, the Sun and Moon, and Jupiter and Mercury. To an alchemist initiated into the study of the field, however, it meant much more, and was a much-discussed piece of alchemical knowledge in the pre-modern Islamic world.

This manuscript was copied on fine Persian paper in a tidy black naskh script, with section titles in gold ink on a red field added later, likely in the 18th or early 19th century. During the addition of these section titles, this complex alchemical text was altered slightly in five places: certain lines were delicately covered up (including the last three verses), and some were replaced with different text. However, with the aid of a simple backlight, one can read both the original and the altered form of the text, and trace the evolution of the poem through the manuscript’s history. The original text, predating the alterations, resembles 16th-17th century manuscript production from the north-eastern Ottoman provinces and late Safavid Iran. This dating is reinforced by the Planetary Poem itself, in which an extra fifth verse appears at the end of the first page; this verse is known to appear in the Splinters of Gold manuscript tradition from the 14th century onwards (cf. Forster/Müller, p. 378).