Iksir or al-iksir has been Europeanized into elixir which...

Iksir or al-iksir has been Europeanized into elixir which has come to mean as an agent for prolong­ing life. According to Taylor,[^5] “the alchemy of China was primarily concerned with the prolonging of life”; he adds[^6] in this connection that “it is very probable that the Arab alchemists received some information about it. It is certainly notable that the idea of the elixir as a medicine prolonging life was present amongst the Arabs and not known to their Greek-speaking predeces­sors.” P.

Kraus[^7] published a voluminous work on Jabir. Its reviewer[^8] correctly noticed that “as to the origin of all those theories, Kraus maintains that not much of Jabir's alchemy can be traced to the extant fragments of Greek alchemistic literature, and that there are certain features in his alchemistic knowledge which are definitely unknown in classical antiquity.” There has prevailed so much prejudice in favour of Greek that even the word “elixir,” absent in Greek and therefore inconceivable as a loan-word in Arabic, has been given a Greek root.

Iksir has accordingly been said to have come from the Greek word ksiron, meaning dry, and has been made to connote dry powder, while elixir means essence, spirit, or fluid. How the Arabs coined their word from Greek cannot be explained. All this tends to show that the primary source of Arab alchemy lies somewhere away from Alex­andria. The Urge to Pursue Alchemy.-There were two types of seekers after lon­gevity.

First, the ascetic who was his own grocer, cook, and doctor and to whom infirmity of old age meant lingering death. The second was represented by a prince who had wealth and power and desired long life, only to enjoy his possessions fully. Though for different reasons, the Sufis, the nearest to ascetics, also indulged in alchemy.

In fact, Wiedemann[^9] remarks that “the study of alchemy has had one undesirable result inasmuch as the representatives of the mystic movement in Islam studied alchemy, e.g., ibn al-'Arabi.” This, however, was expected, and the converse is also true, for about the master of alchemy, Jurji[^10] states that “later tradition makes Jabir ibn Hayyan the first Sufi.” Kraus[^11] explains how Jabir, the alchemist, became interested in Sufism.

He writes, “Alchemy is never practised by Jabir for the object of accumulating wealth and acquiring the power of gold. Its real mission is to bring about salvation.” And how was this possible?