by Jay Weidner
Zosimos informs us in his First Book of the Final Reckoning that alchemy derived from the wisdom of the pre-catastrophe offspring of semidivine beings and humans.1 As noted in chapter 2, these beings were known in ancient Egypt as the Heru Shemsu, or the Company of Horus, the Followers of the Widow’s Son. The “Isis the Prophetess” story is our last text of the ancient wisdom, and in it we can identify the major alchemical themes and preoccupations of the following two thousand years. Alchemy, as “Isis the Prophetess” tells us, is composed of three transformations: an interior transformation, an exterior elemental transformation of matter, and a transformation of time itself.
In the collapse of the ancient world that began with Alexander, this unitary view of alchemy fragmented into several parallel currents. The physical transformative process was seen as separate and became confused with metallurgical and proto-chemical trickery. The internal transformation became the basis for the experiential mysticism, or gnosticism, of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The secret of the transformation of time, the advent of the kingdom of heaven, became the inner core of early Christianity. Unfortunately, this vision was co-opted and debased by the Church into an ongoing apocalypse against heretics. In Judaism, the secret of time was intimately intertwined with the work of creation, the ability to animate matter. As we saw in the Bahir, Jewish mysticism retained intact a major portion of the secret.
With Islam, the split began to widen even further. The secret of time, contained in the heart of Muhammad’s revelation, was retained as a family secret among the descendants of the Prophet. The internal transformative processes became the mystical practices of the Sufis, while the external transformation of the elements became one of the cornerstones of Islamic science, along with medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. Within Islam, threads of all three transformative processes can be found, but it is hard to find anything close to a unitary system.
By the second half of the tenth century, this separation had reached a kind of maximum dispersion. The secrets of the Bahir were known only to a few small groups of Jewish mystics. The Islamic mystics were just forming the early Sufi orders, while the Shi’ite owners of the inner secret were trying to conquer the Islamic world. Christianity, of course, had persecuted its alchemists and gnostics out of existence, leaving a shroud of darkness over the entire seven-hundred-year period from the fall of Rome to the Crusades.2
Learning in the West sank to a level little above superstition.3 Such scholars as there were, Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), for instance, dwelt mainly on ecclesiastical matters with an amazing credulity for tales of marvels, miracles, and the possession of human beings by demons. Beyond such writings, there were only confused compilations from fragments of classical authors, variously and often wrongly ascribed. These were the crumbs of ancient wisdom that nourished that dark and arid age.
This sad state of affairs began to change when the Muslim Arabs and Berbers entered Spain from North Africa in the eighth century. Islam, seemingly endowed with an insatiable curiosity for foreign learning and guided by a truly Oriental imagination that was in sharp contrast to the passive intellectualism of the West, revitalized the civilization of the territories it conquered. Europe was saved from this fate by Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel, at the battle of Tours in 732. But Spain became a Muslim stronghold (see fig.5.1).
Figure 5.1. The tenth-century gardens of Cordova in Muslim Spain.
In the centuries that followed the Arab rise to world-power status, its caliphs, sultans, and generals exhibited a great interest in learning and arranged for the literature of the conquered areas to be translated into Arabic. Much of the ancient wisdom was preserved in these Arabic translations. The writings of Aristotle, Archimedes, Apollonius, Euclid, Hippocrates, and Galen were all preserved for later rediscovery in the West by these Arabic collections. It was also through these Arabic sources that knowledge of alchemy was reintroduced to Europe.
We have already mentioned Jabir, an eighth-century collector and interpreter of gnostic alchemical texts, but of even more significance is the treatment given to the hermetic arts in the great tenth-century Arabic encyclopedia, Kitab-Fihirst. Several pages are devoted to various hermetic subjects, including mention of the Egyptian Chemes, the pre-catastrophe founder of alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus, Mary the Jewess, Cleopatra, and Stephan of Alexandria. The Arabs, at the close of the tenth century, had created a perspective on alchemy as a physical methodology that would color its subsequent development down to the twentieth century.
Spain served as the transmission point between Islam and Christianity. As the tide of Islamic conquest receded, pockets of Christianity remained on the Spanish peninsula and slowly formed into Christian kingdoms. Along with the religious and political struggles, this close contact provided a convenient means of communication. After the Fatimids conquered North Africa in the tenth century, Arab Spain found itself even more isolated from the centers of Muslim life. The Spanish caliphs of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries were concerned with staying even with or ahead of their Fatimid rivals, particularly in terms of culture and learning. It was from Spain, then, that Europe drew the energy and knowledge needed to reanimate its civilization.4
By the early years of the eleventh century, largely as the result of the efforts of one individual, Gerbert of Aurillac, who would become Pope Sylvester II, the intellectual climate in the West had begun to change. Fueled in part by the apocalyptic yearnings centered on the thousand-year anniversary of Christ’s death (popularized by Sylvester’s student Rodulphus Glaber), the Christian West began to stir itself. The Church of Rome tried a few reforms, driven by the new and growing monastic and Peace of God movements. But most significant of all, waves of pilgrims took the long and dusty road to Jerusalem.
Pilgrimage, journeys of repentance and spiritual seeking, had long been an important part of popular Christianity. But before the middle of the eleventh century, pilgrimages to the Holy Land were rare. Starting around the magical year of 1033 (one thousand years after Christ’s death) and continuing in an ever-increasing wave for the next forty years, Jerusalem became the pilgrimage destination of choice. In 1071, the Seljuk Turks conquered Palestine, wrenching the Holy Land from the control of the Egyptian Fatimids, who were sympathetic to the Christian pilgrims. The Turks, however, were not so accommodating. By the early 1080s, pilgrimage to Jerusalem had all but stopped. The few pilgrims who were allowed to visit the Holy City were harassed, robbed, and generally treated as unwanted outsiders.5
Most authorities tell us that this was the motivating factor behind the crusading movement that would overtake Europe after Pope Urban II’s call in 1095.6 The pilgrim impulse, however, soon turned into Holy War. While there is a kernel of truth in this simplification, the real causes of the First Crusade are shrouded by the secrecy of deep political intrigue. From our thousand-year distance, these shadows are almost impenetrable. Like the sudden appearance of a star through the murk of a cloudy midnight, however, certain events and personalities shed some light on the outlines of the Crusades’ political intrigues.
The most important of these events was the political conjunction between East and West begun by Pope Sylvester II, the new Holy Roman emperor, Otto III, and the mad caliph al-Hakim one hundred years before the First Crusade was announced. While it is true that the First Crusade was a pilgrim movement with Jerusalem as its focus, it was also much more. It was part of a vast plan conceived and carried out by a group of secret societies for the purpose of creating a world-state in the Holy Land and thereby bring on the chiliast millennium of peace.7
THE ALCHEMICAL POPE AND THE CREATION OF THE MILLENNIUM
As the Fatimid influence spread in the tenth and eleventh centuries, some of the esoteric knowledge began to reach Europe through the schools of Muslim Spain, where science and civilization had attained a level unknown elsewhere. The best minds of Europe traveled to Spain to study everything from music to medicine to astronomy. One such student, Gerbert o
f Aurillac, stands out as particularly notable. It was Gerbert’s efforts that almost single-handedly pulled the Christian West out of the Dark Ages.
Gerbert’s life is an example of how a poor intellectual prodigy could rise to the very top of early medieval society. He was born around 940 in Auvergne, France, and at an early age entered the nearby monastery of Aurillac. At the abbot’s insistence, Gerbert was sent to Spain to study mathematics (see fig. 5.2).
Spain in the mid-960s was at the peak of its civilization. The caliph Hakim II, son of the triumphant Abd-al-Rahman, who forged Muslim Spain into a world power, surpassed every one of his predecessors in the love of literature and the sciences, we are told by the Muslim historian al-Maqrizi.8 He turned all of Andalusia, Muslim Spain, into a market where the wisdom and learning of the whole ancient and medieval world could be found. It was into this environment that the young prodigy, Gerbert of Aurillac, was immersed, studying at the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll (see fig. 5.3).
Figure 5.2. Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II, the renaissance man of the Dark Ages. (Mural from the Vatican library)
Gerbert must have done very well indeed, because we find Count Borel of Barcelona introducing him to the pope in 970. Pope John XIII, one of the few popes of the period who seemed sincere and managed to die of old age instead of assassination, was so impressed by Gerbert’s erudition that he recommended him to the up-and-coming Otto I, emperor of the Roman West and the Charlemagne of Germany.
After seventy years of internal discord, Otto I, a match for Charlemagne in looks and temperament, became the king of the Franks. At his coronation, Otto surrounded himself with the nobility of the neighboring countries, creating at the very beginning of his reign a sense of transnational importance. No wonder he soon began to see himself as the restorer of the Western Empire.
In the first fifteen years of his reign, Otto strove by any means possible, from war to murder to marriage, to accomplish this goal. In 962, Pope John XII crowned Otto the Holy Roman Emperor of the West. Within a year of his becoming emperor, Otto had marched into Italy and made it a part of the new Holy Roman Empire, which was, of course, a mere appanage of the Frankish crown of Charlemagne. This was the new world power to which the young and scholarly Gerbert was introduced in 970.
Figure 5.3. Seventeenth-century engraving of the monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, near Barcelona in Catalonian Spain, where Gerbert learned astronomy, mathematics, Greek, and the magic of the Moors. Uncredited figure from James Reston’s The Last Apocalypse (New York: Doubleday, 1998)
For the next thirty-three years, Gerbert would be the spiritual adviser and mentor to all three Ottos, Otto I, his son Otto II, and his grandson Otto III. Gerbert’s vast learning and command of all three diplomatic languages of his day, Latin (which he wrote with an elegance not seen since Sidonius in the fifth century),9 Greek, and Arabic, made him an important player in the diplomatic intrigues of the new imperial court. From the mid-970s to his death in 1003, Gerbert would remain at the center of the changes sweeping through the West.
During the year he served as tutor to the young Otto II, Gerbert also helped Otto I arrange a marriage between the Greek emperor’s daughter, Theophano, and his student. This would make their son, the future Otto III, the heir of both halves of the old Roman Empire.
Hard on the heels of the successful conclusion of the marriage negotiations and the wedding, Gerbert was dispatched, at his own request, to Rheims, the ancient and royal cathedral town of Charlemagne, where every king of France (from Clovis I in the fifth century to Louis XVI in the eighteenth) was crowned. Soon after his arrival, he was appointed head of the cathedral’s school by Otto II in appreciation for his diplomatic efforts. He held this post for a decade, and during that time he collected manuscripts from around the world and wrote works on the astrolabe, Arabic astronomy, and geometry.
Gerbert left his post as master of the cathedral school at Rheims in 982. During this period we find him writing letters to various other cathedral schools promoting the development of libraries and encouraging the addition of Greek and mathematics to the curriculum.
Gerbert’s opportunity to return to power politics arrived in 987 with the death of the last Carolingian king of France, Louis V. The unhappy Louis left no heirs, so the choice was between Charles of Lorraine, Louis’ brother and a distant offshoot of the Carolingian line, and the best candidate from the line of the previous dynasty, the Merovingian.
This obscure Dark Age dynasty has been made famous by the speculations in Holy Blood, Holy Grail that the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in fact founded this royal lineage. There is just enough evidence in support of the contention that the Holy Family, its relatives, and perhaps even descendants survived in southern France to make us wonder exactly what their contemporaries made of it all. While the Merovingians were certainly thought to be peculiar, there is no contemporary indication that anyone connected the Merovingians directly to the Holy Family.10
Medieval tradition reports that the Merovingians had a supernatural origin. Gregory of Tours, the foremost Frankish historian, tells us that Merovee, the founder of the dynasty, was the son of two fathers. The first king of the Franks, Chlodio, was one father. The other was a strange sea creature, “similar to a Quinotaur,” according to Gregory of Tours, which impregnated his mother while she was out bathing in the ocean. From this, he was given the name Merovee, “son of the sea.” Merovee can also be translated as “son of the mother” and “son of Mary.”
The latter are strange titles for a barbarian and pagan king. His descendant Clovis I became ruler over a united Gaul and eventually, after much prayer on the part of the hermit monk Saint Remy, was converted to orthodox Christianity. This alliance helped stabilize the Western church. For 250 years, the Merovingian rulers were like priestkings, strangely above and exempt from the censure of the church they supported. Their “mayors of the palace” handled the actual government. In the end, it was one of these mayors, Charlemagne’s great-grandfather, Pepin the Short, who finished off the main line of the Merovingian dynasty.
But other Merovingian lines had survived, most prominently that of Neustria, the Merovingian kingdom that included Rheims and Paris. Descendants of the Merovingian kings had remained in control of the region as its dukes and even as the mayor of Paris. It was almost inevitable that when the Carolingian line died out, the kingship would revert to a descendant of the Merovingian line.
A church council called by Archbishop Adalbero of Rheims and organized by Gerbert of Aurillac decided the issue. Gerbert may in fact have done the research to prove Hugh Capet’s claim to Merovingian ancestry. The council found that Hugh Capet’s family were indeed descendants of the last king of Neustria, and therefore unanimously elected him the new king of France.
The next year Archbishop Adalbero died and Gerbert rightly believed that he should be his successor as archbishop of Rheims. Hugh Capet, ever the politician, gave the archbishop’s post to Arnulf, a bastard son of the Carolingian line. Hugh meant no insult; it was just politics. But it was politics that backfired. Arnulf plotted against Hugh, and in 991 a French church council deposed him and put Gerbert in his place.
For the next four years, Gerbert used his position as archbishop of Rheims to support the growth of the peace movement. He also founded a variety of clerical orders—known collectively as the Chroniclers, or the chronicling orders—and libraries in places far distant from Rheims, including Provence, Aquitaine, Lorraine, and Calabria in northern Italy. During this time, however, the French church was fighting a fierce battle with the current pope, John XV, over whether they had the right to depose Arnulf.
Faced with excommunication over the issue, Gerbert stepped down from the archbishop’s post and moved from Rheims to join the young Otto III’s emerging court in Cologne. In 996, Otto III reached his majority and took over the government with Gerbert of Aurillac by his side (fig. 5.4).
Figure 5.4. The coronation of Otto III. (From the Ba
mberg Apocalypse, State Library, Bamberg, Germany)
When Pope Gregory V died suddenly, in 999, it was inevitable that Gerbert would succeed him. Gerbert had the support of the emperor, on the spot with his troops, as well as that of the abbot of Cluny, the leading force in both the reform movement and the Peace of God movement. Gerbert saw the coincidence of this alignment of forces as the fulfillment of a long-held dream and fully supported his young protégé in his imperial designs. He became Pope Sylvester II, taking the name of Constantine’s pope, Sylvester I, to emphasize the similarity between the two emperors.
With the emperor’s support, Gerbert, or Pope Sylvester, as we shall now call him, plunged into a whirlwind of far-reaching negotiations. He expanded the reach of the Catholic Church into Eastern Europe, adding the area of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by creating archbishoprics and converting kings. Vajk, the Magyar king of Hungary, was baptized as King Stephen, and eventually became a saint. For his baptism, Sylvester sent him a holy crown to symbolize his Christian kingship.
In addition to converting Eastern Europe (perhaps as a bulwark against the press of Asiatic refugees being pushed westward ahead of the early Tibetan/Mongolian invasions), Sylvester was also interested in converting Islam. With that in mind, he made diplomatic contact with the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in the year 1000. To see the millennial significance that Sylvester and Otto attached to the turn of the year 1000, we need only look at the Bamberg Apocalypse, a manuscript of great artistry that took three years to complete. It was presented to Otto III on his way to Rome on the summer solstice of 1000 C.E. In this work, Otto III is presented as the last emperor, the emperor of Armageddon. With this as a context, we can see Otto’s global perspective and the vital importance of Fatimid Islam.
