Alchemy and the Arabic Hermetic Tradition
The English word ‘alchemy’ derives from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ, itself a loan-word from Syriac kīmīyā which in turn was taken from the Greek χημεια, meaning ‘the art of casting metals’. The earliest surviving alchemical texts in the West, which are written in Greek, hardly ever use the word χημεια and refer to their practice as ‘The Work’, ‘the divine and sacred…