Page 5 - Book of Crates

Introduction

Adam McLean

The Book of Cratès is a ninth century alchemical text in Arabic,
now bound with other Arabic works in MS 400 of the University of
Leiden. The text was translated into French by Octave Houdas, a
Professor of Arabic at the school of Oriental Languages in Paris in the
late 19th Century. He contributed this and other translations to the well
known key work of Marcellin Berthelot, La chimie au moyen age (vol.
3, L'alchimie arabe), Paris, 1893.

The Book of Cratès is not, in fact, a work of Arabic alchemy. It has
a short preface obviously written by an Islamic editor, and there is a
short section at the end which mentions Khalid ben Yezir, the Umayyad
King (635-704) who supposedly introduced alchemy to Islam, through
meeting the legendary Morienus, as recounted in the Liber de
compostione alchimiae (see Number 10 in the Hermetic Research
series, The Book of the Composition of Alchemy, Glasgow, 2002).

The text of the Book of Cratès is obviously Greek in origin. Much
of it seems to be imbued with the spirit of Graeco-Egyptian alchemy.
At one point it quotes one of the precepts of Democritus “Nature
delights in Nature”, and I am sure those with a deep knowledge of
Greek alchemy will find other quotations or borrowings from Bolos of
Mendes (second century B.C.), and probably from Ostanes. Ostanes
was especially obsessed with the need for secrecy and this is a strong
theme of the narrative of the Book of Cratès. Also we should note that
Ostanes in one of his works, The book of the Thirty Chapters, uses the
idea of falling asleep and being taken up in a dream where he meets an
old man (a Hermes Trismegistus figure), just as we find in the Book of
Cratès.

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