Page 6 - Book of Crates

It has been suggested that the author of this work by calling himself
Cratès is in fact referring back and aligning himself to the Democritus-
Bolos school of alchemy.

Whatever the origins of this little book the ideas it presents are
those which shaped the alchemy of Northern Europe in medieval times,
through the early modern period and well into the 17th and even 18th
centuries. The use of allegory and the frustration of having the
alchemical secret concealed by the writer of a text, common themes in
the later period, are so cogently presented in this 9th century work. The
writer of the Book of Cratès makes the point many times that alchemists
often used names mischievously to disguise their substances and
confound the reader. Later alchemical writers expressed the same
sentiment in such phrases as “Our gold is not the common gold”, “the
water which does not wet the hands”, “the incombustible sulphur”, and
“the philosophical Mercury”. Such mystification goes back to the early
times of alchemy in the Western World. A substance named
‘molybdochalque’ is mentioned throughout the text. Literally this is an
alloy of lead and copper, but it seems rather to be used in places
figuratively for lead tincted, transmuted, or coloured, and also for the
transforming tincture itself. I have thus left this term untranslated as its
meaning must be divined from the context.

In making this translation I have relied entirely on the 19th century
French version by Octave Houdas. I am not able to make an exact
scholarly translation but have tried to produce one that is readable and
relatively easy to understand. A few words are untranslatable and there
are a few lacunae where Professor Houdas could not make out sections
of the manuscript. The work is really quite direct and not veiled in
mystical terms. Because of the parallels it will be instructive to read it
in conjunction with the Book of the Composition of Alchemy.

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