tomasorban:

Etymologies

The
historical purview of what came to be called alchemy includes an
undeniable current of influence stemming from Pharaonic and Hellenistic
Egypt on one hand, and another stemming from ancient China, medieval
India and Tibet on the other―currents that appear to have
cross-fertilised before converging in Arabic alchemy, whence the term
proper: al-kīmiyā. Scholars have long known that the word alchemy points to an Arabic transmission (alkīmiyā becomes Spanishalquimia, Latin alchimia, French alchimie, German Alchemie, etc.) [The Arabic definite article al- points clearly to this, yet the precise origin of the lexeme kīmiyā is far from certain. Academic consensus has generally favoured Greek sources, notably those published by Marcellin Berthelot,  suggesting an origin from the term chyma(‘that
which is poured out’; ‘flows, fluid’; ‘ingot, bar’; metaphorically,
‘confused mass, aggregate, crowd’; ‘materials, constituents’), whence chymeia, ‘the art of alloying metals’) named from its supposed inventor, Chymēs. As Harris observes in his 1704 Lexicon Technicum:

Chymisty,
is variously defined, but the design of this Art is to separate
usefully the Purer Parts of any mix’d Body from the more Gross and
Impure. It seems probably to be derived from the Greek word chymos, which signifies a Juice, or the purer Substance of a mix’d Body; though some will have it to come from cheein, to melt. It is also called the Spagyrick, Hermetick, and Pyrotechnick Art, as also by some Alchymy.

The
idea of fluid essences, extracts or elixirs is clearly central to the
alchemical purview, and as will be seen throughout this volume, it is
also inherent to the very names for alchemy in Chinese and Indo-Tibetan
traditions (Chinese dao jindan, Sanskrit rasāyana, Tibetan bcud len).
In addition, the Greek etymology distinctly emphasises the idea of
metallic fusibility, and the idea that metals are fundamentallyfusible entities proves central to the alchemical perception. The word ‘metal’ itself (metallon, metalleion) is homophonous with—and most likely derived from—a whole series of words indicating ‘transformation’, such as metalloiōsis, which is formed from the preposition meta– (‘between, with, after; taking a different position or state’) and the substantive alloiōsis (‘alteration’ or ‘change’).

Whether derived from chyma, chymeia, Chymēs, or chymos, the term alchemy appears to
come to the Latin west from late Greek sources through the same kinds
of channels that preserved Platonic and Aristotelian texts, in Arabic
translation, after the fall of the Greek Academy. While the lines of
historical transmission are well known, matters are not quite as simple
as they first appear. Egyptologists and Sinologists have both brought
forward diverging evidence that the origins of alchemy lay not in Greece
but in the Ancient Near or Far East.

The Egyptian Etymology

In addition to the Greek etymology, the root kīmiyā has also been traced to the Egyptian name for Egypt, km.t (Coptic keme, kēmi), which Plutarch gives as chēmia,‘the blackest earth’ (malista melangeion).  The implications of this etymology are explored in detail elsewhere in this volume. Suffice
it to say for now that a wealth of theological and cosmological
significations deeply pertinent to alchemy emerge from Plutarch’s
identification of the name of Egypt with not only the blackness of the
soil, but also with the blackness of the pupil of the eye. On a basic,
symbolic level, this coheres with the fact that the Nilotic black earth,
which literally (and geographically) defined Egypt, was fertile soil—the
perfect receptor of life-giving seed; in the same way, the transparent
openness that forms the pupil of the eye is the perfect receptor of
light.

As will be seen,
these significations directly tie the early conception of alchemy to
genuine Egyptian theological conceptions on one hand, and to the Greek
Hermetic corpus on the other, a point that has already been articulated
in some detail by Erik Iversen with regard to the Memphite cosmology of
the Shabaka stone and its clear recapitulation in the Corpus Hermeticum itself.  Furthermore,
as the late Algis Uždavinys makes abundantly clear, this current of
alchemy cannot be divorced from the numerous morphological continuities
that exist between Egyptian mortuary cult on one hand, and Homeric,
Orphic, Pythagorean, Platonic and hieratic Neoplatonic traditions on the
other.  And as scholars such as
Peter Kingsley have shown, these morphological connections are not
merely apparent: they are deeply rooted in a fine web of mutual
historical and geographical interactions between the initiatic
traditions not only of Egypt itself, but those of southern Italy and
Sicily (whence the Pythagorean current that would retain such a strong
presence in the Hermetic tradition down through the centuries, from
Bolus of Mendes to the Turba Philosophorum).

The Chinese Origin of the Chem- Etymon

Joseph Needham, in the alchemical volumes of his magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, makes a very plausible case for the Greek and Arabic borrowing of the Chinese term jin (‘gold’) or jin i (‘gold
juice, gold ferment’), terms explicitly linked to aurifaction,
aurifiction and elixirs for perfecting bodies, all of which appears to
place kīmiyā in an original context not only of Taoist
metallurgical practices, but also of traditions of physical immortality
(macrobiotics).  After one of the most lucid and thorough surveys of the existing etymological evidence for alchemy, Needham, concludes:

If some have found an influence of jin (kiem) on chēmeia (chimeia, chymeia) difficult to accept, there has been less desire to question its influence on al-kīmiyā.
No Arabic etymologist ever produced a plausible derivation of the word
from Semitic roots, and there is the further point that both jin i and kīmiyā could and did mean an actual substance or elixir as well as the art of making elixirs, while chēmeia does
not seem to have been used as a concrete noun of that kind. We are left
with the possibility that the name of the Chinese ‘gold art’,
crystallised in the syllable jin(kiem), spread over
the length and breadth of the Old World, evoking first the Greek terms
for chemistry and then, indirectly or directly, the Arabic one.

Needham
makes it saliently clear that alchemy is not simply a product of
Hellenistic culture. Although it is difficult to accept an exclusively Chinese
origin for alchemy, the copious evidence adduced by Needham and his
collaborators over four large volumes irrevocably transforms (and
complicates) the overall picture of the genesis of alchemy. In short,
not only must one come to terms with the Ancient Near Eastern influence
upon Hellenistic and Islamicate alchemical traditions, one must also
contend with the Ancient Far Eastern influences upon the intellectual
and technical history of alchemy. This is especially pertinent given the
attested lines of cultural exchange between the Asian, European and
African landmasses along the Silk Road, which were established during
the Han Dynasty (206 bce – 220 ce).

The most important Chinese term for alchemy was jindan,
or ‘golden elixir’, which was conceived in both an external sense (as a
macrobiogen) and an internal sense (as a spiritual embryo).  Jindan also
referred especially to cinnabar, the red salt of sulphur and mercury,
and the raw ingredient from which mercury was refined. As such, cinnabar
points to one of the most ancient and pervasive mineral theophanies of
the world’s alchemical traditions: the marriage of mineral sulphur and
metallic mercury to form a red crystalline stone (mercuric sulphide).
Around this naturally occurring substance, multiple layers of
historical, cultural and mythological meaning would accrue not only in
Chinese and Indo-Tibetan but also in Islamicate and European alchemical
traditions.

With regard to
our previous remarks on metal as a quintessentially fluid substance, it
may also be added here that in ancient Chinese cosmology, metal (for
which jin was also a generic term) was regarded as one of the five elements (wu xing);
not only was it regarded as the ‘mother’ of the water element, the
metal element itself was defined precisely by its double capacity to melt and to solidify into new form (as in a mould). This
ability to revert from a solid form to an amorphous or liquid state,
and back again, is a very important principle. In the western alchemical
canon it would inhere in the formula: solve et coagula,
‘dissolve and coagulate’, a formula that possesses deep symbolic value
in regards to ontologies of ‘flux’ and ‘permanence’ (pointing to a more
paradoxical ontology embracing both ‘permanence in flux’ and ‘flux in
permanence’). It also underscores the universal value almost unanimously
given to mercury as the ‘essence’ of metals. For next to gold and
cinnabar, mercury figures as the most universal of all alchemical
substances in eastern and western traditions alike. When alchemically
refined, moreover, it came to be regarded less as a ‘substance’ per se, as more as the underlying principle of pure sublimity—of absolute volatility—with the unique power to penetrate and transform all things, especially minerals and metals (the most dense things).