Ibn Khaldun on Alchemy and Astrology
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377 CE, Tr. Franz Rosenthal)“The souls of these sorcerers are able to exercise influence upon the world of elements.
The philosophers distinguish between sorcery and talismans:
in talismans, the worker seeks the aid of the celestial spheres and numbers,
while in pure sorcery, the influence proceeds directly from the focused soul alone.”
Popular histories of science usually date the systematic debunking of astrology and alchemy to the European Enlightenment. This text makes essentially the same case, in detail, roughly three hundred years earlier, from outside the European tradition altogether.
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377)
A fourteenth-century Arabic historian's sustained philosophical argument that both alchemy and astrology are impossible and socially harmful.
