Gbalo

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

An order of priests among the Ga people of the Gold Coast, west of Togoland. Geber, otherwise Abou Moussah Djafar al Sofi, was a native of Haman, in Mesopotamia, or, according to other accounts, a Spanish Moor, born at Savile, somewhere about the end of the eighth century, though all dates concerning him are extremely doubtful. Practically nothing is known of his life. He undertook wide experiments in metallurgy and chemistry, with the object of discovering the constituent elements elements of metals, in the course of which he stumbled upon acid and red oxide of mercury. It is, indeed, upon actual discoveries that his reputation is based, and not upon the many spurious treatises which have been attributed to him, and which embrace the entire gamut of the sciences. His alleged extant works, which are in Latin, cannot but be regarded with suspicion, especially as several mediæval writers adopted his name. It is believed, however, that Genius the library at Leyden, and the Imperial Library at Paris, contain Arabic manuscripts, which might be referred to his authorship. His Sum of Perfection, and his Investigation into the Perfection of Metals are his most important works, a complete edition of which was pubished at Dantzic, in 1682, and again in the Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, of Mangetus, published at Cologne, in 1702. The Sum of Perfection professes to draw its inspiration from alchemical authors, who lived previous to Geber, but as alchemy was then not very far advanced, the derivation is an unlikely one. We are told in its pages that success in the great art is only to be achieved by rigid adherence to natural law. A spirit of great strength and a dry water are spoken of as the elements of the natural principle. The philosophical furnace and its arrangement is dealt with in detail, as is the philosopher's vessel, a vase of glass with several intricate details difficult of comprehension. There is no dubiety, however, regarding the absolutely physical basis of metallurgy, upon which the work is composed, and it contains no hint of allegory or the achievement of success through supernatural agency.