Ricerc@Sapienza

The community of Shiite alchemists gathered under the pen name of Ǧābir
b. Ḥayyān produced an important corpus first studied by Paul Kraus, who
dated it between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. The religious,
doctrinal and political issues of the corpus – especially in the last two
collections – show that the Ǧābireans were a real sectarian trend unknown
to heresiographers. Kraus, along with some scholars after him, understood
the Ǧābirean community to be an expression of Ismaili thought. This paper
aims to reconsider: a) the religious and political affiliation of Ǧābir’s
alchemical community in the light of textual comparisons that show a
close connection between the Ǧābireans and the esoteric tenets characterizing
the Shiite ġuluww as mirrored in the heresiographic sources of the
late third/ninth and early fourth/tenth centuries, and in the Ġulāt literary
sources; and b) the last collection of the Ǧābirean corpus as a polemical
outcome specific to the Shiite milieu between the lesser and the greater
Occultation of the twelfth Imam.