Harry Potter and the Golden Age of Islam
The Harry Potter book series is by every fair measure the most popular of all time, selling more than 600 million copies to date. Meanwhile, the Harry Potter film series has grossed nearly eight billion dollars at the box office, making it the fifth most popular movie franchise of all time. Among the seven books in the series and eight films in the franchise, the first one of each stands out in terms of overall popularity and cultural significance. In the United States, even those few who haven’t read the books or watched the movies know the original’s name: Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone. For any non-American readers who might now be scratching your head, no, that is not a careless typo, and your confusion is not an example of the Mandela effect. No one outside of the United States ever encountered Sorcerer’s Stone in ad campaigns, on bookshelves, or at theaters. Only Americans have ever read or seen Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone. The rest of the English-speaking world lined up in long queues for Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone.
The Harry Potter phenomenon began in 1997, when J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone was released in the United Kingdom by Bloomsbury. After the book became a massive sensation in Rowling’s home country, the stage was set for the greatest transatlantic British invasion since 1812 (for those who might say 1964, the Beatles have sold about 177 million albums in the United States, roughly one quarter fewer than the 230 million copies of the Harry Potter books sold thus far to Americans). Even so, Scholastic, Rowling’s U.S. publisher, had a major concern before the release of its future megaseller; it feared that American children — presumably unlike their more historically aware and better-read British peers — would be put off by the esoteric term in the title and demanded wording that would better capture their attention.
Thus, the Philosopher’s Stone title was tossed in the rubbish bin and the new title, Sorcerer’s Stone, was essentially pulled from a hat. In turn, all references to the “philosopher’s stone” in the text were swapped out for “sorcerer’s stone.” In putting together the movie adaptation of the book, director Chris Columbus took similar steps, shooting two versions of each scene in which the stone is mentioned. So, in the U.S. version, orphan Harry, freckle-faced Ron, and brainy Hermione must stop the evil Voldemort from obtaining the sorcerer’s stone — a legendary substance, American audiences learn, that will transmute any metal into gold and will produce the elixir of life, thereby granting countless riches and immortality to whoever possesses it. Elsewhere in the world, it’s the philosopher’s stone that the trio must stop Lord Voldemort from acquiring.
On the surface, this simple word change isn’t all that significant. After all, famed director Alfred Hitchcock would no doubt have pointed out that the stone is merely a MacGuffin, a term he helped popularize to describe an object or device whose main purpose is to advance the plot of a story. Thus, the stone in the book could just as easily have been, say, the Ark of the Covenant (think: Raiders of the Lost Ark) or the Holy Grail (think: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). But like those long-searched-for relics, the philosopher’s stone isn’t the property of any one writer. While Rowling’s fertile imagination birthed a fantastic world, the philosopher’s stone is not her invention. Voldemort seeking the sorcerer’s stone to cheat death makes about as much sense as Nazis seeking the Ark of the Sorcerers to conquer the world or Indiana Jones searching for the Sorcerer’s Grail to heal his father’s gunshot wound. Even if you believe the Ark of the Covenant and Holy Grail are nothing more than chimera based on elaborate myths, their very names — just like the philosopher’s stone — represent a real history with a rich political, cultural, economic, and religious context.
Indeed, the search for a substance that had the power to transmute any metal into gold and produce the elixir of life consumed the lives of countless humans across time and space. As with other myths and legends that have long captured the human imagination if not affected the course of history, such as the Fountain of Youth and El Dorado, the term has deep roots in language and literature. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, Balzac, and even P. G. Wodehouse have all referenced the stone in their writings, and references to it are found as far back as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: “The Philosopher’s stoon, Elixir clept, we sechen faste echoon.” The stone’s significance resonates well beyond English. The French know it as pierre philosophale, the Germans refer to it as der Stein der Weisen, and it was known in Latin as lapis philosophorum or lapis philosophicus. It even has an equivalent in Hindu and Buddhist texts dating at least back to the tenth century CE.
While today we generally think of a “philosopher” as someone who seeks or pursues wisdom through rational inquiry, it also historically referred to an adept in occult mysticism (or “hidden knowledge”), such as alchemy, a usage fully aligned with Rowling’s world of bubbling potions, wondrous spells, and fanciful creatures. Even so, the U.S. publisher feared that the word “philosopher” communicated the exact opposite of the engaging magic and stirring fantasy in the book and thus considered the word a nonstarter. Rowling herself is said to have rejected other titles proposed by the publisher, such as Harry Potter and the School of Magic, and proposed Sorcerer’s Stone as a compromise. She later came to regret this decision, but at the time, she, as a new author, felt as though she had no choice but to accommodate her U.S. publisher’s demand. (Recall, she had already famously agreed to Bloomsbury’s request that the book be published under the name J. K. Rowling instead of Joanne Rowling over concerns that boys wouldn’t want to read a book written by a female author.)
The title change might seem benign enough on the surface, but it’s symptomatic of a deeper issue. Yes, perhaps the word “sorcerer” led a greater number of Americans to pick up the book (a debatable claim), but it separated those same readers from a universal human thread that runs from the classical world to Rowling’s pen. It led them one more step away from the world’s collective heritage and toward ever-greater levels of amnesia about our shared past. After all, there was no centuries-long search for the sorcerer’s stone, a term meaningless historically. But the belief in and search for the philosopher’s stone through the ancient practice of alchemy led to the acquisition of essential natural knowledge and helped lay the foundation for modern science — a process for arriving at the truth that represents, in the words of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, “the zenith of human achievement, the jewel in humanity’s crown.”
Though of obscure beginnings, the concept of the philosopher’s stone is believed to have originated in either Alexandria, Egypt, perhaps in the third or fourth century BCE, or China. Irrespective of its exact provenance, early alchemy in Ptolemaic Alexandria was a craft infused with two Aristotelian beliefs: (1) all things strive toward perfection, just as, for example, all acorns strive to be an oak, and (2) all matter is fashioned from the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water, which are themselves formed by a prima materia, or prime matter. All substances were thus believed to consist of prime matter and a specific “form,” a primitive DNA-like imprint that determined a substance’s elemental proportions and characteristics. One of the first authors on record to apply these beliefs to metalworking is referred to as Pseudo-Democritus, a philosopher or, more likely, a group of philosophers from the Nile Delta region who lived in the first century BCE and whose work was cited for centuries by later Greek alchemists. These ancient philosophers believed that by changing the ratios of the four base elements in lead, the lesser metal could be “taught” to be gold.
Given the nature and focus of such efforts, early alchemists were reluctant to reveal the secrets of their craft, using symbols and codes in their writings to refer to the materials with which they worked. Looking now at the “recipes” published in these early texts, we can see in many cases that what these artisans were really doing was either making imitations of gold or silver, or preparing metal alloys. For example, four parts of pure gold might have been melted and mixed together with three parts copper and one part silver. Though from a strictly quantitative standpoint this did produce “more” gold, the gold’s quality would have dropped by half, from 24 carats to 12 carats.
By the fourth century CE, alchemy had become a stagnant and dying art. This was in part a function of the growing influence of Christianity, which was antagonistic to all manner of pagan learning and thought, and the Roman belief that the transformation of lead into gold might destroy the empire. In particular, Emperor Diocletian feared that the artificial creation of gold would ruin the Roman economic system and allow alchemists to amass large fortunes with which they could gain power. This led him to issue an edict in 290 CE ordering the destruction of all alchemical texts.
Only with the Arab conquest of Alexandria and Persia following the death of Muhammad in 632 CE was alchemy rejuvenated and the search for the philosopher’s stone revived, as the Arabs not only became heirs to the surviving texts and nearly all Hellenistic-Egyptian learning but also had a conduit to knowledge from India and China. The father of Arab alchemy was Jabir ibn Hayyan, a man said to have lived in the eighth century — at the beginning of the Golden Age of Islam, when the Muslim world made important scientific discoveries and engineered novel technological advances, allowing its art, economy, and culture to flourish. He modified the Aristotelian idea of four bases, theorizing that metals were composed of two pure elements, mercury and sulfur, and he searched for a catalyst that could change the proportions of these elements in a metal, thereby transmuting it. This al-iksir, as he called it, is the source of the word elixir, a synonym for the philosopher’s stone.
Hundreds of alchemical texts have been attributed to him, including The Hundred and Twelve Books and The Seventy Books, but he is a difficult figure to study. Research suggests that many, if not all, of these texts were written in the tenth and eleventh centuries by later Arab alchemists. Some argue that Jabir may not have actually been a historical figure at all. Rather, he was created as a symbol by a collective adapting Hermetic texts into Arabic. Regardless, the corpus of the “Jabir writings,” as they are often referred, do present significant advances in the theory and practice of alchemy. In his (or their) search for a universal catalyst that could transform metals and offer immortality, “Jabir” improved methods for distillation, evaporation, filtration, sublimation, melting, and crystallization and was the first to describe the preparation of many chemical substances, including cinnabar (mercury sulfide), alum, arsenious oxide, and lead acetate. Further, a number of technical terms of Arabic origin known to this day are traceable to “Jabir” and early Arabic alchemical texts. These include realgar (arsenic sulfide, often used in fireworks and tanning), alkali (soluble mineral matter), antimony (a metallic element), alembic (an early type of still), aludel (a pear-shaped pot used in sublimation), and even alcohol.
Interestingly, the most significant chemical discovery of the Middle Ages, sulfuric acid, which remains by far the world’s highest volume industrial chemical, is often attributed to “Jabir.” However, it was made by an unknown alchemist in the early fourteenth century. Writing under the pseudonym of Geber, the Latinized form of Jabir, he was most likely a Spaniard who used the name of the famed Arab alchemist either to hide his own identity for some undetermined reason or to give authority to his own work. He is often referred to as the False- or Pseudo-Geber.
Two other influential Muslim alchemists (or philosophers) were Abu Bakr al-Razi (Rhazes in Latin) and Ibn Sina (Avicenna in Latin). Not coincidentally, both of these men are considered the greatest of physicians from the Islamic Golden Age. Many of their contributions to alchemical study stem from the same empirical approach they brought to medicine. Razi (850–925), born to a Persian family just south of the Caspian Sea, was among the first to systematically observe and verify facts related to a number of chemical substances and created a classification of all substances: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Though now scientifically obsolete given the more complete taxonomies of today, this general classification informed the early Linnaean system and still resonates in the popular children’s guessing game “20 Questions.” Further, in his Book of the Secret of Secrets, Razi documented the equipment and chemicals needed for a fully functioning alchemy laboratory. This text guided Christian alchemists throughout the High and Late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Later, Ibn Sina (980–1037), born to a Turkic mother and Persian father near Bukhara in Central Asia, proposed that chemicals maintain their identity even if they become part of a compound, a sharp departure from Aristotle’s belief that substances become homogenized when reacting with one another. Perhaps more importantly, Ibn Sina eyed both transmutation and alchemy with a healthy degree of skepticism, placing himself far ahead of his time:
I do not deny that such a degree of accuracy in imitation may be reached as to deceive even the shrewdest, but the possibility of transmutation has never been clear to me. Indeed, I regard it as impossible. . . . Those properties that are perceived by the senses are probably not the differences which distinguish one metallic species from another, but rather accidents or consequences, the essential specific differences being unknown. And if a thing is unknown, how is it possible for any one endeavor to produce it or destroy it?
Though Ibn Sina found little support for his opinions, such an objective approach to the practice of alchemy was an important step in the eventual maturation of science.
By the twelfth century, major Arab and Muslim contributions to chemical knowledge had ceased, and the Islamic Golden Age slowly came to an end, but the works and writings of these and other Muslim alchemists began to enter Western Europe through Moorish Spain, as Christendom inherited the body of natural knowledge that had been assimilated and augmented by the Muslim world. In introducing one of his earliest translations of an Arabic alchemical text, Robert of Chester wrote in 1144, “Since what Alchymia is, and what its composition is, your Latin world does not yet know, I will explain in the present work.”
This legacy was further carried and built upon by such notable alchemists as Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Arnaldus de Villa Nova, and even Nicholas Flamel, the late-fourteenth-century Parisian scribe who was deeply influenced by Razi’s description of alchemical processes and is said to have possessed the secret to the stone. (This legend was clearly not lost on Rowling, as Flamel is named as the maker of the stone Harry and the others must keep from Voldemort.) Their work, in turn, informed the future studies of such scientific innovators as Paracelsus, Robert Boyle, Joseph Priestley, and Antoine Lavoisier, whose Traité élémentaire de chimie (“Elementary Treatise on Chemistry”), published in 1789, introduced chemistry to the world as an exact science and marked the death knell of pseudoscientific alchemy. The fact that both the words alchemy and chemistry derive from the Arabic al-kimiya is a testament to the centrality of Arab and Muslim contributions to this scientific evolution.
Thus, the book’s change in name from Philosopher’s Stone to Sorcerer’s Stone didn’t just reflect a basic lack of trust in the American book-reading and movie-going public; it also erased a deep and rich history of innovation, ingenuity, and interaction across cultures, religions, and civilizations. When this history and context is ignored if not forgotten, we adopt a warped view of the world — one that fortifies the belief that we are forever and intractably divided into East and West, North and South, Christian and Muslim, and so on — or, as Voldemort saw it in the Wizarding World, Pure-blood and Muggle-born.
When stepping back and looking at the centuries-long search for the philosopher’s stone and its twin, the elixir of life, we can see that Hitchcock’s definition of a MacGuffin applies just as equally to real life as it does to literature and film. Today, the transmutation of elements is known to occur naturally through radioactive processes, but even if the philosopher’s stone was, in the end, not real, belief in it provided the motivation and engine that led to nearly forty generations of scientific action and growth, a significant portion of which occurred during the Golden Age of Islam. It served as a needed MacGuffin to drive the story of early scientific discovery and progress. This is a sentiment that has been uttered in other times and in other ways. Consider the words of Francis Bacon, writing in the early seventeenth century when alchemical thought still had a firm hold on European scientific inquiry:
Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons that he had left them gold buried somewhere in the vineyard; where they by digging found no gold, but by turning up the mold about the roots of the vines, procured a plentiful vintage.
Continuing with this analogy, we can say that the search for the philosopher’s stone did nothing less than “dig up” modern chemistry. Here, as in the Harry Potter book that takes its myth as inspiration, the stone served, in essence, as a MacGuffin — a plot device in the story of humankind that drove knowledge production about the natural world and inspired early experiments that would one day lead to the discovery of the scientific method. And just as large swaths of the world were once connected through belief in this elusive substance, one that promised incalculable riches if not immortality, so too did this mythical object connect the world once again through Harry Potter — a story that resonates across the globe for its universal themes, archetypal characters, and timeless hero’s journey.
Ultimately, of course, the name change is irrelevant when thinking about why people so strongly connect with the book, the magical setting, and all of the memorable characters and fantastic beasts. It’s also worth noting that the titles of foreign works are often changed for the U.S. market, so it’s not as though Scholastic was breaking some taboo with Sorcerer’s Stone. Consider two other imports to the United States from the United Kingdom:
In 1995, the film adaptation of the British play The Madness of George III was released as The Madness of King George for marketing reasons. Although Alan Bennett, the writer of both the play and film adaptation, once half-jokingly said the change was made “so as not to confuse the sequence-saturated American audience,” the primary reason is that the filmmakers wanted a title that would make clear to Americans that the movie is about a monarch — and thus the addition of the word “king” was needed. Two years later, the British film Mrs. Brown was released in the United States as Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown to similarly communicate that the movie was about a monarch (in this case, about Queen Victoria and her much-gossiped-about relationship with a personal servant, John Brown).
But don’t think this rebranding of films to make them more palatable to a specific market doesn’t go both ways. Empire magazine once compiled a list of English-language films whose titles had been significantly altered in China, often courtesy of literal-minded video pirates. The best of the crop: I’m Rich but I Like Cheap Prostitutes, a break-out hit starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere; His Powerful Device Makes Him Famous, an adult fairy tale that traces the rise and fall of a well-endowed porn star played by Mark Wahlberg; and Wretch! Let Me Chop Off Your Finger, a historical drama starring Holly Hunter in her Oscar-winning role as a deaf mute.
Given this context, perhaps we should just be thankful that the first book in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia series was not renamed The Lion, the Witch & the Closet, and we should also acknowledge that Scholastic’s strategic decision to avoid the word “philosopher” is forgivable. Indeed, even the French publisher released the book as Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers (“at the School of Wizards”) and not as Harry Potter et la pierre philosophale. Less easily forgiven, however, are those academics, activists, and leaders who eagerly advance and openly promote the idea that science belongs to the West (or is “white”), that it must be decolonized, and that it must be reengineered to be more inclusive. All fail to recognize the “many rivers, one sea” story of science — that it has never been culturally or geographically bounded and that it is an inheritance that belongs to anyone wishing to claim it. Yes, science, as a tool, can cause immense harm and suffering if wielded by the wrong person, for the wrong cause, or without proper care or guardrails, just as magic can in the world of Harry Potter, but that is a user problem — even if often a “Western” one. Indeed, Rowling herself has been famously vocal in calling attention to an ongoing science-related scandal involving children that is centered almost exclusively in Europe and North America. Yet, as astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss correctly notes, “There is no such thing as ‘western science.’ There is only ‘science.’”
But you needn’t be a scientist to know that any claim denying the universality of science as a methodology for understanding the world and improving the human condition is not only intellectually impoverished but also materially harmful — you need only know that Sorcerer’s Stone is the title that rightfully belongs in the rubbish bin along with so much other historically illiterate and unlettered nonsense.
Kurt Volkan is the editor of Presser.
July 2024