The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
The exalted Ismail, having received from his musician Ferahid a
most resplendent golden flute, attempted at great length and without
success to play the instrument. In frustration he hurled the flute at his
musician, whereupon it glanced off a castle pillar and released some yellowish
powder. Some fell upon the fire and stank. Ferahid defended it as
“a secret and wondrous thing for all manner of transformation and sovereign
medicines.” He then melted several of his own treasures to repair
the flute and returned it to Ismail, the summer flower of Bukhara, who
was much pleased with this display. Ferahid then summoned the oudist
and the doura and doira masters and played with much effort a tune of
his own composition, and the sound produced by Ismail’s golden ney differed
from the sound of an ordinary one as the sweetest summer grape
from a clod of desert sand.
Like so many items in an alchemist’s study, the ney reminds rather than
performs: it is a representation of principles, and a tripartite metaphor:
1. Gold, of course, is a precious metal, and alchemists have (correctly
or not) long been associated with the transmutation of worthless
metals into valuable ones. As such, gold represents the end stage of
the alchemical process, the ultimately changed and unchangeable
substance.
2. The sun represents both gold and the transformative fire. It is the
alchemical father, the active, hot, penetrating force in the process.
3. Sulfur, with which Ferahid filled the ney, represents the same male
principles as the sun. In Kabeljauw’s theory of metals, sulfur “is
the root form of all metals, though it stink like the devil yet must we
have some commerce with it, for by a brief knowledge of demonic
principles we may triumph over the active doom—that is, temptation—and
the passive doom of ignorance.”
Date of manufacture: a.d. 1000.
Manufacturer: Hamid Shorbat ibn Ali ibn Salim Ferahid. Ferahid was
a musician and an astronomer in the Samanid court at Bukhara; he was also a
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