Ibn Umayl

Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī (Arabic: محمد بن أميل التميمي), known in Latin as Senior Zadith, was an early Muslim alchemist who lived from c. 900 to c. 960 AD.

[9] Ibn Umayl's works contain an early commentary on the Emerald Tablet (a short and compact text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus), as well as a number of other Hermetic fragments.

Although such experimenters discovered the sciences of metallurgy and chemistry, Ibn Umayl felt the symbolic meaning of alchemy is the precious goal that is tragically overlooked.

He wrote: “Eggs are only used as an analogy... the philosophers … wrote many books on such things as eggs, hair, the biles, milk, semen, claws, salt, sulphur, iron, copper, silver, mercury, gold and all the various animals and plants … But then people would copy and circulate these books according to the apparent meaning of these things, and waste their possessions and ruin their souls” The Pure Pearl chap.

He set his treatise Silvery Water in an Egyptian temple Sidr wa-Abu Sîr, the Prison of Yasuf, where Joseph learned how to interpret the dreams of the Pharaoh.

[7]: XVI The psychologist CG Jung recognized in ibn Umayl's story the ability to bring self-realization to a soul by interpreting dreams, and from the 1940s onwards focused his work on alchemy.