Bibliotheca Polyglotta

1a exclusive property; b private possession; 2a specialty, particularity, peculiarity, characteristic, property, attribute; b essence, intrinsic nature; 3 leading personalities, people of distinction, al‑~, n.f., the upper class, the educated – WehrCowan1979.

For the historically attested meaning ‘sympathetic quality’, see below, section HIST.

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hist

▪ »ḫāṣṣaẗ, pl. ḫawāṣṣ, also ḫāṣṣiyyaẗ, pl. ḫāṣṣiyyāt, ‘sympathetic quality’ is a recurring theme in magic and occult sciences indicating the unaccountable, esoteric forces in animate and inanimate Nature. The conception that everywhere in Nature such forces are active or can be activated, developed during the Hellenistic period. It was believed that all objects were in relation to one another through sympathy and antipathy – as is evident in the mysterious forces of the magnet – and that diseases could be caused and cured, good and ill fortune be brought about as a result of the relations of these tensions. Unlike peripatetic philosophy, this way of thinking renounces a rational explanation of phenomena. It was voiced in the Φυσικά of Bolos of Mendes (ca. 200 B.C.), the Λιθογνώμων of Xenocrates […], the Cyranides and other hermetic treatises, in the Book of Animals of Timotheos of Gaza and in the books of agriculture. These views also entered into medical and pharmacological literature […] and gained a theoretical foundation in the Neo-platonic doctrine of the graded structure of the world. / The translation of the above-mentioned Grk works carried the doctrine of the occult qualities of Nature to the Arabs, among whom it found an extraordinarily fertile soil and called forth an extensive literature. Muḥammad b. Zakariyyāʔ al-Rāzī, “Ǧābir b. Ḥayyān”, Ibn al-Ǧazzār, Abu ’l-ʕAlāʔ Zuhr, ʕAlī b. Aydamīr al-Ǧuldakī and others wrote books with the title Ḫawāṣṣ al-ʔašyāʔ (or the like). Furthermore, there is hardly any Islamic work on the natural sciences in which the ḫawāṣṣ are not treated at greater or shorter length. The “Books of stones” by Aristotle and Tīfāšī, the “Books of animals” by Ibn Abi ’l-Ḥawāfir and Damīrī, the “Books of plants” by Ibn Waḥšiyya, the “Books of poisons” by Ibn al-Biṭrīq and Ibn al-Mubārak, the encyclopaedias of Qazwīnī and Nuwayrī and the manual of medicine by ʕAlī b. Rabban al-Ṭabarī, are all full of information on the most remarkable effects of “sympathy”. / Finally, abstract entities were also believed to possess mysterious forces: al-Būnī, al-Ǧīlī, al-Nadrumī and others wrote about the ḫawāṣṣ of letters and numbers, of the names of Allāh and of the verses of the Qurʔān« – M. Ullmann, art. »khāṣṣa«, in EI².
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▪ f. of ↗ḫāṣṣ.
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