Review of Oliver Hellwig's Wörterbuch der Mittelalterlichen indischen Alchemie, 2009.

What is it about?

The publication reviewed is an encyclopedic dictionary of mediaeval Indian alchemy. The author of the work reviewed, Oliver Hellwig, has intended the WöMiA as a continuation of the technical-material side of Indian alchemy, the branch that was largely neglected in the West. P.C. Ray’s work is Hellwig’s starting point. However, the innovations Hellwig adopts – by employing newly developed computer-philological and statistical methods – takes research in this branch to an entirely new level. The results of the application of these methods to the vast amount of textual data concerning mediaeval Indian alchemy are found throughout the WöMiA. The methods themselves are explained and justified in another work by Hellwig, Quecksilber und Chronometrie: eine computerphilologische Untersuchung der mittelalterlichen indischen Alchemie (Hellwig 2009b), which also discusses methods of dating (estimating the date of) alchemical texts as proposed by P.C. Ray (1907-1910), A.G. White (1996), and G.J. Meulenbeld (1999-2002). Currently available editions of the texts on which Hellwig’s studies are based are mostly not of very high quality. In dealing with the texts Hellwig therefore bases himself on digitized versions in which the counting of verses has been standardized. These digitized texts of mediaeval Indian alchemy are part of Hellwig’s database for his text analyzer “SanskritTagger” about which an article published in 2009 (Hellwig 2009c) provides more information. At present these electronic texts are available at Hellwig’s website “SanskritReader” (www.sanskritreader.de).

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Why is it important?

This encyclopedic dictionary is an important new research tool in one of the branches of scientific thought of Ancient India.

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