What follows represents the skeleton of a larger thesis and a larger study. The thesis has three integral elements. The first element is historiographic; it involves the question of the conventional boundaries separating the history of science from the history of religion. Breaching these boundaries, at least in the case of the history of Arabic alchemy, is warranted, I argue, not only because of the peculiarities of our historical data, but also because it extends the domain of our explanation and illuminates many otherwise obscure issues. The second element of the thesis is that the Jabirian theory of the ẓāhir and the bāṭin is not grounded in Greek alchemy: in a complex manner, its sources lie rather in Shīʿī metaphysics. The third and final element, which is least developed here, concerns the vicissitudes of the doctrine of the occultum and the manifestum in Latin alchemy. I suggest, tentatively, that the ẓāhir-bāṭin of Jābir ibn Ḥayyān explains the Latin doctrine much better than the ekstrophê theory of the Greek alchemists— which would mean that the roots of the occultum and the manifestum are to be found in Shīʿī metaphysics and not in the Greek alchemical tradition.‬