Somewhere in Upper Egypt, around the year 300, a man fell asleep and watched a priest being cut apart with a sword. The priest stood at an altar shaped like a bowl, at the top of fifteen steps. His flesh was mashed together with his bones and burned, and then, before the dreamer's eyes, he vomited up his own flesh. The dreamer woke, thought it over, and asked himself a technical question: "Is this not the composition of the waters?"
The dreamer was Zosimos of Panopolis, and that question is the key to him. He wrote about stills and furnaces in the same breath as visions of sacrifice. He saw no reason to choose.
A real name among borrowed ones
Zosimos is often called the first alchemist with a name, and that needs a small correction. Greek alchemy before him was crowded with names: Hermes, Agathodaemon, Zoroaster, Democritus, Ostanes and Maria, all of whom Zosimos treated with great reverence. The early texts lean heavily on pseudonyms: books hung on gods, legendary sages or philosophers long dead. What sets Zosimos apart, in the judgment of the historian M. Plessner in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, is that he appears to be the earliest genuine historical figure named as an author in the Greek alchemical texts. Lawrence Principe, writing for the Science History Institute, calls him the first alchemist about whom we have reasonably substantial and reliable details. Marina Escolano-Poveda, in a 2022 study, describes him as the first alchemist for whom we have biographical data.
Even those details are thin. He came from Panopolis, now Akhmim, in Upper Egypt. Three writers outside alchemy mention him: Syncellus and Photius, both writing centuries later, and the Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda, compiled about 950, which calls him an Alexandrian, probably meaning he later lived there. No ancient source gives his dates. The usual figure of around 300 is an inference. He is thought to be somewhat earlier than the alchemist Synesius, who sent a book to the high priest of the Serapeum in Alexandria, a temple destroyed in 389.
Twenty-eight books, mostly gone
The Suda credits him with twenty-eight books addressed to a woman named Theosebeia, each supposedly labeled with a letter of the alphabet. The Greek alphabet has twenty-four letters, so the arithmetic has never worked. One of them, the book Omega, survives in Greek. According to Principe, most of what Zosimos wrote is lost, leaving the prologue to a work on apparatus and furnaces, several chapters and scattered excerpts. Whether Theosebeia was a real pupil or a literary device cannot be settled.
Zosimos is one of about 40 authors in a compendium of Greek alchemical writing probably assembled in Constantinople in the 7th or 8th century and known from manuscripts in Venice and Paris. More of his work passed into Syriac and Arabic. Arabic translations turned up in 1995 in a copy of a book by the Persian alchemist al-Tughra'i, and the historian Fuat Sezgin found 15 Zosimos manuscripts in six libraries, including Tehran, Cairo and Dublin.
Of roughly twenty Arabic titles assigned to Zosimos, Plessner judged that some sound like genuine translations from the Greek and others like Arabic forgeries. One claims to have been translated in AD 659, a date he called obviously false. The French chemist Marcellin Berthelot printed the Greek corpus in the 1880s, but his grouping, Plessner warned, does not show which texts Zosimos actually wrote.
The laboratory
Strip away the visions and Zosimos is a working technician. Principe describes detailed accounts of apparatus for distillation, sublimation, filtration and fixation, much of it adapted from kitchen and perfumery equipment. He credits much to Maria, often called Mary the Jew, including a method of gentle heating in a bath of hot water whose name survives in the French bain-marie. One device, the kerotakis, exposed one material to the vapors of another, and vapors fascinated him.
There was a practical reason. Craftsmen already knew that vapors from heated cadmia, a zinc-bearing earth, turned copper golden by making brass, and that mercury and arsenic vapors whitened copper toward silver. Zosimos noticed that sulfur vapor, itself white, whitened most things but turned mercury yellow, and that when it fixed mercury into a solid, the sulfur became fixed as well. He scolded his contemporaries that "they should inquire into this mystery first of all." Principe reads the remark as an early grasp of a basic chemical principle: substances that react do not average their properties, they change them completely.
His era was not friendly to the art. The Roman emperor Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305, ordered Egyptian texts on alchemy destroyed, according to World History Encyclopedia, to keep the province from growing rich enough to rebel.
The nightmare
In one English translation, the sleeper approaches the bowl-shaped altar and meets a figure who says, "I am Ion, Priest of the Adytum," and explains that he has been dismembered and burned so that he might learn to become a spirit. When he sleeps again, the bowl holds boiling water full of people who burn but remain alive. A little white-haired barber tells him this is the place of embalming, where men flee the body and become spirits. A man of copper holds a lead tablet. Later an old man named Agathodaemon is cast into the flames and announces that he is the man of lead. At each waking the dreamer translates the scene: the lead must be cast out, the vision concerns the combination of liquids.
Plessner summarizes the code. Apparatus becomes a temple, metals become people, and the operation itself becomes a sacrifice. The text later tells the reader to build a temple of one stone with a stream inside and a serpent guarding the entrance, and promises that the priest seated in the stream is no longer a man of copper but of silver, and will soon be gold. Escolano-Poveda has argued that much of this imagery comes not from some generic mysticism but from the temple world of Greco-Roman Egypt, and Panopolis was a place where traditional Egyptian religion was still practiced well into late antiquity.
Gold was not the point
Plessner notes that he warned Theosebeia against deceitful prophets, told her to cool her passion and resist the desire for gold, and openly enjoyed the failures of a priest named Nilus. In a passage translated by the scholar G. R. S. Mead, he tells her, "in thy house be still, and God shall come to thee," and urges her to take refuge in the arms of Poimandres, a name from the Hermetic writings, and immerse herself in his Cup.
He also repeated the story, known from the Book of Enoch, that fallen angels taught the arts of metals to the women they loved, and he derived the word for the art from a book of theirs called chema. It is his etymology, offered as ancient tradition.
Was he pagan, Gnostic or Christian? Plessner thought him essentially pagan, with the Christian passages added by later hands, and admitted that his allegorical style often leaves it unclear whether his subject is alchemy or religion. The question he asked on waking from the nightmare, about the composition of the waters, was the same kind he asked of sulfur and mercury. In both cases he had watched something change color in the heat and wanted to know exactly why.