The best introduction to date about the origins of Alchemy, no doubt is William R. Newman “Promethean Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature.” University of Chicago, 2004. Here one finds a full explanation of Alchemy as sourced in the ancient Greek meaning of Mimesisis as a form of mystical “art”. Or as Erwin Panofsky explained, it was now possible to combine this notion with the Neoplatonic belief that immaterial forms exist apart from matter, which in turn receives its qualitative characteristics from them.[1]

According to Plotinus and his followers, the immaterial, transcendent world of forms was immeasurably superior to the material universe. The artist, when he formed matter into a particular shape or image, was performing a task - parallel to that of the demiurge, when he shaped the material world into its present configuration. The idea in the artist's mind, moreover, found its origin in the world of forms, and its imposition on the matter could be seen as a process of perfecting or at least improving, the latter.

Around the end of the 3rd century century the first Christian alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis (ca. 350- ca. 420) quoted Hermetica in his works, which survive in Greek and in Syriac. It is interesting that the same Zosimus is first quoted as having proposed the idea of alchemy by misunderstanding the so called AE Leiden and Stockholm papyri. Terms for gold making (poiesis chrysou) and silver making (poiesis argyrou) indeed appeared in the Leiden and Stockholm papyri, where in one case of gold making, the recipe is actually called "Fraud of Gold" (chrysou dolor). The recipe works by "doubling" the gold, that is, by alloying genuine gold with iron, thus increasing its weight 46 Another similar recipe in the Leiden papyrus begins with the phrase "Gold is counterfeited" (Doloutai chrysos), and then gives the recipe for the fraud. The ambiguous status of the precious stones and metals fabricated by the methods of the Leiden and Stockholm papyri however is what in the course of time transformed to the legend that an alchemist, not true of course, would be able to convert base metals into genuine gold and silver.[2]

Zoismuss (starting the 'alchemical art' tradition based on the idea imported from interpreted the term "doubling" in the Leiden and Stockholm papyri as meaning Mimezis "mirroring" in the sense of act of creation like 'art'. Aristotle however expressed a distrust of the mimetic arts and the same critical attitude by that time existed also with regard to the technai more broadly. Although they might be clever simulacra of nature, they could not themselves be natural. A clear formulation of this distinction between the products of nature and the products of artifice appears in Aristotle's Physics, where he states
that art can function in two different ways-"the arts either, on the basis of Nature, carry things further (epitelei) than Nature can, or they imitate (mimeitai) Nature.[3]

This dichotomy allowed the possibility of having two distinct types of art, one that perfects natural processes and brings them to a state of completion not found in nature itself and another that merely imitates nature without fundamentally altering it.

Though it is not possible to demonstrate that this was transmitted directly to Arabic authors, one of the most widely-cited Hermetic books of antiquity, The Perfect Discourse, better known today in its Latin version as Asclepius, in fact already mentions an "ancestor' Hermes. Originally written in Greek, The Perfect Discourse was used by early Christians (e.g., it was known in some form by Lactantius ca. AD 310, and was translated into Latin and Coptic. The Greek text survives only in citations by other authors, whereas the Coptic survives only in a partial translation.

We already described the environment where and how this “Constructing Tradition” first took place.

On thing that is for certain is that Zosimus refers to the Egyptians and the Jews as the two great traditions of metallurgy and attempts to show that their techniques and their religious ideas are in agreement. This implies that he was either engaged in or interested in forging alliances with Jewish metallurgists. He apparently thinks highly of Jewish distillation, as well as Jewish mystical ideas which he incorporates by referring to their texts and tradition.This implies that he was either engaged in or interested in forging alliances with Jewish metallurgists. Zosimus also provides evidence that Egyptian metallurgists in Alexandria at the time had incorporated themes from Jewish apocryphal literature into their alchemical writings. Zosimus uses these Jewish (and Christian) themes, Solomon’s exorcisms, the Enochian myth of the fallen angels, and teachings of the Anthropos, to illustrate the differences between natural and unnatural approaches to alchemy. His polemics are directed, in part, at astrological methods, but his criticisms of “unnatural” methods are not limited to astrology, but reveal broader cultural debates over daemonic and divine forms of revelation, and different theories of nature and cosmic sympathy, Fate, and divine power.

As the first known alchemist to frame his work as a soteriological practice, Zosimus of Panopolis thus is a pivotal figure in the history of ancient chemistry and religion, though surprisingly little has been written about him. Zosimus’s concepts of “nature” and what is “natural” are however crucial for understanding the delineations of magic, science, and religion, and that this has broader implications for studying deployments of these categories. Zosimus’s frames the “unnatural” (aph?sika) methods of his rivals versus his own  as opposing methods for the preparation of “timely tinctures.” And it appears that Zosimus’s so called natural methods involved preparing substances in accordance with celestial, seasonal, and diurnal cycles, in keeping with ancient craft traditions. For example Mesopotamian glass-making recipes dating from 1300-1100 BCE contain instructions for the astrological timing of various procedures.

The thrust of Zosimus’s argument is that the daemons preside over very precise locations of the cosmos and therefore have only a partial understanding of nature; one should rather appeal to the divine creator, who can reveal knowledge of nature as a whole. This dichotomy between natural and unnatural methods, then, is between differing views of how to harmonize one’s work with the larger cosmic force at play, and how knowledge of nature is best attained.

Thus it is clear that in late antiquity, spiritual and scientific wisdom were as in the case of the Zosimus tradition, where intimately related. And Zosimus and his students (or/and readers) believed that knowledge of nature was acquired through divine revelation. Behind the visible order of nature lies an invisible order comprised of divine beings that form a hierarchical chain of power linking the heavens and the earth. Scientific knowledge was construed as having penetrated the divine mysteries of nature. This was also a religious ideal, embodied in at the time, presumed sages like Hermes, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the pseudo-King Solomon, who were  popular in Zosimus’s era and credited with the authorship of a variety of scientific-religious texts. This cultural emphasis on acquiring scientific and spiritual wisdom is the context in which now Zosimus, articulates his views of alchemy as a spiritual practice.

Zosimus here, recommends several methods for merging the “corporeal” and “spiritual” aspects of alchemy. Some apparently to be practiced in an alchemical workshop, such as contemplating how the metals reveal the divine presence within nature. Other types of meditation, such as quietly examining the soul and quelling the passions, were probably intended as practiced separatly. Though Zosimus insists that this type of self-examination in the sence of ‚meditations on cosmic sympathy‘ augments one’s work as an alchemist. These, according to Zosimus as we shall see, are designed to lead the practitioner from the mundane usages and symbolism of a particular metal or natural object into progressively deeper cosmological and spiritual associations, culminating in an encounter with the Demiurge.

As P.2 of this study will show, views of cosmology and cosmic sympathy were thought to reveal something about a person’s knowledge, piety, and way of being and acting in the world. Zosimus and his contemporaries shared a basic cosmological framework, the Ptolemaic view that the earth is surrounded by concentric planetary spheres, which are bounded by the realm of the fixed stars, but they widely varied in their views of the invisible, divine order that underlies the visible order of nature. This is particularly evident in regards to the various theories of cosmic sympathy circulating in that era, all of which postulate that hidden forces (angels and daemons, in many cases) link the microcosm to the macrocosm and unite all parts of nature, but imagine the relationships of these forces in different ways. These cosmic forces were actively used. Zosimus and Iamblichus, for example, used the natural order of the cosmos as a model for the proper ordering of the soul. They also activated the invisible lines of cosmic sympathy as a means of ascending from the particulars of nature to the realm of divine universal truths that lie beyond the fixed stars. Zosimus’s rivals, on the other hand, were accused of manipulating cosmic energies (daemons) and trying to bend them to their will. Such attempts to “force” nature were often associated with magic.

Those who focused strictly on the realm of nature, and/or on the divine beings that resided within the cosmic boundaries (as opposed to aspiring to the noetic realms beyond the cosmos), were considered by Zosimus and other philosophers to be spiritually impoverished, enmeshed in worldly concerns, and lacking in their understandings of nature as a whole. As Zosimus often said of his competitors, they know only the things of the flesh, and nothing of the spirit. Whereas the true philosopher, he argued, understands both body and soul, and is able to perceive the divine unity within nature.

By focusing on the ways in which truth claims regarding nature are foundational in distinctions between science, magic, and religion, one can draw out the subtleties and complexities of ancient perspectives, and identify modern biases that may hinder our ability to understand these early occult scientists. A modern version of such cosmic notions as first where formulate (written) about by Zosimus and Plotine (Plotinus), see for example „Occult Science“ (first published in 1909 but still in print today 2007) by the German occultist Rudolf Steiner.

The earliest Greco-Egyptian alchemical texts were written in Greek and incorporate ideas from Hellenistic philosophy and religion. Many of the texts were also translated into Arabic and Syriac, and alchemy flourished among Arab scientists and philosophers during the so-called Dark Ages of Europe. Europeans began to take a serious interest in alchemy in the early twelfth century, shortly after the Crusades, and it was practiced there until the modern age, when it underwent a virtual demise. Religious language and imagery are hallmarks of alchemical literature, and the demise of alchemy was of course due to new understandings of chemistry that refuted alchemical notions of occult transmutations. In an earlier article Laurence Principe and William Newman claim that these characterizations are related to two basic approaches to the historiography of alchemy, which have their roots in Enlightenment scientific debates as well as in Romantic critiques of Newtonian science.[4]

Hereward Tilton who graduated from the University of Queensland in Australia, turn is critical of the Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman. Hence Tilton’s approach in contrast centres on the use of ‘Decknamen’ which Newman claims are "the products of a skilled use of traditional techniques of deception that extend back many centuries in the literature of alchemy."[5] Hereward Tilton is particularly critical of Principe and Newman ascribing the origins of Carl Jung's views to the English occultist Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942); which Tilton in turn claims is" insubstantial."[6] In fact in this case both Tilton and Principe/Newman seem unfamiliar with the much more substantiated claim that unlike Waite and Rudolf Steiner, C.G. Jung in fact quite closely followed Mary Anne Atwood's sequence. Although Jung interpreted Atwood's opus from his own per­spective in analytic psychology, his philosophical commitment to phenomenologism permitted him to eschew theology while refus­ing to question the validity of the apparently parapsychological character of religious experiences. To account for the apparent phe­nomena, Jung went so far as to refer to "projections" that belonged not to personal psychology, but to a collective unconscious. Impor­tantly, the collective unconscious was not restricted to people's ner­vous systems, but instead belonged to the cosmos.[7]

p. 188.) Hence Tilton is also critical of the 2001 article by Principe and Newman, where they ascribed the origins of Carl Jung's views to the English occultist Arthur Edward Waite (1857-1942); which Tilton in turn claims is "insubstantial."[8]

In fact in this case both Tilton and Principe/Newman seem unfamiliar with the much more substantiated claim that unlike Waite and Rudolf Steiner, C.G. Jung in fact quite closely followed Mary Anne Atwood's sequence. Although Jung interpreted Atwood's opus from his own per­spective in analytic psychology, his philosophical commitment to phenomenologism permitted him to eschew theology while refus­ing to question the validity of the apparently parapsychological character of religious experiences. To account for the apparent phe­nomena, Jung went so far as to refer to "projections" that belonged not to personal psychology, but to a collective unconscious. Impor­tantly, the collective unconscious was not restricted to people's ner­vous systems, but instead belonged to the cosmos.[9]

But of course to understand such subtleties is exactly why the title of the recent conference referred to at the start, aptly was "Constructing Tradition".

In later centuries, the evocative transformations of color and form within the ‘alchemical vessel’ served as a mirror of the alchemist’s desire and fantasy. The ideology of Hermeticism itself is one, in in which the upper and lower worlds reflect one another, and bonds of similitude and sympathy pervade a curiously interconnected cosmos. It is for this reason, for example, that the symbols of the sun and the moon speak not only of gold and silver, but also of sulphur and mercury - that is to say, Philosophical Sulphur and the Mercury of the Wise, which by virtue of their qualitative affinity with the ‘fixed’ and ‘volatile’ elements of the same name (and here the properties of cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide, lent their suggestive role) were thought to form the fundamental constituents of every metal. Likewise, the alchemical vessel is akin to a human being or the cosmos; the Passion of Christ corresponds to the black phase of the work, and the Resurrection to its perfection; and so forth.

During the course of the seventeenth century this opaque and many-layered language, in which “the same words are applied to different things and different words to the same things,”[10] began to give way to a more translucent chemical terminology, which tended to restrict the possible significations of words rather than to multiply them in the manner of Hermetic discourse.

Giving the religiosity at the time, it is not surprising that various readers of Paracelsus wanted to  reflect this onto indigenous German/Protestant ‘science,’ founded not upon the ‘papist’ Scholastic tradition but upon the bedrock of Scripture, as pagan wisdom (Plato, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus). Thus for example Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651-1689), whose short life of visions and chiliasm ended on the pyre, applauded the Paracelsian Alchemist (and antiquarian), Athanasius Khunrath’s censure of those “damned souls and teachers of folly” who seek wisdom in Aristotle rather than in the Bible, in Nature and in the ‘mirror’ of their own mind ;that is to say, in the divine signatures reflecting an archetypal cosmic order.[11]

Khunrath tells us that he learnt the secrets of the Art by experience and the grace of God; however, he also read prolifically, and received instruction from a certain learned master of the Kabbalah, who was the first to demonstrate to him the procedures we are about to discuss. The great and the lesser stones. The lesser Stone, as Khunrath emphasizes, is manufactured from metallic silver or gold; it is able to transmute metals and heal diseases by imparting the special silver or golden virtues (‘silverness’ or ‘goldenness’) which God has given these metals by means of Nature. The greater Stone, on the other hand, is not derived from metals or minerals, and is able to generate vast amounts of silver or gold through projection of only a minute portion of the substance. This distinction between universal and particular agents of transmutation is standard in the early modern literature. However, Khunrath goes on to write that both these Stones are created via the same spagyrical procedure - a resolution of the Ausgangsmaterial (source material or subject) into a prima materia, and its ‘artifical conjugation’ in more perfect proportion. Spagyric, or the branch of alchemical technique dealing with the dissolution and re-assembly of matter, is associated with a plethora of alchemical symbols. Thus Michael Maier (1568-1622), a younger contemporary of Khunrath, once stated to his patron that “a straw house cannot become the marble stone castle of a great prince” unless one first “tears down the straw house to its foundations and thereafter builds the marble castle from the ground up.” One of these symbols for spagyric this dismemberment by the sword, in fact is already to be found in the famed visions of Zosimos:

I am Ion, the priest of the sanctuary, and I have survived intolerable force. For one came headlong in the morning, dismembering me with a sword, and tearing me asunder according to the rigor of harmony. And flaying my head with the sword which he held fast, he mingled my bones with my flesh and burned them in the fire of the treatment, until I learnt by the transformation of the body to become a spirit.

The presumed author of the (no doubt also Paracelsian) famous Rosicrucian manifestos, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), in contrast warned that the paradoxical language of Khunrath and his ilk does not bring happiness to a man. But Khunrath continued to be thought of as one of the great German adepts - i.e. possessors of the Philosophers’ Stone - amongst Paracelsians, and his ideas have undergone sporadic revivals within alchemical, Rosicrucian and theosophical circles. The flurry of reprints of Khunrath’s works which emerged in the late eighteenth century from the Rosicrucian publisher Adam Friedrich Böhme testifies to the popularity of his ideas amongst the Gold- und Rosenkreutz, a Freemasonic grouping which sought to wind back the gains of the Aufklärung with its medievalist nostalgia and alchemical cult. In fin-de-siècle France the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae was translated and disseminated widely in the circles of prominent Hermeticists such as Eliphas Lévi and Gérard Encausse (‘Papus’) one of the leading French writers responsible for the so called “Occult Revival.”

Spagyric symbolism readily lends itself to a psychological or religious interpretation, as the Gnostic and cultic-initiatory overtones of Zosimos’ text demonstrate. According to Khunrath, both the lesser and the great Stones are produced by employing this universal solvent, which has the power to reduce all things to their own prima materia by breaking the bonds uniting their three fundamental constituents - Mercury, Salt and Sulphur (the Paracelsian tria prima).

In comment of The Sunday Times of this latest biography, telling little about the background/history of ideas involved. Although Philip Ball thinks the apocalyptic visions of Paracelsus may indicate mental illness, we have found and present here for the first time ever, the written source/ Rupescissa, where it came from. An investigation in the spiritual and naturalist intellectual traditions, academic and non-academic that interacted in the Middle Ages to produce new ways of viewing the world like Paracelsus did.

Historically, metallurgists and glassmakers incorporated rituals into their crafts, such as making offerings to the gods and to the spirits of deceased master craftsmen. The Greco-Egyptian alchemical literature indicates that these craft rituals were still practiced in the first centuries CE. However, Zosimus criticizes such rites. He warns Theosebia not to be flattered by the local gods (he calls them “daemons”) who are hungry for sacrifices as well as for her soul, and he also ridicules alchemists who invoke their personal daemons, or tutelary spirits, for success in their work. Zosimus’s approach to alchemy is more philosophical. His alchemical teachings emphasize ethics, investigations of nature, and contemplation of the divine, all of which are reflected in late ancient views of a philosophical way of life. As Pierre Hadot explains:

Several testimonies show that from the beginning of the second century A.D., philosophy was conceived of as an ascending spiritual itinerary which corresponded to a hierarchy of the parts of philosophy. Ethics ensured the soul’s initial purification; physics revealed that the world has a transcendent cause and thus encouraged philosophers to search for incorporeal realities; metaphysics, or theology (also called “epoptics,” because, as in the Mysteries, it is the endpoint of initiation), ultimately entails the contemplation of God.

While Zosimus does not appear to conceptualize these elements of philosophy in any sort of ascending order, it is evident that he does view them as interrelated components of alchemy, or the “Sacred Art” as it was called in his day.[12]

As we have seen Pythagoras is largely a mythic figure constructed by later generations who wrote in his name; where Pythagoras was regarded as something of a wonderworker and shaman, he was not thought to have taught techniques in astrology, magic, or divination.

Iamblichus’s views of number echo those found in Plato’s Timaeus, and both are influenced by alleged, Pythagorean teachings, that describe how the Demiurge forms the body and soul of the universe according to mathematical proportions and harmonic intervals. The order of nature, which according to this making of tradition is mathematically arranged and structured, provides a visible model of perfect proportion and harmony that the soul can emulate and thereby attain perfection. Iamblichus’s physical, ethical, and divine numbers are clearly related to his notions of the divine hierarchy. The generative powers and properties of change he associates with the physical numbers have creative functions similar to those of the daemons; the ethical numbers, associated with the measure of one’s character, function much like the celestial gods, who impart virtues and vices to the soul and whose revolutions provide a perfect model of order for the soul. And he specifically connects the divine numbers with the noetic gods by referring to these gods as arithmoi. The goal of all Pythagorean mathematics, however, is to uplift the soul to the noetic realm. Iamblichus differentiates between technical mathematics (practiced by “the many”), which has no spiritual goals, and Pythagorean mathematics, which adapts “all its assertions to the beautiful and good,” and uses those that “lead up to Being.” O’Meara demonstrates that Iamblichus’s descriptions of physical number follow the themes of Aristotle’s Physics I-IV to the tee, and he also shows how Iamblichus makes use of passages from Aristotle’s Nichomachean and Eudemian Ethics in his discussion of ethicalnumbers.[13]

Iamblichus and Zosimus however are similar in this regard. Zosimus distinguishes between “corporeal” alchemy, which deals only with the physical realm, and his own “incorporeal” approach to alchemy, which focuses on the ways in which the physical and spiritual dimensions of reality are integrated. Sometimes Zosimus’s descriptions of alchemy are purely technical; other times he explains the religious dimensions of his practice. Zosimus and Iamblichus may not have always performed their sciences in a “theurgical” manner, though this remains their scientific ideal.

But where we have seen that the alleged ‘teachings of Pythagoras’ are part of an invented tradition, Zosimus was not a fictional personality and his writings traceable, thus the term in this case of ‘constructing tradition’ as he was the first well known Hermetic ‘alchemist’.

 

Hermetic Alchemy and Zosimus of Panopolis and Iamblichus P.2.

Hermetic Alchemy and Zosimus of Panopolis and Iamblichus P.3.

Hermetic Alchemy and Zosimus of Panopolis and Iamblichus P.4.

Bibliography

 

[1] See Panofsky, Idea, New York, 1968), 15,49,58,157,165.

[2] See Robert Halleux, Les alchimistes grecs, 1981, pp.88,104,170.

[3] at Physics 118 199a15-17.

[4] See Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, ed. W. Newman and A. Grafton (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 386.

[5] Newman, "Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language?," p. 188.

[6] Hereward Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 2003, p.18.

[7] For a description of Mary Anne Atwood's work see Dan Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visons and Unions, 1999, p.55-58.

[8] Hereward Tilton, The Quest for the Phoenix, 2003, p.18.

[9] For a description of Mary Anne Atwood's work see Dan Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visons and Unions, 1999, p.55-58.

[10] Michael Maier, The Flying Atalanta, Or Philosophical Emblems of the Secrets of Nature, British Library, MS Sloane 3645, 17th century, p. 63.

[11] Quirinus Kuhlmann, Der Neubegeisterte Böhme, ed. Jonathan Clark. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1995, pp. 111-112; c.f. Heinrich Khunrath, Vom Hylealischen, das ist, Pri-materialischen Catholischen oder Allgemeinen Natürlichen Chaos, der Naturgemässen Alchymiae und Alchymisten.

[12] Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, 2002), 153-154.

[13] See O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived, 61-76.

 

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