Zosimos of Panopolis

Almost everything said about the beginnings of alchemy runs through Zosimos, because he is the first practitioner whose own writing survives in bulk rather than in a later summary. He worked in Egypt, at Panopolis in the Thebaid, around the turn of the fourth century CE, and he wrote what appears to have been an enormous set of treatises, of which we have Greek fragments preserved in Byzantine manuscript collections and a larger body in Syriac and Arabic translation.

Several are addressed to a woman named Theosebeia, who is presented as a fellow practitioner receiving instruction. What survives is genuinely two things at once. There is careful workshop material on apparatus, on the construction of stills and furnaces, on the treatment of copper and the production of coloured surfaces, written by someone who had clearly done the work. There is also a religious framework drawn from Hermetic and Gnostic currents in which matter has a spiritual dimension and the operator's own condition is part of the operation.

Later writers who wanted alchemy to be only one of these had to read him selectively, and most did. Nothing survives of the alchemists he cites as his own predecessors except through quotation, which places him at the narrow point of the funnel: everything earlier reaches us, if at all, because Zosimos or a later compiler thought it worth copying.

The best known passages in Zosimos are the visionary ones, in which the narrator dreams of an altar shaped like a bowl, of a priest who is killed, dismembered, burned and reconstituted, of a man of copper who becomes a man of silver and then of gold. These are the earliest surviving texts in the tradition to present the transformation of matter and the transformation of the operator as the same event described twice, and the whole later habit of reading alchemical recipes as spiritual allegory descends from them.

Modern scholarship, and here the work of Lawrence Principe is the standard reference, cautions against the reverse error of reading Zosimos as purely spiritual, since the same manuscripts carry unambiguous laboratory instruction and he plainly expected the operations to be performed. He is also the principal witness for figures who would otherwise be lost. It is Zosimos who names Maria the Jewess as the inventor of the sealed water bath, the gentle heating device still called a bain-marie in French kitchens, and who describes apparatus he attributes to her. Whether she was a real person of the first or second century or a name attached to an existing craft cannot now be settled, and Zosimos is close to the only evidence there is.