Nitrogen's near-namesake in the esoteric literature is azoth, a central term of alchemy denoting the universal solvent, the animating mercurial principle, or the first matter of the Work. The resemblance to azote is a coincidence of sound: azoth descends from the Arabic al-zauq, quicksilver, and was reinforced by a play on the first and last letters of several alphabets, whereas azote was deliberately built from Greek roots to mean lifeless. The two should not be run together, though later writers sometimes did. Nitrogen's genuine pre-modern presence lies in saltpetre, the essential oxidiser of gunpowder, whose manufacture and near-magical potency shaped warfare and, indirectly, the chemistry that would later name the element.
In Paracelsian alchemy azoth became almost a proper name: Paracelsus used it both for the alchemical prima materia and, more idiosyncratically, for a supposed universal remedy he claimed to carry always at his side, sometimes said to be sealed in the pommel of his sword. The word's supposed derivation from the first and last letters of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets (A and Z, alpha and omega, aleph and tau) reflects the alchemical habit of building words that gestured at cosmic totality, everything from beginning to end. Nitrogen the gas, discovered and named on purely rational chemical grounds nearly two centuries later, shares nothing with this tradition beyond an accidental echo of sound.