The Visions, and What He Preserved of Others

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.