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Zosimos of Panopolis
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Distillation equipment of Zosimos, from the 15th century Byzantine Greek manuscript Codex Parisinus 2327.[1]

Zosimos of Panopolis (Greek: Ζώσιμος ὁ Πανοπολίτης; also known by

the Latin name Zosimus Alchemista, i.e. "Zosimus the Alchemist") was a Greco-
Egyptian alchemist and Gnostic mystic who lived at the end of the 3rd and beginning
of the 4th century AD. He was born in Panopolis (present day Akhmim, in the south
of Roman Egypt), and flourished ca. 300.  He wrote the oldest known books on [2]

alchemy, which he called "Cheirokmeta," using the Greek word for "things made by
hand." Pieces of this work survive in the original Greek language and in translations
into Syriac or Arabic. He is one of about 40 authors represented in a compendium
of alchemical writings that was probably put together in Constantinople in the 7th or
8th century AD, copies of which exist in manuscripts in Venice and Paris. Stephen of
Alexandria is another.
Arabic translations of texts by Zosimos were discovered in 1995 in a copy of the
book Keys of Mercy and Secrets of Wisdom by Ibn Al-Hassan Ibn Ali Al-Tughra'i',
a Persian alchemist. Unfortunately, the translations were incomplete and seemingly
non-verbatim.  The famous index of Arabic books, Kitab al-Fihrist by Ibn Al-Nadim,
[3]

mentions earlier translations of four books by Zosimos, however due to

inconsistency in transliteration, these texts were attributed to names "Thosimos",
"Dosimos" and "Rimos"; also it is possible that two of them are translations of the
same book. Fuat Sezgin, a historian of Islamic science, found 15 manuscripts of
Zosimos in six libraries, at Tehran, Cairo, Istanbul, Gotha, Dublin and Rampur.
Michèle Mertens analyzed what is known about those manuscripts in her translation
of Zosimos, concluding that the Arabic tradition seems extremely rich and promising,
and regretting the difficulty of access to these materials until translated editions are
available.

Contents
 1Alchemy

 2Carl Jung and the Visions of Zosimos

 3The Book of Pictures

 4The Book of the Keys of the Work

 5Surviving works

 6See also

 7References

 8Bibliography
o 8.1Fragments
o 8.2Arabic works
o 8.3Studies

 9External links

Alchemy[edit]
Part of a series on

Hermeticism

Hermes Trismegistus

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Historical figures

Ancient and medieval

 Zosimos of Panopolis

 Jābir ibn Ḥayyān (may be legendary)

 Abū Maʿshar
  Ibn Umayl

 Maslama al-Qurṭubī

 Aḥmad al-Būnī

Early modern

 Marsilio Ficino

 Lodovico Lazzarelli

 Giovanni da Correggio

 Pico della Mirandola

 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

 Paracelsus

 John Dee

 Giordano Bruno

 Jakob Böhme

 Robert Fludd

 Christian Rosenkreuz (legendary, see Rosicrucianism)

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Modern offshoots

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 t

 e

Zosimos provided one of the first definitions of alchemy as the study of "the
composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing
the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies." [4]

In general, Zosimos' understanding of alchemy reflects the influence

of Hermetic and Gnostic spiritualities. He asserted that the fallen angels taught the
arts of metallurgy to the women they married, an idea also recorded in the Book of
Enoch and later repeated in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John.  In a fragment [5]

preserved by Syncellus, Zosimos wrote:

The ancient and divine writings say that the angels became enamoured of women;
and, descending, taught them all the works of nature. From them, therefore, is the
first tradition, chema, concerning these arts; for they called this book chema and
hence the science of chemistry takes its name. [6]

The external processes of metallic transmutation—the transformations of lead and

copper into silver and gold were said to always to mirror an inner process of
purification and redemption. In his work Concerning the true Book of Sophe, the
Egyptian, and of the Divine Master of the Hebrews and the Sabaoth Powers,
Zosimos wrote:
There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the
Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the
most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. Their
origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material
and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences,
supported by prayer and divine grace.
The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and
save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its
mixture with the flesh.
As the sun is, so to speak, a flower of the fire and (simultaneously) the heavenly sun,
the right eye of the world, so copper when it blooms—that is when it takes the color
of gold, through purification—becomes a terrestrial sun, which is king of the earth, as
the sun is king of heaven. [7]

Greek alchemists used what they called ὕδωρ θεῖον, meaning both divine water,
and sulphurous water.  For Zosimos, the alchemical vessel was imagined as a
[8]

baptismal font, and the tincturing vapours of mercury and sulphur were likened to the
purifying waters of baptism, which perfected and redeemed the Gnostic initiate.
Zosimos drew upon the Hermetic image of the krater or mixing bowl, a symbol of the
divine mind in which the Hermetic initiate was "baptized" and purified in the course of
a visionary ascent through the heavens and into the transcendent realms. Similar
ideas of a spiritual baptism in the "waters" of the transcendent pleroma are characte