Zosimus of Panopolis: Alchemy, nature, and religion in late antiquity

202 Pages·2003·1.74 MB·English

by  Grimes

ABSTRACT

Late antiquity has been characterized as an era when science and rational
thought were in decline, eclipsed by irrational magico-religious philosophies and
pseudo-sciences such as theurgy, astrology, and alchemy. I argue that new paradigms
are needed in the study of religion that go beyond these stereotypes and more
accurately reflect the perspectives of the practitioners, using as a case study Zosimus of
Panopolis, who incorporates Hermetic and “gnostic” ideas into his alchemical theory
and practice and is considered the founder of religious alchemy. I examine the nexus of
science, religion, and magic in his work and in the broader context of Greco-Roman
culture, and analyze how these epistemologies are configured in light of ancient views
of “nature” and what is “natural.”
My theoretical approach builds upon the work of Bruno Latour, Stanley
Tambiah and others who have exposed the ways in which scholarly analyses of science,
magic, and religion often privilege modern notions of rationality and construe the
viewpoints and practices of the "other" as its opposite. I argue that modern views of
nature and science are frequently defined in contradistinction to “primitive” or “pre-
modern” notions of cosmic sympathy—a theory of nature upon which alchemy is
based—and that modern tendencies to conceptually separate nature and culture have led
to several misunderstandings of Greco-Egyptian alchemy. My thesis is that
conceptualizations of nature are crucial for understanding both ancient and modern
delineations of science, magic, and religion; this type of analysis is also useful for
interrogating modern biases and arriving at more nuanced interpretations of ancient
perspectives.
ZOSIMUS OF PANOPOLIS:
ALCHEMY, NATURE, AND RELIGION IN LATE ANTIQUITY

By

Shannon L. Grimes

B.A., University of Puget Sound, 1993
M.A., California Institute of Integral Studies, 1998
M.Phil., Syracuse University, 2003

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion
in the Graduate School of Syracuse University

May 2006

Approved ___________________________________
Professor Patricia Cox Miller

Date___________________________________
UMI Number: 3241855
Copyright 2006 by
Grimes, Shannon L.
All rights reserved.
UMI Microform3241855
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Copyright 2006 Shannon L. Grimes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

1. ZOSIMUS AND GRECO-EGYPTIAN ALCHEMY 23

2. ALCHEMY AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE 55

3. JEWISH THOUGHT AND NATURAL VS. UNNATURAL METHODS 88

4. ALCHEMY, THEURGY, AND THE DIVINE COSMOS 119

5. NATURE, CULTURE, AND THE PROBLEM OF COSMIC SYMPATHY 152

CONCLUSION 176

BIBLIOGRAPHY 181

BIOGRAPHICAL DATA 196

v
1
INTRODUCTION

When studying late antique religions, ancient as well as modern categories of
magic, religion, and science often become quite blurred. Alchemy, which began to
flourish in this period, poses new questions and problems for scholars in regard to these
categories. This dissertation focuses on the Greco-Egyptian alchemist Zosimus of
Panopolis (ca. 270 CE), who was the first to frame alchemy as a chemico-religious
philosophy and practice; he believed that piety, meditation, and divine revelation
contribute to the effective transmutation of metals. Zosimus’s religious interpretations
of alchemy place him at a nexus of late ancient science, religion, and magic that has
rarely been explored. My claim is that by concentrating on Zosimus’s concepts of
“nature” and what is “natural,” we can better understand his perceptions of the
relationships between magic, religion, and science, and that such an analysis has
implications for understanding the complexity and varied use of these categories in late
antiquity, as well as for interrogating modern biases toward magic, religion, and science
in the study of ancient religions.

Historiographical issues in the study of alchemy
Alchemy is typically defined as the practice of transmuting base metals into
gold, and such practices are considered to be the origins of modern chemistry.
“Western” alchemy (as opposed to Chinese or Indian alchemy, which have somewhat
different aims and practices) is thought to have originated in Greece or Egypt at the
dawn of the common era. The earliest Greco-Egyptian alchemical texts were written in
Greek and incorporate ideas from Hellenistic philosophy and religion. Many of the
2
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 eighteenth century, when it underwent a
virtual demise during the Enlightenment. Religious language and imagery are
hallmarks of alchemical literature, and the demise of alchemy was in part due to new
understandings of chemistry that refuted alchemical notions of transmutation, but also
related to general tendencies toward the secularization of scientific knowledge in
modern Europe.1
Alchemy is often labeled as a “pseudo-science” and associated with magic and
occultism. 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. The first approach, which I will call the Enlightenment approach, dates from
the beginning of the eighteenth century when etymological distinctions between
“alchemy” and “chemistry” began appearing in force as an attempt to distinguish
alchemy from the burgeoning science of chemistry.2 Prior to this time, the terms
“alchemy” and “chemistry” had been used interchangeably in reference to chemical
experiments, pharmacology, and to gold-making, but in the eighteenth century
“alchemy” came to be used almost exclusively to designate gold-making practices,

1 There are several general histories of alchemy available. See E.J. Holmyard, Alchemy (New York:
Dover Publications, 1990 [1957]); and Allison Coudert, Alchemy: The Philosopher’s Stone (London:
Wildwood House, 1980).
2 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.
3
which were now more widely associated with charlatanism and fraud.3 Principe and
Newman point out that Enlightenment writers often described chemistry as a light
triumphantly shining forth from the obscure and deluded darkness of the alchemical
past. These Enlightenment metaphors and attitudes continue to appear in contemporary
histories of alchemy.4
The initial consequence of this separation of alchemy and chemistry, or, in
Principe and Newman’s terms, “the recasting of alchemy as ‘other’ to chemistry,” is
that the religious and esoteric aspects of alchemy became more pronounced. In the
eighteenth century, Pietists, masons, and secret societies began using alchemical
imagery in exclusively spiritual contexts (i.e., divorcing the religious symbolism from
its meaning in the laboratory). By the nineteenth century alchemy was largely
associated with natural magic, theurgy, astrology, and other so-called occult sciences.5
The association of alchemy and the occult has often been used to discredit alchemy, to
reinforce a distinction between “rational” chemistry and “irrational” alchemy.
However, nineteenth-century occultists (the interest in occultism in this period is
attributed to Romantic influences6) celebrated and popularized the notion of alchemy as
an esoteric mystical practice. They claimed that the chemical operations were actually
codes for spiritual realities, used as a foil to conceal the mystical wisdom of alchemy
from the uninitiated. This esoteric interpretation of alchemy, which Principe and

3 A fuller treatment of this etymological shift can be found in another article by the same authors. See
W. Newman and L. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographical
Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32-65.
4 Ibid. Many scholarly works on early Greco-Egyptian alchemy, especially those written by historians of
science, convey these “Enlightenment” attitudes. See, for example, F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists
(St. Albans: Paladin, 1976 [1952]); A.J. Hopkins, Alchemy: Child of Greek Philosophy, (New York:
AMS Press, 1967 [1933]); and a more recent article by P.T. Keyser, “Alchemy in the Ancient World:
From Science to Magic,” Illinois Classical Studies 15 (1990): 353-378.
5 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 387.
6 Ibid., 385.
4
Newman call the “spiritual” interpretation, has been influential in twentieth-century
studies of alchemy, both popular and academic. The authors cite C.G. Jung and Mircea
Eliade, along with a few historians of science, as examples of a predominantly
“spiritual” approach because of their claims that alchemy is essentially a psychological
and spiritual pursuit, and that chemistry plays only a secondary role, if it is even
practiced at all.7
Principe and Newman argue that while alchemy was often expressed in
religious language, it was rarely, if ever, a spiritual practice entirely divorced from
laboratory work, and that the religious language of alchemy needs to be decoded into a
“language of the laboratory and of natural philosophy.”8 I argue that in Zosimus’s case,
it is not always possible to translate his religious language into laboratory operations, or
vice versa, and furthermore, that his natural philosophy is primarily a religious
philosophy. The religious and practical aspects of alchemy should be understood in
tandem, especially when focusing specifically on alchemy as a body of theory and
practice, and I will avoid the “spiritual” approach, which reduces chemical language to
codes for psychological and spiritual processes, and also take care not to view the
religious language merely as codes for chemical operations, though they may indeed
operate as such in some cases.
While I think that the religious and practical aspects of alchemy should be
understood in tandem, I also think that to some extent they can (or should) at times be

7 Jung’s psychological theories of alchemy have been enormously influential on twentieth-century
alchemical scholarship, including Eliade’s treatment of the subject. Principe and Newman do not discuss
the notion promoted by Antoine Faivre and others that alchemy is part of a pervasive religious current in
Western culture, which has been dubbed “Western esotericism.” This approach to the study of alchemy
would no doubt fall under the rubric of “spiritual” interpretations. For examples of the “Western
esoteric” approach to alchemy, see Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994),
esp. Part One and pp. 13, 52.
8 Principe and Newman, “Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy,” 418.