Alchemy in Roman Egypt: A Review of Becoming Gold
BECOMING GOLD by Professor Shannon Grimes has received a favourable five-page review in the 2019 edition of the Spanish science and technology journal, Llull, Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas. (Llull, Review of the Spanish Society for the History of Science and Technology). Significantly, the journal takes its name from the influential Majorcan polymath and Hermetic philosopher, Raymon Llull (1232–1315). The review itself comes courtesy of Dr. Joaquín Pérez Pariente, a prominent researcher for the Spanish National Scientific Research Council. Some selected passages from the review have been translated below:
Alchemy has its origins in Græco-Roman Egypt of the first centuries of the Christian era, and Zosimos of Panopolis, active between the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, is the first alchemist for whom biographical information is available. Shannon Grimes’ book is based on her doctoral thesis and, as she points out, is framed within the revitalising wave in the academic study of Græco-Egyptian alchemy that began with the new millennium, and which revises the classic, pioneering works of Marcellin Bethelot, Frank Sherwood Taylor, Arthur Hopkins, and Jack Lindsay. These studies have been carried out in parallel with other studies of Roman Egypt approached from a diversity of socio-economic, political, religious, and artistic perspectives, which has facilitated a growing contextualisation of the alchemical activities of the time, and of their protagonists. This book is an excellent example of how historical studies of alchemy have opened into a wider cultural environment in order to better understand the nature and development of alchemy through its connection with the society of the time.
Zosimos was a Hellenised Egyptian from the city known by the Greek name of Panopolis, the current Akhmim, formerly Khent-Min or Ipu, in Upper Egypt, center of the cult of the Egyptian fertility god Min, associated by the Greeks with Pan, whence the hellenized name of the city derives. His writings have been preserved along with other Græco-Egyptian alchemical texts in various Byzantine and Syriac anthologies. He is probably the most influential alchemist of his time, and has played a key role in both Arabic and Western Christian alchemy, thanks above all to his conception of laboratory experimentation as a spiritual practice, which has lead scholars of the stature of Festugière to qualify him as the “father of religious alchemy”. However, this grand qualification also contains the great problem facing every attempt to penetrate the nature of alchemy, and this book is no stranger to it: if there is a religious alchemy, there must be another which is not. Are there two types of alchemy, one of a spiritual nature and one related only to material practices, a kind of protochemistry? What do we mean when we speak of alchemy? Grimes masterfully addresses this problem in the specific case of Zosimos, and does so by drawing on a detailed analysis of primary sources to elaborate a cultural biography of this alchemist in the context of Roman Egypt in the fourth century, which at the time constituted a true crossroads of dynamically interrelated philosophical and spiritual currents; a time in which the religiosity of classical Egypt merged with Greek culture and philosophy, with nascent Christianity and traditional Judaism, to form currents of religio-philosophical thought that would later have a profound influence on western culture, such as Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Gnosticism.
The volume is structured into an introduction, five chapters, and a final section of summary and conclusions. In the first part, the conventional conception of Græco-Egyptian alchemy is reviewed, a conception which only views it as a project to transmute common metals into gold based on the application of Greek philosophy to ancient metallurgical traditions. Against this, the author proposes that its roots are found in techniques for coloring metallic objects and in particular to elaborate polychromic statuary developed by temple artisans. Her study also highlights the dominant influence of Egyptian cosmological ideas and religion on the alchemy of the time, and the attempts of Zosimos to harmonise these with the Greek philosophical tradition. The culture associated with the temples is examined in the second chapter, in which Zosimos is presented as a scribal priest and expert in metallurgy who interacted with other professionals and craft guilds dedicated to the arts of metals. In the following chapter, she thoroughly reviews the spiritual aspects of Zosimos’ alchemy in the light of Egyptian religious tradition; in the fourth, she analyzes Jewish and Christian influences, especially Gnosticism, upon his work, particularly in his discussion of “natural” and “unnatural” alchemical methods; in the fifth chapter she extends this analysis to the influences of diverse religious currents such as theurgy and Neoplatonism, comparing the writings of Zosimos with those of the Neoplatonist, Iamblichus.
[…]
The great virtue of this study is, in my opinion, that it clearly shows that alchemy is first and foremost an enterprise of a spiritual nature that is carried out with material means and substances that today would be associated with chemistry. […] Grimes considers that the process of transformation and metallic purification is associated and is analogous to the transformation and spiritual elevation of the alchemist himself, which makes the divine seed that we all carry within shine, thus becoming symbolically the “gold” to which the title of the book refers.
In this double-natured alchemical pathway, simultaneously material and spiritual, Zosimos defends the natural methods to prepare these metallic tinctures according to seasonal and cosmic rhythms, a work associated with the progressive purification of the soul and aligned with the religious conceptions of the Egyptian tradition; he strongly rejects the “unnatural” methods used by other alchemists, who resorted to magic and the invocation of daimons to help them in their work, thus corrupting the spiritual purview of the process. We will find this insistence on following in the footsteps of nature expressed later, on a recurring basis, in the alchemical texts of Christian Europe, which again highlights the enormous influence of Zosimos’ work.
This book constitutes a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the true nature of alchemy as it was configured within the fascinating Egyptian culture that gave birth to it. The author has been very successful in presenting a complex topic in an affordable and enjoyable way for non-specialised readers, accompanied by necessary critical apparatus and a very extensive bibliography. It is a study, no doubt, highly recommended for all those who are interested not only in the origins of alchemy, but also in the Egyptian culture of the early days of Christianity.
Dr. Joaquín Pérez Pariente, Review of “Becoming Gold: Zosimos of Panopolis and the Alchemical Arts in Roman Egypt”, by Shannon Grimes, Auckland, Rubedo Press, 2018, 288 pp. ISBN: 978-0-473-40775-9 (rústica), PVP: 25 €. Llull, Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas, vol. 42 no. 89 (2019), pp. 345–49.