Since the early Christian Era, the name of Hermes Trismegistos has been tied to one art above all arts : alchemy, the mysterious fons of modern chemistry. Hermes is, so to speak, the patron-saint of the art : the quick-change artist par excellence. The word alchemy is derived from the Arabic al-kimiya, preserving the tradition that the art was associated chiefly with Egypt, for the Arabic appears to be a transliteration from the Egyptian kam-it or kem-it, ‘the black’, referring to the dark soil of Egypt, following the Nile's annual inundation, an image also suggesting perhaps the alchemist's fascination for carbonised substance. For all that, we do not know when or where alchemy first began to be practised, though it is reasonable to assume that it had its technical beginnings among the mysteries of the smithy, the glass-maker and the jeweller, where the observer enjoyed ample opportunity to witness the startling transformations wrought by the action of fire, earth, air and water : the four essential elements of which, according to Aristotle - and to alchemical theory - the universe is composed. That theory can be broken down into three basic premisses:
One name associated with our earliest historical knowledge of western alchemy is that of Bolus of Mendes (in the Nile Delta), a canny savant who wrote under the name of Democritus in circa 250 BC8. He made catalogues of the occult (hidden/invisible) properties of substances and organisms with notes as to their uses. His work physika & mystika shows that something like alchemy existed in the third century BC and already had a mystical and philosophical aspect worthy of separate mention, as well as a purely utilitarian one9. For example, the author attacks “those who, on an inconsidered and irrational impulse, want to prepare a remedy for the soul and a release from all suffering, and do not think of the harm they will come to.” This is strongly suggestive of the known attempt (in third century AD Neoplatonic circles) to isolate spiritus from matter in the form of a draught for imbibing, as a quick route to spiritual experience and transcendence of the body. It could also be a quick route to death. Bolus recorded the case of the Persian alchemist Ostanes who, in an attempt to separate the soul from (his) body, died : a victim of, or perhaps martyr to science, depending on your point of view. Ostanes' dates are uncertain (he is referred to by Gaius Plinius [AD 23-79] in his Natural History), but there is no doubt that Ostanes' reputation in the Art was well-established by the time of the Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (circa 300AD).
Zosimos, a great devotee of the Hermetic philosophical corpus, was familiar with the age-old alchemical interest in a transforming stone as both agent and goal of the alchemical work. In his Concerning the Art and its Interpretation, Zosimos quotes from a fascinating and suggestive passage which he attributes to Ostanes :
Go to the waters of the Nile and there you will find a stone that has a spirit [pneuma]. Take this, divide it, thrust in your hand and draw out its heart : for its soul [psyche] is in its heart.10
The search for this stone - the famous lapis philosophorum - would occupy the time and practical resources of alchemists for at least 1500 years after the time of Zosimos.
The explosion of Gnosis in the second century AD made a definite and permanent impact on the development of alchemy. On the one hand, gnostic theories enriched and personalised it, but on the other, gnosticising the Art took it far from its experimental and utilitarian aspect. The Hermetic Cyranides explicitly states with reference to alchemy that the major opus is nothing less than the liberation of the ‘soul’ from ‘body’. It is however never altogether clear in alchemical texts whether the operation of transmuting the lower metals, (viz : lead) to higher metals (silver and gold) might not simply be an analogy for a spiritual exercise or indeed vice versa. A mystical and a physical practice often seem to go hand in hand. For by the second century it was normal to think of metals as being composed of both a lifeless physical base (uniform for all metals), and an invigorating and distinguishable ‘soul’, (becoming visible through the action of fire). The ‘soul’ of the metal was thought to exist in varying degrees of purity, and this not only indicated the dignity of the metal but also provided analogies for the spiritual awareness of the alchemist. It also followed, according to the physics of the time, to see the ‘soul’ of the metal as subject to stellar influences, as people were thought to be. In this context it was logical to envision the possibility of transmuting the metal by influence upon the ‘soul’ of the metal. This explains why operations had to be undertaken according to appropriate astrological configurations. Each planet corresponded to a particular metal : Mercury with mercury; gold with the Sun; silver with the Moon; lead with Saturn; iron with Mars; copper with Venus and tin with Jupiter. The highest state of the soul was identification with God, and in alchemical language, this state was Gold : the Sun, the “visible god” of the Hermetists. The transmutation of the soul, as understood by the sages of Alexandria (where alchemy flourished), required the sympathy, in the deepest sense, of the alchemist with the work. If you wished to advance in alchemy, you had to advance in gnosis.
The great question was how to arrive at the Gold, for which purpose it was necessary to know how to release the spirit (pneuma) or mercurius (principle of transformation - Mercury was of course the Latin form of Hermes), hidden or imprisoned within the chemical substance11. In order to effect the transformation, a system of more or less standard but polyvalent operations was employed, whereby higher substances impacted on lower ones in the belief that the mercurius of the superior substance would swallow the impurities of the lesser. Thus mercurius was frequently portrayed as a devouring serpent. As a symbol of the totality of the cosmos and its cyclic nature, we sometimes see the gnostic figure of the ouroboros, the serpent devouring its own tail, forming an unbroken process of transmutation : the cosmos. And since mercurius or philosophical (not chemical) mercury was thought to be the quintessence of the four elements, seventeenth century Christian alchemists were content to see the striking image of the serpent nailed to a crucifix (symbolizing the four elements) as Christ : the principle of the redemptive suffering of the metal's soul. Death and Resurrection are meaningful ways of interpreting the transformation of substances within the alchemical vase to the spiritual mind. By the sixteenth century, (in the works of Joseph Quercetanus12, who drew on the medieval manuscript tradition), the processes associated with alchemy, forever watched over by the arch psychopomp Hermes Trismegistus, had been systematised as involving more or less the following stages :
Note that last process, projection : a common enough term now in the argot of psychology, and taken from the esoteric jargon of alchemy. Indeed alchemy is full of processes we should now regard as interior psychological ones. For example, the annihilation of opposites through the mysterium conionctionis, sometimes represented in the image of the copulating couple, Sol and Luna. This drive to transcend duality has very clear parallels in gnostic philosophy. The gnostic conception within alchemy could not be expressed more clearly than it is in the prologue to the Hermetic Cyranides where the author quotes from Harpocration of Alexandria (mid-second century BC) who says he found the following inscription in Babylon “carved in Syrian characters” and which he had translated in Alexandria :
O immortal soul, clothed in a mortal body, you are borne from on high by the evil bonds of Necessity, for God Himself declared that you would rule over mortal bodies and bear with the sinful, being the yarn spun by the fates and Necessity. For like a man who is imprisoned and in bondage, so you too are held by the harsh bonds of Necessity. But when you escape from the mortal and oppressive body, you will truly behold God ruling in the air and in the clouds. He who eternally brings upon the earth thunder and earthquakes, lightning and thunder-bolts, and moves the foundations of the earth and the waves of the sea. Such will be the eternal works of God the mother of all things. God has made known to mortals all things, and their opposites.
This account is reminiscent of the legend surrounding what is probably the most significant alchemical text of all time : the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistos, also known as the Tabula Smaragdina. This was variously thought to have been the only inscribed wisdom to survive the Great Flood, or to have been written on a tablet, found in the tomb of the Thrice Greatest himself. It was transmitted in Arabic texts from the eighth to the ninth centuries from a text of Syrian origin and was translated into Latin in the twelth century and made subject to continuous commentary throughout the Middle Ages. The Emerald Tablet was almost certainly in existence in the fourth century AD, since it appears to have been paraphrased by the ‘Gnostic Jesus’ of the Nag Hammadi Library13.
We find in the Emerald Tablet the quintessential doctrines of the Hermetic Art of alchemy : the interaction of the microcosm and macrocosm - the two coming from a single source; the universe created out of the four Aristotelian elements; the universal power of the spirit to penetrate the macro and microcosm, and even the luminous couple of the Chemical Nuptials, Sol and Luna : the two opposed principles which must be united. The Emerald Tablet expresses the Great Work of the alchemist in a nutshell:
It is true, without lie, certain and of all truth,
That which is below is like that which is above,
and that which is above is like that which is below,
to work the miracle of the one thing.
And as all things have been and came from one
thus all things were born in this unique way by adaption.
The sun is the Father,
The moon is its mother,
The wind carries it in his belly,
The earth is its nourisher,
The Father of all, the Will of the whole cosmos is here;
Her power is complete if she is converted in earth.
You will separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the gross,
carefully with great industry.
It climbs from the earth to the sky, and then it descends in the earth,
and it receives the power of the superior things and the inferior.
You will have by this means all the glory of the world,
and all obscurity is removed from you.
This is the strong power of all power,
because it will conquer everything subtle and everything solid.
Thus the world has been created.
From this will be and will follow the innumerable adaptions
for which the medium is here.
That is why I have been called Hermes Trismegistus,
having the three parts of the philosophy of the world.
That which I said on the operation of the sun is accomplished and perfected.14
From the fourth century onwards, the substantial name mercurius would be inseparably linked to Hermes or Mercurius Trismegistus. Instrumental in forging this link was the third to fourth century Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis, (Akhmim), who operated in Alexandria, the heart of the gnostic world at that time. Zosimos is an extremely interesting figure. His dreams have been subjected to positive analysis by Carl Jung, while Garth Fowden writes of him in his excellent book The Egyptian Hermes : “Zosimos' spirituality is clearly the product of his contact with the philosophical Hermetica.”
The vogue for timeless Hermetic study may have had something to do with the times. The century in which Zosimos was born has been described by Dean Inge as “an age of lengthening shadows and waning light. So we think; and so, on the whole, thought those who lived in it. ‘The world has grown old.’ ‘This is indeed the fin de siècle’ (ipsa clausula saeculi). ‘Humanity is at its last gasp.’ Pagans and Christians are equally pessimistic. To both alike, civilisation seemed to have no future. This feeling of hopelessness is intelligible. The government of the Empire had fallen into anarchy. There were seven puppet emperors, set up and deposed by the army, between 235 and 249.15” In spite of all this, Dean Inge asks the question, “May not political calamities actually liberate philosophy and religion, by compelling them to attend exclusively to their own business?” A good point, and one which may explain why we find Zosimos, obviously a brilliant individual, inspecting an alchemical furnace in a temple at Memphis fifty years after the period described.
While our inheritance of Zosimos' works is fragmentary, they nonetheless tell us a great deal about his inner life. Here was a man driven more by spiritual impulse than academic curiosity, a drive whose powerful urges found expression in his acquaintance with Platonism, Gnosticism, Judaism and the wisdom ascribed to Hermes and the oriental Zoroaster. “Like many men of his period, Zosimos reflected on how his soul might be freed from the world of flux and illusion; and his preoccupations occasionally invaded his sleeping hours, and gave rise to dreams and visions.”16 In one dream, Zosimos describes climbing steps towards a bowl-shaped altar, strongly reminiscent of the Hermetic bowl of nous (νους) described in Corpus Hermeticum IV. At the altar stood a priest who announced to Zosimos that he had :
accomplished the descent of these fifteen steps of darkness and the ascent of the steps of light, and he who sacrifices is himself the sacrificial victim. Casting away the coarseness of the body, and consecrated priest by necessity, I am made perfect as a spirit…I am Aion, the priest of the sanctuaries, and I have submitted myself to an unendurable torment. For there came one in haste at early morning, who overpowered me and pierced me through with the sword, and dismembered me in accordance with the rule of harmony. And he drew off the skin of my head with the sword which he was holding, and mingled the bones with the pieces of flesh, and caused them to be burned with the fire that he held in his hand [?], till I perceived by the transformation of the body that I had become spirit. And that is my unendurable torment.17
These archetypal dream-figures appear to embody or symbolise technical, alchemical processes. (Hence, for example, the ‘steps’ to be taken to the bowl/altar.) The dismembering, flaying, apparent death, resurrection and piercing would return in graphic form in seventeenth century Rosicrucian-inspired works such as Atalanta Fugiens (1618), by Count Michael Maier, to baffle the uninitiated.
Unlike modern science, which hopes to objectify the world through the disciplines of rational logic, alchemy, through meditation and imagination, brings the soul and the spirit directly into a vision of the creative process, creating an almost intermediate visionary plane of meaning, tending, adepts believe, towards psychic wholeness. This is why, among other reasons, Carl Jung (who saw himself as a kind of descendent of the Gnostics) took to alchemy with such passion and purpose. (“If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” says the gnostic Gospel of Thomas -and much of Jung's psychology has to do with this drawing-out process, though it should be added that Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy is not shared by all scholars).
Zosimos held the magical view that the material and spiritual find their kinship in a universal pattern of powerful sympathetic links, with the corollary that spiritual experiences may be expressed in material metaphors and, more precisely, that disciplined understanding of the properties of matter is an indispensable aid for liberation of the soul from the ‘body-tomb’. The paradox of the human experience, from this point of view, is that although the body is an expression of the soul, the body can become the prison of the soul. The tendency of man, according to the gnostic alchemical tradition, is to sink into what is, in the profoundest sense, his material projection. Our present plight, according to gnostic theory, represents the outflow of this fall. The spiritual alchemist, the divine operator, tries to redress the catastrophe.
Man's deepest problem, from the Hermetic point of view, is one of perception, ignorance : a-gnosis. For Zosimos, gnosis is linked to the image of the baptism in the Hermetic bowl of nous : mind or spirit, found in chapter IV of the Corpus Hermeticum. This chapter is mentioned by name in Zosimos' treatise, ‘ητελευταια’αποχη, (=he teleutaia apoche), a work devoted to the history of alchemical techniques in Egypt, and the primary role played by Hermes in their formulation. This work was addressed to a woman alchemist called Theosebia and contains a beautiful account of how to wait on God, and how to call Him :
So do not allow yourself to be pulled back and forth like a woman, as I have already told you in my books According to energy. Do not roam about searching for God; but sit calmly at home, and God, who is everywhere, and not confined in the smallest place like the daemons, will come to you. And, being calm in body, calm also your passions, desire and pleasure and anger and grief and the twelve portions of death. In this way, taking control of yourself, you will summon the divine [to come] to you, and truly it will come, that which is everywhere and nowhere. And without being told, offer sacrifices to the daemons, but not offerings, nor [the sacrifices] which encourage and entice them, but rather the sacrifices that repel and destroy them, those of which Membres spoke to Solomon king of Jerusalem, and especially those that Solomon himself wrote as the product of his own wisdom. So doing, you will obtain the true and natural [tinctures] that are appropriate to certain times. Perform these things until your soul is perfected. When you realise that you have been perfected, and have found the natural [tinctures], spit on matter, and, hastening towards Poimenandres [sic. “the mind of the sovereignty”; possibly a word of Egyptian origin] and receiving baptism in the mixing-bowl [κρατηρ], hasten up towards your own race. [the race of perfected souls]
For Zosimos, conventional alchemy is a preparation for the subsequent purification and perfecting of the soul (cf : Iamblichus' Theurgy), information concerning which Zosimos takes wholesale from the Hermetica. On apparatus and furnaces : authentic commentaries on the letter ω, is Zosimos's considered treatise on alchemy's spiritual aspect. The work is concerned to show the poverty of the fatalistic approach; the power of the stars can be transcended by fully realising man's spiritual dimension. Those who do not acknowledge this possibility are warned that : “Hermes calls such people mindless, only marchers swept along in the procession of fate.” This is very similar to the plight of those who refuse to be baptized in the bath of nous in Corpus Hermeticum IV.4-5,7 :
just as processions pass into the crowd, unable to achieve anything themselves, but getting in the way of other people, so these men make their procession in the world, led astray as they are by the pleasures of the body.
Hermes divides humankind up into those who seek God and those who ignore Him. Zosimos follows Hermes and Zoroaster in believing those philosophers to be superior who are mastered neither by grief nor joy. He says that Zoroaster asserts that man can overcome fate by magic (possibly a reference to Neoplatonic Theurgy), but that Hermes declares magic to be unnecessary for the spiritual man. According to Zosimos, Hermes suggests a kind of cosmic quietism, reminiscent of the approach of the Zen Master : “nor must he [the spiritual man] use force upon necessity; but rather he should allow necessity to work in accordance with his own nature and judgement.” Fate (the heimarmene, or ‘night-cloak’ of the stars), we are told, controls only the body, not the divine part of man. Man has the power to rise above the familiar sphere which is subject to zodiacal control. Hermetic man is forever breaking free.