The Chaldean Magi

Zosimus of Panopolis

Zosimos of Panopolis (also known by the Latin name Zosimus Alchemista, i.e. "Zosimus the Alchemist") was a Greek alchemist and Gnostic mystic who lived at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th century AD. To the Hermetic philosopher, Zosimus of Panopolis, the Primordial Man is the Son of God, or the First Man, whose name is Thoth:

The Chaldeans and Parthians and Medes and Hebrews call Him Adam, which is by interpretation virgin Earth, and blood-red Earth, and fiery Earth, and fleshy Earth. And these indications were found in the book collections of the Ptolemies, which they stored away in every temple, and especially in the Serapeum, when they invited Asenas, the chief priest of Jerusalem, to send a “Hermes”, who translated the whole of the Hebrew into Greek and Egyptian.

The doctrine of the alchemists was based on Jewish legend. According to Democritus, “it was the law of the Egyptians that nobody must divulge these things in writing… The Jews alone have attained a knowledge of its practice, and also have described and exposed these things in a secret language.” In an early alchemical manuscript, a priestess who calls herself Isis, and who addresses her writings to her son Horus, declares that she owed her knowledge to the first of the angels and prophets, Amnael, and explains that she acquired her wisdom as a reward for intercourse with him. There was also Mary the Jewess. Her teachings were reserved for Jews, for speaking of the “holiness” of her book, she said: “Do not touch the Stone of the Sages, for you are not of the seed of Abraham.”

Other important alchemists were Theosebia, and a woman who called herself Cleopatra. The most notable fragment left behind by Cleopatra was a single page of symbolic diagrams. One of its images showed the famous symbol of the Ouroboros, a serpent swallowing its tail, with the phrase “The One is the All” inscribed within the circle. The brother of Theosebia, Zosimos of Panopolis, of the end of the third and beginning of the fourth century AD, was probably the most important of the Alexandrian alchemists. Zosimos elaborated on the subject and gives the name of a very early master of the art, the mysterious Chemes. It was thought that Chemes had written a book which he called Chema, with which the Sons of God had given lessons to the daughters of men. From “Chemes” and “Chema” was derived Chemia, a name which was given to the art itself. The Greek work Chemia was the designation for alchemy until the Arabs added to it the article al.

See David Livingstone, Ordo ab Chao, Volume One, Chapter 3, The Hellenistic Age.

taken from a collection of magical charms and prescriptions:

Dry the substance then in the Sun and preserve it as a mystery not to be revealed, which none of the sages ventured to communicate by word but only by signs. For it is an indication of this that in their esoteric writings they use the word stone for that which is not a stone, the unknown they describe as universally known, the dishonoured as highly honoured, the ungenerous as divinely bountiful. Let me then also extol heaven's real gift, which alone in our daily experience rises above the material; for this is the medicine that is potent to heal, the Mithraic mystery.