The Most Important Definition in "A Dictionary of Western Alchemy"

Zosimos of Panopolis (born c. 300 AD) A Greco-Egyptian Gnostic/Hermetic philosopher, alchemist, and the author of the first-known book on alchemy, composed in the fourth century. Included in this fragmentary surviving text is one of the earliest defi nitions of alchemy:

The composition of the waters, and the movement, and the growth, and the removal and restitution of bodily nature, and the splitting off of the spirit from the body, and the fixation of the spirit on the body are not operations with natures alien one from the other, but, like the hard bodies of metals and the moist fluids of plants, are One Thing, of One Nature, acting upon itself. And in this system, of one kind but many colors, is preserved a research of all things, multiple and various, subject to lunar influence and measure of time, which regulates the cessation and growth by which the One Nature transforms itself.

As inspiration to modern or speculative alchemists, Zosimos’s greatest surviving contribution came not from a laboratory, but from his dreams. Zosimos documented repeated visions of either himself or a homunculus being repeatedly destroyed by way of torture, only to be transformed into a spiritual being. Jung was inspired by this account and wrote an extraordinary analysis of Zosimos’s visions (The Visions of Zosimos, 1937).

Okay, so why is this the most important entry in the book?  Because Zosimos, who made such an amazing contribution to alchemical study, did so without a laboratory, without apparatus, without investing thousands of dollars in compounds, supplies, tubes and beakers.

He did it by dreaming.