The First Alchemists: The Spiritual and Practical Origins of the Noble and Holy Art
Tobias Churton
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2023. 303 pp., paper, $26.99.
The quest to chart the history of alchemy is not new. A.E. Waite, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Titus Burckhardt, E.J. Holyard, Frances Yates, Allison Coudert, and many others have contributed in various spirited ways to the current conversation about alchemy, expanding our knowledge of its manifestations in medieval and early modern Western contexts.
Our understanding of the beginnings of alchemy, however, remains disappointingly narrow. Tobias Churton, well known for his work in esoteric studies and acclaimed biographies of Elias Ashmole, Aleister Crowley, G.I. Gurdjieff, and William Blake, trains his own spirited analysis on this problem. Writing for the intelligent lay reader, he offers profiles in ancient audacity that take us back to a rich intersection of pagan, Jewish, Christian, and gnostic wisdom and the fascinating figures who practiced the “noble and holy art” even before Arabic and Greek conspired to give it the name of al-kīmiyā.
Churton begins his history with the paper trail—or, rather, the papyri trail. Early alchemists, principally centered in Roman Egypt during the first centuries of the Common Era, performed all sorts of artisanal and spiritual labor, but they also engaged in literary labor. Their work spaces, fusing commercial, industrial, academic, and monastic elements, were part laboratory, part factory, part oratory, part studio, and part scriptorium. They wrote about their craft, their colleagues, their competitors, their equipment, and even their dreams. Some wisely stored their documents in terra-cotta urns. Or perhaps apprentices hid them, or censors buried them. In any event, Churton ranks the nineteenth-century discovery of Demotic, Old Coptic, and Greek manuscripts at Thebes with the twentieth-century unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library.
Relying on standard translations of the original texts, now housed at Leiden and Stockholm, Churton brings his own linguistic and exegetical skills to bear on the literary treasures as well. He agrees with the ninth-century Byzantine historian Synkellos: the first alchemists wrote about gold and silver and stones and purple “but in an oblique way.” That intentional indirection was their common literary signature. Their shared worldview was the intellectual counterpart to the complex vaporous brews that warmed their alembics, crucibles, and vats.
As individuals, though, the first alchemists were remarkably diverse. Churton the biographer excels in developing portraits of adepts such as Kleopatra the Wise, Mariam the Jewish Prophetess, Ostanes the Mede, the writer known to modern scholars as Pseudo-Democritus and to ancients as “the Philosopher,” Pammenes, Pebechius, and especially Zosimos of Panopolis, who lived in the fourth century CE, and his partner Theosebeia, whom he called his “purple-robed” sister.
Throughout the book, Churton argues that these philosopher-practitioners did not traffic in the gold-making claims of later legend (or fantasies of the philosopher’s stone, for that matter). They predated both. Churton reveals his own knack for transmutation as he molds three-dimensional images of the figures out of the scantiest documentary evidence. He devotes the bulk of his work to Zosimos, whose self-narrated dreams are now familiar to every novice in the field of analytical psychology. The person Churton might have called the “historical Zosimos” was neither temple functionary nor mad scientist nor proto-Jungian. He was a creative blend of entrepreneur, designer, manufacturer, teacher, writer, and mystic made possible by the distinctive character and contours of his time and place.
Zosimos is Churton’s portal into the cultural milieu that nurtured a symbiosis between inventive work with metals, textiles, plants, and precious stones and “the blue-sky gnostic message” of Roman Egypt’s high-energy cosmology.
Jung said his latter-day entrée into alchemy was a dream about a strange house with an old, mysterious library. Churton invites us into the curious house of late antiquity and its rambling library of Hermetic classics, Greek science, Gnostic gospels, “speculative trance texts,” and unrestrained mythologies that link cunning technique not only to the sons of Cain but also to the daimonic sons of God. Churton even draws a dotted line from early alchemy to homoousios—an adjective denoting the free-floating “same substance” concept that was soon monopolized and weaponized by agents of an unprecedented imperial Christianity.
Churton’s synthetic and syncretic mind, coupled with animated, occasionally scrappy, prose, brings to life this almost irretrievable approach to art, science, and spirituality. One of his most important suppositions is the existence of nonsacerdotal guilds or networks uniting the early alchemists. He ponders the riddle of evolution from Zosimos to the likes of Paracelsus and Isaac Newton, particularly alchemy’s conversion from a coeducational to a single-sex enterprise. But change comes as no surprise to the alchemical imagination, old or new. Churton allows the noble and holy art to tell its story in its own oblique way.
Peter A. Huff
Peter A. Huff, author or editor of seven books, teaches religious history at Benedictine University. His article “The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.