Transcription
The art and science of alchemy has produced some of the most colorful characters in experimental and spiritual history. In some sense, this is understandable. Alchemy is the art and science of the transmutation of both physical and spiritual nature, and only those truly daring would even venture the task. You have to be a bit cracked, a bit daring, a bit audacious, maybe even in need of some personal spiritual transmutation to even take up the Great Work. So, the transmuted and the transmuter perhaps reflect one another.
And in the end, and in the beginning of the Great Work, perhaps one of the most mysterious and lauded of all alchemists was Maria Hebraea, or Maria the Jewess, also known as Maria the Prophetess. Credited with the invention of a range of alchemical technologies and theoretical innovations, Mary the Jewish would prove to be a central character in the overall history of alchemy. She is quoted extensively in the works of the late classical alchemist Zosimos of Panopoulos. Her theories populate the texts of Islamic alchemy. She again appears in the European Middle Ages, and her image graces the pages of Michael Maier's 1617 *Atalanta Fugiens*. By the end of the 17th century, Maria Hebraea would have been continuously invoked in alchemical theories and practice for over 15 hundred years, achieving fame second to none in alchemical history.
What do we know about the life of Maria and her inventions? What can we deduce about her alchemical teachings? What light does this all shed on the very foundations of both alchemy and chemistry in the world of late classical Alexandria? And this episode, we're going to explore just these questions and more as we explore the alchemy of Maria Hebraea.
If you're interested in alchemy, the history of magic, or Hermetic philosophy, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out my other content on just these subjects. If you want to support my work of making free, accessible, and scholarly content on topics and esotericism, please consider supporting my work on Patreon or with a one-time donation.
But now, let us turn to the very dawn of alchemy itself. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
[Music]
By the 17th century, an enormous amount of legend had come to surround the Hellenistic era alchemist Maria Hebraea, sometimes known as Maria the Prophet. Just what do we know about the historical person behind the legend? The answer is, well, very little. Though most scholars do think she was an actual historical personage. Most of what we know about her life and her teachings is to be found primarily in the writings of Zosimos of Panopoulos, who flourished sometime around the years 300 of the Common Era. In his writings, he seems to indicate that Maria, like Pseudo-Democritus, were "among the ancients in their wisdom." Though it seems much more likely that Maria only lived a few generations prior to Zosimos. So, this would put her sometime in the first through the third centuries of the Common Era. So, perhaps she was a contemporary of Plotinus, the creation of the *Corpus Hermeticum*, or the rise in Valentinian Gnosticism.
From the writings of this period, we can construct a bit about her world. Of course, Alexandria was a thriving multicultural city by this time, hosting a range of religions, philosophies, and ethnic groups and innovators. Here, the religious philosophy of Hermeticism lived right alongside the mechanical engineering of Hero, who was the inventor, of course, of, among other things, the steam engine and the vending machine. It's clear also that Jews played an active role in the development of alchemy in ancient Alexandria. Indeed, the Jewish quarter in the northeastern side of that city was probably more than just a quarter of the city. Pseudo-Democritus refers on several occasions to the role Jews played in the development of alchemy and in the importance of the Hebrew language. We even learn of another Jewish alchemist from this time period named Theophilus, son of Theogenes, who apparently wrote a text on gold mines in ancient Egypt, although we don't really know much else about him. It's worth noting that his name bears basically no trace of Hebrew; it's totally Greek, much like Philo of Alexandria. Judaism, which has long since gone extinct, managed to fiercely maintain its identity as Jewish. There was even a functioning Jewish temple in Alexandria for quite some time, while assimilating into Greek culture to a significant degree. Of course, none of this is to mention the Library of Alexandria, the Serapeum, the Museum, and other things. Now, I'm not one to be romantic about the past, but what I wouldn't give for a walking tour of Alexandria in about 200 of the Common Era.
Zosimos of Panopoulos, probably the greatest authority in Hellenistic alchemy whose works survive, or maybe just at all, praises Jewish knowledge of alchemy and the power of the Hebrew language numerous times. Aside from about as many quotations and references from Maria the Jewish, the Leiden Papyrus W also mentions the power of both Hebrew and Egyptian hieroglyphics in their role in alchemy. Alchemical texts from this milieu, preserved in Greek, will sometimes even spell technical terms in Hebrew letters, perhaps to encode them, or perhaps to give them more magical power. Regardless, it's clear that the Alexandrian Jewish population played a decisive role in the development of alchemy, and perhaps in its very invention.
Why, you might ask? Well, my conjecture has to do with how alchemy was used in ancient Egypt. Unlike later alchemy, where metallic transmutation was one of the central goals, Egyptian alchemy was much more interested in the coloring of metals and the production of various kinds of metallic polychromes. We know that from other technical texts which have survived, and well, the vast array of fabulous metal works that you can see in basically every museum in the world. A great deal of this knowledge was directly attached to laboratories connected with the House of Life, or the Egyptian state temple system. Of course, Egyptian religious life and political power were deeply tied, and the trade secrets of the temple alchemists were also religious, but also state secrets. Simply put, technology remained carefully guarded, and publication was likely heavily restricted. In fact, Zosimos himself was an Egyptian priest, probably one of the army of part-time priests that were numerous in ancient Egypt, and I think it's possible, even likely, that he first learned alchemy in this environment.
Unlike the temple alchemy, we also know that Jewish alchemists worked in trade guilds, usually attached to a specific synagogue. But those guilds were not bound by state power, even if they had their own trade secrets. There was even evidence that they could appeal to local authorities to protect just those secrets. So, it's at least possible that not being bound to the state religion meant that the Jewish alchemists were a bit more free to: one, experiment beyond the needs, for instance, to produce religious statuary. Of course, Jews were basically forbidden from doing that anyway for religious reasons. And two, they could put their ideas and practice much more into the public market. They didn't have the state telling them not to do it. The Jewish alchemists had to be much more entrepreneurial, of course, because they lacked a state contract and the official state support like the House of Life alchemists. Perhaps that market drove innovation at a rate faster than the more restrictive temple culture. Further, the Jewish alchemical guilds could publish if they chose to, and that might explain why so little temple alchemy texts survive. Of course, barring Zosimos, who I think actually represents a kind of middle ground between the entrepreneurial Jewish alchemy and the state-backed House of Life alchemy. Honestly, entrepreneurial alchemy doesn't get nearly the attention, but it has repeatedly proven to be decisive in alchemical history. More episodes on that later.
It is in this context that Maria Hebraea appears in the first few centuries of the Common Era. How exactly a woman rose to such prominence at this time isn't clear. However, other women were known in alchemy at this time. Cleopatra, not to be confused with the monarch Cleopatra VII, composed at least three works, including the very famous and very enigmatic single sheet called the *Chrysopoeia*. That text is famous for featuring a wealth of alchemical knowledge and symbolism, including an early depiction of distillation and the famed tail-eating serpent, or Ouroboros, perhaps one of the most important alchemical images of all time. More on the Ouroboros in a minute; it's going to matter when we get to Maria, of course. I should also mention the later Neoplatonist philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, who was tortured and murdered by a Christian mob in 415 of the Common Era, because that's not depressing at all. There's a really good movie about her starring Rachel Weisz, which isn't exactly historically accurate, but does try to capture something of this Alexandrian melting pot world with all of its good and bad traits. Regardless, it does appear that women could rise to some degree of prominence in this intellectual and technical milieu, you know, unlike the 15 centuries that followed. That's because, Happy Women's Month.
As I mentioned earlier, we know very little of Maria's life, although she is likely to be the first historical alchemist we know by both name and surviving writings, even if they occur only in fragments. I'll just repeat that: the first historical alchemist, and by extension, the first historical experimental chemist we know by name, was a woman. That she was Jewish flows from both the traditions that surround her, her persistent monotheism, and a few statements in her writing, including one in which she seems to condemn non-Jewish handling of the Philosopher's Stone.
She's perhaps most famous for the various instruments attributed to her, though it isn't exactly clear if she invented them or greatly improved upon them. Her main breakthrough was in the process of distillation, including making various kinds of apparati in glass, which really must have been a technical marvel at that time. She's also known to this day in both French and German for having invented the double boiler, or the *bain-marie*, or the *Marienbad*, which still bears her name, and for which numerous alchemical assemblies appear through history. The *bain-marie* is a device which sets a constant temperature by using boiling water to gently heat a mixture, and is used extensively in cooking. Double boilers are also still prevalent, for instance, in brandy, gin, and absinthe production, where direct heat would scorch the fruit or herbs within the still. So, if you've ever enjoyed a glass of cognac or brandy more generally, you can thank Maria.
She also seems to have developed a more complex still with three condensers called the *tribikos*, which may have collected different distillates at different condensing temperatures. Her invention, the *kerotakis*, however, is of special interest here. We have a three-part device: a furnace at the bottom, a boiling pan above that for the "divine water," and a reflux system at the top for exposing various kinds of metals to chemical and vapor baths. It's actually named for the triangular Greek painting palette, which had to be kept warm to keep the wax-based paints liquid. To use this device, one would prepare a specific mixture of divine water, which often included mercury and various kinds of acids, which would be sealed within the *kerotakis* and boiled within this hellish environment. Various kinds of metals, often copper-lead alloys, it seems, would be subjected to a circulating reflux of this caustic vapor, thus transforming them. Precisely this circulating reflux within the *kerotakis* became associated and represented by the famed tail-devouring snake, or the Ouroboros. That reflux going up and down inside the *kerotakis* really is, in some sense, like the Ouroboros.
For my chemistry folks, especially those who work in organic labs, this should all sound somewhat similar to a Soxhlet extractor. In fact, when I first saw a Soxhlet extractor, I just sort of said, "Eh, that's just a fancy *kerotakis*," revealing that I know more about Hellenistic alchemy than I do about modern chemistry. That, that end changed much.
In addition to these distillation devices, it also appears that Maria composed at least one textbook on various kinds of furnaces and some guides to creating the lute, or the seal, that one would use to, well, hermetically seal her various distillation tools. And there's a guide on the various kinds of divine waters that were to be loaded into the *kerotakis*.
Maria's alchemical doctrine can only really be reconstructed from the fragments quoted in other writers like Zosimos of Panopoulos. She seems to have argued that transmutation of metals was to be achieved through a distillation, sublimation, rectification process, which explains a lot of her inventions and the development of the kind of equipment mentioned earlier, like the *kerotakis*. In fact, there are some alchemical scholars that detect two distinct Alexandrian schools: the distillation vapor school of Maria, and the cementation school of Pseudo-Democritus. Although I don't think these have to be thought of as two separate schools in some strong sense.
She seems to have also held that alchemy can only really be successfully practiced in the Egyptian month of Pharmouthi. This is roughly corresponding to sometime in March or April. You actually see that idea survive well into European medieval alchemy as well. The fundamental substance for starting the process was the so-called *tetrasomia*, or an alloy of copper, iron, lead, and zinc. Though Maria seems to have focused most heavily in her work on a copper-lead alloy, usually referred to as *melibda calcos*. A similar procedure known as the Formula of the Crab, or the Formula of the Scorpion, is also known from this time period in the writings of Zosimos. If you want to learn more about this early encoded text for the transmutation of metals, or about Egyptian alchemy more generally, take a look at my episode in the card above.
Her general procedure seemed to have centered on subjecting the *tetrasomia*, usually in the form of the *molybdecalcose*, or the copper-lead alloy, to a host of caustic vapors of various versions of the divine waters in the *kerotakis* or similar kinds of devices. Here, the divine waters, which again seem to have consisted of sulfur, the male force, and mercury, the female force, along with other caustic agents like primitive acids. As Maria famously pronounced, "One must join the male and the female, and then you will find what is sought." Similarly, she notes that one must "invert nature by volatilizing the solid sulfur and by fixing the liquid mercury" with the *tetrasomia* in the *kerotakis*. Now we're talking alchemy.
By subjecting the *tetrasomia* and various forms to the divine water in various forms, this causes a transformation in color from black to white to yellow to red. That last phase uses cinnabar inside the *kerotakis*, which contains mercury, hence the red color. This will all result in a kind of homologous transformation in the substance. It's transmutation. The *tetrasomia* becomes gold. Though she said that a great deal of substance is actually lost in this whole process, but can be re-subjected to what she calls *diplosis*, or doubling, by the use of further mercury at the very end of the process, again in the form of cinnabar. The cinnabar being red, and that last red color indicating that one is at the very end of the alchemical process of both transmutation and *diplosis*.
Maria held that transmutation was possible because nature was fundamentally one substance in different forms, mirroring one another. Thus, her theory understands that the metals and the human body share fundamental correspondences, and that just as death and life give birth to one another in the body, so too they give birth to one another in the metals. Thus, her language moves between the organic world of human birth, reproduction, and death, and the inorganic metallic world of transformations seamlessly. Indeed, this fundamental axiom of Maria was said to have been the result of nothing less than divine revelation. In her famed prophetic shriek, or ecstatic cry, the Greek is *ekstasis*, she declared, "One becomes two, and by the means of the third and the fourth achieve unity. Thus two are but one." The idea of unity, division, unity as the dialectic of being itself is perhaps the most repeated axiom in all of alchemy. It made such an impression on Carl Jung that he can basically be said to have built an entire psychological system around it. And furthermore, understood all of alchemy through this axiom. Of course, that very ecstatic insight eventually earned Maria the title of Prophetess, as well as alchemist.
Her writings and teachings persisted into the early Christian period, and it was even claimed by Epiphanius that she was, in fact, a convert to that very religion. Further, she also appears in several later Islamic alchemical texts, specifically as an expert on fixing the volatile and, well, vice versa, and in the development of the so-called divine waters, which would eventually transform during the Islamic period into the development of various kinds of acids. Of course, this is a tremendous breakthrough in chemical history. Modern chemistry is impossible without the invention of acids. Interestingly enough, many of the texts referenced by the alchemists during the Islamic period seem to be independent of those referenced by Zosimos, which perhaps indicates that a substantial body of literature by or attributed to Maria was still circulating during that period.
At the same time, her legend was also beginning to take wings. She was increasingly being pushed further and further back into antiquity, made at first a contemporary of the famed Zoroastrian mage Ostanes, and then linked with Jesus. In fact, she'll eventually become sort of weirdly linked with Mary, the mother of Jesus. And finally, she's pushed all the way back to being the very sister of Moses and Aaron. Of course, that Miriam is also a prophet, Miriam HaNeviah.
By the time Maria's ideas reached Europe, her fame was well established. In fact, at the beginning of his *History of Alchemy*, at the beginning of the text on the composition of alchemy, which was the first alchemical text to enter Europe in 1144, it is said, "Blessed are you, Maria, for the divine, hidden, and always splendid secret is with you forever." If you're interested in this very first European alchemical text, you might want to check out the card above for an entire episode on it.
Through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, Maria will become one of a handful of women who have said to have found the Philosopher's Stone. She also appears as the master teacher in a dialogue with Aros, or Horus, which first appeared in the famed *Artis Auriferae* in three volumes, first appearing in 1572. The origin of this text is mysterious because it's an alchemical text, and yeah, but it's very possible that it's in fact a Latin reworking of an Arabic text. There are Arabic technical terms in the text as well, which itself may be a reworking of an ancient Greek text, though the jury's out on exactly the origins of this book. The dialogue features Aros, or Horus, inquiring of Mary, who answers in a both pithy and enigmatic style. Despite the difficulty of this text, the teachings in it do seem remarkably similar to those found all the way back in what we take to be authentic Marian texts and Zosimos.
It's also in this work that we learn of the famous "white, clear, precious herb which grows upon the small mountain, which is also called the 'Stone of Truth,' which must be placed within the 'Vessel of Hermes,' which was hidden by the Stoics, and not the vessel of the necromancers." All of this is the method by which the Great Work, that your work of transmutation, is accomplished. This white herb, along with the circulation of the two fumes, becomes solidly connected with Mary during this period. The two fumes are likely those of mercury and sulfur. This is an idea going back to Aristotle and Islamic alchemy, more properly. Well, the identity of the white herb is well, mysterious, and some have argued that it might be moonwort, which does have alchemical significance in many other texts. But it doesn't appear that moonwort is actually depicted in Michael Maier's famous image of Mary in his *Atalanta Fugiens*. Though in that image, the spiral-like flow of fumes from urn to inverted urn in a kind of constant reflux certainly harkens back to the ancient doctrines and techniques of Maria the Jewish, prophetess of alchemy.
If you want to learn more about Mary and read what remains of her alchemical works in translation, certainly the best place is Raphael Patai's *The Jewish Alchemists*. There, Patai offers a general treatment of Hellenistic alchemy generally, the role of Jews in the development of Hellenistic alchemy, and a reconstruction of basically all that we know about Maria, along with translations from sources in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, including a really lovely poem by Arnold of Villanova. I'll put it on the screen, which manages to capture Maria's alchemical theory in a few lines of enigmatic but really pleasant Latin verse. I've also included links in the description to the original Greek text found in Berthelot's famous collection and a link to the dialogue between Maria and Horus in the Latin text of the *Artis Auriferae*. I'll say that all of these texts are rather technical and require both a background in alchemy and kind of in chemistry to make much sense of them, but they are certainly worth pursuing for their literary and alchemical beauty.
Again, if you're interested in alchemy, make sure to stay tuned. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and you've been watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.