Transcription
Hellenistic Egypt was the birthplace of Hermetic theory and practice. Both the teachings ascribed to the famed sage Hermes Trismegistus and the practical Hermetic sciences of astrology and alchemy have their origins there in the first few centuries of the Common Era.
Sadly, very little of these documents has survived the ravages of history. Perhaps just as sadly, many of those texts that did survive still don't have modern editions, especially those of the so-called technical Hermetica, specifically ancient astrology and alchemy. Thus, languishing in obscurity to this day are the surviving works of one of the most innovative alchemists in ancient history: Cleopatra the Alchemist.
Cleopatra's works laid the foundation for a great deal of both the imagery, including the central symbol of the tail-devouring snake, or the Ouroboros; the allegories of the alchemical process, especially the metaphor of the alchemical process as the conception, gestation in the womb, and birth and nurturing of the child as the Philosopher's Stone; along with what was an early attempt at setting out a uniform set of weights and measurements, something not achieved in science until the 18th century.
Cleopatra's surviving works, sadly only in brief fragments, indicate the work of a true genius, recognized as such by her male peers at the time in both the practical and theoretical aspects of her Hermetic philosophy. In this episode, I want to explore the alchemical writings of Cleopatra the Alchemist. If you're interested in alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, or magic, make sure to subscribe and check out my other content on topics in esotericism.
Also, if you want to support my work of providing accessible, scholarly, and free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting my work on Patreon or perhaps with a one-time donation. You can find those links below. I just want you to know that I deeply appreciate your consideration of supporting the channel and the project of esoterica. But now, let's turn to the fragmentary but illuminating works of one of history's great alchemical innovators, Cleopatra the Alchemist. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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Alchemy was first developed as both a technical craft but also as a theoretically informed protoscience in Hellenistic Egypt in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Specifically, there seems to have been an early exchange between the priest-metallurgists connected to the state-run Egyptian temple system, or the Houses of Life, and the Greek philosophers and protosciences settling in that region, especially in the newly created city of Alexandria. Indeed, some of these master alchemists had also been trained as Egyptian priests, the most important being Zosimus of Panopolis.
Here, the millennial-old expertise of the temple metallurgists, whose output remains some of the most stunning metalwork of the ancient world, were combined with cutting-edge developments and natural speculation imported from the Greek world. Further, this was all put into conversation very early on with the hybrid philosophical religion associated with the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. Specifically, Hermetic and alchemical thought shared a kind of central tenet: that the smallest units of reality reflected and imitated the largest structures of reality, and vice versa. The macrocosm was in the microcosm, and so too was the reverse. All aspects of being mirrored one another.
Thus, a substance or natural process, when correctly understood, can be made to transform itself into other substances because both the physical and metaphysical registers they were were all composed of one substance, often a divine substance. That's a core aspect of both Hermetic thought and Hellenistic alchemy, and it's also the core of the alchemical theory and practice of Cleopatra.
We know basically nothing about Cleopatra's life or really even when she lived. The typical thinking is that she seems to have flourished sometime in the third or fourth centuries of the Common Era, probably in Alexandria. She seems to have followed the school of Miriam the Jewess. Miriam Hebrea specifically seems to have held that the key to substantial transmutation was using cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, in a device of her own apparent invention called the kerotakis.
In this apparatus, the mercury-containing cinnabar would be subjected to a series of circulating vapor baths of what she called divine waters, very likely primitive acids. These vapor baths would cause the stone to transform in color before a final diplosis, or doubling, were achieved. Such the stone could be transformed into mercury and then silver through a fixation process. Of course, Miriam is also associated with the invention of the alembic, still used in cooking to this day, but also the development of distillation equipment, especially the alembic, though credit for the alembic is often shared or sometimes just given to Cleopatra as well.
If you want to learn more about this foundational ancient Jewish female alchemist, make sure to check out my episode about her in the card above. We say that Cleopatra was in the school of Miriam Hebrea because she seems to adopt and extend both the theoretical and practical aspects of Miriam's thought, though it seems that Cleopatra focused more of her attention on the use of the alembic and the process of distillation rather than on the use of the kerotakis.
Further, it appears that another of Cleopatra's teachers was the priest Comarius, or Comarius, and it's in fragments associated with him that we find one of her only surviving extended teachings. Also, this is probably the time to just make it clear that our Cleopatra the Alchemist is not the same as the famed Queen Cleopatra VII Philopator, who lived a few centuries prior. Though Queen Cleopatra wasn't an alchemist so far as we know, she should certainly be known for being more than just some Roman bro's lover. She was a skilled politician, a naval and civil administrator, and may have even composed works on medicine and cosmetics. Even a book on poisons is attributed to her at one point. But let's turn to Cleopatra the Alchemist. That other Cleopatra is already, she's already famous enough.
Three works of or featuring Cleopatra's thought survive from antiquity: On Weights and Measures, the single-page Chrysopoeia, or Gold-Making, and the Dialogue of Cleopatra Among the Philosophers. Her work on weights and measures is sometimes also ascribed to Queen Cleopatra VII. The case of mistaken identity probably that seems to have begun during the period of Islamic alchemy. In fact, during that same period, Miriam Hebrea also gets equated with the mother of Jesus and then even sometimes the sister of Moses, just kind of blend all the Miriams and Cleopatras together. Why? Why don't you?
Regardless, this fragmentary text deals with a purely practical but decisively important aspect of alchemy: a system of uniform weights and measures by which alchemists can work, share, and publish their findings. As you might imagine, such systems, if they existed at all, could vary from region to region or even lab to lab, and the want for such a universal system of weights and measures was still in such a demand that even Thomas Hobbes said that only absolute sovereign power could establish one as late as his 1651 work of political philosophy, the Leviathan. Well, that power, that absolute power, would be the world spirit on horseback, to quote Hegel. Napoleon himself, with the spread of the metric system, which is one universal acceptance everywhere, people are rational about such things. Regardless, such a work was important, even if it wasn't the most sexy Hermetic thing.
Sexy Hermetic. Her Chrysopoeia, or Gold-Making, is probably Cleopatra's most well-known text, though it's actually only a work of a single page. However, the old adage that an image is worth a thousand words is certainly true here, and this work is packed with symbolic meaning, though sadly much of what is lost to us today. The title can be found in the upper left and seems to indicate that we're looking at some kind of technique for the production of alchemical gold.
But to get a sense of what's going on on this single-page document, let's try to unpack a few of these important visual elements. Starting on the upper left here, we find a stylized version of the Ouroboros, or the tail-devouring serpent, with two concentric rings of text. One of which reads: "One is the All, and by it the All, and in it the All, and if it does not contain the All, it is nothing." And in the inner ring, we read: "The serpent is one. He who has the venom with two compositions. Sun." The matter. And finally, in the inner circle, we find the alchemical symbols for gold, silver, and mercury. We'll come back to the text in just a moment.
A serpentine tail coils off to the upper left and connects to what is probably a code-like sequence by which the gold was in fact produced. Such similar code sequences are known from other similar sequences in other texts, though just what this section means here is now lost to us and likely even had its origins in quasi-magical symbolism. If you're interested in such code sequences in Egyptian Greek alchemy, take a look at my episode on the Formula of the Crab, also called the Formula of the Scorpion, in the card above.
Below the concentric rings are depictions of the alchemical vessels typical of this period, including both alembics and the kerotakis, and what may have been a double boiler or a bain-marie, though if this represents a sequence of alchemical procedures in various vessels isn't clear. Directly below the images of the alchemical devices, we have the famed image of the Ouroboros, or the tail-devouring serpent, with the inscription "Henōpan," or "All is One," a sentiment also found in the concentric rings above it. Here we have an articulation of the Hermetic philosophy mentioned earlier, by which nature and divinity are thought to be one unified substance, an idea that will appear in her dialogue in just a moment, such that the unity of being allows for the possibility of alchemical change at all.
Thus, by decomposing any substance into its underlying being, it is possible to transform it into another substance through various processes. Indeed, every substance may also contain its dialectical opposite. Notice that the image of the snake here is black and white, just as the serpent's venom is a pharmakon in the sense of a poison, so too is it a pharmakon in the sense of a cure. And of course, the term pharmakon also had a magical ring to it as well in ancient Greek.
Further, the black and white circulating image is also probably representative of the movement of the vapors or the liquids inside either the alembic or the kerotakis. The rotating nature of the transformation of this is captured both in the coloration of this Ouroboros and actually in other Ouroboros images we find in alchemy of this period, which are actually color-coded to indicate changes through the process, but also mirroring the very physical processes within the alembic or the kerotakis, in which the Ouroboros is capturing both the physical, the metaphysical, and the philosophical aspects of this process.
I'll be doing another episode exploring the origins of the Ouroboros in both magical and in alchemical literature at some point in the future, so stay tuned for that. Though let's just note here what's missing compared to later alchemical theories. Compared to this Hellenistic one, the Aristotelian theory of the four elements does not appear here, nor does an explicit version of the mercury-sulfur theory of later Islamic and alchemy. But this text exactly lays down the foundation for just that theory.
Recall the presence of mercury in the circle above. Mercury would have only appeared in the ancient world in the form of cinnabar, or mercury sulfide, which I actually have some right here, and would have had to have been processed in order to release the liquid metal. We might just be looking at that process on the image to the right. This is a large dibikos, or perhaps a hybrid of the kerotakis of Miriam and the alembic, with each part labeled.
In the center of the device is simply a Greek word meaning something like "apparatus," with a Greek sigma and a delta, which likely indicates the presence of unprocessed cinnabar. Beneath the apparatus, we see "photō," or the word for flames, for heating or roasting the device. And the cinnabar rising from the device is a central tube, atop which seems to be an inlet hole for the vapor, and atop that, we read "phialē," or saucer, or bowl, which here seems to serve as the ambix, or still head, over which water could be poured to aid in condensing any vapor back into liquid if needs be, though typically the phialē is actually the word for the receiving vessel of the alembic.
But here we have the alembic reaching out to two further tubes. A solemn and a warning notch to touch them. One can imagine that if you want is in fact roasting cinnabar, those tubes are going to be incredibly hot. Noticing that we see gas escaping from both of the tubes, assuming that cinnabar is in the apparatus, those escaping gases would be vaporized mercury and sulfur dioxide. The classic way of capturing the mercury would have been to submerge the condensing tubes in a cold water bath, which would allow the sulfur dioxide to escape out of the water while the vaporized mercury would rapidly condense back into a liquid and fall to the bottom of the cold water and could be extracted later just by pouring the water off, though the water would be contaminated with mercury.
In fact, a very similar cinnabar liquid mercury extraction apparatus can be seen in this 1570 alchemical manual, over a millennium after Cleopatra's text was composed. Now, needless to say, this is a very crude and extremely dangerous method for the extraction of liquid mercury. I'm not saying that I attempted this as a 15-year-old and got badly injured, but no. Without a proper lab and training, just no. Leave this to an expert like Cleopatra, and don't be, don't be 15-year-old me, please.
Now, as crude as this is, it's still a dramatic breakthrough. Virtually all further alchemical theory, obviously, especially the later Islamic mercury-sulfur theory, but also as late as Paracelsus and the practice of alchemy, assumes the central use of liquid metal mercury, and this text image seems to depict just that process, along with other more mysterious processes on the way to producing alchemical gold, all combined with a Hermetic theory which underwrites the viability of the entire process. It's truly an incredible historical document, surviving in two Byzantine-era copies, that sets the stage for almost all of alchemical symbolism, general theory of alchemy, and the single most foundational process in all of historical alchemy: the production of pure liquid metal mercury. It's no wonder this document is very famous and often reproduced, even if it's more celebrated than understood.
The last document to survive is the Dialogue of Cleopatra Among the Philosophers, which survives in a somewhat garbled Greek and may have been translated from another language, perhaps Syriac, or translation from Greek to another language and then back into Greek. Further, the text is somewhat fragmentary and seems to have suffered at the hands of a butcher of an editor, with some sections missing entirely and other sections added in haphazardly, especially a specifically Christian introduction. This is probably further evidence of what I call the Byzantine filter, whereby pagan texts from antiquity are passed through an editorial process of editing, redacting, and correcting them before they ever reach the Latin West, if they ever did. It appears that the Corpus Hermeticum has gone through just such a process, perhaps under the careful eye of Michael Psellos.
Despite this, the text remains a tour de force of early alchemical theory. We find the priest-king Comarius presiding over a lecture given on the natures of gold and silver by the aptly named divine philosopher Cleopatra. The first discourse is rather vague and seems to refer to the process of gold and silver making by subjecting some substance, it is entirely clear, perhaps alum, to various processes by which its color changing reflects its transmutation. This first text, I have to admit, is very vague, and it's so garbled that I have difficulty interpreting it or even understanding what's going on in it at all.
Following this first discourse, the philosopher Ostanes declares: "In you, Cleopatra, is hidden the whole terrible and strange mystery. Enlighten us in general, but especially about the elements. Tell us how the highest descends to the lowest, and how the lowest ascends to the highest, and how the one in the middle approaches the highest to unite itself with it, and what is the element that acts on them all?" Of course, this is high praise coming from Ostanes, who himself was credited in the ancient world with nothing short of being the Magi who introduced magic into the Hellenistic world. It's kind of a big deal.
From here, Cleopatra begins a long discourse which, in many ways, sets the stage for much of the future of alchemical allegory and theory. Seeming to rely on much older religious myths, she likens the transmutation of the Philosopher's Stone inside either the circulating vapors of the kerotakis or the alembic to the process of the resurrection of the Pharaohs of old. In fact, Lindsay has, I think, really rightly pointed out here the very close parallels between Egyptian funerary magical language and the processes described by Cleopatra, in which both the Philosopher's Stone and the body of the Pharaoh are subjected to violent processes deep in Hades, which purifies, transforms, and resurrects them as a new, perfect substance.
This imagery of death, transformation, and resurrection, especially once linked to that of the resurrection of Christ, will become staple alchemical imagery and it seems actually have pre-Christian origins. Further, she likens the processes of changes in nature and in the alchemical vessel to the processes of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and her deeply affectionate language glides effortlessly from depictions of a mother caring for her child to the alchemist attending to the lab doing the Great Work. Indeed, these are among some of the most beautiful passages in all of alchemical history, at least in my opinion.
She also discusses a further, quote, "mystery of the philosophers," which, according to the text, has never been published or taught publicly. Specifically, but the alchemical process reduces a substance back into the primarily unified substance of all being, the underlying divine substance of which all beings are composed. Her reasoning sounds as Hermetic as it rings of the metaphysics of Spinoza. Thus, when a substance has been broken down into its divine state, it's capable of purification and transmutation by art, such that it can undergo its final transmutation into perfection as gold.
Her discussion of nature as fundamentally divine is incredible and impressive, both for its implications on ancient physics but also for its sheer metaphysical beauty. So impressed are the philosophers around her that they declare that they've fallen into mystical ecstasy at her mere words and cry out: "Blessed be the womb that bore you, O Cleopatra!" a phrase said of none less than Jesus in the New Testament.
In her final fragmentary discourse among the philosophers, there are lines that are even reminiscent of the famed Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, such as: "The natures controlled and conquer the natures, and through this they changed the natures and the bodies and everything from their nature. And he who fled entered into the one who did not flee, and he who controlled entered into the one who did not control, and they were united with each other." And another quote: "One single nature results that pursues and dominates all natures, and the one itself conquers the nature of fire and earth and transforms its whole nature." Of course, these lines remain cryptic, but when put into the larger, more Hermetic framework, we begin to see an alchemical theory that operates on the idea that the cosmos, or nature, is fundamentally a united divine substance.
In fact, the Corpus Hermeticum has a very similar notion when it refers to the cosmos itself as a co-divine son of God, of which the alchemist grasps, transforms, and perfects. A positively beautiful conception of the nature and role of alchemy. It's unsurprising, then, that she is among only four other women in alchemical lore, including Miriam the Hebrea, to have produced the Stone of the Philosophers.
Cleopatra the Alchemist's life and works remain obscure to this day, despite her tremendous influence on alchemical symbolism, allegory, theory, and practice. Sadly, no modern, complete, and critical edition of her works exists in English, much less her mentions in the world of Islamic alchemy, where she was also very highly praised. The only reliable editions remain the Bertha Lowe collections of Greek alchemical texts, along with his French analysis and translation, produced over a hundred and thirty years ago, though you can find quality reprints of this text in its own line in the public domain as well. And I'll say that while dated, it's still a must-have for any serious student of alchemy and remains in general very solid.
Sections of her dialogue can be found here and there, with the most complete translation being found in George Luck's very fine volume, Arcana Mundi. I must also say that if you want a copy of her single-page Chrysopoeia, or Gold-Making, then you absolutely must pick up a copy of this beautifully printed version in the original Greek by Ouroboros Press. It's press printed in red and black ink on beautiful paper, and honestly, it's as gorgeous as a piece of art as it is part of both alchemical lore and women's history of science. I'll include a link to it below in the description as well.
Again, if you're interested in alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, or the history of magic, make sure to subscribe, check out my other content, and I hope you consider supporting my work of making scholarly and free content on topics in esotericism available for free here on YouTube by taking a look at my Patreon or considering a one-time donation. You can find those links below. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.