Sometime around this period, Zosimos of Panopolis wrote the oldest surviving texts on alchemy. If you want to learn about alchemy, he is maybe the worst possible place to start.
His work is preserved across dozens of manuscripts in a half-dozen old languages, and no modern scholar has translated them all in one place. His writing is especially strange, full of oblique, quasi-religious imagery, encounters with gods, and chemical processes personified as men being tortured. He is difficult to study. Scholarly works on Zosimos are often forced to focus on a single work in a single manuscript. Because of this, it is easy to get a one angle, but difficult to get the whole picture.
Zosimos of Panopolis dreamed of alchemy.
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