Byzantine Alchemy, or the Era of Systematization
Cristina Viano2018, Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World Edited by Paul T. Keyser and John Scarborough
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Abstract
The chapter shows how the texts of early Byzantine alchemy transformed the alchemical tradition. This period is characterized by a generation of “commentators” tied to the Neoplatonic milieu. Their writings, designed primarily to clarify the ideas of the previous generations, represent the most advanced stage of ancient alchemical theory. In the fifth century, authors external to alchemy explicitly speak of alchemy as a contemporary practice to produce gold from other metals. Around the seventh century, the corpus of alchemical texts began to be assembled as an anthology of extracts. The object of the research was agents of transformations of matter. The cause of the transformation is an active principle that acts by dissolution: “divine water” (or sulfur water), mercury, “chrysocolla” (gold solder), or raw sulfur. Mercury is at once the dyeing agent and the prime metallic matter, understood as the common substrate of the transformations and the principle of liquidity
Key takeaways
- The issue of identification of the commentators Olympiodorus and Stephanus with their namesakes the Neoplatonic commentators was raised very early by historians of alchemy and until now has made much ink flow.
- This person could have copied Olympiodorus up to a point and then added a series of notes on the main alchemical operations, accompanied by excerpta of Zosimos and other alchemical authors, organizing everything according to the double criterion mentioned.
- In his alchemical work, Stephanus comments in a very rhetorical style on the ancient alchemists, and he connects alchemy to medicine, astrology, mathematics, and music.
- He mentions Hermes, John the Archpriest, Democritus, Zosimos, and then "the famous worldwide philosophers, commentators of Plato and of Aristotle, who used dialectical principles, Olympiodorus and Stephanus": they deepened aurifaction, they composed vast commentaries, and they bound by oath the composition of the mystery (CAAG vol. 2,p. 425.4).
- Thus, even if one can perceive many similarities in the alchemical commentary of Olympiodorus with the commentary on the Meteorology, as well as with other texts of Olympiodorus the Neoplatonist, in contrast, in the commentary on the Meteorology, there is no explicit connection with the art of transmutation.
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