The Alchemical Art of Dyeing: The Fourfold Division of Alchemy and the Enochian Tradition Matteo Martelli
Abstract What is Graeco-Egyptian alchemy? Which kinds of techniques and craft practices does it encompass? And what were its goals? The paper addresses these questions by investigating the earliest Greek alchemical texts preserved both in Byzantine and in Syriac manuscripts. Already during the first centuries AD, in the Graeco-Roman Egypt it is possible to recognize some disagreement over the definition of alchemy and its expected outcomes. On the one hand, ps.Democritus’s four books and the Leiden and Stockholm papyri support a fourfold division of alchemy including processes for making gold, silver, and precious stones (glass working included), and for dyeing wool purple. On the other hand, Isis’s treatise focuses only on the making of precious metals, which is identified with the main goal of alchemy during the late Byzantine tradition. In the process that led to such a simplification of the technical background of alchemy Zosimus’s work seems to represent an important turning point. In fact the author inherited the above mentioned polarity and discussed different ideas of alchemy in a key text (here edited and translated into English for the first time) on the revelation of alchemy based on the Enochian myth of the fallen angels.
Alchemy and the Making of Gold: An Overview of the Byzantine Tradition Between the seventh and the eleventh century different people—including imperators, caliphs, and scholars moved by antiquarian curiosities—became interested in che¯meia (alchemy) and somehow identified this art with chrysopoeia (the making of gold) and argyropoeia (the making of silver). Sure enough, these people were not practitioners and they did not test the techniques described by alchemical recipes. M. Martelli (*) Department of Classics, Humboldt Universita¨t zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: martellm@cms.hu-berlin.de S. Dupre´ (ed.), Laboratories of Art, Archimedes 37, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05065-2_1, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
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