Zosimos of Panopolis: The Vision of the Priest Ion

Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greco-Egyptian alchemist working in Alexandria around 300 CE. He wrote encyclopedically, addressing his works to his student Theosebeia — a woman, which is worth noting in the ancient world. His surviving texts on the operations of alchemy are the oldest we have in the Western tradition. But embedded in his technical writings is something no one expected: a series of dream visions that are among the most psychologically remarkable texts of late antiquity.

He falls asleep. He sees an altar shaped like a bowl, with fifteen steps leading up to it. A priest stands at the top. A voice speaks: I have accomplished the descent of the fifteen steps and the ascent of the steps of light. Zosimos asks who he is.

The figure introduces himself: I am Ion, the priest of the inner sanctuaries, and I submit myself to an unendurable torment. Someone came at dawn and pierced him with a sword, tore him open, drew off the skin of his head, and mingled his bones with his flesh and burned them — until, Ion says, I learnt by the transformation of the body to become spirit.

Zosimos asks a figure in red who stands outside what all of this means. The answer is laconic: They come into the altar as men and they come out as spirits. Do you not know that it is the same with copper? They make it naked: it sheds its body; it becomes spirit.

When he wakes, Zosimos reasons through what he saw. The bowl is the alembic — the glass vessel in which alchemical operations are performed. Ion is the metal, being dissolved, purified, and sublimated. The suffering is real: the operations of dissolution are violent. But they are also something else. There is but one art, and one transformation; what happens to lead, happens to the soul of him who contemplates it.

This equivalence — the transformation of matter and the transformation of the soul are a single process — is the founding insight of Western spiritual alchemy. Zosimos did not invent it. But he documented its first clear emergence from a dream. Everything that followed — the alchemical tradition through the Arabic world, through medieval Europe, through Jung's psychology of individuation — can be traced back to this sleeping Egyptian watching a priest dissolve into light.