Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/836

816 the hieroglyph for the planet Mercury; and a similar identity is observable between the sign for gold and the hieroglyph for the sun. Osiris was the synonym for lead, sulphur, etc.

This mystic relationship of the metals and the planets goes back to the Babylonians, and the idea was perpetuated. Pindar mentioned the relation between gold and the sun; and Proclus, in his commentary on the Timæus, wrote, "The sun produces gold, the moon silver, Saturn lead, and Mars iron."

The symbol for the philosophical egg appears to have originated in Chaldea, and to have been introduced thence into Egypt. So was the idea of the microcosm made in the image of the macrocosm. Thus the Babylonians and the Greeks of Egypt, as well as the Alexandrians and the Chinese, held to these aphorisms, afterward so dear to the alchemists, concerning the generation and transmutation of metals, the panacea, and the elixir of long life.

Traces of Jewish traditions, mingled with Eastern fables, can be found in some of the alchemic beliefs of about the eleventh century. Several papyruses mention important receipts as included in the pretended Secret Book of Moses; a Greek manuscript of St. Mark's represents Mary the Jewess, to whom the invention of the water-bath is attributed, as saying: "Do not touch the philosopher's stone with your hands; you are not of our race, you are not of the race of Abraham." According to Zosimus, the sacred art of the Egyptians and the power of gold that resulted from it were delivered to the Jews by a fraud, and they revealed them to the rest of the world.

This confluence of the Chaldo-Egyptian and Jewish sources of alchemy took effect in the first three centuries of Christianity, or at the time when Gnosticism was flourishing at Alexandria. The first alchemists seem, in fact, to have nearly all fallen under the influence of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. The symbolical forms of universal life, the allegorical figures in which the philosophical sense of things was hidden, were abundant in their writings; and here and there in them we meet all sorts of Gnostic signs, from the image of the world without beginning or end, represented by the dragon Uraboros, a serpent biting his tail, to the eight-rayed stars and magic circles of Cleopatra's "chrysopaeus." The introduction of Gnostic ideas into the theories of the alchemists undoubtedly accounts for their inclination to explain the hidden properties of nature by signs of double or triple meaning.

The same tendency is evident in the Greek alchemists, whose memory has been preserved by the ancient manuscripts. The St. Mark's manuscripts cite as among the most famous of these, after Hermes, John, Arch-priest of Thutia, and Democritus, the celebrated philosopher of Abdera. But they also introduce to us