$18.00

“This little tractate by the Egyptian alchemist Zosimos is of absorbing interest as a miniature showcase of the religious and philosophical trends of the first centuries of the Christian era. The obscurity in which it has languished is, however, hardly surprising. Largely scorned by historians of science as rubbish, and gladly relegated to their domain by humanists, the Graeco-Roman alchemical literature has, on the whole, remained a virtual terra incognita even to scholars of its cultural milieu. Yet this body of literature is a valuable source of information for the study of the many elements that, much like some strange amalgam of the sacred art itself, fused to produce the complex, eclectic thought of late antiquity.”
— from the introduction