On the Art of Fermentation

"Friend of the ancients" (he names a furnace, the libraries of the Ptolemies, the temple of Serapis, and the red nitre of the Egyptians) is that Christian (he names Adam and Simon the high priest of Jerusalem, the composition of Solomon the Jew, the divine Daniel, the "Light in Paradise"; he says to Adam, the first man, that he corresponds to the virgin earth, the bloody earth, the red earth, the fleshly earth; he also has these words: "The Son of God says, being able to do all things and becoming all things, when He wills, as He wills, to whom Jesus Christ brought [it back], fare well in the Lord"); he is also entirely immersed in allegories, as the Alexandrian theologians are accustomed to doing (hence he applies the passage of the prophet Ezechias, ch. XXXVI, concerning the bones, to chemical furnaces). Finally, he is—as concerns the greatest part of the booklets—an author of a later age (for he mentions the gold-making of Cleopatra; Simon, who lived under King Ptolemy Lagides, who sent Hermes, who interpreted all the Hebrew into Greek and Egyptian; and Sextus Africanus; he also has the belleric myrobalans of the Arabs, by the corrupt name elilec, belilec), but he is here and there fragmentary and variously interpolated through the carelessness of scribes. For old things are mixed with new, and spurious with genuine; some things are added from the fifth book of Agatharchides Concerning Metallic Stones, in which Gold is Found; there is also the word katzion, which corresponds to the Italian word cassa, that is, capsule; finally, there is the phrase structura operis [work of construction]. Furthermore, in the text, one reads not once but often, in the manner of chemists, "Zosimus says," "The Panopolitan says," "The wise Zosimus," "As Maria's lead-work," "finding Zosimus saying today," "not in vain did the pious Zosimus say"; indeed, his Genuine Memoirs on Instruments and Furnaces are mentioned, to which the spurious ones are tacitly opposed. Now, however, I shall not dwell on the matters of the critics; nevertheless, Zosimus of Panopolis is an ancient author, and by far the most famous among the patrons of the divine art. In the frag-