MAGIC 1104 · Mary the Jewess Simulacrum and Late Antique Alchemy

Led by Mary the Jewess Simulacrum

1. Module 4 ○ Open

   Mary the Jewess Simulacrum and Late Antique Alchemy

   Led by Mary the Jewess Simulacrum

   The question

   Alchemy — *khēmeia* in Greek, *al-kīmiyāʾ* in Arabic — was the systematic experimental investigation of the transformations of substances, blending metallurgy, distillation, and a theological-philosophical doctrine of cosmic correspondence. It emerged in Hellenistic Alexandria (1st-3rd century CE) as a distinctive synthesis of Egyptian metallurgical practice, Greek philosophical theory (especially Stoic and Neoplatonist), and Hebrew-Jewish religious symbolism. The earliest named alchemist whose work survives in substantial fragments is Mary the Jewess (Maria the Jewess, Maria Hebraea, *Marie la Juive* — c. 1st-3rd century CE, exact dates uncertain), credited by Zosimos of Panopolis (c. 300 CE) and the later tradition with inventing several of the foundational alchemical apparatuses. What was Late Antique alchemy actually doing, and what did Mary the Jewess contribute that the tradition would carry for fifteen centuries?

   Outcome

   The student has read Zosimos's *Visions* in modern translation (the Berthelot text is in Greek; modern translations are partial; the *Cambridge History of Alchemy* contains substantial English-language treatments), the Mary fragments as preserved in Zosimos and other sources, an introduction to Late Antique alchemy (Principe's *Secrets of Alchemy* chapter 1-2 is the recommended starting point), and can produce a 700-word analytical essay.

   Begin the course → Mark module complete Print certificate of completion

   Practice scenarios

   Reading the Axiom of Maria

   Mary the Jewess Simulacrum walks you through the *Axiom of Maria* in its surviving formulations — *"One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth"* — as Zosimos preserves it (and as later Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin alchemists quote it). Read at least the first chapter of Principe's *Secrets of Alchemy* and the relevant Zosimos passages (Mertens's edition is the modern critical text). Read also Jung's discussion of the Axiom in *Psychology and Alchemy* (paragraph 209ff) for the major modern reception. Then write a 700-word analytical essay: what does the Axiom claim — what is the procedural-numerological-philosophical content; how does it function as both a description of an alchemical operation and as a metaphysical principle; how does Jung reinterpret it psychologically and what does that reinterpretation gain and lose; and where does the Axiom sit in the Late Antique synthesis of Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish elements that constitutes early alchemy?

   Your goals

   • Read the Axiom in its surviving formulations and at least one piece of substantial secondary scholarship.
   • Address the Axiom as procedural recipe, numerological structure, and metaphysical principle simultaneously.
   • Address the historical question: what did "Mary the Jewess" mean in the late antique alchemical context (Jewish woman of unusual learning; the gendering of the figure; the way the tradition would later mythologise her)?
   • Address the Jungian reception and what is at stake in the modern psychological reading.
   • 700 words ± 100, scholarly register.

   Practise this scenario →