[Excerpted from my new translation with commentary of The Hieroglyphica of Horapollon, forthcoming 2025 with Black Letter Press. Sign up for their newsletter for updates or subscribe here for more excerpts and announcements!]

The Parisinus Graecus 2327 manuscript is one of the more richly illuminated alchemical manuscripts to have reached the West along with the better known Marcianus codex in Venice, gifted by Cardinal Bessarion to the republic of Venice.1

Dated with certainty to 1478 on the basis of its colophon, a version of the iconic red and green ouroboros nests within its folia.

Numerous other symbols originating in astrology are found in this and other texts to denote substances and operations alongside diagrams of alchemical apparatus. The P lists over two hundred symbols and their corresponding meanings.

The source of Byzantine alchemical cryptography

Rather than acting as a glossary for scribes, however, many of these are only known from these lists, and became a key source for the alchemical pictorial vocabulary developed initially in the Byzantine alchemical tradition (and not, as is often thought, in the Latin Renaissance).2

Use of these symbols within these manuscripts has shown that aside from simply denoting elements, substances, and planetary correspondences, the symbols were intended to guide the reader within the text and direct them to “translate" the theoretical explanations into alchemical practices. In some cases, this meant the reader needed to move between parts of the text to extract the instructions; in others, they were used to summarise operations supposedly known to the reader - or to conceal them from those unworthy of using them.

In others still, this “translation” was to take place through substituting elements of what appeared to be metaphorical or allegorical text with specific substances or operations; so an apparently innocuous text that superficially did not seem related to alchemy could be transformed into a set of alchemical instructions by recognising which symbol corresponded to particular words or references.

This process of encoding was performed largely for reasons of protecting the secrets within, but also acted as something of an Esperanto; as similar symbols are attested in Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, and Latin texts, it is suggested that they “conveyed operative information through a visual language with the potential to become largely intelligible across different linguistic traditions.”3

The symbols in the manuscript were not the only encoding that the learned reader was expected to decipher; the attributions and names of the purported ca. 40 authors of the treatises (listed on the pages pictured in the first image above) were also significant. They begin with Plato; the “ecumenical philosopher.”

Stephanos of Alexandria (seventh century) is among the most significant names listed, as is Zosimos of Panopolis (third/fourth century) and the pre-Socratic (pseudo-) Demokritos. Porphyrios (Porphyry), Agathodaemon, Ostanes of Egypt, and Sofar of Persia are listed too. Apart from Kleopatra (here listed as wife of Ptolemaios (Ptolemy), two emperors, Ioustinianos (Justinian) and Heraklios are also named as authors and “new exegetes of Plato and Aristotle.”

Regardless of many of these being pseudepigraphic attributions, to the eyes of the learned Byzantine reader, they would have conferred an imperial status, Christian approval, and the prestige of both Egyptian and Greek philosophers and early natural scientists.

But the Byzantines didn’t do anything with alchemy?

This is one of the more egregious misconceptions in modern scholarship resulting from ongoing “Latinocentric” approaches. It is thankfully in the process of changing.

As noted in a valuable recent study of the Marcianus graecus mansucript:

The study of Byzantine science is at a relatively early stage, in part due to a prevailing narrative about the history of premodern science that discourages looking for scientific activity among medieval scholars writing in Greek.

This narrative, developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to a certain extent still persisting, recounts that the ancient Greeks, drawing on Babylonian and other Near Eastern traditions, developed a systematic approach to interpreting empirical observations, which we may call “ancient science”; such scientific activities continued into the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods but then in late antiquity began to decline in the face of a Christian obsession with orthodoxy.

At this point, just in time, the Muslim conquests of the seventh century established a new civilisation that eagerly translated Ancient Greek books of science and philosophy into Arabic; then, just as Islamic civilisation was itself stagnating after the triumph of Sunni orthodoxy over philosophy and science in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Western Europe discovered Arabo-Islamic science and translated the relevant texts into Latin.

Latin civilisation as a standard-bearer was confirmed around the time of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, when Western Europeans learned Greek, acquired Greek manuscripts, and engaged directly with the original sources of ancient science, thus obviating the need for Arab (or Byzantine) intermediaries. This direct contact led (eventually) to the Scientific Revolution.

The contribution of Byzantium, when it appears in this narrative at all, was to preserve Greek texts so that “Westerners” could discover them.

There are numerous problems with this narrative and it has rightly been challenged on a number of fronts.

As far as Byzantium is concerned it has persisted in practice: many modern scholars, especially non-Byzantinists, still do not expect to find Byzantines of the medieval period studying or practicing science with any seriousness - despite the fact that this prevailing narrative… can no longer be sustained…

[…] Work on the [alchemical] corpus has proceeded almost entirely with the aim of recovering texts written before and up to the fourth century CE - and, to a lesser extent, up to the seventh - rather than understanding the Byzantine alchemical tradition…4

A further narrative in the process of being rightly challenged and refuted is the question of spiritual alchemy and the degree to which it is or is not present before the Latin Renaissance.

Decades of scholarship have suggested that the notion of spiritual alchemy derives from the late Renaissance onward as a result of the Rosicrucian Michael Maier’s contribution to alchemical thought, while it is only in the twentieth century and Carl Jung’s perspectives that “spiritual alchemy” became altogether detached from the physical, laboratory work.5

This equally incorrect narrative - drawing directly on the previous one - has unfortunately been widely disseminated in scholarship of these topics, so these re-evaluations of the material, particularly those challenging of the notion of Byzantine “stasis” are urgently needed.

The riddle

These matters aside, the Parisinus contains much of interest to the scholar, practitioner, and curious reader alike.

One such element is an initiatory riddle, which along with much other material definitively proves the presence of a long tradition of ‘spiritual’ alchemy firmly interwoven with its laboratory counterpart and traceable to late antiquity via the work of Zosimos of Panopolis among other writers. Eager readers must wait for the book for the rest of the evidence; for now, here is the riddle. There are several late antique efforts to solve it; these too, are in the book!

Known as the “Riddle of the Philosophers’ Stone according to Hermes and Agathodaemon,” this version is attributed to (pseudo-) Stephanos of Alexandria (though it has been convincingly argued that he may not be so “pseudo” after all):6

The first part of the riddle reads:

ἐννέα γράμματα ἕχω, τετρασύλλαβός εἰμι, νόει με· αἱ πρῶται δύο γράμματα ἔχουσιν ἑκάστη, ἡ λοιπὴ δὲ τὰ λοιπά, και εἰσιν ἄφωνα τὰ πέντε. τοῦ παντὸς δὲ ἀριθμοῦ ἑκατοντάδες εἰσὶ δὶς ὀκτὼ καὶ τρεῖς τρισκαιδεκάδες καὶ τέσσαρες. γνούς δέ τίς εἰμι, οὐκ ἀμύητος ἔσῃ τῆς παρ ̓ ἐμοῦ ὠφελείας…

Translation:

I have nine letters, I am four-syllabled: understand me; The first [three syllables] have two letters each, while the remaining (syllable) has the remaining (letters), and five (letters) are consonants. In their total number, the hundreds are twice eight, and (there are) three times thirteen, and four. Know who I am. You shall not be uninitiated any more thanks to my help.7

Versions of this riddle are found in Zosimos and the Sibylline Oracles as well as a funerary inscription from Bithynia, 2nd-3rd century. Both Zosimos and Olympiodoros attempted to answer it and came up with very different responses; pseudo-Stephanos devoted long calculations to it. 8

In my study of the Hieroglyphica, this is brought in to illustrate one of numerous possible connections between the Hieroglyphica and late antique alchemy... more in the book!

Can you guess the answer to the riddle? Leave your reply in a comment below!

Tip: Do note that the answer needs to be in Greek; you will need a working knowledge of both the language and its alphanumeric values to answer this.

Browse recent posts for more excerpts and updates on my forthcoming publication!