Mary the Jewess The Mother of Alchemy

 

Mary the Jewess, Mother of Alchemy, linocut 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2023

This is my hand-printed linocut portrait of the earliest recorded alchemist: Mary the Jewess (also known as Maria Hebraea, or Miriam, or Maria Prophetissa). The ancient alchemist Zosimos of Panopolis (who lived in Hellenistic Egypt around 300 CE), cites her research and innovations and calls her "the divine Maria". He even states that she opened an academy for studying alchemy, and taught, "the inner, concealed nature of the metals could be discerned by a complex alchemical process that was revealed to her by God himself and that was to be transmitted only to the Jewish people." She must have predated him, in the early centuries of the common era, and several scholars suspect she lived in Alexandria, Egyptian in the first century. Zosimos relates that she wrote a treatise called "On Furnaces and Apparatuses" and she invented, or at least described ovens, apparatuses for cooking and distilling, and other alchemical experimentation, made of metal, clay, and glass with joints sealed using fat, wax, starch paste, and fatty clay. She favored glass vessels which allowed one to observe reactions without disturbing them and provided some protection fro poisonous materials like mercury, sulfurous and arsenic compounds. Amongst inventions attributed to her are the bain-marie (named in her honour, essentially a double boiler, still used in cooking and chemistry today), the kerotakis (which allowed one to heat items while collecting vapors) and the tribikos (a kind of alembic with three arms that was used to obtain substances purified by distillation, still used in chemistry labs today). The kerotakis was an extractor for vapors which had a metallic palette supported inside to hold samples on which the vapors would act. When working properly it made an airtight seal and we get the term "hermetically sealed" from its use in the "hermetic arts" (that is, in alchemy). It played a role in alchemy and the advent of chemistry up to the late19th century when German chemist Franz von Soxhlet produced the modern, modified kerotakis, known as the Soxhlet extractor in 1879, which is used to this day. I've included these three devices in my portrait. Her name also comes down to us in the term "Mary's Black" for the iron(II) sulfide coating on metal after using the kerotakis. She appears in the writings of other alchemists in the Greek tradition, like Olympiodorus the Younger (c. 495 – 570)  and Christianos in the 7th century, and in the writings of early Arab authors. Arab writer al-Habīb (dates unknown) must have had access to a now lost Hellenistic treatise by or about Mary. The tenth century Arab author Ibn Umail quotes Mary's books with information not found in other sources, suggesting he possessed her actual writings.

Sadly we know very little about Mary's life, but some of her books are quoted by others, and she casts quite the long shadow across centuries of alchemy. Like other alchemists, her words about her explorations of substances are quite mystical and hard to understand. Her axiom, known as the 'Axiom of Maria': "One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one," was quoted by many alchemists who followed her; C.G. Jung called it a leitmotiv which runs seventeen centuries of alchemy. It's enigmatic and unscientific to the modern reader, but during her life, philosophers in the Mediterranean held an Aristotelian view of mater. She was expressing the idea that all materials were one. Aristotelians believed that mater was composed of four elements (air, fire, earth, and water), with four qualities in opposing pairs (hot/cold and wet/dry). It was commonly believed that by appropriately adjusting the proportions of the four elements by adjusting the balance of the qualities, a material could be transformed into any other. Alchemists in Egypt believed that a base metal like lead could be transmuted into gold with four steps: 1) melanosis, or blackening, to kill the base metal; 2) leukosis, or whitening the metal (using arsenic compounds); 3) xanthosis, or yellowing silver into gold (which might involve sulfur); and 4) iosis, or making the metal violet, which was purported to make it transformable into other metals. Much of their exploration involved producing these colour changes in metals.

Alchemists disguised their works to avoid accusations of witchcraft or sorcery or to keep their research findings secret from most people, so it is hard for us to interpret. Her interests were broader that we tend to assume for alchemists; she was interested in more than attempting to transmute lead into gold or producing the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life. Alchemy was more a religious view of life for her. She spoke of joining metals of different sexes, or the death of metals - things which do not fit with our modern scientific knowledge. Nonetheless some people credit her with discovering hydrochloric acid. She is credited with inventing the silver sulfide process, still used in metalworking today. She is believed to have discovered caput mortum, a dark purple dye. Though alchemists' understanding of materials was not scientific, the methodologies and apparatus developed definitely involved scientific thinking and form the foundation of what was to become chemistry. Mary's "On Furnaces and Apparatuses" contains the first description of a still. The instruments attributed to her, and her innovations for sealing apparatus were well-designed and played a role in chemistry and cooking for many many centuries or even persist today. And that is truly extraordinary!

My colour scheme is influenced by the deep purple of caput mortum. In Arab texts she was called "Daughter of Plato" - a term used in Western alchemy for white sulfur, so I also use a yellow-gold colour in my portrait. There's a portrait of her in German physician and alchemist Michael Maier's book 'Symbola Aurea Mensae Duodecim Nationum,' but since it was published in 1617, I don't think it actually provides any insight to her appearance or clothing. I was more influenced in imagining what she would have looked like by researching the clothing of Hellenistic Jews of the first to third century of the common era and the frescos of the Dura-Europos synagogue built in Syria in 244 CE. I made this print for the #SciArtSeptember prompt: alchemy.

References 

Cohen, Stephen Michael. "Maria the Jewess." Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 25 June 2021. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on September 14, 2023) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/maria-jewess>.

Hendrickson, Kristin. Maria the Prophetess: Mother of Alchemy, lecture given at Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, Arizona, as part of the ACMRS Fearless Females series program, on September 20, 2013, https://www.medievalists.net/2015/07/maria-the-prophetess-mother-of-alchemy/

Lewis, Jone Johnson. "Mary the Jewess, First Known Alchemist." ThoughtCo, Aug. 25, 2020, thoughtco.com/mary-the-jewess-biography-3530346.

Mary the Jewess, Wikipedia, accessed September, 2023

Patai, Raphael. The Jewish Alchemists: A History Source Book. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. pp. 60–91. ISBN 978-0-691-00642-0. 1995

Sacks, Harold. Mary the Jewess and the Origins of Chemistry, SciHi Blog, May 8, 2020. http://scihi.org/mary-the-jewess-origins-chemistry/

van der Horst, P.W. (2002). Maria Alchemista, the First Female Jewish Author. In: Berger, S., Brocke, M., Zwiep, I. (eds) Zutot 2001. Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3730-2_6