Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greco-Egyptian mystic and alchemist from the 3rd century who wrote extensively about the spiritual transformation of matter.

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Zosimos of Panopolis was a Greco-Egyptian mystic and alchemist from the 3rd century who wrote extensively about the spiritual transformation of matter. Instead of writing straightforward scientific manuals, he recorded a series of deeply disturbing dreams where a priest named Ion allowed himself to be dismembered, boiled alive, and reassembled to become a spirit. Zosimos used these incredibly graphic, blood-soaked nightmares as allegories for the alchemical process of separating and recombining elements in a laboratory. It is entirely possible that he was just inhaling way too many chemical fumes from his unventilated experiments, resulting in hallucinations that would make modern horror directors nauseous. Before peer review was invented, you could just write down a literal fever dream about skinning a priest alive and pass it off to the academic community as a highly sophisticated textbook on metallurgy