Zosimos of Panopolis
[2] He wrote the oldest known books on alchemy, which he called "Cheirokmeta," using the Greek word for "things made by hand."
He is one of about 40 authors represented in a compendium of alchemical writings that was probably put together in Constantinople in the 7th or 8th century AD, copies of which exist in manuscripts in Venice and Paris.
Fuat Sezgin, a historian of Islamic science, found 15 manuscripts of Zosimos in six libraries, at Tehran, Cairo, Istanbul, Gotha, Dublin and Rampur.
He asserted that the fallen angels taught the arts of metallurgy to the women they married, an idea also recorded in the Book of Enoch and later repeated in the Gnostic Apocryphon of John.
[5] In a fragment preserved by Syncellus, Zosimos wrote: The ancient and divine writings say that the angels became enamoured of women; and, descending, taught them all the works of nature.
Their origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences, supported by prayer and divine grace.
Similar ideas of a spiritual baptism in the "waters" of the transcendent pleroma are characteristic of the Sethian Gnostic texts unearthed at Nag Hammadi.
Zosimos describes the alchemical work by means of a series of images and says to Theosebeia: "What I wrote and told you, and with the picture I made for you with me in it, I gave you what you need to know, and this should be enough for you.".
Another source for his teaching was his suffering of a passionate love relationship to Theosebeia, being not allowed to be simply lived out physically.
This led him to understand the alchemical work as psychic transformation, enabling the adept to hold and contain the fire of attraction.
[10]: 29f., 80f., 68f., 135 Following Abt, the book can be regarded as the earliest historical description of an alchemical work based on a psychic transformation."
Other traits of Latin symbolic alchemy, like the traditional division of the work in 12 parts or the representation of inner and outer relationship between adept and soror mystica (e.g. in "Rosarium Philosophorum" and in "Mutus Liber") can be traced back to this book and seem to be influcend by it.
Regarding the inner and outer relationship between man and woman or between psychic male and female aspects, the "Book of Pictures" forms a cultural bridge between pharaonic thoughts and European medieval alchemy.
As in the "Book of Pictures", one can trace motives and symbols of Zosimos' teachings that go back to the worldview of pharaonic Egypt.
