"When the highest descends to the lowest, & the lowest rises to the highest; when the blessed waters descend to visit the dead stretched out, enchained, cast into the darkness & gloom of Hades; when the Pharmakon of Life reaches them & awakens them, taking them out of sleep, right where they are; when the New Waters penetrate … rising in the midst of Fire … The waters, on reaching them, awaken the chained & impotent bodies & spirits … little by little they are unfolded, ascend, redressed & are seen in living & glorious colors, like flowers in Spring."
— Zosimos of Panopolis
“The vision of Zosimos symbolically describes the alchemical work as a violent sacrifice in which the matter (and the operator) must die, dissolve, and be dismembered in order to be spiritually reborn and transmuted from copper into gold”. - Carl Jung in his commentary on the Visions of Zosimos
“The dramatization shows how the divine process is revealed in the realm of human understanding and how man experiences divine transformation as punishment, torment, death, and transmutation.” - Carl Jung in his commentary on the Visions of Zosimos
“While asleep, Zosimos saw an altar in the shape of a patera (a type of dish used in antiquity to make sacred offerings) with several steps, upon which stood a priest who said his name was Ion, and who confessed to having been violently torn apart, flayed, and burned until he was transformed into spirit. Then Zosimos saw the altar filled with boiling water and a multitude of men who burned without dying, subjected to a maceration that also turned them into spirits. A man of copper appeared, who was at once sacrificer and sacrificed, who governed the process, ordering the punished to write while they were purified by fire. The alchemist is also asked to build a temple and sacrifice a serpent. In further visions, Zosimos attempted to ascend by steps, but lost his way and saw figures throwing themselves into the fire and being consumed: a man with a razor, a white old man called Agathodemon, and another led to sacrifice.”
- Carl Jung
“For everything is done according to a method, according to a measure and according to an act of weighing the four elements. Without method the combination and the decomposition of all things and the connection of the whole do not occur. The method is natural (fusikhv), giving and taking away the breath and preserving its rules, increasing them and bringing them to their end. And all things agreeing through separation and union; if the method is respected, in a word, they transmute nature. For nature turned upside down turns upon itself. This is the nature of the art of the universe and its connection.”
- Zosimos.