The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (38 page)

There are close parallels between Egyptian beliefs and practices concerning death and the afterlife and the theory and practice of alchemy that developed in the medieval world. More specifically, the Egyptian Book of the Dead offers precise prescriptions for the transfer of the human soul from life to death and then to rebirth in immortal form which are extremely close to the prescriptions adopted by alchemists. No great surprise, then, that all this occult knowledge and wisdom should come to Alexandria, where it would be systematically codified into a set of mystical beliefs and procedures recognizable by the likes of Isaac Newton some 1,500 years later.

The person (or persons) responsible for the Alexandrian alchemical canon is, without doubt, the most mysterious figure we shall encounter in the whole of the history of Alexandria. The canon itself is a collection of works purporting to contain secret wisdom and known collectively as the
Hermetica
(though the collecting was performed by a group of Italian scholars during the Renaissance). The majority of the works are concerned with alchemy and magic, and are written in Greek, though there are also extant Hermetic works in Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, and other languages. From the language of the Greek versions it seems likely that they were written in the second to third century AD, though some scholars place them as early as the first century AD. The author names himself (or herself ) as Hermes Trismegistus, that is, “Hermes, the thrice great.” Hermes is the Greek name for the god of wisdom, Thoth in Egyptian.

Not just the god of wisdom and alchemy, Thoth also invented writing, mathematics, music, sculpture, and astrology, so he was a crucial deity in the Egyptian pantheon, and there is some evidence that these works attributed to his earthly incarnation may be expressions of the Egyptian population of Alexandria. Though mostly written in Greek, some of their contents are clearly anti-Greek and anti-Roman, and, curiously, the texts are almost never mentioned by the Alexandrian philosophers, even though they are frequently quoted by almost every other available doctrinal source. They frequently assert the superiority of the Egyptian language, and one work, the
Asclepius,
prophesies that there will be a bloody expulsion of “foreigners” from Egypt. Overall, then, it seems that these alchemical outpourings may well be the authentic voice of the ancient Egyptians, beset as they were at the time by the baying of the Romans and Greeks, the Christians and Gnostics, and all the other new cults which were thriving in Alexandria at the time.

Though we tend to think of alchemy as a quick, base-metal-to-gold, rags-to-riches fix, its practice, at least as expounded in Alexandria by Hermes Trismegistus, was far deeper and more complex than that. It involved in essence the transformation of the body into spirit in the quest for immortality. To acquire the ability to transform base metal into gold, the initiates would have to transform not just metals but themselves as well. They had to undergo an inner death and resurrection, a “baptism of fire,” holding out the prospect of rebirth into immortality. Alchemical initiation was a reduction of the self to
Materia Prima,
the fluid, shapeless fundamental state of chaos, a time of darkness and night, symbolically corresponding to the meltdown of metals from solid to liquid form. Rebirth meant entering the cosmic creation, being admitted, as it were, to the “high church” of the scholar/philosopher/mystic as the
Filius Philosophorum,
son of the lovers of wisdom. These profound transformational processes guided the techniques and symbolism of the alchemist.

Thus the first stage of the alchemical process was colored black, for the descent into darkness and primordial chaos of the underworld. The second stage produced its opposite, the color white, symbolizing purity, the quality metal attains at white-hot temperatures. The third stage was golden, an enrichment and ascent to the sun. The final stage was the bloodred of vitality after rebirth here on this earth. In this way the alchemist was taken into the cosmos. This is Hermes Trismegistus’s “fourfold way,” best articulated in the
Emerald Tablet,
an obscure text first recorded around 800, which claimed to reveal the secrets of primordial substance and its transmutations. From this first version the short work appears to have been added to the twelfth-century
Secret of Secrets
by John of Seville, eventually finding its way into Renaissance texts and hence to Isaac Newton’s laboratory, where he penned his own translation. In this he summed up the value of the occult way as he saw it: “By this means you shall have ye glory of ye whole world & thereby all obscurity shall fly from you” (Hermes Trismegistus,
Emerald Tablet,
trans. Isaac Newton).

This was the promise that so attracted Isaac Newton. He knew perfectly well that all this talk of transforming metals was just a facade, even a cover, for a far more profound spiritual awakening: “For alchemy does not trade with metals as ignorant vulgars think, which error has made them distress that noble science, but she has also material veins of whose nature God created handmaidens to conceive and bring forth its creatures” (Isaac Newton,
Alchemical Notes,
in KCL Keynes MS 33, fol. 5v). A more perfectly Alexandrian set of precepts is hard to imagine.

Newton was one of the first great men of science, but few realize that his occult work, his alchemical studies, gave him the keys to the biggest breakthrough in his life. Alchemy insists that there are unseen, invisible forces at work in the universe, capable of acting on objects at a distance. An apple may (or may not) have dropped on Newton’s head, but beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was alchemy which prompted Newton to formulate the notion of gravity—alchemy which had been rendered into a coherent and communicable, if secret, code in Alexandria.

Alchemical writings continued to emerge from Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt, in various scripts, long after the departure of the Romans and the fall of the Greek-dominated city, suggesting that as a cult it was indeed native to the peoples of Egypt.

Trismegistus not only foresaw the expulsion of the “foreigner” but also the demise of Egypt and the fall of the “temple of the world.” He foresaw the faith of the worshippers failing and the gods leaving the earth and retreating to heaven. But he tells us the situation is never hopeless, and, as everything changes and reforms, so this great deterioration will be followed by a sudden resurgence, a rebirth that “will bring back the world to its first beauty, so that this world may again be worthy of reverence and admiration, and so that God also, creator and restorer of so great a work, may be glorified by the people of that time in continual hymns of praise and blessing” (Hermes Trismegistus,
Hermetica,
16).

At the beginning of the third century, it must have seemed to many Alexandrians that the apocalyptic moment of destruction which Hermes Trismegistus had prophesied had arrived, though the purveyor of the calamity was not a god but a vicious Roman emperor.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE ASCENDANCY OF FAITH

Francis Bacon,
The Advancement of Learning

 
 
A
fter Marcus Aurelius’s successful visit to Alexandria there were many in the city who believed that relations with their Roman masters were restored, and this view was endorsed when all Egyptian cities were granted a municipal council by Emperor Septimius Severus in 200. But if the people of the city believed they had woken from the rebellion of Avidius Cassius into a new Roman dawn, it was to prove a false one. Alexandria was used to speaking its mind, and Rome did not always like what it heard.

Septimius Severus had two sons, and it was his wish that both should succeed him on the imperial throne. Though the two boys, Aurelius Antoninus and Geta, were only eleven months different in age, they loathed each other from early childhood. To try to generate some rapprochement between the two, the aging Septimius took them off to Britain, where he placed his younger son, Geta, in charge of civil affairs while Aurelius Antoninus commanded the army in their campaigns against the northern barbarians. It was here that Antoninus got the nickname by which he would be remembered from thenceforth—Caracalla, from the hooded Gallic tunic, or
caracallus,
that he always wore.

After two years in Britain, on February 4, 211, Septimius died at York, and the two boys were declared joint emperors. They determined to return immediately to Rome to arrange their father’s funeral, but such was their mutual antagonism that during the entire journey back they never traveled or ate together, and they slept every night in separate houses.

Back in Rome the imperial palace was split in half, doors were sealed, and guards were mounted at every entrance, as if each half of the building was under siege. The only hope of resolving the latent civil war lay with the two boys’ mother, Julia Domna, a formidable woman who was renowned for her coteries of learned men, including Galen. Edward Gibbon, the famed eighteenth-century classicist, is full of praise:

 
That is not to say, however, that the somewhat prudish Gibbon found her character to be faultless. The more salacious ancient sources also suggest that Julia enjoyed more than just mental stimulation from the men around her, and Gibbon was forced to rather elliptically point out that if those sources were true, then chastity was “very far from being the most conspicuous virtue of the empress Julia” (Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
volume 1, chapter 6).

Naturally it fell upon Julia to attempt to resolve her sons’ differences. She convinced Caracalla to meet with his brother in her apartments to attempt a reconciliation. But the minute Geta entered the room he was set upon by a troop of Caracalla’s men. According to the contemporary chronicler Cassius Dio, Geta died in his mother’s arms while his faithless brother ran, blood-soaked, to the camp of the Praetorian Guard, pretending he had escaped an ambush aimed at assassinating both of them.

Now absolute ruler of the Roman Empire, Caracalla soon showed his true colors. There followed an appalling bloodletting in Rome in which all of Geta’s supporters and their families—men, women, and children—were slaughtered, one contemporary observer putting the figure at twenty thousand dead. It was also rapidly becoming clear that the emperor’s megalomania would allow for no criticism. Anyone who dared to offer a different opinion, from senators down to the charioteer Euprepes, who “showed enthusiasm for a cause that the Emperor opposed” (Cassius Dio,
Roman History,
book 77, chapter 1), was summarily executed.

This alone should have been warning enough to the outspoken Alexandrians, but already growing in the emperor’s mind was an idea that would have far worse consequences for them. Caracalla was rapidly coming to the belief that he was the new Alexander, destined to recapture the Macedonian’s empire in the East. According to Cassius Dio, he carried with him items that were said to have belonged to Alexander, including his personal weapons and the cups he was supposed to have drunk from. He created a new army unit, a traditional phalanx made up of sixteen thousand Macedonian soldiers, which he armed with period weapons already half a millennium out of date. From his reading of the histories of Alexander he had also come to believe that Aristotle had taken a part in his hero’s murder, so Caracalla persecuted Aristotelian philosophers, arguing that their books should be burned and ordering the abolition of their communal dining room in the museum in Alexandria.

But it was when the emperor arrived in Alexandria in person that its citizens realized just what they had to fear from a man who considered himself the heir of their founder’s destiny. At the time, certain Alexandrian satires appear to have been in circulation that criticized the murder of Geta and lambasted the emperor’s claims to be another Alexander. In response he decided to visit the city in the winter of 215-16. His mission was ostensibly intellectual and religious, as Caracalla had a passion for religious institutions, having already stayed at the famous temple of Asclepius in Pergamum, where Galen trained, and received all the holy rites there. According to Cassius Dio, however, this was just a subterfuge. When Caracalla reached the suburbs he stopped and waited for the leading citizens of the city to come to meet him, as was customary. This they did, bringing with them the sacred symbols of the city and their offices. The emperor, in apparently jovial spirits, met them and led them to believe that they would enjoy a banquet and entertainments with the royal retinue before proceeding into the city. When they were thus put off their guard, he had them all slaughtered.

The emperor then marched into the city, taking up residence in the Serapeum and attending the temple’s sacrifices and other rites. As he considered himself both a deeply religious man and a scholar, he doubtless also took advantage of the extensive library housed in this temple, although we cannot imagine that any Aristotelian texts housed there fared well. But if Caracalla hoped the chastised inhabitants of the city would now take him as their new Alexander, he was badly mistaken. Sporadic rioting seems to have erupted in the city, and rumors flew around town that the emperor intended to marry his mother, Julia—an idea Caracalla perhaps thought Egyptians would appreciate. Instead, it was whispered that he was Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Incestuous marriage might have been allowable among divine pharaohs, but in Roman emperors it was laughable.