[892] In the first chapter of the Automatic Theater he says, “The ancients called those who constructed such things thaumaturges because of the astounding character of the spectacle.”
[893] PW, 1045.
[894] But perhaps this is a medieval interpolation in the nature of a crude Christian attempt to depict “the firmament in the midst of the waters” (Genesis, I, 6). However, it also somewhat resembles the universe of the Greek philosopher, Leucippus, who “made the earth a hemisphere with a hemisphere of air above, the whole surrounded by the supporting crystal sphere which held the moon. Above this came the planets, then the sun”—Orr (1913), p. 63 and Fig. 13. See also K. Tittel, “Das Weltbild bei Heron,” in Bibl. Math. (1907-1908), pp. 113-7.
[895] Berthelot (1885), pp. 68-9. For the following account of Greek alchemy I have followed Berthelot’s three works, Les Origines de l’Alchimie, 1885; Collection des anciens Alchimistes Grecs, 3 vols., 1887-1888; Introduction à l’Étude de la Chimie, 1889. Berthelot made a good many books from too few MSS; went over the same ground repeatedly; and sometimes had to correct his previous statements; but still remains the fullest account of the subject. E. O. v. Lippmann, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie, 1919, is still based largely on Berthelot’s publications. In English see C. A. Browne, “The Poem of the Philosopher Theophrastos upon the Sacred Art: A Metrical Translation with Comments upon the History of Alchemy,” in The Scientific Monthly, September, 1920, pp. 193-214.
[896] The earliest of them is John of Antioch of the reign of Heraclius, about 620 A.D., although they seem to use Panodorus, an Egyptian monk of the reign of Arcadius. Even he would be a century removed from the event.
[897] Berthelot (1885), pp. 26, 72, etc., took this story about Diocletian far too seriously.
[898] Berthelot (1885), 192-3.
[899] But the Labyrinth of Solomon, which Berthelot (1885), p. 16, had cited as an example of the sort of ancient magic figures which had been largely obliterated by Christians, and of the antiquity of alchemy among the Jews (ibid., p. 54), although he granted (ibid., p. 171) that it might not be as old as the Papyrus of Leyden of the third century, later when he had secured the collaboration of Ruelle (1888), I, 156-7, and III, 41, he had to admit was not even as old as the eleventh century MS in which it occurred but was an addition in writing of the fourteenth century and “a cabalistic work of the middle ages which does not belong to the old tradition of the Greek alchemists.”
[900] Berthelot (1885), p. 59.
[901] Ibid., p. 53.