Ζώσιμος ὁ Πανοπολίτης was an Egyptian-born Greek alchemist and Gnostic mystic who lived at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th century AD. He wrote the oldest known books on alchemy, which he called "Cheirokmeta," using the Greek word for "things made by hand"

The external processes of metallic transmutation—the transformations of lead and copper into silver and gold were said to always to mirror an inner process of purification and redemption. In his work Concerning the true Book of Sophe, the Egyptian, and of the Divine Master of the Hebrews and the Sabaoth Powers, Zosimos wrote:

There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. 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.

The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its mixture with the flesh.

As the sun is, so to speak, a flower of the fire and (simultaneously) the heavenly sun, the right eye of the world, so copper when it blooms—that is when it takes the color of gold, through purification—becomes a terrestrial sun, which is king of the earth, as the sun is king of heaven.