Library › Greek: Science & Medicine › On the Dry Powder (Xerion)
On the Dry Powder (Xerion) is a very short alchemical chapter by Zosimus of Panopolis, the Egyptian alchemist active around AD 300. It concerns the xerion, the dry powder projected onto metals to transform them, and explains that the truest xerion has three powers, which produce three effects: tincture, penetration and fixing. Zosimus compares these to the three dimensions of a mathematical body and of a physical body, length, breadth and depth, and speaks of the matter that receives these powers.
The xerion is the ancestor of the elixir of later Arabic and Latin alchemy, the word itself deriving, through Arabic al-iksir, from this Greek term. The chapter shows how Greek alchemists described this agent of transformation in philosophical and mathematical terms, long before it became the elixir of later tradition.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: CAAG II 205 (III.xxxi)). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).