Cleopatra the Alchemist, One of the Four Women Whom Hermetic Tradition Claims Found the Philosopher’s Stone

The Philosopher’s Stone is not just the object of desire for Voldemort, who longs to regain his full powers in the first Harry Potter novel. There was a time when its pursuit was the dream of all alchemists—and their patrons—because, according to legend, it was a substance capable of converting base metals into gold or silver, as well as providing immortality. According to Atalanta Fugiens (“The Flight of Atalanta”), an emblem book (images with explanatory text) on chrysopoeia published by the German physician Michael Maier in the 17th century, out of all the people who managed to find the formula, only four were women, and one of them was Cleopatra the Alchemist.

She often appears in documentary sources mistakenly identified with Cleopatra the Physician, a Greek woman from the 1st century AD about whom nothing is known except that she authored Cosmetica (“Cosmetics”), a manual of remedies to treat problems such as baldness or dandruff, cited by Galen, Aetius of Amida, and Paul of Aegina. Both she and the Alchemist were also frequently confused with the famous queen Cleopatra VII. A good example is the Basillica Philosophica by Johann Daniel Milius, a physician, theologian, and lute composer who wrote the work in 1618 and displayed her seal alongside the motto “The divine is hidden from people by the wisdom of the Lord.”

It is likely that both adopted the pseudonym Cleopatra in homage to the Egyptian queen, but it is impossible to know because there is scarcely any information about their lives. From the Alchemist we can only deduce that she lived between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD in Lower Roman Alexandria; everything else belongs to the realm of fable, as she usually appears in alchemical texts as a character in dialogues structured in the typical master-students format. Such is the case of the Dialogue of Cleopatra and the Philosophers, which is sometimes wrongly attributed to her.

Cleopatra alchemist philosophal stone — Emblems and badges of the main alchemists of antiquity, collected in the Basillica Philosophica of Johann Daniel Milyus. Credit: Arsgravis, arte y simbolismo / Universidad de Barcelona

Other works in which she appears include Making Gold with Cleopatra and On Weights and Measures. However, the only one that can truly be considered her work is Chrisopoeia, generally translated as “Making Gold,” because it refers to chrysopoeia, that is, the transmutation of metals into gold as the culmination of the Opus Magnum or Great Work, an alchemical term from the hermetic tradition (the philosophy contained in Hermetica, pseudepigraphical texts supposedly written by a legendary Hellenistic figure who syncretized the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth: Hermes Trismegistus) to refer to that process of transformation.

That transformation, where the precious metal is obtained by applying the correct dose of a kind of catalyst known as chrysogony over a mixture of certain materials (pyrite, dew, tartaric acid, sulfur, mercury…), followed four fundamental stages: nigredo (melanosis, blackening), albedo (leucosis, whitening), citrinitas (xanthosis, yellowing), and rubedo (iosis, reddening). As we mentioned earlier when referring to Michael Maier, aside from Cleopatra the Alchemist, only three other women managed to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone.

The first was Maria the Jewess, whose motto was “One smoke envelops another smoke, and the herb of the mountain absorbs them both“; the second was Medera, about whom we know little more than her seal and motto thanks to the aforementioned book by Mylius: “Whoever is ignorant of the rule of truth is ignorant of the alembic of Hermes.” The third was the Egyptian Taphnutia the Virgin, who corresponded with Theosebeia, the sister of Zosimos of Panopolis (author of the oldest known alchemical books, who scorned her methods and knowledge, probably because they belonged to rival alchemical schools), and she too had her slogan: “A marriage is celebrated between two gums, the white and the red.“

Chrisopoeia extended no more than a single sheet of papyrus, of which the oldest surviving copies belong to a 10th-century manuscript held at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and another at the Library of the University of Leiden. And what does this document contain? Part of the imagery related to the aforementioned hermetic philosophy, as well as to Gnosticism (ideas resulting from the syncretic fusion of Jewish and Christian cosmogonies with contributions from Platonism and Zoroastrianism), with its emblems (enigmatic images provided with a phrase or motto that helped decipher a hidden moral meaning recorded below, either in prose or verse).

In fact, it is believed that it is in this work where alchemical emblems such as the eight-pointed star (evoking renewal and regeneration) appear for the first time, shown alongside other stellar icons with a waxing crescent moon above; apparently, they represented the conversion of lead into silver. Other illustrations correspond to a dibikos (a two-armed alembic, which some authors believe was invented by Cleopatra the Alchemist), a kerotakis (a device used to treat metals in a vacuum with vapors of others), and various signs representing gold, silver, and mercury, which, as we have seen, are closely related to chrysopoeia.

But above all, Chrisopoeia presents the oldest known ouroboros. It is the drawing of a reptile, half white and half black (the characteristic hermetic duality), swallowing its own tail symbolizing the cyclical nature of things, which never end but change. Inside the circle it forms, the Greek phrase hen to pan (“All is one”) is written. There is also a double ring with an inscribed phrase (“One is the Serpent which has its poison according to two compositions, and One is All and by it is All, and if you do not have All, All is Nothing“) and surrounded by instruments used in smelting, distillation, and sublimation.

The text is written as a dialogue between her and some disciples, as we noted earlier was typical at the time in philosophy, but it also has poetic and metaphorical nuances: the production of metals is compared to pregnancy and childbirth, while the relationship of the alchemist and philosopher to their work is compared to that of a mother raising her child. Such an exalted conception earned its author an entry in the tenth chapter of Kitab al-Fihrist (“Catalog of Books”), an Islamic encyclopedia of knowledge compiled in 988 by the Shiite scholar and bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim, which references approximately ten thousand books and two thousand authors.

However, the first documentary mention was earlier and corresponds to Al-Masudi, a traveler and historian who in 956 mentioned Cleopatra in his work Al-Muruj, confusing her with the Egyptian queen and stating:

She was wise, a philosopher who raised the level of scholars and enjoyed their company. She wrote books on medicine, enchantments, and cosmetics, as well as many other books attributed to her that are known to those who practice medicine.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on April 28, 2025: Cleopatra la Alquimista, una de las cuatro mujeres que la tradición hermética asegura que encontraron la piedra filosofal