However, after a couple of years in obscurity he was recalled to Rome by none other than the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, who asked him to accompany them on a military expedition against the invading barbarians. Galen was to be their personal physician. Some scholars claim that he turned down the offer to be imperial physician on the campaign, but either way a year or so later he was made personal physician to Marcus Aurelius, and this brought him back to the city of his training with his grateful rather than vengeful master.
During Marcus Aurelius’s reign there were huge improvements in medical care in the army, and Galen must have had a hand in many of these. To keep their troops fit they built military hospitals. Tucked away in the corner of the fort, away from the noise and bustle of the army, such a hospital was a very modern-looking institution. Passing through the wide gatehouse, a patient would enter the first wing of a square building constructed around a wide courtyard. Ahead was a light, spacious ward where new arrivals waited. Beyond was the operating theater, projecting out into the courtyard to allow the maximum amount of light for the surgeons. At the hospital in Neuss, in modern Germany, raised hearths were even found in the operating theater. These were probably where the surgical tools were sterilized in the fire before use—just as Galen had suggested.
In one corner stood a complex of baths with a block of flushing toilets attached—hygiene was very important to doctors like Galen. In another stood the kitchens where the healthy balanced diets required by convalescing patients were prepared. In other wings lay a series of small wards designed to reduce the risk of cross-infection, consulting rooms, a dispensary, and—for the unfortunates that even a man as great as Galen couldn’t save—a mortuary.
We know so much of Galen’s work because, like the true Alexandrian scholar he was, he wrote prolifically. Although much has been lost, the definitive modern edition of his work, edited by K. G. Kühn, still runs to over twenty thousand pages. In these volumes he describes not only surgical procedures such as the removal of cataracts and the making of false teeth but the correct tools with which to perform operations. Galen was very particular that his instruments should be made with iron from Noricum, which could be made into what was basically surgical steel, and his bag contained the catheters, hooks, probes, needles, bone chisels, dilators, and forceps familiar to any modern surgeon. He also hypothesized about the cause of illnesses, particularly those contagious diseases such as the plague he witnessed tearing through the troops on Verus’s return from Parthia. Though as late as the eighteenth century many thought the cause was “polluted air” or some evil miasma, Galen reasoned that there were tiny particles, or “bad seeds” as he called them, so small they could not be seen, which carried infection. He could not have seen them— there were no microscopes in the ancient world—but using logic he inferred their existence. And he was absolutely right.
Galen lived to serve another two emperors after Marcus Aurelius, dying at the great age of eighty-seven. He was clearly a doctor who took his own medical advice. Because of his insufferable arrogance he was not popular, and few mourned his passing—indeed, not a single statue was ever known to have been erected to him. His works, however, achieved wide circulation and were still being taught in Alexandria in 500, although they largely disappeared with the demise of the classical world. But they were rediscovered by the Arab Renaissance in the ninth century. From the late eleventh century the Arabic versions of his works were then translated into Latin and rapidly became the core teaching materials in the medical schools of medieval universities all over Europe.
Galen’s undoing came in 1543, at the hands of the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius. As much of Galen’s later work had been carried out in Rome, a city where human dissection was forbidden, he had been forced to use animals to study anatomy. When Vesalius, who had free access to human cadavers, compared what he saw in the anatomy theater with what was written in Galen, he realized that much of Galen’s work was simply wrong. The inside of a dog, or even the inside of his preferred Barbary apes, was not the same as the inside of a human. So Galen was abandoned, and even his most insightful works forgotten. What Alexandrian inquiry had made, Roman taboos had broken. Suddenly his own boast seemed rather hollow: “Whoever seeks fame need only become familiar with all that I have achieved” (Galen, quoted in F. Marti-Ibanez, The Epic of Medicine, p. 92).
Galen and Claudius Ptolemy were the two great scientific comets blazing their way across the star-studded cosmos of second-century Alexandria, but there was a third figure, altogether darker and more mysterious but no less influential on the modern world.
Alchemy was a subject largely scorned and dismissed by modern scientists until the great economist John Maynard Keynes bought a box full of papers in 1936 at an auction at Sotheby’s in London. The papers dismissed as of “no scientific value” when offered to Cambridge University fifty years earlier had been written by none other than Sir Isaac Newton. They were almost all concerned with his lifetime passion for alchemy, and they so amazed Keynes that he felt it necessary to entirely redraw the established view of who Newton was and how his mind worked. In 1942 Keynes addressed a distinguished group of members of the Royal Society:
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
John Maynard Keynes, “Newton the Man”
And where did Newton get his alchemy from? Why, Alexandria of course.
The roots of alchemy lie in the origins of metallurgy, in the discovery that by applying intense heat to specific rocks they can be purified and transformed into metal. From the very start this process acquired occult or secret status, and the objects produced by this sacred craft—ornaments, jewelry, and currency from gold and silver; weapons and tools from copper, its alloys, and iron—were always given high prestige and value. It’s clear from ancient texts that iron especially had divine qualities: The Egyptians called it the “metal from heaven”; the Babylonians, “celestial fire.” These and other sources make it seem likely that people first encountered iron as meteorites which had fallen from heaven to earth. When they later discovered the same metal underground, inside the womb of Mother Earth, it must have seemed like confirmation of the metal’s divine status.
This notion of “Mother Earth” was the starting point for the alchemists. The first smiths and metallurgists were either farmers or pastoralists, both depending for their sustenance on the fecundity of the surface of the earth. When people began to extract both metals and precious stones from within the earth, from the womb of Mother Earth, they attributed life, or at least evolution, to the materials they extracted, albeit at a very different pace from the beings living on the surface. If left to gestate slowly in the womb of Mother Earth, rocks would gradually evolve into precious stones (for example, quartz was considered to be a juvenile, “soft” form of diamond). Likewise lead, if left in Mother Earth’s womb, would eventually transform itself into gold, and copper would develop into iron. It was therefore the task of the early smiths and forgers to accelerate this natural process of gestation by purifying metal ores through the application of heat. The alchemist’s task, however, was to transform, by secret occult means, the base materials from one form to the next on the scale of metallic evolution.
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 s
urprise, 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
All good moral philosophy is but a handmaid to religion.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
After 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 on
ly 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:
She possessed, even in old age, the attractions of beauty, and united to a lively imagination a firmness and strength of judgement seldom bestowed on her sex. . . . In her son’s reign she administered the principal affairs of state of the empire with a prudence that supported his authority and with a moderation which sometimes corrected his wild extravagances. Julia applied herself to letters and philosophy, with some success and with the most splendid reputation. She was the patroness of every art and the friend of every man of genius.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, volume 1, chapter 6
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.
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