Zosimos of Panopolis has a much stronger claim to historical reality than any of the other early alchemical writers introduced thus far. He is thought to have lived in the late third and early fourth centuries AD and, like the author of the Dialogue of Cleopatra and the Philosophers, to have been deeply influenced by the tangle of religious and philosophical elements that constituted the culture of Alexandria at that time. Garth Fowden speaks of him as “a man of strong spiritual urges and little conventional scholarship, who moved in an eclectic milieu compounded of Platonism and gnosticism together with Judaism and … the ‘oriental’ wisdom of Hermes and Zoroaster” (120). Although Zosimos and his “spiritual sister” Theosebia are assumed to have had practical experience in alchemical laboratories, they also believed that its primary goal was purificatory and contemplative, esoteric not exoteric. This is apparent in the broadly allusive Visions, where Zosimos's syncretic religious and intellectual environment is reflected in dense allegory, enigmatic expression, and obscure symbolism. In the selection that follows, the dream vision itself – with its motifs of transformation from body into spirit, torture and violence, death and regeneration, and cryptic humanoid figures – has made Zosimos a challenging subject for the Jungian analyst no less than for the student of alchemy or of the fantastic.