Zosimos, the Founder of Nigredo

Zosimos, a cryptic figure par excellence, is a visionary who traveled with his mind into the futurop and founded the Cult of Nigredo, as well as being considered the author of one of the oldest known texts on alchemy. In his esoteric writings, drawn from ecstasies and intoxicating visions, he narrates how alchemy, the “science of the hand,” consists of the occultist’s ability to study the composition of waters, their movement and growth, drawing vapors from the primordial elements and spirits from bodies, ultimately effecting both material and allegorical transformation on the world and the Self.

One of Zosimos’ most eccentric texts concerns a dream sequence related to alchemy. He, first among mortals, arrives in a dream at the Cinerean City (called by others “City Without a Name,” or even “conjunction of the two oceans” and “Nowhere“). Having climbed fifteen steps and reached an altar, he encounters a violently mutilated being who says his name is Ion, priest of the Inner Sanctuaries. The priest reveals that he climbed the fifteen steps and completed an initiation process, at the end of which an unbearable force dismembered and decapitated him with a sword, according to the rules of harmony. Suddenly, the man begins to melt and decompose horribly, turning into a small creature, a homunculus, who solemnly announces that Zosimos’ vision represents the “entrance, exit and transformation” necessary to distill the soul from the body.

Little or nothing is known about Zosimos’ end. Some sources report that he was abducted beyond the heavens, others that he was seized and torn to pieces by unseen entities in broad daylight in Damascus, an epilogue identical to that of another mysterious Yemeni alchemist of several centuries later. The truth is that his spirit now rules over the Cinereal City, the World Beneath the World, whose essence covers the dome of reality like dust, overflowing into it and communicating with it in subtle and imperceptible ways. From the Cynerian City, a world without gods, a realm of ivy and ruin, he announces the Cult of Nigredo, of which he is the founder and first priest. Zosimos holds the sacred task of bringing to light the texts of lost knowledge capable of subverting the rules of the cosmos, freeing the chained spirits of mortals and, with the passage of strange aeons, leading them before the Cinereal Gap, cleft on the infinite vastness of the planes…