Ostanes

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A column splits open in a temple. The story is told in the oldest stratum of Greek alchemy, in a treatise that runs under the name of Democritus: the master had died before he could teach his pupils the one thing they most needed, the art of harmonizing the natures of substances, and the disciples, bereft, called him up from the dead to demand it. He answered that the books were hidden in the temple. They searched and found nothing — until, during a feast, a pillar burst apart of its own accord and disclosed the secret it had held. Inside was no recipe but a sentence: nature delights in nature, nature conquers nature, nature masters nature. The dead master who refused to give a formula and gave a law instead was named Ostanes. He is the most consequential teacher in the history of Western alchemy who almost certainly never existed.

A name in search of a man

The Greeks knew that magic came from Persia, and they wanted a face for it. The earliest face they found was Zoroaster, set absurdly far back — Hermodorus, a pupil of Plato in the fourth century BCE, placed him five thousand years before the fall of Troy and made him the head of a long succession of magi reaching down to the age of Alexander. In that genealogy of names Ostanes stands near the front, the first link after the founder, a member of the line rather than a dated individual. Hermodorus, so far as the record shows, knew nothing of any career or lifetime attached to the name; he had a slot in a scheme and a word to fill it.

The most influential account comes from Pliny the Elder, who in the thirtieth book of his Natural History opens his survey of magic by tracing its descent. Pliny is skeptical of the whole pretended succession — he calls magic the most fraudulent of the arts — but he reports, as the field’s own tradition, that the first man to leave a written treatise on it was an Ostanes who had accompanied Xerxes on the Persian expedition against Greece. The expedition is datable: 480 BCE, the campaign of Salamis and Plataea. The man is not. Pliny’s verdict on what this Ostanes did has fixed his reputation ever since. He disseminated, Pliny writes, what one might call the seeds of this monstrous art, infecting the world with it at every stage of the journey. The metaphor of contagion did its work. Ostanes became the carrier — the point at which an Eastern science crossed into Greek soil and took root.

That the figure is a construction rather than a record shows in the seams of Pliny’s own text. The same Natural History supplies a second Ostanes, this one a companion of Alexander on the march to India, a century and a half after Xerxes. The chief of the magi cannot easily be at Salamis and at the Hydaspes both; Pliny, needing the authority of an eyewitness at more than one epoch, simply produced a doubled sage, and noted with characteristic dryness that he found it necessary to supplement his history with such doublets. The contradiction is not concealed in the sources; it lies on the surface, and only the wish for a continuous magian tradition keeps it from dissolving the whole succession at a touch.

Modern Iranists have looked for the man underneath and come back with little. There is no figure of a comparable name in any Iranian tradition; the reconstructed Old Iranian form, something like (H)uštāna, is a philologist’s hypothesis, not an attestation, and which historical reference, if any, first spawned the legend remains undecided. Some have wished to anchor him among the Achaemenid grandees — an Ostanes is named as a son of Darius II and a relative of the royal house — but the alchemist of the Greek books has no demonstrable thread back to any such person. Whatever historical Persian official, if any, first lent the syllables, the Ostanes of the Greek imagination is a vessel — a prestigious foreign name into which later writers poured whatever they wished to make authoritative. He is less a forgotten man than a permanently open signature, a place in a text reserved for whoever needed to write as the East.

The opening page of the first printed edition of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, Venice, 1469. Pliny’s thirtieth book made Ostanes the man who “sowed the seeds” of magic among the Greeks — and seeded the legend itself. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

What Pliny attributes to him, beyond the act of transmission, is a definition. The magic of Ostanes, as Pliny relays it, was a composite discipline: divination practiced through water and through globes, through the air and the stars, through lamps and basins and the calling-up of the dead, the whole apparatus of reading the unseen. The list matters because it fixes the breadth of the name from the start. Ostanes was never narrowly a chemist or narrowly a diviner; he was the master of the secret arts as such, the single Persian author to whom the entire repertoire of forbidden knowledge could be referred. That comprehensiveness is what made the name so useful, and so durable.

Medes and Persians processing on the eastern stairs of the Apadana at Persepolis, the Achaemenid ceremonial capital. The magi of Greek legend — Zoroaster, Ostanes, Hystaspes — were imagined against a Persia like this one. — Bontenbal, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Hellenized magi

Ostanes does not travel alone. He belongs to a trio — with Zoroaster and Hystaspes — that scholarship has come to call the Hellenized magi, the three Persian names under which Greek-language pseudepigrapha circulated from the Hellenistic period into late antiquity. The phrase is owed to the two scholars who first assembled the wreckage. In 1938 the Belgian historian Joseph Bidez and his collaborator Franz Cumont published, in Paris, Les Mages hellénisés, two volumes that gathered every surviving scrap of Greek and Latin attributed to Zoroaster, Ostanes, or Hystaspes, and set beside it the critical edition of the texts themselves. Their reconstruction is still the foundation of the subject, and its central finding is deflationary: beneath the magi of the Greek books there is essentially no Persian theology, only the projection of Iranian prestige onto thoroughly Hellenistic occult science. The magi were Hellenized — made over in Greek, for Greek purposes — far more than the Greeks were ever Persianized.

What the name conferred was the authority of depth. A treatise on the powers of stones, on the sympathies between plants and planets, on the calling-up of spirits, on the transmutation of metals — such a treatise gained immeasurably by claiming descent from a magus who had stood at Xerxes’ shoulder, in a Persia older and stranger than anything Greece could boast. This is the logic of what one might call alien wisdom: truth is held to lie furthest east and furthest back, among the priesthoods of empires that fell before the Greeks rose. The magi supplied the easternmost and oldest authority available in the Greek imaginative atlas, and Ostanes — already tagged by Pliny as the very inventor of written magic — was its sharpest single point. The same impulse later reached for the Chaldeans of Babylon and the priest-scribes of Egyptian Hermopolis, and bound the three together; but where Babylon offered the stars and Egypt offered Hermes Trismegistus, Persia offered the magus, and the magus had a name.

The arrangement is worth pausing on, because it inverts the ordinary direction of cultural borrowing. The Greeks did not learn Persian doctrine and write it down; they wrote Greek doctrine and signed it Persian. Bidez and Cumont’s term — the Hellenized magi — captures exactly this. The Avesta and the genuine teaching of the Iranian priesthood left scarcely a trace in the corpus; what the corpus contains is Hellenistic physics, Egyptian metallurgy, Babylonian star-lore, and Greek demonology, dressed in a borrowed eastern robe. The prestige flows one way, the content another. Ostanes is the seam where the two meet — a Greek book wearing a Persian face, and wearing it so convincingly that for nearly two millennia almost no one thought to look behind the mask.

The corpus that gathered under his name was correspondingly vast and various. There were magical books, in which Ostanes appears as the hierophant who initiates the adept into the operations of the art. There was astrological and divinatory material, the casting of futures by water and stars and the souls of the dead. And there was, above all, alchemy — for it was as a chemical and metallurgical master, the keeper of the secret of gold, that Ostanes would have his longest life.

The master of Democritus

The decisive move was to make Ostanes the teacher of Democritus. Not the historical atomist of Abdera, but the figure who stands at the head of Greco-Egyptian alchemy: the author, or rather the pseudonym, behind the Physika kai Mystika — the Natural and Secret Questions — and the lost Four Books on the dyeing of metals, stones, and wool that lie behind it. Scholarship distinguishes the layers carefully. An early figure, Bolus of Mendes, a Hellenized Egyptian who flourished in the third or second century BCE, wrote works of natural marvels and sympathies under the name of Democritus; the strictly alchemical writings, however, are now dated later, to an anonymous author active in the second half of the first century CE, around the reign of Nero. Both strata are pseudepigraphic. The ascription of the recipes to Ostanes-and-Democritus is exactly the kind of traditional attribution the academy treats with caution — a claim made by the texts about themselves, not a relation the historian can vouch for.

But inside the frame of the art, the lineage is everything. The Physika kai Mystika opens not with a procedure but with the scene of bereavement and disclosure — the dead Ostanes, the searched temple, the column that breaks to reveal the words. The drama encodes a doctrine. What the master finally communicates is not a list of ingredients, which any cook might follow, but the principle that governs why ingredients act on one another at all: hē physis tēi physei terpetai — nature delights in nature, and nature conquers nature, and nature masters nature. Like seeks like and overcomes like; substances are kin or enemy by an inner sympathy and antipathy, and the operation succeeds only when the artist reads those affinities rightly. The whole later vocabulary of alchemical “marriage,” of bodies embracing and devouring and being reborn, descends from this triple sentence. It became the most quoted maxim in the literature, repeated by Zosimos of Panopolis around 300 CE and by the Byzantine commentators after him as a kind of creed.

The ouroboros inscribed “ἓν τὸ πᾶν” (“the All is One”), from the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra in Codex Marcianus graecus 299 — the oldest surviving Greek alchemical manuscript, the same tradition that preserved the books going under the names of Ostanes and Democritus. — 10th–11th c., via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The doctrine has a precise content beneath its drama. To say that nature conquers nature is to claim that the powers driving the transformation of matter are themselves material and kindred — that there is no external force imposing change from outside, only substances acting on substances according to their hidden likeness. Gold is drawn out of a base body because something in the process is already akin to gold; the tincture finds its mark because like answers to like across the surface of things. This is a theory of sympathy and antipathy, the same web of affinities that, in the other half of the Ostanes corpus, lets a stone draw down the power of a planet or a plant cure the organ it resembles. The alchemical workshop and the magician’s table run on one principle, and the Physika kai Mystika — natural questions and secret ones in a single title — refuses to separate them. The “harmonizing of natures” that Ostanes died before teaching is the art of arranging affinities so that the transformation the artist desires becomes the transformation the substances themselves want.

The figure of Ostanes here is doing something precise within the worldview. The alchemist is not an inventor but an inheritor; the secret is ancient, lost, and recovered, never devised. A teaching that arrives from a dead Persian master through a fractured pillar carries an authority no living chemist could claim. The pseudepigraphy is not a fraud incidental to the science — it is the science’s theory of its own truth. Knowledge that matters is received, and the further back the giver, the surer the gift. The cracked column is the perfect emblem of the whole tradition: the secret was always already there, sealed in the temple of the ancients, waiting only to be uncovered by the worthy. Nothing is made; everything is found.

Into Arabic, and into the record

When the alchemical inheritance of late antiquity passed into Arabic hands from the eighth century on, Ostanes passed with it. The Arabic tradition knew him and continued to compose under his authority; among the texts that circulated in his name is the Kitāb al-Fuṣūl al-ithnay ʿashar fī ʿilm al-ḥajar al-mukarram, the Book of the Twelve Chapters on the Honored Stone — an Ostanes-treatise on the philosophers’ stone with no Greek original behind it, the legendary master speaking once again, now in a new language, to a new generation of adepts. The pattern that began with the Greek pseudepigrapha simply continued: a revered ancient name, an unbroken claim of transmission, fresh material flowing in under cover of the old authority.

The dialogue literature carried the same lineage westward. In the Turba Philosophorum, the Latin “Assembly of the Sages” translated from an Arabic source and put into English by A. E. Waite in 1896, a convocation of philosophers debates the natures of fire and water and air, and a speaker called Democritus takes his turn among them — the alchemical Democritus of the Ostanes line, his doctrine of contending and reconciling natures still recognizably the doctrine of the cracked column. The maxim about like conquering like became the common property of medieval and early modern alchemy, repeated by adepts who had no idea that the master at the root of it was a name with no man behind it.

That recognition came late, and it came from philology rather than from the workshop. The Renaissance revivers of ancient wisdom took the magi at their word; figures such as Pico della Mirandola and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa read a Zoroaster and an Ostanes who were the genuine fountains of a prisca theologia, an ancient theology older than Plato and consonant with the truth. It was the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the source-critical reconstruction of the fragments, culminating in Bidez and Cumont — that dismantled the figure into the literature that had built him. They could trace where the name attached, when the corpus accreted, which century each layer belonged to; they could not find the sage. What they found instead is in some ways stranger. Here is a teacher with no biography who taught the West how to think about the hidden kinship of things, a master assembled entirely out of the books his pupils needed him to have written, surviving not despite the absence of a life but because of it. The pillar broke and there was a sentence inside, and the sentence outlasted every Persia anyone could have imagined for the man who never spoke it.

→ In the library: The Turba Philosophorum, or Assembly of the Sages (trans. A. E. Waite, 1896)

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