The Leyden and Stockholm Papyri - University of Cincinnati

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
literature and later as “Books of Secrets,” which combined practical
recipes with magical and religious charms and rituals (25). Like
the closely related practical recipe books for craftsmen and artists,
it has an almost continuous tradition which extends through the
late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where it eventually further
mutated into a genre of popular science writing known as “natural
magic,” which consisted largely of collections of practical recipes,
amusing experiments, magic tricks, and mathematical puzzles, and
which, in turn, persisted well into the 19th century (26-28). A
typical example from the 16th century is the famous Magia naturalis
of Giambattista della Porta, which is readily available as a modern
photo-reproduction of the English translation of 1658 (29). Like
our two papyri, this contains sections dealing with recipes for both
the counterfeiting of gold and of precious stones, though the recipes
in the latter section do not seem to share much in common with
those found in the Stockholm papyrus.
! There is even evidence that a writer such as Pliny may have
derived some of the information in his epic Naturalis historiae
from this earlier literature (25). Writing more than two centuries
before the date of the Stockholm papyrus, Pliny explicitly noted
the existence of a long and established literary tradition dealing
with the counterfeiting of gems and precious stones (30):
Nay, even more than this, there are books in existence, the authors
of which I forbear to name, which give instructions how to stain
crystal in such a way as to imitate smaragdus and other transparent
stones, how to make sardonyx of sarda, and other gems in a
similar manner. Indeed, there is no other kind of fraud practiced by
which larger profits are made.
! Of course no one would ever classify Pliny as either a magician
or an alchemist and, in a similar fashion, the fact that the unknown
compiler of the Leyden and Stockholm papyri mentions pseudo-
Democritus in passing no more proves that he was a practicing
alchemist than his cribbing from Dioscorides proves that he was
a physician or his citation of Julian Africanus proves that he was
an early Christian philosopher. The same goes for the reference to
to one Phimenas in recipe 84 of the Leyden papyrus. This is
- 7 -