Among the shadowy corridors of ancient wisdom, one name continues to echo with mystery and reverence—Mary the Jewess, also known as Maria Hebraea or Maria Prophetissa. She is considered by many to be the first true alchemist whose teachings laid the foundation for what would later become both spiritual alchemy.
Mary lived in Alexandria during the early centuries of the Common Era—possibly as early as the 1st or 2nd century AD. A woman in a world dominated by men, she stood as a beacon of knowledge, not through force or fame, but through her intellect and devotion to the Great Work.
She is best known for her invention of essential laboratory apparatus that remain in use even today: the bain-marie (Mary’s bath), a gentle double-boiler method still used in chemistry and cooking; the tribikos, a kind of alembic with three arms; and the kerotakis, a sealed vessel used for distillation that many associate with the alchemical womb of transformation.
But Mary was not merely a technician—she was a philosopher. To her, alchemy was not about transforming metals but about purifying consciousness. She spoke in veiled language, hiding truths within symbols, as all true adepts do. One of her most cryptic sayings is:
“One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the One as the fourth.”
This riddle has puzzled and inspired alchemists for centuries, echoing the mystery of the Prima Materia’s division, transformation, and reunion into the One Thing—the Philosopher’s Stone.
It was well known in Antiquity that matter was composed with four basic elements: Air, Fire, Water and Earth. Consciousness, also the creation of God in His image, had also four directions and the elements served as the identification of those directions. As such, the prima materia of alchemy is always consciousness.
The four elements eventually leaded to the four temperaments of the Ancient Greeks which were used by C. G. Jung to define his four cognitive functions. These correspondences are generally admitted:
Earth = melancholic = sensation
Air = sangine = intuition
Water = phlegmatic = feeling
Fire = choleric = thinking
In Maria Prophetissa's riddle, we clearly see that the alchemical opus was about the increase of consciousness. We know from Jung and the MBTI, that humans only develop two cognitive functions. The other two are left undifferentiated in the unconscious. The riddle shows the process of developing a third and a fourth cognitive function whence aquiring the optimal consciousness (the one) with its four elements or directions.
Mary also taught that the Great Work required patience, humility, and insight. Her processes were governed by harmony, balance, and the cooperation of opposites—Sulfur and Mercury, the Sun and the Moon, the masculine and the feminine. Sulfur and mercury are nowadays known as the auxiliary and the tertiary cognitive functions. They were the tag used bu the alchemists to identify the second and the third direction of consciousness.
The sun and the moon represent the dominant and the inferior function. Those functions are also illustrated with the king and the queen, the masculine and the feminine in the alchemical imagery.
Mary the Jewess occupies a central role in the alchemical lineage. Her wisdom was not just Jewish, not just Hellenistic, but universal—a bridge between worlds, veiling the fire of eternal truth in the language of symbols. She was a true alchemist.
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