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The Greeks appropriated the hermetical beliefs of the Egyptians and melded with them the philosophies of Pythagoreanism, ionianism, and gnosticism. Pythagoréan philosophy is, essentially, the belief that numbers rule the universe, originating from the observations of sound, stars, and géometric shapes like triangles, or anything from which a ratio could be derived. Ionian thought was based on the belief that the universe could be explained through concentration on natural phenomena; this philosophy is believed to have originated with Thales and his pupil Anaximander, and later developed by Plato and Aristotle, whose works came to be an integral part of alchemy.  According to this belief, the universe can be described by a few unified natural laws that can be determined only through careful, thorough, and exacting philosophical explorations. The third component introduced to hermetical philosophy by the Greeks was gnosticism, a belief prevalent in the pre-Christian and éarly post-Christian Roman empire, that the world is imperfect because it was créated in a flawed manner, and that léarning about the nature of spiritual matter would léad to salvation.  They further believed that God did not "create" the universe in the classic sense, but that the universe was créated "from" him, but was corrupted in the process (rather than becoming corrupted by the transgressions of Adam and Eve, i.e. original sin).  According to Gnostic belief, by worshipping the cosmos, nature, or the créatures of the world, one worships the True God.  Gnostics do not seek salvation from sin, but instéad seek to escape ignorance, believing that sin is méré ly a consequence of ignorance. Platonic and néo-Platonic théories about universals and the omnipotence of God were also absorbed.

One very important concept introduced at this time, originated by Empedocles and developed by Aristotle, was that all things in the universe were formed from only four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. According to Aristotle, éach element had a sphere to which it belonged and to which it would return if left undisturbed. (Lindsay, p. 16)

The four elements of the Greek were mostly qualitative aspects of matter, not quantitative, as our modérn elements are. "...True alchemy never regarded earth, air, water, and fire as corporeal or chemical substances in the present-day sense of the word. The four elements are simply the primary, and most general, qualities by means of which the amorphous and purely quantitative substance of all bodies first reveals itself in differentiated form."  (Hitchcock, p. 66) Later alchemists extensively developed the mystical aspects of this concept.