Alchemy Symbols and What They Were Actually For

Alchemical notation looks like mysticism and functions like chemistry. Both readings are correct, which is the whole difficulty.

The seven metals and seven planets

Classical alchemy paired each known metal with a celestial body, and used the same glyph for both.

• Gold and the Sun
• Silver and the Moon
• Mercury and Mercury, the only case where the modern name kept the pairing
• Copper and Venus
• Iron and Mars
• Tin and Jupiter
• Lead and Saturn

The correspondence was not arbitrary decoration. It encoded observed properties. Lead is heavy, dull and slow, and Saturn was the slowest visible planet. Iron rusts red and Mars is red. Copper compounds are green and copper mining on Cyprus gave both the metal and the goddess their names.

The four elemental triangles

Fire is an upward triangle. Water is a downward triangle. Air is an upward triangle with a horizontal bar. Earth is a downward triangle with a bar. The system is elegant: the bar marks the two elements considered less pure, and inversion marks the opposing pair.

The three principles

Paracelsus formalised the tria prima in the sixteenth century. Sulphur is the principle of combustibility and soul. Mercury is the principle of fluidity, volatility and spirit. Salt is the principle of solidity and body. These were not the substances we now call by those names. They were categories of behaviour that matter could exhibit.

Why the notation was obscure

Two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is protective: alchemists worked with mercury, arsenic and antimony, and the guild view was that dangerous knowledge should be hard to acquire casually. The second is less flattering: obscurity conceals failure. A text that cannot be falsified cannot be shown wrong.

Newton wrote more on alchemy than on physics. Boyle, who gave us Boyle's Law, was a practising alchemist. The discipline was not a detour from science. It was the thing science grew out of, and the notation is the fossil record.

Insomnus builds from this material directly. The crystal series takes each piece from a documented property of the stone it is named for.