Alchemical symbol


Alchemical symbols were used to denote chemical elements and compounds, as well as alchemical apparatus and processes, until the 18th century. Although notation was partly standardized, style and symbol varied between alchemists. Lüdy-Tenger published an inventory of 3,695 symbols and variants, and that was not exhaustive, omitting for example many of the symbols used by Isaac Newton. This page therefore lists only the most common symbols.

Three primes

According to Paracelsus, the three primes or tria prima – of which material substances are immediately composed – are:
  • Sulfur or soul, the principle of combustibility: ?
  • Mercury or spirit, the principle of fusibility and volatility: ☿
  • Salt or body, the principle of non-combustibility and non-volatility: ?

    Four basic elements

Western alchemy makes use of the four classical elements. The symbols used for these are:
The seven metals known since Classical times in Europe were associated with the seven classical planets; this figured heavily in alchemical symbolism. The exact correlation varied over time, and in early centuries bronze or electrum were sometimes found instead of mercury, or copper for Mars instead of iron; however, gold, silver, and lead had always been associated with the Sun, Moon, and Saturn.
The associations below are attested from the 7th century and had stabilized by the 15th. They started breaking down with the discovery of antimony, bismuth, and zinc in the 16th century. Alchemists would typically call the metals by their planetary names, e.g. "Saturn" for lead, "Mars" for iron; compounds of tin, iron, and silver continued to be called "jovial", "martial", and "lunar"; or "of Jupiter", "of Mars", and "of the moon", through the 17th century. The tradition remains today with the name of the element mercury, where chemists decided the planetary name was preferable to common names like "quicksilver", and in a few archaic terms such as lunar caustic and saturnism.
The following symbols, among others, have been adopted into Unicode.
The alchemical magnum opus was sometimes expressed as a series of chemical operations. In cases where these numbered twelve, each could be assigned one of the Zodiac signs as a form of cryptography. The following example can be found in Pernety's Dictionnaire mytho-hermétique :
  1. Calcination ♈︎
  2. Congelation ♉︎
  3. Fixation ♊︎
  4. Solution ♋︎
  5. Digestion ♌︎
  6. Distillation ♍︎
  7. Sublimation ♎︎
  8. Separation ♏︎
  9. Ceration ♐︎
  10. Fermentation ♑︎
  11. Multiplication ♒︎
  12. Projection ♓︎

    Units

Several symbols indicate units of time.
The Alchemical Symbols block was added to Unicode in 2010 as part of Unicode 6.0.

Works cited

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