Alchemy Symbols: A Guide to the Elements, Metals and Planets

Alchemy symbols were the shorthand of early chemistry. Alchemists used compact signs for metals, elements, substances and laboratory processes, and many of those signs are still instantly recognisable. This guide sets out the core symbols and explains where they come from.

Where the symbols come from

Alchemical signs were already in use among Greek, Syriac and Egyptian writers around the fifth or sixth century AD. They were adopted and multiplied by medieval Arabic and European alchemists, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries printed chemistry books routinely included tables of symbols; the Science History Institute holds one such table, published in London in 1671. Variation was enormous: a twentieth-century inventory recorded 3,695 alchemical and pharmaceutical symbols and variants. The signs fell out of learned use as modern chemistry and its nomenclature took over, but they survive in scholarship, art and design, and are now part of the Unicode standard.

The seven metals and their planets

The oldest and most stable group links the seven metals known in antiquity with the seven classical planets.

| Metal | Planet | Symbol | |---|---|---| | Gold | Sun | ☉ | | Silver | Moon | ☽ | | Copper | Venus | ♀ | | Iron | Mars | ♂ | | Tin | Jupiter | ♃ | | Lead | Saturn | ♄ | | Quicksilver (mercury) | Mercury | ☿ |

The pairing shaped alchemical language for centuries: lead was simply "Saturn", copper "Venus". See the lead symbol for the Saturn connection in detail.

The four elements

Alchemists inherited the Greek theory that all matter is composed of fire, air, water and earth, and they represented each with a triangle.

| Element | Symbol | Form | |---|---|---| | Fire | 🜂 | upward-pointing triangle | | Air | 🜁 | upward triangle crossed by a bar | | Water | 🜄 | downward-pointing triangle | | Earth | 🜃 | downward triangle crossed by a bar |

These triangles are not a modern invention; they appear among the core symbols of the early modern printed tables. See the fire symbol for more.

Salt, sulphur and mercury

In the sixteenth century the physician Paracelsus popularised a further set of three principles, salt, sulphur and mercury, which many later alchemists used alongside the four elements. In this sense "mercury" means a principle of matter as well as the metal.

Reading alchemy symbols today

Alchemy is often described as mystical, and many alchemists did combine laboratory work with spiritual ideas. But its symbols were first working notation for real materials and processes, the ancestor of chemical formulae. Wearing one is a nod to the long history of trying to understand what things are made of.

AURYN's alchemy designs can be found in the charms collection.