Chronicles of Pharmacy, Vol. 2 (of 2)

by A. C. Wootton

Planets and Metals.

There are no historic records of the origin of the association of the seven metals with the seven planets nor of the connection of either with the deities of antiquity.

That Greece transmitted the mythological connection to Rome is clear enough, but it is not so certain whence Greece obtained the idea. Traces of it can be discovered in both Persia and Egypt, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the circle of imagery may have developed from the worship of the sun. Allowing that heavenly body to have been the supreme divinity, or at least the residence of such a being, it would be natural to assign to the moon and the five principal planets apparently in attendance on the earth similar though lower dignities. The tendency to group gods and planets and metals into sevens would be an obvious link between the last two, and the characters of the deities named would naturally be extended to the materials named after them.

Berthelot considers that Babylon and Chaldea were the localities where imagination was first most abundantly applied to the elucidation of science. There and elsewhere in the East the mystic relations of the number seven came to be recognised. Perhaps it was the regular appearance of the seven planets, visible to the naked eye, from which those early notions were based. Then the moon’s phases consisted of four equal periods of seven days each. The seven stars in the Great Bear, the seven colours, the seven tones in music, the seven vowels in the Greek alphabet, the seven sages, and, naturally also, the seven known metals, were all evidences of this order of the universe. Out of this correspondence grew the Chaldean and Persian ideas of seven heavens, each with its gate of a different metal; the first of lead, the second of tin, the third of brass, the fourth of iron, the fifth of a copper alloy, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of gold.

The philosophers of Chaldea attributed to the heavenly bodies, or rather to the deities who had made these their homes, extensive control over the products of the earth. The sun-god produced gold, the moon-god silver, and so forth; and this view was prevalent certainly until the sixteenth century. Naturally all the early investigators had to picture their fancies more or less crudely, and thus alphabets originated. The Egyptian ideograms are the most familiar of this ancient poetry to us, and among these are some which are intelligible to us to-day. The sun and gold, ☉, are still represented by that sign; water,

, was so indicated in the papyri and in the alchemical books of three or four hundred years ago; and the sign still used for the planet and the metal mercury, ☿, differs but little from the hieroglyph of Thoth, whom the Greeks called Hermes and the Romans Mercury. Greek students have imagined that this sign was derived from the caduceus or winged staff of the god, but some Egyptologists have claimed it as a picture of the “sacred ibis.”

It need not be supposed that any definite table of the planetary symbols was ever drawn up and agreed to. These only very gradually became uniform. Even the association of the planets and the metals was by no means invariable in different nations. Among the Persians, for example, copper was assigned to Jupiter; but the Egyptians dedicated a compound of gold and silver called electron to him, while in more recent systems Jupiter and tin are allied. Venus controlled tin according to Persian lore; but the Egyptian attribution of brass or copper to her has prevailed. Iron belonged to Mercury before quicksilver was recognised as a metal and at that time Mars was the god-father of an alloy similar to bronze. The oldest table known is one given by Olympiodorus in the fifth century, and in that electron is still associated with Jupiter and tin with Hermes (Mercury).

Berthelot’s laborious researches into the origin of alchemy, and his reproductions of ancient manuscripts show that while signs were used by the ancient Greek writers of about the first century of our era, they were not used by the Latin authors, but seem to have been in full adoption in the Middle Ages. The manuscript of St. Mark at Venice, which Berthelot believed was written about the year A.D. 1000, probably for some prince, contains a multitude of these symbols. A regular system is followed. Gold, for example, is represented by

; gold filings by

; gold leaf, thus

; and a combination of gold and silver by

. A similar modification of the original symbols is found in connection with the other metals.

There is scarcely any allusion to the symbols in the Arabic manuscripts, for that race had a holy horror of all forms of Greek paganism, though it may be noted that their physicians made a superstition of the practice of bleeding on Tuesdays and Wednesdays only, unconscious perhaps of the origin of this ritual, which depended on the fact that Mars, the god of blood and iron, superintended Tuesday’s operations, and Mercury, who had the management of the humours, was in charge on Wednesdays. It was really not until the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the European alchemists were trying to find a way to transmute the baser metals into gold, that the code became “conventionalised.”

As already stated, the signs for the seven metals have not been invariable, but for many centuries they have been distributed thus:—

☉	Sol, the Sun, Gold.
☽	Luna, the Moon, Silver.
♃	Jupiter, Tin.
♀	Venus, Copper.
♂	Mars, Iron.
☿	Mercury, Quicksilver.
	Saturn, Lead.

It may be noted in passing how these old-time fictions have influenced our language, our literature, and especially our medicine. Lunatic, jovial, saturnine, martial, venereal, and mercurial, are etymological reminiscences of the time when temperaments and diseases were associated with the heavenly bodies, and the extent to which metallic compounds acquired their medical reputations from their artificial relationship with the powers which were assumed to have adopted them, is curious. Nitrate of silver was given in brain disorders originally because of the belief in the control of the mental faculties by the moon. The administration of iron for the purpose of invigorating the constitution was largely due to its connection with Mars, whose fame for virility assured the possession of similar virtue in his metallic god-son.

These symbols are a few of those used in alchemical treatises of the fifteenth century. They are collected in “The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II.,” by H. C. Bolton, published by the Pharmaceutical Review Publishing Co. of Milwaukee, U.S.A. Reproduced by permission.

To the ancient planetary symbols the alchemists added a number of other signs to represent chemicals of later discovery, and to make their jargon even more incomprehensible than it would have been without them. Thus they indicated earth, air, fire, and water by the signs

These were a few of their other characters:

The introduction of any kind of mysticism was dear to the alchemical fraternity, some of whom, perhaps, really believed there was some hidden meaning in the symbols, for there were among the adepts clever men, true discoverers, who cannot be accused of fraudulent intentions, and yet can hardly have accepted literally the poetry they devised. Glauber, contemporary with our James I. and Charles I., was one of these. According to him the symbols were invested with a special mysterious meaning. He showed them in squares, thus: and explained that the extent to which the symbol touches the four sides of the square indicates how near it approaches perfection. Gold, it will be observed, touches all four sides, silver three, and the other metals only two each.