It may be added that among the old manuscript signs ℈ is often used for ejus. I am not, however, prepared to suggest any connection between this word and a scruple.
℞
Paris, in “Pharmacologia,” pages 13 and 14, makes the statement that “such was the supposed importance of planetary influence that it was usual to prefix a symbol of the planet under whose reign the ingredients were to be collected; and it is not perhaps generally known that the character which we at this day place at the head of our prescriptions, and which is understood and supposed to mean Recipe, is a relict of the astrological symbol of Jupiter.”
I have not met with that statement in any earlier writer, but it has been quoted by scores of compilers since. It is very confidently asserted, but I think its accuracy is questionable. As an excuse for my temerity in challenging such an eminent authority it may be mentioned that on the same page the author informs us that the word “crucible” was derived from the circumstance that the alchemists were in the habit of stamping the figure of a cross on the vessel from which they were to obtain their long sought prize. No modern philologist would endorse that etymology.
Paris quotes, in support of the Jupiter theory, a few instances of directions for gathering specific plants “at the rising of the moon,” “when the dog-star is in the ascendant,” and so on. But these have no reference to a compound of several ingredients. It would have been of no use to invoke Jupiter alone for any of the ancient prescriptions. Every plant, said Paracelsus, has its special star. It would have stirred up discord in Olympus if any had been neglected.
Pereira adopts Paris’s theory, but makes it almost impossible to accept it. In “Selecta et Prescriptis,” he says it was usual in old prescriptions to prefix to the formula a pious invocation such as “D. J.” (Deo Juvante), “J. J.” (Jesu Juvante), the figure of a cross, or some similar Christian sign. The suggestion is that we have progressed from Christian to heathen symbols. It would be particularly interesting to know when the physicians of Christendom substituted the appeal to Jupiter for that which their own religion had pressed upon them.
Greek and Roman physicians wrote prescriptions, no doubt; but I am not aware that any of these have been preserved to us. Our prescriptions are the direct descendants of the “bills” which the physicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scribbled in coffee houses when they met their apothecaries. “Physitians bylles not Patients but Apothecaries know” (Warner, 1612, quoted in “Murray’s Dictionary”). It is too much to ask us to imagine that these scribes were in the habit of sketching the symbol of Jupiter at the head of these documents.
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.