The Seven Planetary Metals of Alchemy

The alchemists knew seven metals — and seven wandering stars in the sky. To them this was no coincidence but correspondence: the sun mirrored itself in gold, the moon in silver, Venus in copper, Mars in iron, Jupiter in tin, Saturn in lead and Mercury in quicksilver. Each metal bore the character of its star: gold the radiant perfection of the sun, silver the cool clarity of the moon, iron the will of the planet of war.

This teaching lives on in the languages of Europe: Latin silver is argentum like silvery lustre, the French word for lead poisoning, “saturnisme”, recalls Saturn — and for the metals the alchemists simply wrote the signs of the planets. The doctrine of correspondence — “as above, so below” — goes back to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary forefather of alchemy.

At the centre of the alchemical world of images stood the pair Sol and Luna — gold and silver, sun and moon, the active and the receptive. Their union, the “chymical wedding”, was regarded as the emblem of completion. When our labels speak of the sun metal and the moon metal, they take up this millennia-old language.

Lead and quicksilver we do not carry, for good reason: the old teaching did not yet know their toxicity — we do. But the remaining five planetary metals you will find all in our range: gold, silver, copper, iron and tin.