Alchemical Symbols: A Guide to the Signs and Emblems of Alchemy

Alchemical symbols are the signs, figures and emblems that alchemists used to name substances, describe operations and express the philosophy behind their work. They range from simple shorthand marks for the metals and elements, many borrowed from astrology, to elaborate allegorical images of lions, dragons, kings, queens and hermaphrodites that encoded laboratory processes and spiritual meanings at the same time.

Why alchemists wrote in symbols§

Alchemical authors wrote in a deliberately veiled style. Scholars call their cover names Decknamen, a German term for words that hide a substance or process behind another name. Concealment served several purposes: it protected valuable recipes, it limited knowledge to readers judged worthy, and it reflected the belief that nature's secrets were sacred. Symbols also allowed alchemists to think in analogies, linking metals to planets, operations to the seasons, and the transformation of matter to the death and rebirth of living beings.

Because of this, an alchemical symbol rarely has one fixed meaning. A dragon might stand for mercury in one text and for a corrosive solvent in another; the same image might describe a chemical reaction and a moral or religious truth. Reading alchemical imagery well means reading it in context, author by author. The broader setting is outlined in What Is Alchemy?.

The planetary metals and their signs§

The most stable part of the alchemical vocabulary is the correspondence between the seven metals known in antiquity and the seven classical planets. It is already present in late antique Greek sources and became standard in Arabic and Latin alchemy:

• Gold — the Sun (☉), a circle with a central point, the most perfect metal.
• Silver — the Moon (☽), a crescent.
• Mercury (quicksilver) — Mercury (☿), the only metal liquid at ordinary temperatures.
• Copper — Venus (♀); copper was associated with Cyprus, the island sacred to Venus.
• Iron — Mars (♂), the metal of weapons.
• Tin — Jupiter (♃).
• Lead — Saturn (♄), the heaviest and "oldest" metal, starting point of many transmutation schemes.

These correspondences connected alchemy to astrology and to the wider doctrine of correspondences. Some authors believed that the planets influenced the growth of metals in the earth, and that operations should therefore be timed by the heavens.

Signs of the elements and the tria prima§

Alchemists also used compact signs for the four Aristotelian elements, drawn as triangles. Fire is an upward-pointing triangle and water a downward-pointing one, following the natural tendency of fire to rise and water to fall. Air is an upward triangle crossed by a horizontal line, and earth a downward triangle crossed by a line. The combination of the fire and water triangles produces the hexagram, which some later esoteric writers read as the union of opposites.

The three Paracelsian principles had their own signs: sulphur, often a triangle above a cross; mercury, sharing the planetary sign; and salt, a circle divided by a horizontal line. Alongside these, manuscript and printed tables of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries list hundreds of further signs for substances such as vitriol, antimony, sal ammoniac, aqua regia and arsenic, as well as for operations like distillation and sublimation. These tables are an important link between alchemical shorthand and the early notation of chemistry.

Animals of the Great Work§

Animal figures frequently mark the stages of the Great Work:

• The crow or raven signals the nigredo, the blackening and putrefaction of the matter, sometimes shown as the "crow's head" (caput corvi).
• The peacock's tail (cauda pavonis) describes a display of many colours that some texts place before the whitening.
• The swan or white dove represents the albedo.
• The pelican, believed to feed its young with its own blood, signified a vessel in which matter circulated and also the self-sacrificing love of Christ.
• The phoenix, reborn from its ashes, often marks the final perfection of the Stone.

Among the most famous animal symbols is the green lion, frequently shown devouring the sun. Modern historians have identified it with different substances in different texts, including corrosive solvents and impure or "unripe" mineral matter; the image of the lion eating the sun probably depicts a solvent dissolving gold. Dragons and serpents generally stand for volatile mercurial matter, and a winged dragon chasing a wingless one can express the relationship between volatile and fixed substances.

Human figures: king, queen and rebis§

Alchemical imagery is full of royalty. The Red King and White Queen, or Sol and Luna, represent masculine and feminine principles, often identified with sulphur and mercury or with gold and silver. Their marriage, the coniunctio, symbolises the union of opposites in the flask. The well-known woodcuts of the Rosarium philosophorum, printed in Frankfurt in 1550, show the king and queen meeting, bathing, uniting, dying and being reborn.

The product of their union is often a two-headed hermaphrodite, the rebis ("double thing"), standing for the reconciled opposites from which the Stone arises. Other recurring figures include the old king being devoured or drowned, the "philosophical child", and Hermes himself as patron of the art, as in images inspired by the Emerald Tablet.

The ouroboros and the unity of matter§

The ouroboros, a serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail, is one of the oldest alchemical images. A celebrated example appears in a Greek alchemical manuscript preserved in Venice, in a sheet of diagrams known as the Chrysopoeia ("gold-making") of Cleopatra, where the circle surrounds the words hen to pan, "the All is One". The image expresses the idea that all matter is ultimately one substance passing through cycles of dissolution and renewal, and that the Work returns to its beginning. The motif predates alchemy, with Egyptian antecedents, and has had a long afterlife in Gnostic, Hermetic and modern esoteric symbolism.

The great emblem books and illuminated manuscripts§

From the fifteenth century alchemical symbolism became a visual art. Key works include:

• The Splendor Solis — a richly illuminated manuscript, the best-known copy usually dated to 1532–1535, with twenty-two paintings of the Work.
• The Rosarium philosophorum (1550) — twenty woodcuts of the royal marriage, later central to Jung's interpretation.
• Basil Valentine's Twelve Keys (first printed around 1599) — emblems attributed to a pseudonymous Benedictine monk.
• Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1617) — fifty emblems with epigrams, discourses and musical fugues, an ambitious union of image, text and music.
• The Mutus liber ("silent book", 1677) — a sequence of plates with almost no words.
• The Musaeum Hermeticum (1625, enlarged 1678) — an anthology whose plates became some of the most reproduced alchemical images.

Some of these images can be read as accurate depictions of chemical procedures; historians such as Lawrence Principe have reconstructed experiments behind several of them. Others are primarily philosophical or devotional. Many readers since the nineteenth century, including C. G. Jung, have read them psychologically, an approach discussed in the guide to spiritual alchemy.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the alchemical symbol for gold?§

Gold is represented by the sign of the Sun, a circle with a dot in the centre. The circle, a figure without beginning or end, expressed the perfection that alchemists attributed to gold.

What does the green lion mean in alchemy?§

The green lion usually stands for a powerful solvent or for raw, immature mineral matter, depending on the author. When shown devouring the sun, it typically represents the dissolution of gold, an early step in some versions of the Work.

What are the four elemental symbols?§

Fire is an upward triangle, water a downward triangle, air an upward triangle with a horizontal bar, and earth a downward triangle with a bar. They express the Aristotelian idea that fire and air rise while water and earth sink.

Why do alchemical symbols differ between books?§

Alchemists wrote independently, over many centuries and in several languages, and often deliberately varied their cover names. A symbol must therefore be interpreted within the particular text and tradition where it appears.

Sources and further reading§

• A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery — Lyndy Abraham, 1998
• Alchemy & Mysticism — Alexander Roob, 1997
• Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art — Johannes Fabricius, 1976
• The Secrets of Alchemy — Lawrence M. Principe, 2013
• The Hermetic Museum — A. E. Waite, 1893
• Psychology and Alchemy — C. G. Jung, 1944