Old SymbolsWhere every symbol began

Plate 1 Seven signs in two rows: the sun as a circle with a dot, the crescent moon, Mercury’s horned circle over a cross, Venus’s circle over a cross and Mars’s circle with an arrow above; Jupiter’s sign like a 4 and Saturn’s like an h crossed at the top below

Planetary metals (☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄)

The seven signs alchemists wrote for the seven metals known in antiquity, each borrowed from the heavenly body it was paired with: the sun ☉ for gold, the moon ☽ for silver, Mercury ☿ for quicksilver, Venus ♀ for copper, Mars ♂ for iron, Jupiter ♃ for tin and Saturn ♄ for lead.

Occult and alchemical symbols. Also called ☿, ♃, ♄, alchemical symbols, alchemy metals, alchemy symbols, gold alchemy symbol, lead alchemy symbol, mercury symbol, quicksilver symbol, seven metals of alchemy, silver alchemy symbol, tin alchemy symbol.

Meaning

Alchemy tied each metal to a planet and wrote the metal with the planet’s sign, so that a recipe could put ☉ for gold and ♄ for lead. The editors of Isaac Newton’s alchemical papers at Indiana University write that, like most alchemists, Newton employed the planetary symbols for the known metals. The textbooks of the seventeenth century printed whole tables of these characters, which probably spread their use, and the signs went out of learned use as alchemy gave way to a chemistry of controlled experiment and measurement. They live on, the same Indiana historians wrote in 2009, in scholarly books, creative work, New Age texts and games.

Origin and history

The pairing of metals and planets is older than the signs on this page. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica thought the identification of the metals with the planets probably Babylonian. In the Leiden papyrus the astronomical signs of the sun and moon already stand for gold and silver, and in the Meteorologica of Olympiodorus lead goes to Saturn, iron to Mars, copper to Venus, tin to Hermes (Mercury) and electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, to Jupiter. Greek manuscripts of the tenth century in the library of St Mark’s in Venice use whole systems of such signs. When electrum dropped out as a metal of its own, tin passed to Jupiter and the sign of Mercury came to mean both the planet and quicksilver. By Chaucer’s time the list was the one alchemists kept, and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale recites it: “Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe, / Mars yren, Mercurie quik-silver we clepe, / Saturnus leed and Jupiter is tin, / And Venus coper, by my fader kin!”

Greek or Arabic?

The Indiana University historians who proposed the alchemical signs for Unicode in 2009 write that they were first used by Greek, Syriac and Egyptian writers around the fifth or sixth century, and then taken up and multiplied by medieval Arabic and European writers. A Victorian popular science book gave them to the Arabs alone. John Henry Pepper, in The Playbook of Metals (1861), held that we have abbreviations by signs from the Arabians, and that “no doubt” the alchemical signs for the metals came from the same people; by his day, he added, they were only seen on the show bottles in chemists’ shops. The 1911 Britannica’s examples come from the Leiden papyrus and from Greek manuscripts of the tenth century.

Seven metals in one picture

The Science History Institute in Philadelphia holds three miniatures from a copy of Das Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, the Book of the Holy Trinity, a treatise produced in southern Germany or Austria in the 1400s and the first on alchemy written in German. In the first, “The Seven Forms of Transmutation”, the sun and moon stand for masculine gold and feminine silver, and four circles below them, for Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, stand for copper, iron, lead and tin.

Newton’s lead, crossed and uncrossed

Even one writer’s signs changed. The historian William Newman noticed that Newton’s sign for Saturn and lead, an h with its ascender crossed like a t, is uncrossed in his early manuscripts and always crossed in his late ones, which helps to date them. Newton also made signs of his own: for the ore of a metal he took the metal’s sign and attached a small o.

Venus, Mars and the sign for antimony

Two of the seven had a second career. Unicode encodes the signs of copper and iron as the female sign and the male sign; they have their own pages as the female and male symbols. The sign most often mistaken for one of the seven is ♁, a circle with a cross on top, which looks like the Venus sign upside down. In the tables it is antimony, the metal Basil Valentine wrote about around 1600; Newton’s symbol guide gives the same sign for earth as well, and its editors read a cross on top of a circle, in Newton’s compound signs, as an antimony compound.

See also

Male symbol (♂), Ouroboros, Pentagram, Baphomet, Philosopher’s stone (squared circle).

Sources

  1. Alchemy, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 1, Wikisource, Origin; the metals and the planets
  2. Proposal for Alchemical Symbols in Unicode, William R. Newman, John A. Walsh, Stacy Kowalczyk and Wallace E. Hooper, 26 January 2009 (Unicode document L2/09-037), Indiana University, for the Unicode Technical Committee (unicode.org), pp. 1–4; Table 1
  3. Symbol Guide, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, general editor William R. Newman, Indiana University, Introduction; term list
  4. Three Alchemical Miniatures, Cecilio M. Cooper, 13 March 2025, Science History Institute (Collections blog), “The Seven Forms of Transmutation”
  5. Chasing the Clues in Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, Distillations magazine, Science History Institute, Dating the manuscripts
  6. The Playbook of Metals, by John Henry Pepper, 1861 (scan on the Internet Archive), Routledge, Warne and Routledge, London, pp. 128–129, Fig. 80
  7. Antimony, Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 2, Wikisource, Antimony

The same shape elsewhere

Browse symbols formed from arrows, circles, crosses or curves and waves.

Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research

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