The Seven Metals of Alchemy: A Planetary Guide

Antiquity counted exactly seven metals, and exactly seven wandering lights in the sky. Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and quicksilver were the only metals a smith could win from the earth before the modern age; the Sun, the Moon, and the five bright planets were the only bodies that visibly moved against the fixed stars. Two sevens, sitting side by side — and to an age that read the cosmos as a single fabric, leaving them unmarried was unthinkable. Each metal was given a planet, and the pairing was treated not as a poetic flourish but as a real line of kinship, running from a lump of ore up to a light in the heavens.

The scheme grew so settled that alchemists often wrote the planet's glyph where they meant the metal: a Sun sign on the page could mean the Sun itself or the gold that answered to it, and the reader was trusted to know which. The alchemical symbols for the seven metals simply are the planetary glyphs. These same seven planets, climbed in order, are the rungs of the soul's ladder in the Poimandres ascent — so the metals are not a separate system but the material face of one cosmos the tradition read on several levels at once.

The seven pairings at a glance

Listed here in the order of the ascent, from the sphere nearest earth to the farthest, each metal with its planet, symbol, and weekday — and a doorway to its own essay.

• Silver — Moon (☽, Monday): cool, white, and mirror-bright, prized less for hardness than for how faithfully it takes and returns light. The Moon sphere: silver, receiving, and constancy.
• Quicksilver — Mercury (☿, Wednesday): the one metal that will not hold a shape, liquid and swift as the fastest planet — the metal and the planet even share a name. The Mercury sphere: quicksilver, cunning, and honest speech.
• Copper — Venus (♀, Friday): warm and rose-red when polished, greening to verdigris in the weather; its Latin name traces to Cyprus, Venus's own island. The Venus sphere: copper, desire, and clear love.
• Gold — Sun (☉, Sunday): the one common metal that does not tarnish or corrupt, matched to the light nothing outshines and made the emblem of the perfected Work. The Sun sphere: gold, rulership, and humility.
• Iron — Mars (♂, Tuesday): hard, unglamorous, rusting the colour of dried blood, the metal of blade and ploughshare, given to the god of war. The Mars sphere: iron, recklessness, and tempered courage.
• Tin — Jupiter (♃, Thursday): soft, low-melting, expansive, and readier than most metals to alloy — matched to the planet of largesse. The Jupiter sphere: tin, greed, and generosity.
• Lead — Saturn (♄, Saturday): heaviest, dullest, slowest, coldest, at the outer edge of the visible cosmos — the planet of time and limit made solid. The Saturn sphere: lead, despair, and patience.

Why these pairings were made

The reasoning is not a single principle but a bundle of resemblances, and the pairs draw on different threads of it. Some are matches of colour and light: silver's pale sheen for the Moon, gold's incorruptible yellow for the Sun, iron's rust-red for red Mars. Some are matches of behaviour: quicksilver's refusal to stay still for swift, mercurial Mercury; tin's soft, spreading pliancy for expansive Jupiter. Some are matches of weight and temperament: lead is the heaviest, dullest, coldest metal, and Saturn the slowest, farthest, gravest planet, so the two mirror each other almost too neatly. And at least one is a matter of language and myth: copper's Latin cuprum descends from aes cyprium, "metal of Cyprus," and Cyprus was the island of Venus. Read together, the correspondences are less a code to be decrypted than a family resemblance the ancients felt across the whole visible order.

Where the old sources disagree

It would flatter the tradition to say the seven pairings were fixed and unanimous from the start; they were not. The set of seven metals crystallised into this table only gradually, across Greco-Egyptian, Arabic, and medieval Latin alchemy, before hardening into the canon that Renaissance texts treated as obvious. A few of the pairings are all but universal — gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, lead with Saturn are hard to imagine otherwise. Others were argued over. Tin's attachment to Jupiter is the least self-evident of the seven, and different authors reached for different justifications to steady it; earlier and non-Western schemes sometimes distributed the correspondences along other lines. Honesty asks us to present the standard table as a durable convention that won out, not as a law of nature that was never in question. Where a symbol carried more than one reading, the old authors often kept it plural on purpose.

Metal as substance and as state

The deepest thing to understand about alchemical metals is that each name points two ways at once. "Lead" is a grey, heavy element you can hold in your hand — and it is also a condition of the soul: the leaden state, dense and stuck, the prima materia the Work begins from. "Gold" is a yellow metal that never corrodes — and it is also the name for a finished, incorruptible inner condition, the state the Work moves toward. When an adept spoke of turning lead into gold, the sentence was true on the bench and true in the person at the same time, and the tradition rarely bothered to separate the senses, because to its eye they were one motion described at two altitudes.

This is why the metals map so readily onto inner life. Each planet-metal in the Septem Portae instrument carries a characteristic vice that can be refined into a characteristic virtue — the Moon's borrowed moods steadied into constancy, Saturn's despair burned down to patient truth. The colours those refinements pass through are the four alchemical stages, from the blackness of raw lead to the red of the finished stone, traced in our companion piece on the stages from nigredo to rubedo. The metal you are made of, on any given day, is a description of a state — never a sentence, and never fixed.

A doorway, not a verdict

This overview is meant as a hub, not a destination. Each of the seven metals has its own essay above, where the planet, the vice, the virtue, the operation, and the two directions of the gate are worked out in detail; this page only lays the whole table on one surface so the pattern is visible at a glance. If the correspondences feel like a self-standing system dropped in from nowhere, the wider tradition they belong to is sketched in what Hermeticism is, for newcomers.

When the table starts to feel less like a chart and more like a set of questions — which metal is heaviest in me this week, which is asking to be refined — the natural next step is to cast the Septem Portae and see which of the seven spheres presides over the reading, and whether its metal shows bound in its vice or refined into its virtue.