Copper

Copper is the metal of Venus in the classical scheme, and the pairing rests on both appearance and mythic geography: copper takes a warm reddish and, when it weathers, a beautiful green patina, and its great ancient source was Cyprus, the island sacred to Aphrodite, indeed the Latin name of the metal, cuprum, derives from Cyprus. The alchemists marked copper and Venus with the same symbol, the circle above a cross that also serves as the sign for the female.

Copper's green corrosion products, verdigris and malachite, tie it to the green of Venus and to the cosmetic and pigment traditions. As the first metal widely worked by humans, and the basis, alloyed with tin, of bronze, copper stands near the beginning of metallurgy. Its Venusian symbolism gives it associations of love, beauty, harmony and the arts, and in ritual and folk practice copper is linked to attraction and to healing; it is also, unlike most of the seven, an excellent conductor, a property that has given it a large modern metaphysical literature of its own.

Sources The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe with The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd editionOxford University Press

Copper is the metal that opened metallurgy. It occurs native in usable pieces, it can be cold-hammered into shape, and it melts at a temperature a good charcoal fire will reach, so it was the first metal smelted and cast almost everywhere that metal was worked at all. Alloyed with tin it becomes bronze, harder and far easier to cast than either parent, and because copper ore and tin ore rarely occur in the same country, the demand for bronze built some of the earliest long-distance trade in the ancient world.

The supply that mattered most to the Mediterranean came from Cyprus. The island and the metal share a name, and which of them gave the name to the other is still argued. Cyprus was also a principal centre of the cult of Aphrodite, and that historical coincidence is the thread behind the copper and Venus pairing rather than any resemblance in the metal itself.

Copper's working life follows its chemistry. It weathers to a green carbonate patina, and the same reaction yields verdigris, used as a pigment and, by the ancient medical writers, as a caustic. Copper alloy is the standard material of the Tibetan and Nepali ritual bronzes, cast by the lost-wax method in the Kathmandu valley for a thousand years.

In Yoruba practice and in its diaspora forms, brass, a copper alloy, is the metal of Oshun. That is an independent tradition arriving at a comparable association by its own route, and it should not be read as a borrowing from the Mediterranean scheme or folded into it.

Sources De Re MetallicaGeorgius Agricola, translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover (1912) with The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd editionOxford University Press