Silver

Silver is the metal of the Moon in the classical planet-metal scheme, the counterpart to solar gold, and the pairing is nearly as intuitive: silver is white and reflective like moonlight, cool where gold is warm, and second in value where gold is first. The alchemists gave silver and the Moon the same symbol, a crescent, and called the metal Luna.

In the great opposition that structures alchemical thought, Sol and Luna, gold and silver, Sun and Moon, king and queen, the fixed and the volatile, the masculine and the feminine, must be joined for the work to succeed, so silver is not merely inferior gold but its necessary complement. Silver's reflectivity gives it a symbolism of mirrors, of reflection and intuition, and its association with the Moon links it to the tides, to cycles and to the feminine principle. Ritually and in folklore silver was protective, held to repel evil and later to be the metal fatal to werewolves; it also has genuine antimicrobial properties known long before their cause was understood.

Silver is the second of the metals that can be found native, and the second in the classical hierarchy, but the great ancient supply did not come from nuggets. It came from cupellation, the roasting of lead ores in a bone-ash hearth until the lead oxidises away and the silver is left behind. That process ties silver and lead together in the workshop as closely as the planetary scheme separates them, and it is worth holding in mind whenever the two are set at opposite ends of a table of correspondences.

Silver tarnishes where gold does not. The black film that forms on it in air is silver sulphide, and that plain chemical fact underlies a long habit of reading silver as the pure metal that is nonetheless susceptible, needing attention where gold needs none.

Its ritual life in Europe is largely lunar and largely nocturnal. Silver vessels, silver mirrors and silver coins recur in folk practice as the material that meets what belongs to the other side, and the silver bullet of nineteenth-century story belongs to that pattern rather than to any older text. In the Greek world the silver of the Laurion mines paid for the Athenian fleet, a reminder that the metals of the planetary scheme were strategic commodities and that the people who assigned their meanings knew exactly what they were worth.

Alchemically silver is luna, one rung below gold, and the albedo, the whitening, takes its name and its imagery from the metal and the moon together. It marks the stage at which the matter is said to be purified but not yet fixed.

Sources The Secrets of AlchemyLawrence M. Principe with An Encyclopedia of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies, and Other Supernatural CreaturesKatharine M. Briggs