Good day dear community, I hope you have a pleasant start to the new weekend! In this article I would like to devote myself to alchemy again and hope you are interested in this diverse topic and can expand your knowledge.
For the alchemists it was extremely important to record their work and this best so that others could not decipher their recipes so easily and in this context, they used different symbols and created their own alphabet which can also be considered a form of cryptography. Right in the first picture you can see a metal plate on which this alphabet can be seen which represents the symbols that are associated with the different elements and these characters were important to be able to abbreviate things and in addition, it was not widespread in the past and others could not do anything with these symbols and in the first place it was about communicating with each other with these symbols and this type of cryptography had the advantage that only the one could read it who also had the key, so knew what the symbols meant. The alchemists were of course aware that others could also decode it and therefore liked to swap certain symbols or connected them with other texts and in this alphabet you only see the best-known symbols and it is assumed that there were a few thousand with which certain elements and reactions were described which can be described today as a chemical reactions. Most of these symbols were created during the early Middle Ages and depending on the country in which alchemy was practised there were also differences in the symbolism and the alchemists were also oriented to ancient cultures and some of the symbols probably come from ancient Mesopotamia which were associated with astrology like certain planetary symbols and later some of these signs were also linked to various events from mythology. A well-known example are the well-known 7 metals from alchemy, each of which has been assigned to a planet, which had a connection to Roman and Greek mythology and the symbols of the alchemical alphabet were also associated with other characters and so each symbol stood for its own letter. This alphabet was used for a relatively long time until the alchemy became more and more chemistry between the 17th and 18th centuries, however, this mystical alphabet also had an important meaning in later times and was one of the most important parts of alchemy.
Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about alchemy! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.