The metals and the planets
verified
Classical and medieval alchemy pairs seven metals with the seven classical planets: gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, mercury with Mercury, copper with Venus, iron with Mars, tin with Jupiter, lead with Saturn. The scheme is thoroughly attested across the literature and supplies alchemy's planetary symbols, several of which chemistry still uses.
The seven is inherited, not discovered. It comes from the seven moving bodies visible to the naked eye — the same source as the seven-day week and much else, as set out on the number 7 hub. Seven metals were known; seven planets were visible; the pairing followed.
exploratory
That the pairing encodes a real correspondence between celestial and material nature is the alchemical doctrine. It is recorded here as doctrine. The metals known to antiquity happened to number seven, and had they numbered six or eight the correspondence would have been drawn differently or not at all.
Elements and principles
verified
The four-element scheme — earth, water, air, fire — descends from Empedocles through Aristotle and dominates European natural philosophy into the early modern period. Its transmission is fully documented.
verified
Paracelsus (d. 1541) adds the tria prima: sulphur, mercury and salt, as principles of combustibility, volatility and fixity. This is a genuine sixteenth-century doctrinal innovation with a named author, not an anonymous inheritance.
Three over four, or three and four together giving seven, is a structural move made in many traditions and needs no special explanation. What makes the alchemical case unusually tractable is that the innovation is datable and attributable — we know who introduced the tria prima and roughly when, which is rarely true of numerical schemes elsewhere on this site.
The Great Work
disputed
The stages of the magnum opus are frequently given as a fixed sequence — commonly four (nigredo, albedo, citrinitas, rubedo) or twelve. In the primary literature the number and naming of stages vary substantially between authors. The tidy canonical lists in modern summaries are later systematisations, and the four-colour sequence in particular owes much to twentieth-century psychological readings.
verified
Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (Oppenheim, 1617; second edition 1618) is genuinely structured on fifty emblems, each pairing a motto, an engraving by Matthäus Merian, an epigram and a three-voice fugue. The count is a plain fact about the book, and the tripartite form is deliberate.
The general caution matches the one on Buddhist numerics: a literature that enumerates heavily is not thereby operating a single system. Alchemical authors enumerated constantly and disagreed with each other constantly.
The manifestos and the vault
verified
Three texts constitute the Rosicrucian founding corpus: the Fama Fraternitatis (1614), the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615) and the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz (1616). Their publication dates are documented.
verified
The Fama narrates the discovery of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz, described with pointed numerical detail: a seven-sided vault, opened 120 years after the founder's death. The numbers are explicit in the text.
disputed
There is no evidence that the Brotherhood described in the manifestos existed before the manifestos. The scholarly consensus attributes at least the Chymical Wedding to Johann Valentin Andreae, who later referred to the affair dismissively — a ludibrium, a joke or play. The vault, its seven sides and its 120 years are literary devices in a fictional narrative.
This gives a rare and clean case. The numerology is real, deliberate and authorial — someone chose seven sides and 120 years, and chose them for their resonance. It simply describes nothing that existed. It is a reminder that intentional numerical design and historical reality are separate questions, and that this site's grades address the second.
The subsequent history is the interesting part: a fiction generated real societies, real traditions and a real influence on later esotericism. That is a genuine historical phenomenon, and it does not require the vault to have been real.
Western Esotericism
Agrippa, the planetary squares and the Tarot correspondences.
The Number 7
The seven classical planets, and everything that follows from them.
Pythagorean & Platonic Numerics
The classical background to the four elements.
Claims That Fail
Backdating as a recurring pattern.
Cite this page
Formatted references for this page. The evidence grade is part of the claim — when quoting a graded statement, carry the grade with it.