CyberSavant schrieb: > Hello. Sorry for the crosspost. I am looking for metal correspondences. > For example: as LEAD is to GOLD > Silver is to __ > Copper is to __ > Bronze is to __ > Platinum is to __ > Iron is to ___ > etc. etc, etc > > Does anyone have any ideas they'd like to share? Resources? Well, metaphysically it doesn't work that way. Alchemy bases its assumptions on metal transmutation on a hierarchy of metals (in itself part of the 'Great Chain of Existence'). In this, gold is the highest and purest of metals, an assumption based on it being found in naturally pure form, it being very valuable, mythologically connected with nobility, power and the sun, which is, in turn, the highest in the order of planets (I know it isn't a planet, but goes into that order in many alchemical texts) and the symbol of the highest deity in Neoplatonic cosmology), and being beautiful and, well, golden. It's a bit of a case of circular reasoning - noble things are connected with gold, so gold is noble - but then, it's a prescientific theory. Lead, in its turn, is the basest of metals. It's dull, dirt cheap, common, and used to be used for all kinds of very ignoble purposes (like cheap kitchenware, water pipes and roofing). Therefore, the ability to transform lead into gold is the most obvious application of the power to transform the base into the noble, which was the metaphysical goal of alchemy. To serious alchemists, changing lead into gold was no more than a kind of litmus test - if you can do that you've got the right stuff (in this case, the philosopher's stone). It was only popular superstition (and greed) that saw this transformation as the actual goal of alchemy, and criminal energy on the part of the alchemists to represent it as that (Early Modern monarchs were not known to suplpy research funding for disinterested reasons). However, if you're running a freer system with a game flavor different from the hermetic - neoplatonic - astrological - aristotelian mismash that constitutes real 'high alchemy' yu can put in as much or little of real-world connections into your metal correspondences. Just go with what's intuitive. Frex: > For example: as LEAD is to GOLD > Bronze is to __ (bronze shouldn't count since it's an alloy. But if you insist you could have it correspond to Electrum > Platinum is to __ Platinum isn't one of the 'traditional' metals, so you could just leave it out. If you want to use it you may have to go fairly far-fetched (or you could just put Tin-Silver-Platinum into the three-tiered hierarchy) > Iron is to ___Copper (here I'd go with the color red as an intuitive connection.) So in short I'd postulate connections based on a hierarchical major-minor relationship. This exists, say, between Lead and Gold, Tin and Silver, Iron and Copper, Zinc and Mercury, Arsenic and Antimony... It has a nice mystical flavor (you could assign planets and/or zodiacal signs), and nobody can disprove it since it's all intuitive and therefore 'self-evident' to the 'right-thinking' or 'enlightened'. Volker ---------------------------------------------------------------- GMAST Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gmast/
