Antimony (Stibium)

The sign 🜫 (U+1F72B) is a closed circle surmounted by a Latin cross whose stem meets the upper arc while the bar stays clear of it. The figure inverts Venus, whose cross hangs beneath the orb, and must not be taken for Earth, a barred inverted triangle, nor for a salt marked by a cross inside a ring. Pens of the seventeenth century loosen the module. Newton's laboratory notes usually crown a circle with a cross, sometimes reduce it to loop and upright, and occasionally add a hook when the line means crude stibnite rather than stellate regulus. Gessmann's 1899 register of Geheimsymbole places several Stibium marks with Lupus metallorum: cross upon orb, lupine monograms, and ligatures carrying a sulfur or Mars stroke for the ore rather than the metal. The stable test is the cross set above the circle.

In the laboratory Stibium was handled first as the mineral stibnite, a steel-grey, striated sulfide (Sb2S3) taken from veins in Hungary, Tuscany, and later the Harz. Assayers roasted the needles in air until the sulfurous fume passed off and a white calx remained, then reduced that calx, or the raw sulfide with iron, in a covered crucible to a brittle regulus. The metal is lustrous, bluish grey, and unusually crystalline: if the melt is clean and cooled without agitation it freezes in a star of fern-like rays, the stella antimonii prized by seventeenth-century operators. On the cupel and in the wind furnace antimony behaves as a devourer of metals; fused with gold or silver it carries off base admixtures and can itself be driven off by a strong blast, leaving a purified bead.

Chymists lodged antimony under Terra yet named it Lupus metallorum, the wolf of metals, because it consumes the bodies of the imperfect metals and, in the emblematic trial, the king himself. The polarity is deliberate. As earth it is cold, heavy, and fixed once reduced; as wolf it is hungry, corrosive, and medicinal, a poison that Paracelsian doctrine held to be the signature of a hidden virtue. Aristotelian theory struggled with it: the substance shows the fusibility of metal and the brittleness and fumes of a mineral earth, so commentators treated it as an imperfect metal whose sulfur was excessive and whose mercury was still entangled with an earthly feces. The wolf-and-king image, circulated in early seventeenth-century emblem books, states the same doctrine in heraldic form: impurity is devoured, the noble body is restored, and the operator must survive the danger of the devourer.

Greco-Egyptian technical papyri and the medical writers know stibi or stimmi as the black sulfide ground for the eyes; Zosimos and the later Greek chymical corpus treat such minerals as matter for washing and coloring rather than as a named philosophical metal. Arabic mineralogy transmitted ithmid into Latin as antimonium and stibium, and medieval assaying books record its use in parting and in the making of alloys. Paracelsus placed antimonial preparations among the arcana of chemical medicine, sharply separating crude ore from corrected forms. The early seventeenth century fixed the literary canon: the Currus triumphalis antimonii issued under the name of Basil Valentine, and Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618), whose emblem of the wolf devouring the king glosses antimony's power to purify Sol.

Within the Magnum Opus antimony is an instrument of Purificatio rather than a final stone. Operators reduce stibnite to regulus, seek the stellate surface as a sign that earthly feces have been parted, and then employ that regulus to cleanse Sol: the wolf swallows the king, the mass is fired, and the noble metal is recovered brighter. Some sequences go further, digesting the regulus with martial additions to draw a philosophical mercury, a living solvent reputed to open gold. The stage is therefore double—purification of the antimony itself, and purification performed by antimony upon other metals. Failure is read in a dull, rayless lump; success in the star and in a bead that survives the blast.

Eighteenth-century reform stripped the wolf of its emblematic office and kept the body. Lavoisier ranked antimony among the metals in the 1787 nomenclature, and Berzelius's alphabetic system fixed the symbol Sb from Latin stibium, distinguishing the element from its sulfide Sb2S3. Modern chemistry describes a metalloid of atomic number 51, lustrous and brittle, occurring chiefly as stibnite and recovered by roasting and reduction—the same broad operations the assayers named, now quantified and detached from Purificatio. The old cross-on-orb survived as a historical character. Unicode 6.0 placed it in the Alchemical Symbols block (U+1F700–U+1F77F) at U+1F72B, so that Newton's mark and Gessmann's catalogue entry can be cited as text rather than as a woodcut.