Copper

The Bright Metal

In alchemy, the metal of Venus associated with beauty, emotional warmth, creative attraction, and conductivity.

Copper takes the sign of Venus unchanged. The correspondence is old and probably geographical before it was astrological: Cyprus was the ancient world's copper source and was sacred to Aphrodite, and the Latin for copper, cuprum, is the island's name. Alchemy read the metal through the planet — soft, bright, readily worked, taking a high polish and then greening — and the shared glyph is the point. The seven metals and the seven planets were not two lists that happened to correspond; they were one set of seven, and a text could name either and mean both.