Mercury
Also called quicksilver, Hermes Trismegistus’s metal
The glyph stacks crescent, disk, and cross
Alchemy symbolsMercury meaning
The mercury sign — a crescent, a circle, a cross — names the planet, the metal quicksilver, and the alchemical go-between. The same shape was later used for Wednesday and, much later, for intersex and nonbinary identities.
The go-between. Metal, planet, principle, and a god who travels.
The name. The sign is a crescent over a circle over a cross: moon, sun, and earth in one figure.
Where it comes from
Wednesday, quicksilver, merchants, thieves, doctors, messengers. Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at an ordinary bench, which is why it became the name of whatever mediates. As a Paracelsian principle it is not the element Hg. It is volatility, spirit, the fume that leaves and can be condensed again. The planetary glyph and the principle share a portrait because the culture refused to separate them cleanly. This entry refuses the separation too, and labels the layers instead.
Alchemy
Three stacked worlds
Crescent above, solar disk, cross below. The drawing says mediation: lunar receptivity, solar center, and the earthly cross of the four directions, held in one body. That is a lot for a margin doodle, and it is why the sign survived. In the tria prima, this is the spirit between sulfur’s character and salt’s body.
Hermetic
The same name as the guide
Hermes, Thoth, Mercurius: a stacked identity, not a single biography. The caduceus is his staff and is not this glyph. If a text says Mercurius and means the volatile in the flask, you are in a laboratory. If it means the guide of souls, you are in a myth. Often it means both, and expects you to notice.
Near this
Sources
- Early modern planetary glyphs: Mercury for quicksilver
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.