There is a cold in metal that nothing else on the altar has.
Stone is cold too, but stone gives its cold away slowly, grudgingly. Metal takes the warmth straight out of your palm, holds it a moment, and hands it back all at once, as though it had been thinking the matter over.
Lift a silver ring that has lain all night on a windowsill and you are holding the whole night in your hand.
Metals are the oldest of the made things. Every one of them began as dull ore locked in rock, and every one of them had to be broken out by fire before it could shine.
That is why they sit differently beside the dried herb and the wax. A leaf is given to you. A metal is won.
What a Metal Remembers
A stone arrives as it was. A metal arrives as somebody made it.
There was a furnace. There was a hammer, or a mould, or a wheel of wet grit throwing sparks into a dark workshop. Somebody decided the shape and then let it cool.
Older craft treats that history as part of the material. The metal is held to carry the heat it passed through and something of the hand that turned it into a cup, a blade, a bell, a thin bright band for a finger.
You do not need to believe anything unprovable to feel the difference. Hold a hammered copper bangle, with its little moons of dented light, and then a stamped one. The hand knows.
The Seven Metals and the Seven Planets
Long before the Craft took its present shape, alchemists and astrologers paired seven metals with the seven wandering lights of the old sky. Those pairings passed almost untouched into modern witchcraft.
- Gold — the Sun
- Silver — the Moon
- Iron — Mars
- Copper — Venus
- Quicksilver — Mercury
- Tin — Jupiter
- Lead — Saturn
The table is worth learning because so much older writing simply assumes it. When a grimoire tells you to inscribe a plate of Venus, it means copper, and expects you to know.
If you wish to work with the hours those attributions govern, the arithmetic is set out in planetary hours. Here the concern is the substance itself, in the hand, on the cloth.
Silver: The Moon’s Own Metal
Silver is the coolest of the metals to the eye. It does not blaze like gold. It gives back a paler, more secretive light, the colour of a wet road under a full moon.
It is the metal most often worn by witches, and most often set aside for lunar work: the crescent, the pentacle at the throat, the ring turned three times on the finger before a rite.
Silver tarnishes. Sulphur compounds in ordinary air dull it to grey and then to near black, and the tarnish creeps fastest in warm, still, closed places.
Take that as chemistry rather than omen. A blackened chain means the drawer was stuffy, not that something dark passed the door.
Because it is a moon metal, silver is often the vessel or the lid for water gathered under a bright sky, a practice set out in moon water. Worn rather than worked, it belongs with the other pieces described in wiccan jewelry.
Iron: The Metal That Says No
Iron is the refusal. It is the gate hinge, the horseshoe over the lintel, the nail driven into the doorframe, the heavy black pot that has outlived four generations of the kitchen it stands in.
Where silver invites, iron forbids. British and Irish folklore is thick with the belief that the fair folk and other unhoused things will not cross cold iron, and that belief settled deep into the protective craft that followed.
Iron at the threshold is treated fully in warding the home. The blade that most witches call iron is in truth steel, iron married to a little carbon, and its place in the circle belongs to the athame.
Iron rusts, and rust is only iron returning to the red earth it came out of. Dry a working blade after a bath rite. Oil it lightly. Do not let it weep orange onto an altar cloth.
One thing must be said plainly, because iron and blood are so often linked in older writing. No working described on this site asks for your blood, in any amount, from any implement. If a source tells you to open your own skin, close the source.
Copper: Green Fire and the Warm Hand
Copper is the warm one. It carries a pinkish, firelit colour that flatters candlelight, and it moves heat so readily that a copper cup left near the hearth is warm before you notice you have picked it up.
It is the metal of Venus, and so it gathers around work of love, beauty, friendship and reconciliation. Coiled as wire, it is wound around wand shafts and the shanks of rings.
Left to the weather, copper goes green. That bloom is verdigris, and on a garden ornament it is beautiful.
Against skin it is less romantic. A copper bangle can leave a green stain on the wrist where sweat has worked at it. The mark is harmless and washes away, though it is a fair warning of what copper does when acid touches it.
Gold: The Sun Held in a Small Weight
Gold does not tarnish, does not rust, does not dull in a drawer. Buried for a thousand years it comes up the same colour it went down.
That incorruptibility is the whole of its symbolism. Solar work, sovereignty, the vow that is meant to outlast the mood in which it was made.
Gold is also expensive, and a great deal of altar gold is honest brass or plate over base metal. There is no shame in that. A brass disc standing for the Sun serves the rite as well as bullion would, provided you do not lie to yourself about what it is.
The Alloys: Bronze, Brass, Pewter and Steel
Most metal you will ever handle is a marriage rather than an element.
Bronze is copper and tin, the alloy that gave an age its name and gives old bells their long, brown, mourning voice. Brass is copper and zinc, brighter and more brazen, the metal of censers and candle cups and thumb-worn bowls.
Sterling silver is silver with a little copper added for hardness, which is why sterling tarnishes more eagerly than fine silver does. Steel is iron taught to hold an edge.
Pewter is tin-based, soft, grey and pleasantly heavy, and it is the alloy that most rewards suspicion. Modern pewter is generally made without lead, but an antique or unmarked piece cannot be assumed safe, and pewter belongs with the metals discussed below.
Tin, Lead and the Metal Never to Be Touched
Tin, the metal of Jupiter, is agreeable enough and turns up in old charms cut from sheet.
Lead is another matter. Saturn’s metal is soft, dull, faintly greasy to the touch, and genuinely toxic. Lead sheet, lead solder, lead came from old windows and lead-bearing curios have no place near food, drink, bedding or a child, and none of it should ever be scraped, filed, melted or sanded in a home.
Wash your hands after handling any old unidentified metal. That is ordinary care, no more mystical than washing them after the garden.
Quicksilver is the one to refuse outright. Mercury is a liquid metal that is toxic by vapour as well as by touch, and small sealed vials of it are still sold as curiosities and amulets. Do not buy one, do not open one, and do not accept one as a gift. Mercury is a metal to read about and never to hold.
Metal and the Cup
A cup is not a decoration. Whatever is inside it goes inside you.
Unlined copper and unlined brass leach copper into anything acidic. Wine, cider, citrus, vinegar and fruit juice all draw it out, and copper taken that way causes real nausea and vomiting. If a vessel is copper or brass, it must have an intact interior lining, and it must not be used for a drink that stands in it while the rite goes on.
Antique pewter may carry lead, and antique glazes and solders may carry it too. Admire such pieces on the shelf; do not drink from them.
Stainless steel, glass, glazed ceramic and lined vessels are the safe company. The cup itself, its place in the circle and how it is shared are treated in the chalice.
Ordinary Care with Metal
Metal asks little, but it does ask.
Nickel is a common irritant in cheap jewellery. If a clasp reddens your neck, the answer is a different clasp, not endurance.
Do not grind, sand, buff or torch metal of unknown composition at home. Fume and fine dust are the hazards there, and no altar piece is worth breathing.
Cast iron holds heat cruelly and does not look hot. Use both hands and a cloth. If you burn anything on charcoal inside an iron vessel, the room must be genuinely ventilated, never sealed, and never a small closed space where a bird is kept, because charcoal gives off carbon monoxide as it burns. The vessel and its fire are handled in the cauldron.
If you gather old iron from a field, a beach or a ruin, check what is permitted where you live before you carry anything away.
Tarnish, Rust and the Long Patina
There is a difference between dirt and age.
Dirt is wax, soot, fingerprints and the grey film of a stuffy cupboard, and warm water, a mild soap and a soft cloth will take it. Dry the piece completely afterwards. Water left in a joint is where rust begins.
Age is the darkening in the low places of a design, the softened edge, the shine worn into a handle by fifty years of the same grip. Do not polish that away in an afternoon of enthusiasm.
Commercial silver dips are harsh. Wear gloves, open a window, keep the liquid off any set stone, porous setting or glued join, and rinse thoroughly.
Metal set with stones has two natures at once, and the stone rules. Some minerals must never be soaked, salted or left in sun, and that is set out in cleansing and charging a stone.
Making a Metal Tool Yours
A new blade or a new cup arrives smelling of the shop, and most witches wish to change that before it is used.
The rite of claiming a tool, what to do about an object that had a life before you, and how to retire one honourably are all set out in making a tool yours. Read it before the first working rather than after.
Choosing a Piece
When you stand in front of a market stall with a little money and a great deal of wanting, a short list helps.
- Ask what the metal actually is, and be wary of an answer that is only a colour.
- Check any drinking vessel for an intact lining, and put back anything unlined, antique or unmarked.
- Look at the inside of the piece, not the front. That is where honest work shows.
- Lift it. Weight tells you more than shine does.
- Choose the plain thing you will use over the ornate thing you will fear to use.
One good piece, handled often, becomes yours faster than a drawer of bright things that never leave the tissue paper.
The Ring on the Windowsill
Metal keeps time differently from the rest of the altar.
The herb crumbles, the candle sinks into its own pool, the flowers on the cloth go brown at the edges within the week. The silver will still be there when everything else has been swept away and replaced, a little darker in its grooves, a little smoother where your thumb goes.
Leave the ring out under a bright sky. Bring it in at dawn, cold as river water.
The night is in it, and so, by now, are you.