Mercury itself occurs in nature in a red sulfide, cinnabar, which can also be made artificially. Mercury united with most of the other metals, and the amalgam formed coloured powders (the sulfides) when treated with sulfur. It was known from prehistoric times in native deposits and was also given off in metallurgic processes (the “roasting” of sulfide ores). Sulfur, “the stone that burns,” was also crucial. Mercury, the liquid metal, certainly known before 300 bc, when it appears in both Eastern and Western sources, was crucial to alchemy. The metals gold, silver, copper, lead, iron, and tin were all known before the rise of alchemy. Superficially, the chemistry involved in alchemy appears a hopelessly complicated succession of heatings of multiple mixtures of obscurely named materials, but it seems likely that a relative simplicity underlies this complexity.
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