Alchemical symbols — elements, substances and operations

The working notation of alchemy, grouped because it is a system rather than a collection: four element signs built from one triangle by inversion and a bar, three Paracelsian principles, a vocabulary of substances, and a set of named operations for what you do to them. Three things are held apart in every record here, and almost nowhere else on the open web. What practising alchemists used a sign for, between roughly the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. What nineteenth-century occult revivalists and later Jungian writers said it meant. And what it is used for now, on jewellery and in games. The first is the best evidenced; the third is where most of the searching comes from. The notation was also never fully standardised — arsenic has several unrelated forms — and records say so rather than presenting one manuscript as canonical.