No metal has attracted more mystical weight than silver. Gold is revered for its rarity and its color, its association with the divine and the royal. But silver’s symbolic life is stranger, more varied, and in some ways more durable. It wards off werewolves. It purifies water. It channels lunar energy. And in certain corners of the modern internet, it is the one asset that shadowy forces are desperately suppressing.
This piece takes all of that seriously — as history, as anthropology, and as sociology. It does not take any of it literally. That distinction matters, and we’ll be explicit about it throughout. Alchemists believed silver embodied the lunar principle. That is a documented historical fact. Silver actually embodies the lunar principle: that is a metaphysical claim this site will not make.
Luna: Silver and the Moon
The association between silver and the moon is so consistent across ancient cultures that it demands explanation.
Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations all connected silver to lunar symbolism. In Mesopotamian cosmology, the moon god Nanna (later Sin) was associated with silver. In Egypt, the moon was the “silver sun.” Greek and Roman tradition assigned silver to Artemis/Diana, the moon goddess. This was not merely symbolic decoration — it reflected a sophisticated, if pre-scientific, theory about metals and their cosmic correspondences.
The ancient framework went roughly like this: the seven known “planets” (in the ancient sense: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn) each corresponded to one of the seven known metals. Gold belonged to the Sun. Silver to the Moon. Copper to Venus. Iron to Mars. Mercury (the metal) to Mercury (the planet). Tin to Jupiter. Lead to Saturn.
This was the cosmological foundation on which alchemy built. And it was not arbitrary — there were intuitive reasons behind it. Gold is yellow, like the sun; it doesn’t tarnish. Silver is white, cold-looking, reflective; it waxes and wanes in brightness as it tarnishes and is polished again. Iron rusts violently, like the “angry” red planet. The correspondences had an internal logic.
The key point is that ancient civilizations were observing real properties of these metals and mapping them onto their cosmological frameworks. They weren’t just making things up — they were doing natural philosophy with the tools available to them.
Alchemy and the Noble Metals
Medieval and Renaissance alchemy inherited and elaborated the ancient correspondences. The alchemical symbol for silver is ☽, the crescent moon. In Hermetic tradition, silver was called Luna and was understood as the feminine, receptive, lunar principle — the complement to gold’s solar, active, masculine energy.
This was not merely literary. Alchemists actually worked with silver, subjecting it to chemical processes — dissolution in acid, precipitation, combination with sulfur and mercury — in hopes of understanding its nature and, theoretically, transmuting it into gold. The philosophy and the chemistry were inseparable.
F. Sherwood Taylor, the historian of alchemy, documented how the alchemical tradition developed a rich symbolic language for silver’s properties: its brilliant white color, its reflectivity, its relationship with sulfur (silver tarnishes to black silver sulfide — the “death” of the metal, from which it could be “resurrected” by polishing or chemical reduction). The tarnishing and restoration of silver’s luster mapped onto ideas of death and resurrection that resonated with the broader Hermetic project.
Lynn Thorndike’s exhaustive eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science traces how these ideas evolved across centuries of European intellectual history. The consistent thread is silver’s association with purity, purification, and the lunar cycle — all of which, again, have partial grounding in silver’s actual properties. Silver’s real antibacterial activity (caused by silver ions disrupting bacterial cell membranes) may explain why “silver purifies” beliefs were so persistent: they were observationally correct, even if the mechanism was misunderstood.
Werewolves and Silver Bullets
The notion that silver bullets are necessary to kill a werewolf is deeply embedded in popular culture. The question of where it actually came from is more interesting — and more surprising — than most people expect.
First, the timing: the silver bullet–werewolf connection is not ancient. Werewolf legends are ancient, appearing across European folklore for centuries. But the specific detail that silver bullets are required to kill a werewolf only appears consistently in the 18th and 19th centuries. Earlier werewolf accounts typically specified that the creature was killed by conventional means: swords, arrows, or by a holy man’s blessing. Silver enters the picture later.
The single most commonly cited origin story is the Beast of Gévaudan: a series of fatal animal attacks that terrorized a region of southern France between 1764 and 1767. Over 100 people — mostly women and children — were killed. The attacks caused national alarm; King Louis XV dispatched royal hunters. The creature was eventually shot and killed, and contemporary accounts (and later legend) claim the killing shot was made with a silver bullet.
Historian Jay M. Smith, in Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard University Press, 2011), examines these accounts carefully. The “silver bullet” element is part of the folk elaboration of the event rather than a confirmed historical fact. Modern historians believe the beast was most likely a large wolf or wolf-dog hybrid. The silver bullet detail was amplified in the retelling, and the 18th-century attribution to silver connected to existing beliefs about silver’s purity and efficacy against supernatural threats.
This folkloric logic is coherent on its own terms: silver was associated with purity and the divine; werewolves were associated with spiritual corruption and the demonic; a metal that was “pure” would naturally be effective against a being that was “impure.” It’s bad metaphysics but good narrative structure.
The detail then propagated through popular culture, hardening into the “universal rule” about silver and werewolves that appears in every horror novel and film today. By the time Universal Pictures was making monster movies in the 1930s and 1940s, the silver bullet was treated as ancient, obvious lore. It was barely 150 years old.
Silver’s Real Purifying Properties
One reason these beliefs were so persistent is that silver’s protective and purifying associations were not entirely fictional.
Colloidal silver — very fine silver particles suspended in liquid — has genuine antibacterial properties. Silver ions interfere with bacterial enzyme function and cell membrane integrity. This is why:
- Ancient Romans and Greeks stored water and wine in silver vessels. The silver ions inhibited bacterial growth, keeping the contents safer.
- Silver was used in wound dressings for centuries before anyone understood germ theory. It worked, imperfectly but noticeably.
- Modern medicine uses silver in wound care products, coatings on catheters and other medical devices, and water purification systems.
The folk belief that silver purifies was empirically reinforced over thousands of years of observation. The ancient explanation (“silver has lunar purity”) was wrong. The observation (“silver keeps things from going bad”) was approximately right. This is a recurring pattern in the history of folk medicine: wrong mechanism, real effect, persistent belief.
To be clear: none of this validates occult claims about silver. It explains why those claims had staying power. There’s a difference.
Hermetic Tradition and Silver
In formal Hermetic tradition — the esoteric philosophical framework synthesized in texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, likely composed in Alexandria in the 2nd–3rd centuries CE — silver plays a specific cosmological role. The seven metals correspond to the seven planetary spheres that a soul must pass through on its journey from the earthly plane to the divine. Silver, as Luna, represents the innermost sphere — the last barrier before the divine realm.
This is a richly developed symbolic system that influenced European thought through the Renaissance and beyond. It shaped alchemy, astrology, and early chemistry. Its influence on how educated Europeans thought about silver specifically is real and historically documented.
The key historical point: Hermetic authors believed these things. Newton, Boyle, and other figures we’d now call scientists were deeply engaged with Hermetic ideas. The tradition is a documented chapter of intellectual history, not a marginal curiosity.
Modern Echoes: From “Silver Is Money” to “Silver Is Suppressed”
Contemporary precious metals culture has its own esoteric dimension, though it operates in secular language.
The assertion that silver is “real money” — and that paper currencies are fraudulent substitutes — has a religious quality to it: an absolute truth held against the corrupted world. Some silver advocates speak of central banks and bullion banks with the same certainty that medieval heretics spoke of the Antichrist: as deliberate agents of cosmic deception.
The “silver suppression” thesis — that major financial institutions systematically suppress silver’s price through coordinated short selling — has attracted serious legal and regulatory attention. The facts on record:
- The CFTC investigated silver manipulation allegations from 2008 to 2013 and closed the investigation without finding sufficient evidence of manipulation to bring charges.
- Deutsche Bank settled a class-action lawsuit in April 2016 in which it was alleged to have participated in fixing the London silver price. The settlement did not require Deutsche Bank to admit wrongdoing. As part of the settlement, Deutsche Bank agreed to provide cooperation and trading data that was used in related litigation against other banks.
These documented events are real. They represent legitimate reasons for questions about market structure. What they do not establish — because no investigation or court proceeding has established this — is a comprehensive, ongoing conspiracy to suppress silver’s price.
The conspiracy framing has a sociological function: it explains why the “obvious” value of silver hasn’t been reflected in the price. If you believe silver should be worth $500/oz and it’s trading at $85, you need an explanation for the gap. “They are suppressing it” is an explanation that simultaneously protects the investment thesis and attributes heroic status to believers who see the truth.
This is not a critique unique to silver. It appears wherever people hold strong conviction about asset values that markets don’t confirm. But it’s worth identifying it clearly, especially in a community where genuine historical grievances (real market manipulation instances, documented) can be conflated with sweeping conspiratorial claims.
What the Sociology Tells Us
The consistent thread across 4,000 years of silver’s symbolic life is this: silver has genuine, observable properties that lend themselves to symbolic elaboration.
It is white — purity. It is reflective — truth and revelation. It has real antibacterial action — purification. It was used as money — value and exchange. It tarnishes to black and is restored to brilliance — death and resurrection. It came from the earth in veins, like blood — life force. It is associated with the moon, which controls tides, menstrual cycles (in ancient belief), and the realm of dreams.
None of this proves that silver has mystical properties. It explains why practically every human civilization that knew about silver assigned it mystical properties. The metal’s actual characteristics invited symbolic interpretation. And those symbolic interpretations, once established, proved remarkably durable — persisting into modernity in forms that are secular in language but structurally similar in function to their ancient counterparts.
Understanding this history doesn’t change silver’s price. But it adds dimension to the story of a metal that has never been merely an industrial input or merely an investment thesis. It has always been both of those things and also something stranger — a material that seems to invite reflection, in every sense of the word.
The Bottom Line
Silver’s occult associations are ancient, global, and historically documented. They emerged from real properties of the metal — its color, reflectivity, antibacterial action, and monetary history — interpreted through the cosmological frameworks of successive civilizations. The silver bullet, the alchemical Luna, the Hermetic planetary correspondence: these are real chapters in intellectual history, not fringe inventions.
What they are not is literally true. Silver does not ward off werewolves. Its price is not suppressed by a secret cabal. Understanding the difference between documented history and operative myth is the prerequisite for thinking clearly about any of it.
Sources
[1] F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists: Founders of Modern Chemistry (Schuman, 1949). Primary reference for alchemical silver symbolism.
[2] Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (Columbia University Press, 1923–1958, 8 vols.). Comprehensive survey of occult science including silver’s role in Hermetic tradition.
[3] Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Harvard University Press, 2011). Historical analysis of the Beast of Gévaudan and the silver bullet legend.
[4] Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), “CFTC Closes Investigation Concerning Silver Markets,” September 25, 2013. cftc.gov
[5] Stacy Meichtry and Liam Moloney, “Deutsche Bank Agrees to Settle Silver Rigging Case,” Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2016.
[6] U.S. Geological Survey, “Mineral Commodity Summaries: Silver,” various years. (For silver’s antibacterial properties — documented in materials science literature.) usgs.gov
[7] Various news reports on the 2021 Silver Squeeze, January–February 2021. Reported in Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal.