What, if any, distinction was found (or imagined) by White Wolf between the two amalgam symbols, used for Correspondence and Matter, is unknown. Medicinisch-Chymisch, at least, makes no such distinction. White Wolf may simply have liked both designs.
The symbol used in Mage for Forces does match up nicely with a fairly common—though not common enough to get Wikipedia or Unicode treatment—alchemical symbol for boiling. It doesn’t, however, match up very well with the Medicinisch-Chymisch symbol for ebullitio, which adds another leg and splits up the crossbars between the two legs.
“Sol” is “the Sun,” and “aurum” is “gold.” The “ſ.” here is a long s (
ſ
notf
), and in particular, it is in Blackletter font, indicating it is German and not Latin. It stands for “ſiehe,” meaning “see,” and has a similar usage in German as “cf.” does in English. So this is basically “Sun, see also gold,” where gold is listed as “Aurum, sol,” or “Gold, Sun.”Alchemists heavily associated gold with the Sun and often used the astrological symbol for the sun,
U+2609
☉, to mean gold. Unicode also includesU+1F71A
🜚 as the alchemical symbol for gold, which in some fonts looks rather similar to that for the Sun. Amusingly, Unicode also includes a very similar “see also” note onU+1F71A
🜚, pointing toU+2609
☉.My guess here is that the idea is the “Aurum, sol” entry is for symbols used for both gold and the Sun, while “Sol, ſ. aurum” is for symbols that are used only for the Sun, and don’t mean “gold.” The “ſiehe” is reminding the reader that if they’re looking for symbols for the Sun, they should also consider all the symbols for gold. Unfortunately, the author doesn’t provide a German translation as he does for so many other entries, most likely because “sol” and “aurum” were rather well-known Latin words, so this is somewhat speculative on my part.
Also, note that the Wikipedia list associates Mind with
which is a large stretch, and simply wrong considering how close the penultimate “Sol, ſ. aurum” entry is. This may have just been misunderstanding the rather dense table, since “solutio” is immediately after “sol, ſ. aurum” and the entries kind of run into one another (plus the lack of translation on “sol, ſ. aurum” could make it all look like one entry).
Medicinisch-Chymisch is confusing here, as it has separate entries for “acetum ſ. vinum mortuum” and “vinum mortuum, ſ. acetum.” “Acetum” and “vinum mortuum” both mean vinegar—the author even translates both as “Eſſig,” which is German for vinegar—and it’s a mystery why these two entries are different, or why our Tenth Sphere symbol only appears in the latter. If this book’s entries were in English, we’d have “acedic“acetic acid, cf. vinegar” and “vinegar, cf. acetic acid” as if those were different things.
Unicode’s
U+1F70A
🜊, for the record, is Medicinisch-Chymisch’s entry for “acetum, ſ. vinum mortuum,” i.e. not the entry with the Tenth Sphere symbol. Things sort of likeU+1F70B
🜋 are listed for “acetum deſtillatum,” distilled vinegar I suppose, but the symbols have a top crossbar,, or they have only two of the four dots,
.