The Mage: the Ascension line has adopted symbols that represent each Sphere. My question is where they are from? Not in-world – I am interested what is the real world source of these.
I would also want to clarify that I do not believe these were created specifically for Mage. As a game tries very hard to incorporate real world mystic concepts and practices and concepts.
I have seen some of the symbols in other places, for example the Prime symbol (perhaps an ornate Greek Psi character) shows up in some video games as a "spell particle effect" or otherwise something mystic among other thing.
As an example, the video game Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura features the symbol for the Fire magic college. It is not merely a Psi character – it is the same trident shape with a line through it:
The same game also features the Life symbol for the Phantasm College a Greek Psi with soft curves, rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and ends in a "hook":
Arcanum also has the Summoning which has the Entropy symbol – I can only describe it as an Arabic numeral "4" with a big flourish for the middle horizontal dash to make it 1. curved a bit 2. styled as an arrow pointing to the right:
I am sure I have noticed others like the Matter and Time symbols in other contexts but I cannot give examples right now. Perhaps the only one I do not remember seeing elsewhere is the Spirit symbol.
All in all, it appears that many works tap into the same source for these but I am not sure where to search for it and how.
Best Answer
As Guybrush McKenzie’s fine answer notes, Wikipedia claims these are alchemical symbols depicted in Symbols, Signs, and Signets by Ernst Lehrer, 1950. However, I haven’t been able to find a copy of this book to double-check that, and I don’t think anyone at Wikipedia has either: they don’t cite the book itself but rather this forum post. However, our own @JasonWodicka does have a copy, and confirms that it contains these symbols, drawn by Lehrer from his own references:
Wikipedia also includes a list of Latin names for the alchemical ideas that the symbols represent, citing this page’s scans of Medicinisch-Chymisch und Alchemistisches Oraculum, Ulm, 1755. This book is conveniently well into the public domain, and the Internet Archive has a full scan of it, making it easy to verify (convenient, since actual reprints of it apparently go for over $300).
Notably, no one is claiming that White Wolf actually referenced these particular sources for Mage: The Ascension. Lamed-Ah-Zohar’s forum post claims he just happened to find Symbols, Signs, and Signets in an old-book store while looking into the symbols, not that he has any knowledge that White Wolf used it. It’s completely unclear how Medicinisch-Chymisch was found. Point is, we don’t know exactly how White Wolf found these symbols—but most likely, it was a process rather similar to Lamed-Ah-Zohar’s, whoever was tasked with this went to a library or old-book store, and just used whatever happened to be available. Remember, Mage was published the same year Tim Berners-Lee released the world’s first web browser, so information was a lot harder to come by.
Anyway, here’s the full list, using Mage symbols from The Unofficial White Wolf Wiki, modified to fit on our site, next to the actual symbols from Medicinisch-Chymisch, for comparison. I’m using the levity.com scans since they’re in black and white, and are somewhat indexed. I also include a column with the Unicode characters for each concept, where available, just to show that the ones from Mage aren’t (apparently) the most prominent ones.
Correspondence
U+1F75B🝛Entropy
U+1F764🝤Forces
Life
Matter
U+1F75B🝛Mind
U+2609☉(“sun”)
Prime
Spirit
Time
U+1F74B🝋Tenth sphere
U+1F70A🜊U+1F70B🜋U+1F70C🜌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 (
ſnotf), 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 “acetic acid, cf. vinegar” and “vinegar, cf. acetic acid” as if those were different things.
Unicode’s
, or they have only two of the four dots, 
.
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,