Alchemical Symbolism in the VMS

[-JKP-]

Pliny referred to cinnabar as a rock that continually sweated mercury.


So mercury is often depicted in the alchemical manuscripts as droplets, which  are the sweat that oozes from the ore  (as well as the distillation into vapor), and the little cubes or rocks may have represented the crushed cinnabar from which the mercury was harvested (it took me longer to figure out the significance of the little cubelets, but I think it probably represents the source of the mercury, or mercury in its "raw" unprocessed cinnabaric form).