Silver, metal of the moon and of purity
Silver in lunar alchemy, the five-fingered hand of the Maghreb, the Neapolitan cimaruta and the late legend of the silver bullet against werewolves.
In ancient and medieval culture every metal was associated with a heavenly body, and silver belonged to the Moon. Its pale colour, its cool lustre and its ability to reflect light made it the metal of night, of purity and of quiet protection. From Mediterranean amulets to the five-fingered hand of North Africa and the Neapolitan cimaruta, silver has been the favoured material for many objects meant to defend the home and its people.
The Moon of the alchemists
In the alchemical tradition the seven metals corresponded to the seven planets visible to the naked eye: gold to the Sun, silver to the Moon, iron to Mars, copper to Venus, mercury to Mercury, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn. Silver, often simply called luna in Latin texts, stood for the feminine and receptive principle, complementary to solar gold. The graphic sign used to denote it was, fittingly, a crescent moon.
The biblical tradition also uses silver as an image of purity. Psalm 12 compares the words of the Lord to silver refined in the crucible and purified seven times. The image of metal tried by fire runs through the religious and moral literature of many centuries, and helped make silver the material of many liturgical objects.
The hand and the cimaruta
In the Maghreb and the Middle East the khamsa, the five-fingered hand also called the hand of Fatima or, in Jewish contexts, the hamsa, is traditionally made of silver. The pale metal was preferred for amulets against the evil eye, and in many North African cities silversmiths, often Jewish, produced endless variants decorated with eyes, fish and geometric patterns. The number five, linked to the fingers of the hand, was itself thought able to repel the envious gaze.
In Naples and southern Italy the most elaborate silver amulet was the cimaruta, a stylised sprig of rue from which small symbols hung: the moon, the key, the heart, the hand, the flower. In 1895 the Englishman Frederick Thomas Elworthy described it at length in his book The Evil Eye, which remains one of the main sources for its forms and regional variants.
The silver bullet
Much more recent is the belief that only a silver bullet can stop a werewolf or a vampire. The motif has roots in European folklore, where silver sometimes appeared as a weapon against witches and creatures of the night, but its present form was fixed mainly through nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century cinema. The stories about the Beast of Gévaudan, which terrorised France between 1764 and 1767, were embellished with this detail only long after the events.
Silver shows us another way of thinking about protection: not the strength of iron, but purity and reflected light. Linked to the Moon, to the feminine and to the night, it became the natural material of domestic and family amulets. The extraordinary properties attributed to it belong to myth and literature, but the objects born from it, from silver hands to cimarute, are precious records of art and popular culture.