elements
Platinum
Pt
- Crystal system
- cubic
- Hardness
- 4–4.5 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- metallic
- Colour
- Silvery white
- Where it forms
- In ultramafic igneous intrusions, and concentrated in placers. The Bushveld Complex in South Africa holds the majority of world reserves.
- Chiefly from
- Bushveld Complex, South AfricaNorilsk, RussiaUral Mountains, RussiaColombia
Why it is that colour
Metallic, and it does not tarnish — platinum is chemically inert like gold and considerably rarer.
Safety
Metallic platinum is inert. Some platinum compounds are potent — cisplatin is a major chemotherapy drug, and it works precisely because it is reactive enough to bind DNA.
Where it comes from
South Africa dominates, and platinum mining there is deep, dangerous and politically charged; the Marikana strike in 2012 ended with police killing thirty-four miners. Russian production at Norilsk is associated with severe pollution.
Historical use
Pre-Columbian metalworkers in what is now Ecuador and Colombia worked platinum by sintering it with gold, which is remarkable given that platinum melts at over 1,700 degrees and no furnace of the period could reach that. Spanish colonists regarded it as a nuisance contaminant in gold placers and named it platina, little silver.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
Worth knowing
Platinum is in this collection as a deliberate blank in the attribution column. It is rarer than gold, more expensive for most of the last century, inert, beautiful, and it carries no metaphysical tradition at all — because it was not known to the classical world, was not one of the seven metals, and arrived in Europe only in the eighteenth century as an annoyance found in Colombian gold workings.
The alchemical scheme has seven metals for seven planets and it is closed. Platinum, zinc, nickel, aluminium and everything else discovered afterwards has no place in it, which is a useful reminder that the scheme was a description of what was known rather than of what exists.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.