Zinc occupies an ambiguous place in the Western tradition: it was never one of the seven planetary metals of classical alchemy, because it was not clearly recognised as a metal in Europe until late, yet it entered the alchemical literature all the same. Paracelsus, in the sixteenth century, wrote of zincum as a distinct metal, and the white flowers of zinc oxide that rose during its burning were named lana philosophica, philosopher's wool, a poetic term of the laboratory. Zinc thus sits at the edge of alchemy, acknowledged by its later practitioners but excluded from the ancient planetary scheme, a metal known in its compounds and its brass long before it was won and named in its own right.
Zinc oxide has its own long pharmaceutical afterlife in calamine lotion, still sold today for skin irritation, its name drawn from the same calamine ore that also yielded Stromeyer's cadmium. Because reliable brass, a true copper-zinc alloy, seems not to have been deliberately smelted in the Mediterranean world until Hellenistic and Roman times, when it was called orichalcum, most instances of brass in older English Bible translations are understood by scholars to render Hebrew or Greek words for bronze or unspecified yellow metal rather than the zinc alloy in the modern sense, a nuance that leaves zinc itself, unlike copper or iron, essentially absent from scriptural chemistry.