This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mineral gathers seven substances mined rather than made, most of them valued for the metal or pigment they could yield rather than for themselves. Galena, the chief ore of lead, often carried enough silver to make cupellation, extracting silver from it, economically worthwhile on its own. Cinnabar was mined for the same reason toward mercury, roasted in air to drive off quicksilver as vapor, and, left as a ground red powder, doubled as one of the most prized pigments of the ancient and medieval world. Calamine served the same extractive role for zinc, smelted together with copper ore to make brass centuries before anyone recognized zinc as a distinct metal being created in the process, and the name itself, this group's clearest fuzzy edge, actually covers two chemically different minerals, the carbonate smithsonite and the silicate hemimorphite, that pre-modern mineralogy never separated.
Orpiment, Realgar and Pyrite form a smaller cluster of their own. Orpiment and Realgar are closely related arsenic sulfides, golden yellow and orange red respectively, almost always discussed and used together as toxic but visually striking pigments. Pyrite, fool's gold, earns its place by deceptive resemblance to gold rather than by any real kinship to it, and by a genuine link to the vitriols, since weathered pyrite is the natural source green vitriol forms from. Antimony closes the group as its most ambivalent member, covering both the ore stibnite and the smelted metal itself, prized by Basil Valentine's writings as both a powerful medicine and a poison at once.