Alchemy Part I

Unfortunately I had to change the background color to make these show up.  Thanks to iridus.info, sacred-texts.com, and symbols.com for the images.

To avoid getting into too much speculation, I'm just going to show some alchemy symbols and Glagolitic letters, plus some of the letters "unique" to Cyrillic or versions of it.  This is only to show that there is at least superficial reason to believe that alchemy signs may have been a visual system that Cyril drew on.  All I can say is that to my eye these pairings seem are attractive.

 Sal Ammoniac, and (Ж) Cyrillic Zh

Phosphorus, Cyrillic Yat

Alchemy for Sulfur,or  in Glagolitic

, Arsenic, two of many versions, (also Purification) and  the Glagolitic V.  

,  and  Glagolitic D

 Realgar and Glagolitic Zh

 and ⰢGlagolitic large X

Now some of these elements have other symbols, and some of these symbols have other meanings.  I don't know which were known to Cyril, and I won't even start on their resemblence to the Old Bulgarian letters and religious signs.  But at the very least you can see how one can get the idea (rightly or wrongly) that there's a link.  We see a lot of circles and triangles in both, some crosses, shapes on other shapes.  I won't speculate on whether Cyril was inspired by the forms, or intentionally chose to copy specific alchemy signs, or if he even knew these signs at all.