![]() ![]() In Greek myth, his mother was Maia, the oldest and the most beautiful of the Pleiades. Although he bore the light that filled the whole world, he remained hidden and worked in secret. ![]() He was present when the world was created his role was to impregnate the waters with the seed of life. As the World Soul, the mercurial serpent was said to impart “beauty and ripeness to all things, life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit” ( Alchemical Studies, par. Like the serpent of wisdom that encircles everything, Mercurius “has something of everything in herself.” ( Psychology and Alchemy, par. As quicksilver, Mercurius was imagined as fluid and volatile, like water “that does not make the hands wet,” “that indefinable, fascinating, irritating, and elusive thing which attracts an unconscious projection” ( Alchemical Studies, par. Jung reminds us that Hermes was originally a wind god, and so was the Egyptian Thoth, who made the souls breathe. 528) Further, he is the “great south wind,” who is both an active agent in its fiery aspect and a passive receptacle in its watery, quicksilver aspect. He was also synonymous with divine water, “the spirit of life, not only indwelling in all living things, but immanent in everything that exists.” ( Psychology and Alchemy, par. the feminine aspect of the hermaphroditic Mercurius. At the same time, he was “the universal and scintillating fire of the light of nature, which carries the heavenly spirit within it.” This fiery spiritual seed impregnated the Virgin, i.e. He was the fire of hell, “a rearrangement of the heavenly, spiritual powers in the lower, chthonic world of matter,” found in the centre of the earth, in the dragon’s belly (Jung, Alchemical Studies, par. His fiery aspect was sulfurous, active and masculine, and yet invisible and working in secret. (6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious. (5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum. (4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature. (3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures. “The multiple aspects of Mercurius may be summarized as follows: (1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. In Alchemical Studies Jung thus summarizes the role of Mercurius: As a symbol of wholeness, the animating principle and the world soul, he gathered all elements in himself. ![]() He was both the beginning (the prima materia), the middle (the process, the means) and the end (the philosopher’s stone – Filius Macrocosmi or the Cosmic Son) of the opus. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.The chief figure of alchemy was Hermes/Mercurius. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. ![]()
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