MERCURY / HERMES
[In the Order of Appearance]
Hermes, god: R. Creeley. From, "Prayer to Hermes."
protect these feet: Mercury is one of four terrestrial planets in the Solar System. It has a moon-like,body with craters and long ridges. Being the closest planet to the sun, its surface temperatures are extremely high.
hermeneutic circle: "There has been a highly developed practice of interpretation in Greek antiquity, aiming at diverse interpretations like oracles, dreams, myths, philosophical and poetical works, but also laws and contracts. The beginning of ancient hermeneutics as a more systematic activity goes back to the exegesis of the Homeric epics." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For an in-depth history of the hermeneutic circle: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics
A master of knowledge: A. Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Grand Rapids MI, 1995.
as fast as light: Mercury "is most often depicted as bright, quick, and light; these are in fact the very qualities which account for his peculiar kinds of insight." T. Moore, The Planets Within. New York, 1982.a gargoyle grimaces: "If I had a gargoyle protecting me, I could use his blood. It has the same healing properties as mercury, without the aftereffects—you know, blindness, organ failure, insanity, those petty things." P. Morgan, The Beautiful and the Cursed. New York, 2013.
Hermes, Hermes: H.D. From "Hermes of the Ways."guide us: "The dual power of the shaman corresponds to the two attributes of the god Hermes according to Alexandrian tradition, which developed around the first century BC. Hermes, in effect, is psychopompos; that is to say, he conducts the soul of the dead to hell while simultaneously interpreting the symbols that reveal the outcome of that soul." C. Camelin, "Hermes and Aphrodite in Saint-John Perse's Winds and Seamarks." In, M. Zupancic, editor, Hermes and Aphrodite Encounters. Birmingham AL, 2004.
choose between: "The animacy of the lifeworld, in short, is not the result of an infusion of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically prior to their differentiation." T. Ingold, "Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought." Ethos, Issue 1, 2006.
straw hat: As the patron of travelers, Hermes is often shown in a wide-brimmed sun hat made of straw.
Vincent: . Although the ridges on Mercury are named for artists, there is none named for "Vincent van Gogh;" even though this palette took him close to the sun, which is also Mercury's place.
the ridge: "One distinctive feature of Mercury's surface is the presence of numerous narrow ridges, extending up to several hundred kilometers in length. It is thought that these were formed as Mercury's core and mantle cooled and contracted at a time when the crust had already solidified." WikipediaMercury...fatal: "Mercury (also) must be killed—that is, rendered non-volatile and reduced to a fine ash—in preparation for its internal use by the alchemist." D.G. White, "Mercury & Immortality: The Hindu Alchemist Tradition." In, A Cheak, , Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. Melbourne, 2013.
A rabbit: Rabbits, or hares, are sacred to Hermes.
hermetic strands: "The particular strand of Neoplatonic thought that interests (Gilles) Deleuze is closely tied to the hermetic tradition, and it is out of this hermetic strand of Neoplatonic thought that Deleuze’s conception of immanence in philosophy emerges." J. Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze. Durham NC, 2012.Image: "With allowances for distinctions, (Hermes) is Coyote in much Native American lore (Kokopelli among the Pueblos of the Southwest), Hanuman in the Vedic tradition, Loki in the Norse tales, and Susa-no-o in Shinto mythology." M. Slavin, Metaphor and Imaginal Psychology: A Hermetic Reflection. London, 2018.
Consciousness moves: J. Hillman, Loose Ends: Primary Papers in Archetypal Psychology. Irving TX, 1978.
I learned the subtile: A. Braverman, Dharma Brothers, Kodo and Tokujoo.” Ojai Ca, 2011.
ram: At Olympia there is a statue of Hermes carrying the ram under his arm.
curfled down: One of Hermes' many assignments is to guide souls to the underworld.in pain: Hermes was the first god to shed human blood. Judged by Hera, and sentenced to mock punishment in the "sacrifice that ends in stoning." W. Berkert, Homo Necans. Berkeley, 1983. The herm, then, is a pile of stones that mark a boundary, a limit stained with blood, as borders always are.
heat: "The Sun looms large in Mercury's sky. It appears twice as big as we see it from Earth when Mercury is at the farthest point from the Sun in its lopsided orbit and three times larger at the closest point." B. Bova, Mercury. New York, 2005.was dotted: J.D. Hughes, "Spirit of Place in the Western World." In, J.A. Swan, editor, The Power of Place. Wheaton IL, 1991.
temple: At the temple of Hermes "(the supplicants there to request the god's wisdom), hung on the altar gold, silver, a herald's caduceus of ivory, or other rich presents. After Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 5.15.
psychopomp: "(Jung's) choice of Hermes-Mercurius as the darkener, as the psychopomp to the underworld, echoes the Homeric hymn to Hermes, where this God is 'the only recognized messenger to Hades,' as the Bringer of Dreams'"
J. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld. New York, 1979.
our collective: J. Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. New York, 1984.powerful anthropomorphic beings: L.J. Bean, “Powers and its Applications in Native California.” In, L.J. Bean and S.B. Vane, eds., Ethnology of the Alta California Indians. New York, 1991.
primarily creators: In Greek mythology, the primary creators are Titans. "The Titans' acts are acts of excess, of overweening pride. Hesoid tells us that Uranus had given the Titans their name as a term of abuse and as a pun. The word derives from titanien, 'to overreach oneself,' and from tises, 'punishment.'" G. Thomas, Healing Pandora: The Restoration of Hope and Abundance. Berkeley, CA, 2009.
a great work: Carl Kerenyi suggests that 'the titans had overreached themselves in their fool-hardiness by attempting to perform a great work.'" Ibid.an open-ended unfolding: K. Pillow, "Jupiter's Eagle and the Despot's Hand Mill: Two Views of Metaphors in Kant." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Spring 2001.
Mercury's orbit: Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, which it orbits in 88 days. Seen from Earth, its cycle of phases reoccurs approximately every 116 days; and someone on Mercury would see one day every two years. As the fastest orbiting planet, it was named after the swiftest god. "Why do animals have eyes on the side? There are very few who have eyes in the front like us. This is because real danger comes from the side or from behind. Speed flattens the vision, like a screen." P. Virilio, Interviewed by C. Dumoucel. Vice. Sept. 16, 2017.
who would brake: "and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on." W.H. Auden, From, “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
Angel flying: W. Nelson. Sung in 1980 film, "Honeysuckle Rose."silvery-white flowers: Mercury (Hg ) is a silvery-white color. It is also called quicksilver. "'Mercury,' identified with water, possesses coldness and moistness. These two 'principles,' which are not to be confused with common sulphur and mercury or quicksilver, interact in the form of subterranean exhalations or vapors (the former 'male,' the latter 'female'), and if the conjunction occurs under the proper conditions—the degree of heat within the earth is especially important-—metals are formed." S.J.Linden, The Alchemy Reader: From Hermes Trismegistus to Isaac Newton. Cambridge, UK., 2003.
yellow fields: "Sulfur hastens nature toward its decay and thus toward its next season." J. Hillman, "The Yellowing of the Work." Alchemical Psychology: James Hillman Uniform Edition. Putnam, CT., 2010.
the style of old age: "The language is so spare as to almost elude restatement in any other terms. At times it even defies the possibility of a literal correlate. It approximates the greological concreteness of the elements it invokes." Jed Rasula addressing Louis Zukofsky's "'A' 22-23." J. Rasula, "The Style of Old Age." Sulfur 12 (1985).prima materia: Mercurius "is the arcanum, the prima materia, the 'father of all metals,' the primal chaos, the earth of paradise, the 'material upon which nature worked a little, but nevertheless left imperfect.' He is also the ultima materia, the goal of his own transformation, the stone, the tincture, the philosophic gold, the carbuncle, the philosophic man..." C.G. Jung, Alchemical Studies. CW 13., London, 2014.
salty sea: "If alchemy, whether Oriental of Old World, has spent countless years studying the use of morning dew to create 'the gold of the thousandth dawn,' the study of seawater and of its mother liquor proceeds from the same quest and truly accomplishes miracles." J. de Langre, "Seasalt and Alchemy." In, R. Grossinger, editor, The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century. Berkeley, CA 1983.At high altitude: Sequoia National Forest, CA.
Drought-stressed: B. Boxall, "What all Those Dead Trees Mean for the Sierra Nevada." Los Angeles Times, January 28, 2017.
Elsewhere: Ladera Lane, Santa Barbara, CA.
where new things: A. Das. "And when this mortality is done, there's going to be a process where new things come in, and we don't know what. It's the beginning of something." Quoted in Ibid.
The silence between: "As god of journeyers, the older Hermes was also a god of boundaries and thresholds, the one who is necessarily beyond the boundaries he draws, who knows both sides of the line." V.B. Rutter and T. Singer, eds., Ancient Greece, Modern Psyche. London, 2015.
a cabin: Above Ettawa Springs, CA.the gravitational waves: S. Hossenfelder, "Echoes of a Black Hole.” https://aeon.co/essays/do-ripples-in-space-time-herald-a-new-theory-of-gravity
easy picking of death: "Reflection on Hermes' role as psychopomp leads us to think about underworld experience in a particular way, to ask: What is the difference between being guided to rather than abducted to the underworld?" C. Downing,the silence: "To use words to describe (Hermes,) the god of words might be thought of as a kind of narcissism. But how to capture the Lord of Language except through language?" M. Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Oxford, UK, 2008.
16.When the fire escaped: "The greatest fear of the alchemist...was of the fire blazing out of control, destroying both vessel and furnace." R. Severson, "The Alchemy of Dreamwork: Reflections on Freud and the Alchemical Tradition." Dragonflies: Studies in Imaginal Psychology. Fall 1978, The Thomas Fire which began on December 4th, 2017 near Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, CA. It was largest fire ever recorded in California for the month of December. "Probably the greatest mind to investigate alchemy in the 13th century was Thomas Aquinas. The extent to which he studied alchemy was small, but his comments on the Great Art were very influential on his contemporaries. 'The chief function,' wrote St. Thomas, 'of the alchemist is to transmute metals, that is to say, the imperfect ones, in a true manner and not fraudulent'.'" E. Reirther. "The Nature and History is the Great Art of Alchemy." https://www.beezone.com/edwardo/Alchemy/alchemy.htm
"Among the early Greek philosophers there was one for whom fire became a universal theme. Heraclitus of Ephesus regarded fire not just as one among several elements but rather as that through the conception of which one could think of the universe itself, which he called—using the word in a sense that was just becoming current—the cosmos. By thinking fire, it is—according to Heraclitus—possible to think the cosmos because—in a sense of the word that the Greek philosophers first rigorously determined—the cosmos is fire." J. Sallis, Topographies. Bloomington, IN, 2006.
hierophanies: An hierophany is "the sacred revealed at different cosmic levels." M. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion. New York, 1963.
Suddenly a whirling: S. Takahashi. From, "Burning Oneself to Death." L. Stryk, Translator.
mercurious: "Red mercury is a modern version of that Red Tincture, or Powder, which is best known as lapis philosophorum, the Stone of the Philosophers." P. Harpur, The Philosophers' Secret Fire. Glastonbury, UK, 2009..
into this wild project: M. Taussig, In, D.L Strauss, “The Magic of the State: An Interview with Michael Taussig.” Cabinet, Summer 2005.
We walk around: U.A. Olsen. From, "The Third-Millennium Heart." K.O. Jensen, Translator. Berlin, GR., 2017.It was so hot inside: Mercury's surface temperature can reach a scorching 840 degrees Fahrenheit.
A faint smell: "The arts and fire—the world of craft and techne—have their primordial beginnings in the realm of Hermes. An act of theft that brings them to man. Through the Promethean deceit, the stealing of fire from the gods, man is made capable of enjoying the goods of the divine world." (She calls this "Hermes's fire.") G. Thomas, Healing Pandora. Berkeley, 2009.For a long time: G. Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston, MA, 1964.
delivering symbols: “To situate the symbol within this context is to introduce an irreducible element of grief into the Hermes process, the hermeneutic act of interpretation, because there is always a remembrance---consciousness or unconscious---of the gap between the original presence and its symbol.” R.D. Romanyshyn, The Wounded Researcher. New Orleans, 2007.
Missing a signpost: “As the basis of understanding the world, (Hermes) is also an idea, though one we have not yet fully grasped,” K. Kerenyi, Hermes Guide of Souls. Zurich, 1976.less sacred than Delphi: "The temple has collapsed and the very vegetation has disappeared. Certainly silence is evoked, but only in a mournful implied comparison: the laurel is gone, and even the metaphorical chatter of the water has dried up, we know how much divine or human speech to expect." M. Wood, The Road to Delphi. New York, 2003.
I will read: C. Sandburg. "Fire Pages."The poem: O. Paz. From, "Response and Reconciliation."
an image without an original: K. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. Berkeley, 1983.
Ryoanji: The temple of Ryoanji, in Kyoto, was founded in 1450, but its famous rock garden was not worth mentioning until the seventeenth century. Until then, the rock garden was "only a secondary element and was eclipsed for a long time by (a) cherry tree. Then, when the tree died, one became aware of the beauty of the rocks and began to value them." F. Berthier, Reading Zen in the Rocks. Chicago, 2000.
magnetic fields: "Mercury is somehow generating a magnetic field in its interior, but it's quiet weak (just 1% that of the Earth's)." However, like the Earth, it deflects charged particles, creating a "hot flow anomaly." E Howell, "What's Important to Know About the Planet Mercury?" https://phys.org/news/2015-02-important-planet-mercury.html
holds of ice: "Close examination of the ice shows sharp boundaries, which implies that it wasn't deposited that long ago; if it was, the ice would have somewhat eroded and mixed in with Mercury's regolith surface. So somehow, the ice came there more recently—but how?" Ibid.
heap of: T.S. Eliot. From, "The Waste Land."