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Mercurius

Mercurius

Mercurius is the central figure of the alchemical imagination — simultaneously the prima-materia with which the opus begins, the fluid medium through which it proceeds, and the spiritus animating the lapis-philosophorum in which it ends. He is duplex: the same substance in opposite states, before and after. He is the arcane substance, the spiritus Mercurii, the invisible factor that sustains the transformation. Where sulphur-alchemical is fixed, active, masculine and Luna receptive and feminine, Mercurius is the tertium quid that runs between them, making the coniunctio possible. Abraham states the doctrine cleanly: “the chemical wedding of Sol and Luna may not take place without the presence of a third mediating principle. This medium of conjunction is Mercurius, the substance which contains both male and female seeds and unites them” (Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998).

His psychological signature is trickster. Jung: “Mercurius, following the tradition of Hermes, is many-sided, changeable, and deceitful… He is duplex and his main characteristic is duplicity” (Alchemical Studies, 1967, par. 267). He is two dragons, winged and wingless; he is puer-aeternus and senex-saturn in one figure; he is akin to the Godhead and “found in sewers.” He is uroboros: “The mother bore me and is herself begotten of me… he impregnates, begets, bears, devours, and slays himself” (Jung 1967, par. 272).

As the anima media natura he is anima-mundi — “a life-giving power like a glue, holding the world together and standing in the middle between body and spirit” (Jung 1967, par. 263). He is the spiritus Phytonis, the spiritus vegetativus, the revelatory nous symbolized by the serpent. He is both aqua and fire. He is trinus et unus and four at once — the load-bearing instance of the axiom-of-maria.

Against any easy Christological reading, Jung insists on Mercurius’s contrary trajectory: the filius macrocosmi “starts from below, ascends on high, and, with the powers of Above and Below united in himself, returns to earth again. He carries out the reverse movement and thereby manifests a nature contrary to that of Christ” (Jung 1967, par. 280). The opus must go through matter, not past it. Jung concludes: “The lapis is at most a counterpart or analogy of Christ in the physical world. Its symbolism, like that of Mercurius who constitutes its substance, points, psychologically, [to the Self]” (Alchemical Studies). Mercurius is the tradition’s name for the autonomous transformative principle within psyche — the collective-unconscious itself under an alchemical name, the Hermes-who-operates.

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