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Mercurius Duplex

Mercurius Duplex

The figure of Mercurius as explicitly double — masculine and feminine, solar and lunar, spiritual and chthonic, the medium of conjunction and that which is itself to be united. In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung names the structural role: “Mercurius is the soul (anima), which is the ‘mediator between body and spirit’” (Jung 1955, §658), and “Mercurius, however, is not just the medium of conjunction but also that which is to be united, since he is the essence or ‘seminal matter’ of both man and woman” (Jung 1955, §659).

The duplex nature explains why Mercurius appears in contradictory guises across the corpus: as the green lion, as the aqua permanens, as the crowned hermaphrodite, as the serpent uroboros, as the poisoning dragon that the work must slay. “The desperately evasive and universal Mercurius — that Proteus twinkling in a myriad shapes and colours — is none other than the unus mundus” (Jung 1955, §660). Psychologically, he is a personification of the collective unconscious’s dual function: it presents the opposites and provides the medium in which they unite. This makes Mercurius the symbolic ancestor of what Jung elsewhere names the transcendent-function.

The dark side of Mercurius — the “active sulphur,” the “four-horned serpent” of Dorn — is not excised but integrated. “His equivalent in alchemy is the dark side of Mercurius duplex and, as we saw, the active sulphur… To the natural philosophers of the Middle Ages, and to Dorn in particular, it was perfectly clear that the triad must be complemented by a fourth” (Jung 1955, §238).

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