Mercurius is the embarrassment of alchemical psychology — the figure that refuses every attempt to redeem him. The saviour-approximation Jung notes at the end of the list is precisely what makes the inventory so troubling: the trickster does not become the saviour, he only approximates one, and that distance is everything. Every time alchemy reached for redemption through Mercurius, the shape-shifter moved. The torture motifs are not a preparatory stage on the way to divinity; they are constitutive of the figure. Pull the tortures out and the saviour-approximation dissolves with them.

What the alchemists were doing with this figure — and what Jung recognized — is that the psyche produces, in its own laboratory, something that looks salvific from one angle and is half-animal from another, something that heals through deception and damages through apparent help. The dual nature is not a contradiction awaiting resolution; it is the definition. What this means for anyone working with Mercurius as an interior figure is that the moment you feel you have located the divine half and can proceed on that basis, the malicious prank is already prepared. The figure holds the tortures and the approximation to holiness in the same hand, and refuses to let either go.