Tag: jung

astrolocherry:

Mercury 
The archetypes of Gemini and Virgo

The astrological Mercury glyph is a circular planet with beneath the cross of matter, which is an expression of the word of God made flesh, crowned by a lunar crescent, tying him to the goddess.

Hermes Trismegistus is the syncretism of the Greek god Hermes of Mercury. In Hellenistic Egypt, the god Hermes was given as epithet the Greek name of Thoth 
Both Thoth and Hermes were gods of writing and of magic in their respective cultures. Thus the Greek god of interpretive communication was combined with the Egyptian god of wisdom as a patron of astrology and alchemy. In addition, both gods were psychopomps, guiding souls to the afterlife. 
Jung adds further, “When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. He is the play of colours in the division into the four elements.
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. 

He is both material and spiritual. 
He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa. 
He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature. 

Hermes is a magician with a magic wand; mediator between human and divine affairs. He is “like a teacher mediating between the stone and the disciple.” To others the friend appears in the shape of Christ or Khidr or a visible or invisible guru, or some other personal guide or leader figure. Jung also warns that Hermes comes as the light of nature only to those who are mindful and vigilantly strive towards it, while for many the same light “turns into a perilous foolish fire, an illusion” and the psychopomp into a diabolical seducer.” Psychology and Alchemy Part 3, Chapter 3.1

In his incarnation as Hermes Trismegistus, he was the “creator of civilization, responsible for medicine, chemistry, writing, laws, art, astrology, music, magic, rhetoric, philosophy, geography, mathematics and much more,” –Gary Lachman