Mercury

Mercury’s physical stature is quite small when compared to the Sun. It is said to be made of Iron, though we are unsure if the core is solid or molten. By weight it is most near to Mars, which is roughly twice as heavy.

Mercury is also the second most dense planet that we know of (Earth is the most dense).

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and has a very elliptical and eccentric orbit.

This planet has the peculiar and fascinating property of having a solar day length which is twice as long as its year length! Strangely enough this is a common scheme in star systems that the closest bodies to the star are generally tidally locked in some fashion like our Moon.

The rotation of Mercury is said to slow to a halt near its closest point to the Sun, and begins rotating slowly at the more distant part of its path around the Sun.

Mercury is also one of 3 bodies in the 12 here listed that travels above the plane of the ecliptic (indicated by eccentricity and a more elliptical orbital path). There is almost no atmosphere on Mercury, which certainly contradicts any association of Mercury with Air, unless it is as a counterpoint. Luckily Mercury is often associated with Earth—apt because of its richness in Iron and its stable ground or crust layer.

By temperature Mercury is said to be around 870 degrees Fahrenheit on the light side, and -270 degrees on the dark side. The Core Temperature is said to range from 2,420 to 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit (a quarter to half the Sun’s outer atmosphere).

Some of the more interesting physical properties of Mercury can help us to have a clearer idea of the energy of Mercury. Particularly the Solar Day Length of Mercury compared to its Year Length gives us the Second Harmonic—or what is known as the Law of Octaves in modern musical practice. An important part of the Musical Cosmos Theory is that an octave can be defined in more ways than by the 2nd Harmonic, or the number 2. But since Mercury so clearly reflects this octave measure it is certainly a powerful part of this small planet that it reflects a shared pattern of the solar system in its own orbit and rotation. So it is perhaps a sort of precursor to the generally unified, though organic and loose, harmonic structure by distance that is present in the solar system, which I call the planetary octave and the planetary power chord (see the maps section for a display of this idea in an excel spreadsheet).

This is the Hermetic Sphere called Hod traditionally (HoD in Hebrew), the meaning generally accorded to it is Splendour. What does splendor mean in this context? I won’t pretend to know the absolute meaning or the best version of this term, but I suspect it has mainly to do with its other main attribution: association (more on that below). Association is a property which likely relates to Mercury’s position in the solar system—as it is associated most closely with the Sun.

Mercury is also traditionally accorded to Language in all its forms, Communication, and the Intellect in the Vedic system of astrology, which gives Mercury the name Bodhi—which you may be familiar with as Bodhidharma or a manifestation of Buddha. In this way, the splendor of Mercury becomes the splendor of the intellect to pick apart and appreciate all things as a form of language in its infinite forms. Of course, with this splendor comes a warning and an inspiration: don’t get too caught up with interpretation, meaning and the wonders of the intellect—it’s only a part of the whole experience and a very tricky one.

In the Quareia system of Magic, Mercury, or the 8th Sphere, is the Power of the Unraveller. This is a power which unravels the power of the Grindstone as it makes things harder and stronger. It acts as a counterbalance to all that strengthening, and also to the proliferation of a pattern in all its forms which occurs in the 7th Sphere. The aspect of sorting through experience, to categorize, characterize and communicate, becomes a power of unravelling, but yet in the way that organizing and creating come from this sphere in some form as well, what is the Unraveler is also the ‘Raveller.’

In terms of Spiritual Intelligences, here the spirit catalogues give mostly Michael or Raphael as the Archangelic Nature resident in this sphere (the same as the Sun). For these reasons I find the names of Angels and their presence not too different from the way we use familiar stock characters to act as comforting presences in strange territory, though I certainly won’t detract from the practice in general. The order of Angels is said to be the Sons of God or the Beni Elohim, which is an extension of the Archangelic Consciousness present (as it is in all cases).

The idea of Mercury being the planet of Language has a simple sort of resonance in that it is the nearest to the Sun and so is the both the fastest moving by year (like an ideal forecaster) and the slowest by day (like an ideal ruminator). It is perhaps incidental that the language I have chosen to elucidate Hermetic wisdom with, Music and Harmony—has in Mercury a key to the musical edifice of nature—it is the planet that currently plays the same note by day and year—nearly a perfect octave apart (of solar day length divided by year length). So in some ways this is the deeper aspect of Mercury’s associative, abstract and linguistic properties though it is couched in the language of music, specifically by defining the octave length of 2 as a measure of “musical equivalence” (as in 2 notes that are the same but have different frequencies).

Mercury has also been called the Morning Star and Evening Star—just as Venus has as well—which comes from their closer orbital distance from the perspective of the Earth.

But how might this planet relate to the power of Unravelling, which is both an aspect highlighted in Hebrew lore in the Quareia school of Magic? The power of intellect is in some ways this very power made in an abstract mold—to pick apart by analysis and criticism, or to separate something that was whole by analysis is quite a big part of unravelling a thing’s nature.

An yet again, Mercury is perhaps the planet that has been most unravelled by the power of the Sun—the Sun’s heat has burned away Mercury’s atmosphere, and the Solar Winds have carried the rest further out into the solar system.

Signs (as in Semiotics)

In this usage perhaps Mercury is best thought of as the beginning of the sign process where meaning is created between one lifeform and another through use of signs, which is a sort of pre-linguistic form or general form of communication. In this, perhaps it is truly Earth which is the essence of language, especially for Earthlings. The reasoning here is that since language arrives over generations and a wide spread cultural development which is a life long process of standardized education and experiment, then it makes more sense to keep language closer to the culture which formed it as a conceptual marker of prime harmony (where the closeness of association is the comparable property of language as distance is to force).

Language

Communication

Unravelling

Intellect

Intelligence

Association