Mercury

In the astrological typology of the psyche, Mercury represents the personal mind.  Many would equate the personal mind with the psyche because the personal mind is the locus of all of our individual thought and sensory experience, as well as the vehicle through which we perceive our emotions.  In our construct, however, the psyche is much more complex and inclusive and, at best, the personal mind is the observer of all of the other components that are included in the psyche but not their originator.  Some of the confusion between the personal mind and the psyche undoubtedly exists because the soul, our attention, is inextricably tied to the personal mind at this level of consciousness, knotted together as it were.

The personal mind can be viewed as an accretion of the Universal Mind.  It is Mind, separated from itself by the construct of ego and attached to the individual entity on the physical plane of existence.  Thus, we can say that Mercury (personal mind) is a lower octave of Uranus (Universal Mind). 

The personal mind may be viewed as necessary equipment for the psyche to operate on the material plane.  Without it, the physical body cannot function, for it has no guidance, no command center.  In a sense, the personal mind is located within the body, as it is associated with the physical organ, the brain and, indeed, with the entire nervous system (which Mercury rules).  In another sense, the body exists within the mind, for it is the mind that perceives the body and, without this act of perception, the body would have no objective existence.  In another, and more real, sense, both the body and the personal mind are accretions or imaginings of Universal Mind. 

Mercury’s natural relationship with the Moon is that the personal mind is attached to or “has” a personal subconscious.  The personal subconscious is itself an accretion of the Collective Unconscious, which can be viewed as a construct to describe the entire edifice of realms of consciousness that lie between the personal subconscious and Universal Mind.  While traveling through the subconscious is one route to the Collective Unconscious and, ultimately, to Universal Mind, it is not the only route.  For, being an accretion of Universal Mind, the personal mind has a direct, if blocked for most people, relationship to Universal Mind and can, through Revelation and consciousness raising, make contact with Universal Mind and even enter into those realms (by ascending into higher states of consciousness and becoming reabsorbed into Universal Mind).

Yet, as we have stated above, the personal mind is necessary if the psyche is to have a bodily experience and, so, it may be said that the purpose or mission of the personal mind is to connect the psyche with the material world.  This fundamental role, to connect, becomes central to many of the phenomena symbolized by Mercury.  It is also fundamental to Mercury’s natural relationship with the Sun.

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and its orbit is interior to every other planetary orbit in our solar system.  Its orbit can be viewed as a kind of littoral, marking the boundary or transition between the Sun’s sphere and the rest of the solar system.  This is one avenue through which Mercury symbolizes boundaries and boundary markers.

More specifically, it is the personal mind that operationalizes raw consciousness (the Sun).  It is through the personal mind that consciousness becomes self-aware in an objective sense and functions within the physical world.  In other words, it is through the operation of the personal mind and its several functions that consciousness gains awareness of and “mastery” over the physical, “objective” world.

Another way to conceive of the personal mind is that it is the psyche’s mental body.  Just as the physical body is necessary to make physical contact with the material world, through the senses and by physically manipulating matter, so the mental body is necessary to make mental contact with the material world.  It is said that upon entering the material plane, the psyche takes on the coverings of three bodies: the mental, the astral and the physical, in that order.  These bodies allow the psyche to operate in the material world mentally, emotionally and physically.

Since all three bodies are needed for the soul to exist on the physical plane, they necessarily work together.  Thus, the mind never operates independently of the physical body while in the material world.  It always acts through the body—specifically, through the organs of the brain and the nervous system in conjunction with the organs of sense.  Therefore, the nervous system and the sensory organs are ruled by Mercury. 

Operating mentally in the physical world implies contact and relationship between the mind and the physical aspect of the world.  As Aristotle illustrated, the mind—that is, the personal mind—depends upon data about the external world that is collected by the senses.  It is from this sense data that the mind constructs ideas about physical reality.  According to Aristotle, we perceive reality through our senses.  He, thus, rejected Plato’s belief that what we perceive is a reflection of a reality that exists in the world of Ideas (Uranus) and that it is from this world of Ideas or Archetypes that our knowledge comes.  Aristotelians would say that all abstract thought derives ultimately from sense perception of an objective reality and that purely abstract thought does not exist.  Thus, astrologically, we may look to the Moon or to Neptune for association with any purely intuitive knowledge, or to Uranus if we include revelatory insight as a form of intuition—but not to Mercury.  Mercury, identified with the personal mind, exemplifies the Aristotelian epistemological model.

We can now outline the psychological function that is associated with Mercury and, thereby, gain further insight into its astrological symbolisms and associations.  We start with the senses and the collection of information about the world through the senses.  Thus, Mercury is associated with data and the collection of data.   It is associated with information and the flow of information, since the sense data is carried through the nervous system to the brain—the most basic level of information flow and a Mercurian function. 

This conveyance of coded information from the sense organs to the brain is also the most fundamental and rudimentary form of travel.  It is the nervous system that sends signals from the motor brain to the body’s muscles to allow them to move and, thus, enable crawling, walking and running—the basic forms of travel for the body in the external world.  Thus, Mercury is associated with travel, particularly over short distances. 

The conveyance of electrical signals through the nervous system also suggests general conveyance.  Mercury (the god) was the patron of commerce and we can envision a sort of commerce being undertaken within the body through the nervous system.  These electrical impulses also travel across nerve synapses at tremendous speed, as information is conveyed from the senses to the brain or other organs of the nervous system in fractions of a second.  Swiftness and speed are, thus, also associated with Mercury.  So are the movements of the body that are enabled and directed by Mercury’s nervous impulses and, therefore, we have the connection of Mercury to nimbleness, agility and grace. 

When sensory input reaches the brain, it is used to construct images.  Here, we can associate Mercury with photography.  These images are processed and analyzed by the mind but they are also stored in the mind’s memory—another Mercurian function.  The personal mind, however, does not have the automatic facility to process and analyze new images.  We generally assume that the external world perceived by a newborn infant must be chaotic and confusing because they lack prior reference with which to organize their senses impressions.  It is only by repeated association of certain images with certain events or stimuli that we are able to categorize and analyze the sensory data being conveyed to the brain.  Here, we have two more associations of the planet Mercury—categories or categorization, and learning, for the association of sensory input with mental images and constructs must be learned and is the first task to be learned. 

Although all of these processes are happening at the most elemental level, they are all extrapolated to higher orders of development.  For instance, the ability to categorize images in the brain becomes taxonomy at a higher level.  Mercury’s association with collections and collecting derives not only from the nervous system’s collection of sensory data but also from the brain’s ability to categorize and compartmentalize—for collections, if they are to have meaning and not be just a chaotic jumble of stuff, must be classified and put into categories.  This also leads us to Mercury’s association with curiosity, for we collect because we are curious about something.  Mercurian curiosity also serves an evolutionary function in that it leads us to gather data that may be useful for our survival or betterment.

The basic function of learned memories and responses manifests at a higher level as education and tutoring.  This includes not only formal education in schools but the even more fundamental learning about the world and about how to interact in it that we learn as children in the first years of life.  Much of this is learned through our interaction with siblings and with childhood friends.  Mercury (the god) had numerous siblings himself, including Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Persephone, the Muses, and the mortals Perseus, Heracles, Helen of Troy, and Minos. 

Education also results in proficiency.  Mercury is associated with being adept and adroit.  Apprenticeship would also be associated with Mercury.  We can also assign crafts and handiwork, anything involving skill, to the planet Mercury.  The Mercurian artisan produces mostly items of utility and, hence, the association of Mercury-ruled Virgo with usefulness.

Returning to the basic psychological functions symbolized by Mercury, once the mind has collected a sufficient number of mental images and related those to experiences in the external world, it can begin to process and analyze those images.  This begins with simple association and connection.  This association with connecting and connectedness is another pathway to establish Mercury’s rulership over trade and commerce—for trade is essentially about connecting supply with demand.

Mercury also, of course, symbolizes thought and mental processes, in general.  As Mercury interacts with sign and house positions and with aspects to other planets, these Mercurian functions become enveloped, astrologically, with qualities.  Thus, Mercury can symbolize our mental state, our mental preferences and attitudes, how we operate mentally, our mental acuity, or in what direction we develop our mental powers. 

As analysis becomes more complex, a vehicle more sophisticated than images needs to be developed in order to handle higher level thought processes.  This vehicle is language. 

Language is essentially symbolic.  Thus, Mercury can be associated with symbols and symbolism of all sorts.  Mercury, of course, governs language and all that derives from language.  Language provides the ability to convey thoughts from one person to another and the growing sophistication of mental analysis and thought provides the impetus for desiring to convey one’s thoughts to another. 

Communication can be seen as the last of Mercury’s psychological functions to be developed.  Mercury rules communication and all forms of communication, especially those involving language—speaking and writing.  Communication also creates a feedback loop for evolutionary development.  As humans communicate ideas, discussion ensues.  This leads to even more abstract thinking but also to the application of thought to improving the human condition through practical advances.  This takes us to the edge of the realm symbolized by Mercury’s octave—Uranus. 

Although thinking may become more abstract and communication may become more sophisticated, the realm that Mercury symbolizes is restricted by its association with the personal mind.  This is not to say, of course, that the personal mind does not have access to the broader mental realms associated with Jupiter and Uranus.  However, those levels of mental undertaking are not ruled by Mercury.  The personal mind under Mercury tends to be focused on what is personal and immediate.  Although these higher order mental processes cannot exist without the lower order processes symbolized by Mercury, there are boundaries to Mercury’s realm. 

Across, those boundaries, however, commerce takes place.  There is certainly interaction between the sensory-nervous-thought-communication system ruled by Mercury and those systems and processes associated with Jupiter and Uranus.  These are enabling and enhancing connections, however.  The psychological processes associated with Mercury are more fundamental, as we shall see with our exploration of the next two personal planets—Venus and Mars.

Mercury has also been associated with tricksterism, and the unreliabilities associated with Mercury retrograde are legend.  We can ask how these relate to Mercury’s primal association with the personal mind.  Retrograde motion itself may be called upon to explain unreliable and tentative plans and communications but why is Mercury so susceptible to retrograde motion, which affects nearly every other planet?  For answers, we can look to the very nature of the personal mind itself.  For the personal mind operates in the realm of appearances.

Socrates was one of the first historical personages to methodically demonstrate the fallibility of the senses.  Before Socrates, Hindu Vedantists realized that all that we perceive through our sense organs is illusion.  The fact is, the senses themselves, the basis for all of Mercury’s functioning, are inherently unreliable.  Not only is the “reality” that they perceive only an imagination, but the perception of that imagined reality is subject to change depending upon our circumstances and the viewpoint that we bring to our environment.  Two people are apt to describe the same object differently and our own perception of the same object is subject to change.  Memory, the recording of our sense impressions, has been scientifically demonstrated to be unreliable.

We are constantly tricked by our senses, the optical illusion being only an obvious example.  In fact, our entire experience in the created world has been described by many as a cosmic joke.  The tricksterism symbolized by Mercury simply reminds us that all this is unreal.  It is as if, in putting on our mental, astral and physical bodies, we have strapped a virtual reality device to our head.  As Shakespeare has told us, we are only actors in a play.  We have agreed that, while we are in the play, we will consider it to be real.  We will not suddenly come out of character.  Mercury reminds us that we should take all this lightly. 

We have been focusing on the personal mind as the vehicle by which the soul enters the material world and maintains its connection with the material planes of existence.  At its transcendent level, we reverse the direction of the mind's focus/  At the transcendent level, Mercury represents the vehicle by means of which the soul may escape the gravitational pull of the material planes.  Paradoxically, this vehicle, the mind, will never escape these realms because it is of those realms.  Its goal is to return to its home at the highest level of Universal Mind.  However, the mind can deliver the soul to that portal, crossing which, she is free to enter the pure spiritual realms.

Some mystics have said that we must pierce the intellect with the intellect.  It is through the analytical properties of the personal mind, often with the aid of revelation from the Higher Mind, that we recognize our predicament in the material world--that we are trapped in an illusion.  Our body, our mind, our individual identity are all illusions--they are not Real.  It is through the intellect that we must come to this realization, which is the first step on our spiritual journey of Return to our Original state.  The task to which we are born into the human body is to turn our personal mind inward and upward from its "natural" orientation, which is outward and downward.  It is through the personal mind that we recognize the Perennial Wisdom, the Universal Truth, so far as it can be grasped by the intellect.  It is through the personal mind that we know the process we must follow to attain Liberation and the discipline we must adhere to in order to do the spiritual work. 

Thus, we find that Mercury rules alchemy--the symbolic exercise of purifying the mind and the soul and transmuting the base substance of matter into the gold of Spirit.  Alchemy--and we can generalize this term to all spiritual paths by which the soul is liberated from her entrapment in gross matter--requires exact knowledge, apprenticeship before mastery, uncompromising discipline and, in the end, the sacrifice of the intellect so that the soul may attain liberation.

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