“When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it, he means quicksilver, but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed in matter.
Mercurius stands at the beginning and the end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and dies, to rise again as the lapis.
He is the play of colors in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements.
He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the traditional brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novem, the stone.
He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all opposites.
The multiple aspects of Mercurius may be summarized as follows:
(1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. 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.
(2) He is both material and spiritual.
(3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa.
(4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature.
(5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum.
(6) As such, he represents on the one hand the self and on the other the individuation process and, because of the limitless number of his names, also the collective unconscious.“ - C. G. Jung.
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