Mercury the Artist
The first lyre was not invented by Venus, goddess of love, or Apollo, leader of the Muses but by Mercury, or Hermes.
A lyre is a hand-held stringed instruments often depicted in iconography of angels, plaintively plucking away in the clouds of heaven. Orpheus, divine musician, could use his lyre to “impart sleep to waves, feeling to rocks, hearing to trees, tears to Pluto, and finally a limit to death”.1 If not for his looking backwards, it would have brought his lover, Eurydice, back from the dead. Accordingly, the lyre symbolizes “the harmonious union of the cosmic forces”2 and because it’s sound it made when the strings vibrate through the horn making up its curve, is demonstrates the relationship between earth and heaven. To me, the lyre is the ultimate symbol of the creative process; where human will and divine pattern come together to create something beautiful and dare I say true.
The first lyre was created from a transgression. Young, resourceful Hermes finds the cattle Apollo had hidden in a cave in Pieria and slaughters one. Using its guts and the shell of a turtle, he creates the stringed lyre, so sweet in sound it lulled his mother to sleep. When Apollo catches up to the thief, his anger melts to enchantment at the sound of the new instrument. He agrees to give the rest of the cattle to his brother in exchange for the lyre. To create your art, sometimes you must break something in the universe.
From there, Hermes visits all sorts of deities to expand his skills. He learns how to divine from pebbles from the Thriae “and he himself invented both the game of knuckle-bones and the art of divining by them”.3 Hades teaches him “to summon the dying gently and eloquently” and he works with the Three Fates to create the alphabet. From there he himself “invented astronomy, the musical scale, the arts of boxing and gymnastics, weights and measures…and the cultivation of the olive-tree”.4 Through a combination of outside influence and interior ingenuity, Hermes, the Greek name for Mercury, is able to hone a wide variety of skills, not needing to find any consistency or reason other than the joy of trying.
This is what our own Mercury gives to us: inventiveness, fluidity, the cultivation of techne, and the ability to use what one learns. Though we may associate Mercury with writers, technicians and merchants, artists cultivate their Mercury whenever they learn a new skill or allow some other artist or resource to influence their work. Mercury is fluid, as I have explained in my most recent newsletter, and open to being changed.
Isn’t that what we need as artists, those who join with the world to birth something new? Catholic nun and artist Corita Kent taught her students that everything around us is a source; we just need some help remembering to look. She references that T.S. Eliot adage that minor poets borrow, but, like Hermes, major ones steal: “Borrowing implies that the source really keeps possession. Stealing implies that the source has become the property of the thief–that she has made it into something her own”.5 We are always what is outside of us but by taking it inside and expressing it outward we inevitably make it our own. Hermes’s theft created something wholly different than what Apollo had previously owned and the Sun god was the better for it.
Mercury also teaches the importances of practice and skill. Without a basic grasp of paint mixing, grammar, the poattery wheel, etc, we could hardly make our medium express our ideas. As the planet of youth, Mercury reminds us of the power of beginner’s mind and that the scales, warm-ups, rough drafts, are anything but basic. So don’t neglect the importance of practicing your craft, especially as Mercury enters Pisces, where they become an artist who must fit all of their poetic fantasies into a pinhole. Don’t forget what is simple.
My own private Mercury
We can also look to our own private Mercuries to tell us about our unique cultivation of skill and where we may draw our inspiration from. Though Mercury is certainly not the only planet involved in creativity, his craftiness and fluidity is one any artist of any kind would do well to cultivate.
I’ll use my own as an example. I was born when Mercury was in Scorpio, the sign of chthonic depths; deep, still water; penetration in the dark. Mercury is in my 4th house, the lowest part of the chart and sky, which attunes it towards interior things: private life, interior spaces, what is hidden but flows from birth to death. She is conjoined Pluto, god of the Underworld, and square Saturn, planet of ancient lore and restrictions all the same. She is also in a specific phase called heliacal setting. A planet is considered in its heliacal set when it has recently entered within 15º of the Sun, the range in which the light of the luminary blocks the other planet from sight. You can liken it to Mercury retreating to a cave or a descent into the underworld. In some ways, my Mercury can make me overly private or hide my light under a bushel. But this placement also gives my Mercury night vision. There is always plenty to do in the dark. In his book “The Light Inside the Dark” Zen teacher John Tarrant speaks of the Underworld as a place of repetition: “the souls carry great stones around the mountain paths…But they hoist their loads joyfully, are glad of burdens and tasks because burdens and tasks will transform them”. My Mercury is geared towards periods of darkness and interiority; where we feel like we have little space. They are also here to say: there is always movement; there is always light.
I have spent around six cumulative months in silent meditation retreats while spending years devoting my life to Zen practice and the bare simplicity for which it asks. I have found fertility in loss, dead ends, caves; the underside of rocks, sad songs, occult magic, the poetry of Clarice Lispector6:
““And if I often paint caves that is because they are my plunge into the earth, dark but haloed with brightness, and I, blood of nature—extravagant and dangerous caves, talisman of the Earth, where stalactites, fossils and rocks come together, and where the animals mad by their own malign nature seek refuge. The caves are my hell. Forever dreaming cave with its fogs, memory or longing? eerie, eerie, esoteric, greenish with the slime of time. Inside the dark cave glimmer the hanging rats with the cruciform wings of bats. I see downy and black spiders…And all of this is me. All is weighted with sleep when I paint a cave or write to you about it—from outside it comes the clatter of dozens of wild horses stamping with dry hoofs the darkness, and from the friction of the hoofs the rejoicing is freed in sparks: here I am, I and the cave, in the very time that will rot us.”7
We come to the Underworld to face our demons, our karma, our harmful patterns, but we also descend to get to the source and change our life from the ground up, like how compost turns death into life. Manilius says that the 4th, opposite the 10th house of publicity and purpose, is the deep pivot from which we can even begin acting in the world. What is invisible to the outside eye is not frivolous or extra; it is the foundation for a public life that doesn’t ruin you.
My Mercury is naturally attuned to the hidden, the overlooked; seeking out the mystery lying beneath your surface. They draw on what is intense but transformative; finding light, knowledge, skill where darkness prevails.
This is what I offer you through my astrology practice: a deep, penetrating eye who can carry a torch through your dark spaces, whether they just be hidden or a period of confusion and grief. In paran to the fixed star Alcyone of the Pleiades, stars of sight and prophecy— I can pinpoint sharp insights and visions that remind you that underworld excavations are marvelous places of creativity, magic and rich fodder for your next project.
My Mercury reminds you that sometimes, death or loss is the burden we must bear for new life.8 But by letting go and letting god we let something we didn't expect to shine through and be born.
My books are currently open for February. **Today is the last day to get 15% off your next consult using the code “fishy”. ** I offer natal and predictive readings, as well as fixed star parans and creative praxis muse readings.
For now, I offer you this. Like many, I have been angered and saddened by the media’s current coverage of trans health care while ignoring the very real consequences of their concern trolling while anti-trans legislation is getting passed left and right. If you want to pull apart the stupefying “just asking questions” landscape the media has currently conjured around trans youth, please, please check out this Left Anchor podcast episode. The hosts interview Michale Hobbes and Evan Urquhart about the history of trans healthcare and how the current media, particularly the New York Times, have created a moral panic that obfuscates the truth. Listen below:
Until next week my loves,
Chloe
Manilius, book 5, Astronomica, 1st century AD, p.327
Juan Eduard Cirlot, “A Dictionary of Symbols,” p. 565
Robert Graves, “The Greek Myths,” p. 121
ibid, p. 121
Corita Kent, “Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit,” p. 105
who is not just a fellow Mercury in Scorpio but has hers at the exact same degree as mine (!!)
Clarice Lispector, “Agua Viva,” p. 23
Ari Felix’s latest newsletter has some hearty wisdom on this topic.