Next week the planet Mercury will do an unusual thing that it does only once every 33 years in May. It’s called a “transit” and it happens when Mercury so lines up with the Earth and the Sun that it seems to move straight across the face of the Sun. To get ready for this, I want to talk about some of the ancient mystery wisdom associated with Mercury.
Mercury is the smallest and fastest planet in our system, and as the closest one to the Sun, it was known in ancient times as the messenger of the gods, and as the trickster! Its swift passage around the Sun also earned Mercury the role as the escort for souls passing between the worlds of life and death.
Now these ideas about Mercury didn’t just pop up out of some wild imagination of ancient star gazers, they were developed over centuries of study and striving to understand the “universal language of nature.” For the ancients, the ability to read the book of nature and to figure out the force behind every form and pattern was to come into the contact with the divine.
This kind of knowledge was reserved for the initiated and included figuring out the patterns made by the “wandering stars” our planets, because it was believed that these patterns were the handiwork of the gods. To understand and read these patterns meant to find to the answers to the greatest of cosmic mysteries.
So let’s consider the motion of Mercury. Mercury moves three times as fast as the Earth and if we trace its path each year, it seems like Mercury circles around the Sun making three forward and three backward loops.
For the ancients, this motion described a sacred and discernible geometric form that they believed had been left for them by the gods ~ kind of like a clue left to help human beings find their way to a greater harmony, especially when they could no longer see the divine in nature.
Mercury just started a retrograde loop and will meet the Sun in conjunction next Monday. So we’ll talk about it more then.