Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system, closest to the sun, taking a magical 88 days for a year. It travels fast but spins slowly – a day being 1.5 times as long as a year – with a quirky, egg-shaped orbit.

Small with a big character. That kind of sums up mythical Hermes (Mercury) who, on the first day of his life, invents music, fire and ritual, steals Apollo's cattle and snuggles back into his blanket like nothing happened.

To get in touch with this endlessly paradoxical being we begin with his Orphic Hymn: an invocation of the god. Only, of course, there isn't one hymn but two. Already he has found a way to 'twin' himself. The first hymn gives us a sense of his role as messenger – his 'day job' – the second as psychopomp: guide of souls who assists us through the many deaths of our lives.

That's the thing about Hermes/Mercury. We meet him at the threshold. Even astrologically he is the third in a set of three. He revises where we've been and sets us up for where we're going next.

Of course, being an episode about words themselves, there had to be some poetry involved. Dylan Thomas takes us in with On the Words in Poetry – essentially a love song dedicated to the magic of words themselves. And then, to close us out, a poem called, if this isn't too on the nose, Magic Words.

References

• Homeric Hymn to Hermes — Theoi Classical Texts Library
• Orphic Hymns — Apostolos N. Athanassakis & Benjamin M. Wolkow, The Orphic Hymns — Johns Hopkins University Press
• The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart — Robert Bly, James Hillman & Michael Meade — Open Library
• Dylan Thomas — “On the Words in Poetry” — from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
• “Magic Words” — from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
• Tim Minchin — “Prejudice” — YouTube
• Tim Minchin — “If You Open Your Mind Too Much Your Brain Will Fall Out” — Tim Minchin
• Sigmund Freud / “Freudian slip” — APA Dictionary of Psychology
• Arnold Mindell — “Discovering the World in the Individual: The World Channel in Psychotherapy” — Process Work
• Hermes — Theoi Greek Mythology — Hermes
• Hermes, the herma, fire, lyre and psychopomp — Theoi: Hermes

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