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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Podcast Musician: Marlia Coeur
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Today I’m joined by mentor, guide and friend of the podcast, Brian Clark.

It’s time to enter the world of Hermes, guide of souls, the one we meet on the road who can lead us away from home and lead us back when the time is right.

We begin our discussion by talking about mythological Hermes, tracing his origins back to Mycenaean culture where he was known as the ‘herma’ – a pile of rocks that we still have in our language today as the ‘milestone’.

Brian and I discuss moments in our lives, of which there are far more than we could possibly mention, of when we had a plan and Hermes had an alternative. Once off the track of what we thought might happen we are in the hands of Hermes or Mercury and on the pathless path where the mystery, unmistakably, is unfolding at our feet.

From here we go into the more technical realm of Mercury the planet. The numbers that are associated with his relationship to the sun, including Pi – that endless rambling number that seems random but follows an invisible order. And we suggest some ways to work with Mercury and its cycles in order to follow its intrinsic patterns, tend to the mind and thread together ideas so that they might become fruitful projects over time.

I decided to leave the conversation unedited. The moments of wrestling with an idea, or getting things wrong, or taking the apparently wrong path, seem an important part of the contemplation of Hermes Mercurius. Without that tension, that wrestling match, that confusion, those strange crossroads, we’re unlikely to receive that little bag of gold that Hermes holds in his hand, the one that isn’t holding the Caduceus.

Resources Mentioned

Books & Texts

• Lewis Hyde — Trickster Makes This World
• Homer — The Iliad
• Homer — The Odyssey
• Homeric Hymn to Hermes

Authors & Thinkers

• David Abram
• Dane Rudhyar

Mythological References

• Hermes / Mercury
• Perseus and Medusa
• Kairos
• Prometheus and Epimetheus
• Metis
• Mnemosyne
• Snow White / Sleeping Beauty

Astrology & Astronomy

• Mercury's Promethean and Epimethean phases
• Mercury's retrograde cycles
• Mercury's inferior and superior conjunctions
• Mercury's greatest elongation
• The ~116-day Mercury cycle
• The relationship between Mercury's cycles, 22/7, and π

Astrosynthesis

• Brian Clark & Glennys Lawton — Astrosynthesis

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Podcast Musician: Marlia Coeur
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Spyros Siamos is an energy healer, esoteric author, and former mathematics teacher based in Messinia, Greece. He lives on a coastal olive grove situated near an ancient Temple of Apollo, where he conducts one-on-one healing sessions and hosts sound therapy, meditation, and spiritual workshops.

A father of two and author of three books on esotericism, Spyros has explored various healing modalities and trained in Peruvian Shamanism for over ten years. He recently established Esothen Messinia—a dedicated space created to host accessible, low-budget creative and spiritual holidays, as well as affordable retreats in Greece.

English is not Spyros' first language. Many of the concepts we touch on in this episode are ones that he wishes he could wax poetic on in his mother tongue. Never the less, this apparent limitation gives us, the listener, the opportunity to, like Apollo, allow ourselves to be engaged in the struggle of birthing the light.

We begin with Spyros' childhood. His father taught primary and encouraged his interest in the ancient myths of his culture that were taught in early education. Spyros experienced myth as a way of tapping into the threads of history.

Once in high school, myth was no longer taught. He replaced mythology with philosophy as that's what was considered to be the sensible thing to learn. To put away childish things.

Then, through his exploration of the interior landscapes with a Peruvian Shaman, in the depth of his own consciousness, the mythic figures he'd learned about in early education returned as guides. First Athena, Aphrodite, Dionysus and others. And after a few years, Apollo.

It was this first hand experience with the gods that I wanted to connect to On the Soul's Terms. Apollo (or the astrological Sun) not just as a concept that we can form opinions on and argue on the costs and benefits of such a god, but as an emergent, embodied, felt sense experience that is personified in Ancient Greek culture as the deity of light, harmony, balance and a clarifying light at the centre of it all.

Later in the episode we touch on how and where Apollo has shown up in Spyros' healing work. Including the first time, when he was in the position of healer for a young man who had gone into a coma following a motorcycle accident. Here the god helped him to stay in a state of observation whilst the pain, suffering and emotion swirled all around him.

We talk about the cultivation of the mind necessary to be in right relationship with such potent energy fields. And the risk, that Spyros himself has suffered personally, of having one's system blown open when that light is unmediated.

Which draws us to the field of the Muses or the Angels or the Daimones. Whatever one might call that layers of consciousness that is neither this nor that, both... and. And how they can help us to create from a steady hearth rather than from bright sparks that leave us singed in the end.

Spyros will be hosting a retreat for men in Greece in October. I'll be personally attending. For more information on that click here.

The episode artwork is from the West Pediment in the museum in Olympia. We discuss the scene in the episode – The Centaurs vs the Lapiths. Apollo stands in the centre of a chaotic battle between consciousness and instinct. Victory, in this sense, is not a case of overpowering the instinct, but of locating the light whilst being open to it all.

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Podcast Musician: Marlia Coeur
Please consider becoming a Patron to support the show!
Go to OnTheSoulsTerms.com for more.