Mercury, as a type, is a symbol of philosophers, priests and wizards. That he is a priest we see in his role as guide to the underworld. In fact the entirety of Christianity and “Western philosophy” —as sophistry, in its common “spiritual” non-Nietzschean form— might also be termed “Mercurial.”
Many salient Christian writers [1] from late antiquity through the Renaissance, considered Hermes Trismegistus or Hermes “The Thrice Greatest,” a synonym of the Roman God Mercury, to have been a wise pagan prophet. Frequently they understood him as the Prophet Moses himself. Perhaps the first to identify Hermes Trismegistus with Hermes was the Egyptian Jew Artapanus of Alexandria, sometime in the third or second century B.C. His contention was likewise that Thoth-Hermes were the same person.[2]
Here, remarkably, these Christian writers believed that a Prisca Theologia, or a single true theology, had been passed to them through a line of…
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Alchemical Virgo 