When Skippy was a Warrior - all fierce & fine in his Militaria & Combat gris-gris - he wore on his Dress Greens the small brass Caduceus of the Medical Corps. Skippy was highly trained & would trache you on a whim. It was actually the American Military who made the Caduceus the standard sigil of Medicos by mistaking the Caduceus Hermetica for the Staff of the Greek healer god Asclepius. The 2 have nothing to do with each other except that they both use a staff or a wand and the figure of a snake or snakes. Asclepius is not Hermes and he has nothing to do with theft, commerce, deception, or the erect male phallus. God loves fools and he used to like Amerikans so we'll just chalk this confusion up to powerful mind altering drugs because this is about the only connection between Hermes, Asclepius, and Skippy. Caduceus is from the Greek "kerukeion" which means "Herald's Wand," from "kerux" or "Herald." A Herald is a Messenger, a bearer of News. Angels are Heralds. So are Town Criers. In the most Esoteric sense, all signs, symbols, sigils, & words are Heralds. They are Bearers of Meaning. The Caduceus is the Wand of Hermes, Thoth, Mercury, Merlin, Yoda, and all figures of Inspiration, Magic, Conception, & Hidden Truths. When the Holy Ghost impregnates the Virgin Mary with the Logos Spermatikos - the Word - he is the Herald of the Gods: Caduceus Hermetica. When Thoth tells Isis and her Cabana Boy Osiris about Sex & the Seed and how that equals Corn, he is in the guise of the Caduceus which Reveals.
As symbols the Caduceus is composed of : a Central Rod, Shaft, Tree, or Wand. Two Snakes of Dialectic Opposition & just bursting with Mirror-Image Attributions & Correspondences. Depending on the Milieu & the Myth the Snakes are either Fighting, Fucking, or Balancing each other. They wind up the Vertical Rod in anywhere from 2 to 7 Conjunctios or Levels where Transformations can happen. Surmounting the Rod/Tree is a Ball, an Orb, a Sun, or a Bird - like an Eagle or a Hawk. Some kind of `top of the food-chain muthafuka.' Most often the Rod has burst into Wings, or sometimes Flames. As a Symbol it is ripe with antitheticals - the most powerful of all conceptual conjunctions: Up/Down, Bird/Snake, Right/Left, Dark/Light, Line/Curve, Male/Female, Matter/Spirit, blah, blah, blah. The Symbol is a "natural" for many reasons as you shall see, but first because it is such a rich blend of the Opposites which compose Reality. So, even before we grasp its meanings, we are attracted to the Symmetry of its Forms and Elements. Monkey minds love Symmetry. It speaks of Design and Intention. Things with Symmetry can usually move and thus grab our attention by they way they shatter the fractal noise of the static background and the frame. Asymmetric Clouds Violate that Ontology and that's why we are drawn to infer some iota of meaning from their dancings. The Caduceus speaks to us Standing Still - except for the inferred progression of the Snakes. Things which Rise are very, very, Salient to Monkeys whose minds have been shaped by the dangers and the safeties of the Trees.
The earliest use of the word Herm was not to describe a god but to describe a Pile of Stones. The Greeks, living on the rockiest ground on Earth, would Mark Boundaries by a Pile of Stones. Farmers usually do this unconsciously when they clear their acres of rocks and stones. So a Herm is a Boundary Marker. It's a Claim on Territory. Primate Researchers and Ethologists like Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt have long noted that Monkeys in the Wild use a Stiff Dick for more than just fucking monkeys. Males will Display an erect penis whenever they wish to warn off other males that some thing or some space is taken. Hands off! A troop of Monkeys out foraging for food or females will send out LURPs with Stiff Dicks to scout the perimeters and Claim Space. Carl Sagan described how males in a troop will ritualistically display to each other an erect phallus and then `Mount' each other from the rear, not as a Sex Signal but as a Social Signal. It means: I mount you. I am dominant. In this way the pecking order is ratified. There is no penetration so the act has been displaced and sublimated. Higher Monkeys do the same thing. When members of Kenny La Roche meet for Spuds & Bacon before a mission they greet each other with: Hey Cocksucker! And, Fuck You! Here is everything you need to know about Metaphor: The Human Body - and all of its Parts and Processes is the Font for both Vehicles and Tenors. The more Salient the Part, the more it is used in Metaphor. The cosmos is dripping in cock and pussy significations. Anything standing up or standing out will always ring the Phallus Bell in our Minds. When Skippy just gets near a Lake, or a Pond, or a Mud Hole in the ground he gets very Hot and very Bothered. Something's pending but unresolved - and it's like stopping in the middle of a fuck. It's as if something is crying out for `Meaning.' The Greeks marked their fields as well as their city squares with Herms. Tall columns or blocks of stone surmounted by a head and with no other feature except a Stiff Dick and Engorged Testicles. Stiff as a Stag as the frogs say. Bandé comme un cerf! Over time the Pile of Stones had morphed into the Herm. Later, Christians or Muslims would chip off the Dicks because in their minds such Markers were Obscenities. The first wave of Islam did the same thing in Egypt where they chopped off the Swollen Dick of the god Min - who was the "Discriminator" of Sacred Temple Space.
"It is indeed needed that at the End of this World, Heaven and Earth should meet and come home."
from: Splendor Solis of Solomon Trismosin
The Greek god Hermes was a Type of the Egyptian god Thoth. Mercury is the Roman Type of Hermes/Thoth. Nearly everything you can say about Hermes is true of Thoth, and likewise Mercury is the Mirror of Hermes. The Christian Personage of the 3rd Person of the Trinity - the Holy Ghost - is also a Version of this Sippe but you have to hunt a bit to find Stiff-Dicked Doves. Only a bit. Thoth invented Writing and Agriculture as well as Alchemy. He is the Herald who informed Isis and Osiris about the Secret of the Seed and it's Shadow: the Secret of Sex. Thoth has a Snake form in the Sumerian/Semitic/Christian Garden of Eden story. The Greeks refer to the character in their creation myth as "Snake Virgins in the Garden of God." All of these figures are Heralds and Revealers. They spill god's secrets and for a price, they will tell those secrets to the Monkeys. The Art of Letters - to the Ancients - was the Crown of the Intellect. So Thoth/Hermes are the Fallen Angels - the Anshe Shem - who teach this Demonic skill to men. Every Mythosphere of every Culture has a Merlin/Mercury figure. Their purpose is to inform and transform the Mind itself so they tend to be extremely Numinous. They are characters in the stories which we are drawn to immediately, because we know them already. Jung's Archetypes. Pascal Boyer's Ontology Agents. They are catalysts in Alchemy and Chemistry. Quicksilver to both Dissolve and Absolve. Merlin is the real Point of the Arthurian Myths - not the Missing Grail. That Vessel is just a Type of Merlin. In Babylon the Snake is the Herald and the Spirit of the Earth Mother - the Virgin Bitch the Greeks called Gaia and Maia. The Snake/Hermes is the Mind of Nature. The Mind of God. So it knows all the Secrets and knows where All the Bodys are Buried. In myth, a creature like this is always a Duality: Knowledge cuts both ways. So the Mercurial Herm is a "light-bringer" and therefore a Lucifer. Merlin is the Old Dragon in a form which Arthurian Mentalities can apprehend. The Wizard with gifts who speaks with a forked tongue. Thoth is the Change Agent who will Repair the Shattered World when he returns the Stolen Eye of Horus to the Hawk-Headed god at the end of time. Odin too will get his eye back - he too gave it up for Gnosis. Hidden Secrets. Like how plowing a woman is just like plowing a field and why therefore the 2 will depend on each other in the ceremonies and rituals. Thoth/Hermes/Mercury/Merlin in Semiotic Terms are the Innenwelt of the Umwelt within which the monkey lives and dies. They embody everything you need to know to know everything you need to know, ad infinitum. They are Silver-Tongued and can sing or charm you into anything. If you needed a vessel to hold all the knowledge in the cosmos you would call that vessel Hermes - or the Holy Spirit. They come to the same. If you needed a way of grasping this gnosis you would come to Analogy and Allegory. You would come to Metaphor - or at least a stage in Metaphor. Northrup Frye says it's 2nd Stage Thinking. This for That. This is That. And This is sure Like That. Ergo . . . Thoth's gift to Man is Measurement and the terms with which we Measure. Which are wildly Bodily Terms. Merlin is the Garden and he wants the Garden to know that. So he sings to the Garden in vessels the Garden can understand. In terms of itself. Hermes, as a Boundary Marker, stakes out the Universe. Markers limit and define. They make Claims about Separated Identities. Secret Shit for Monkeys leaving the Garden. No wonder we all have a Hardon.
Naturally, we get the word Hermeneutics from Hermes. The Science of Hermeneutics is the art of Divining Hidden Meanings. Big School tells us to call this entity: Interpretation. If the Cosmos is, at base, a Code - and both Hermes and Skippy insist it is - than Interpretation is Reading the Universe. How deeply we read or which Version we read depends on our preparedness and our Access to Tools. An Alphabet can capture more features of Reality than Smoke Signals or even Ideograms. Every Tool, in its Hermeneutic aspect is a Form of Cunning. Having a Decimal system makes Infinities Possible. Having a Zero in your Number System makes Nihilism Probable. Cunning comes from the Indo-Euro root: gno. That little shithead gives Western Languages a Thousand words revolving around: to Know. Cunning does not come from Cunt - whose root is: ku. The AHD says this about that root: "Hypothetical base of a variety of conceivable related Germanic words meaning `a hollow space or place, an enclosing object . . ." We get words like: cove, cubby, coop, cower, and cunt from ku. Skippy bets that all you Synesthetes & High-Fuctional Autistics, went from "cunning" to "cunt" in a micromoment. God knows what the word tastes like or what colors it brings with it, but Skippy just Knows that they will have a Symmetry across Sensory Modalities. That's the Really Big Secret which Thoth and Hermes tell the Monkey - once the Monkey has developed the Ontologies to Grasp the Message and the Meaning. The Secret is so Big, so Final, so Allish, that it gives the Archangels Stiff Dicks and scatters them to their Posts to Mark the Boundaries and keep out the Tourists while they watch for the One. The Secret is so Profound that it has been carved on the Emerald Eye of Satan himself. The Secret is so Fecund that the Same Emerald, as it fell into Matter after Michael knocks it out of Lucifer's head, twists in the gravity of things coming from energy into being and transforms itself into the Holy Grail. Wherever that Stone plunges into Earth is Sacred Space. Our Ancients used to Mark these places with giant standing stones. Dolmens and Menhirs the Etics call them. The Emics who put them up called them the Sperm Dick of God. They were agriculturalists who had successfully internalized the Secret of the Seed and the Mana/Chi of such Seeds. Merlin knows all the Charms of Making. Merlin is the Embodiment of what the Belly knows about the Earth and vice versa. He proceeds from the Mother. Kikidom inverts that so that the Holy Spirt proceeds from the Father. Irony of Ironies. It was learning the Secret of the Seed which changed the Monkey's mind about the Gender. There's a Price to Pay for Secrets.
If you tell another Monkey that the Secret of the Universe is that What is Above is What is Below. He will likely hold out for more. Or Worse: he will want to know what the fuck that means? So don't tell him. Instead get all Etic on his Ass! Tell him that Joe Henderson, in his book: Transformations of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of the Spendor Solis, said of Jung: "He reasoned that the Alchemists, while trying to understand the unknown in Matter, would project onto Matter the Images and Categories of the Unconscious." Tell him that Thoth/Herme's Alchemy reveals more about the Mind than it does about the Nature of Metals. Tell the Peckerwood that Fascination - as depicted in the Bacchanal - stems from the Innenwelt seeing itself in the Umwelt. Then tell him to Fuck off! And show him your Stiff Staff of Life, your Spear of Destiny.
Click on the Caduceus to the right and watch a Slide Show of Stolen Images of Baphomet - one of the Avatars of Hermes/Mercury/Satan and the bane of the Knights Templar.
Hermes is the god of Thieves. As a god, the 1st act of the Just-Born, Hermes was to Steal the Cattle of the Sun-god Apollo. Hermes was born to Maia the Earth Mother on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. In the Homeric Myth, Maia is referred to as "the Ancient One" and "one of the Pleiades taking refuge in a Cave of Arcadia." Caves, Coves, and Cubby Cunnies are Types of Winter, Wombs, and the Old Dragon which every season swallows the Sun. Being born from a Cave is a Solstice Sign of the Resurrection of the Divine Child who is the "New Year." There are so many Correspondences between Christ and Hermes and also Satan and Hermes that Christians have traditionally responded with a "grotesque fascination" to the many images which combine these "personalities." The key to this "fascination" is Hermes/Thoth/Merlin's role as the Guardian and Revealer of Secrets. Always the "unknown" is tinged with danger and delight. Such inferences always lead to the Devil. When Skippy was hawking Mythology at the Great University which employed him he would watch with his own delight how horrified his Kiki students would be when it was argued that Lucifer/Satan was the Older Brother of Jesus Horatio Christ. The Tail of the Dragon, he would pontificate, is called Satanael, while the Head is called the Christ or Pendragon. Uther Pendragon ["Dragon's Head"] is the father of the "One" - Arthur - who had been conceived thru the "magic" of Merlin - the Holy Fucking Ghost. When the Head Swallows the Tail in a Spiritual Type of Autofellatic Frenzy then the Mind is Asleep in its Solis Splendor and the Unconscious still rules. Only when the Uroboric spits out its own Tail is Sin born, and with Sin, comes Consciousness. Recognition of the Other and therefore the Separation of the Self. I am Not That, says Hermes, the new Mind. But I must become That again. So Hermes and Merlin are the Guides for the Transformations of the Soul. The Greek term is Psychopomp. The Image underneath this is of a Statue found in the caked ruins of Pompeii - a city which had been a hub of the Isis Mystery Cult. The Isis "faith" was the chief rival of early Christianity. It was an Allomorphic Explanation of the "Mysteries" of life and death. Of Conception and the Secret of the Seed. It was "in your face" Phallic and also deliciously Cunnilinguic in its Icons and Images. Christians were appalled at its blatant sexuality. The Isis Cult was secretive and aimed at the Upper Classes of Roman Society - especially the Officer Class of the Roman Army - the same Knights who had brought the Cult to Rome from the far east corners of the Pagan World. Kikidom - the Christians - were Open & Chatty about their new Faith, and they aimed themselves at the Great Unwashed Masses of the Poor. Skippy says there are only 3 Rules in all of Reality: 1. Don't get Tattooed - be careful of what you Believe. 2. Always Bet on the Teeming Masses - numbers are closer to reality than myths. 3. There are no other Rules. Skippy loved to piss his little darlings off by emphasizing - again and again - that Rule 3 is far more important and far more Powerful than the other 2.
Hermes had a Son with the goat nymph Amaltheia.. They named him Pan. Over time Pan morphed into the Kiki Demon Satan. All gods of Nature became Demons in the Christian Pantheon. But Pan too was known as "The Good Shepherd" - though others point out that Pan "loved" his Sheep too much. There is a myth, celebrated in Poetry [another child of Hermes/Apollo/Pan] that at the exact moment that Christ went Kenotic on his Cross at Golgatha - that is, when he bowed his head and "gave up the Ghost." That at that moment a voice was heard all across the known world and everyone heard the voice in his own tongue. "Pan is Dead!" The Big Voice said. "The Great God Pan is Dead!"
Click on the Caduceus to the right for a Slide Show on Mercury/Pan/Hermes. WARNING! There is a Shocking Truth about the Hermes Nexus included. You may be offended. Cauté.
Deus Sive Natura. God or Nature. That was Spinoza's dictum. He said that God and Nature were One. Pan gives us his name for his faith: Pantheism. Spinoza was a stripe of Pantheist but not an Orthodox Pantheist. Monkeys today have been reattracted to Pantheism in all of its stripes. The Green Movement could just as easily be hawked by the Jesuits as the Return of the Holy Spirit - which it is. Shekhina yearns for the Heavenly Nuptials which bring the Above and the Below together in a Sacred Marriage. A recombination where "Heaven and Earth can Come Home." When god and his Attributes fuck - its because Change is coming in the way we see Reality. The gods themselves are morphing into new forms. The Same Ontologies, "mind you", but repackaged for the Times.
Skippy and the Captain are getting ready to Split for Paris. They're going to meet Pooler Jones at the Stained Glass window of the Mystique Pressoir in the interior Ambulatory of St Étienne-du-Mont. Then they're off to Mont St. Michel to hook up with Barber Perfect for a few days. Barber's got a neat story of the Spear of Destiny - the Spear of the Roman Soldier Longinus which he used to Pierce the side of the Crucified Christ. Out of that 5th Mystic Wound a stream of Water and Blood spilled out into the Basin of Golgatha. Barber said that the Spear had been kept at Mont St. Michel because of it's association with the Spear of the Archangel Michael who will use it to Pin the Old Dragon to the Earth at the end of our times. Barber talked Himmler into an Ahnenerbe Expedition led by SS Oberführer Hans Widerhaken von Vollendette. Himmler called Widerhaken Murmur and both men thought they were so clever the way they had extended the Theory of Correspondences into their Domain. Skippy brought the little round Vitrail to the left back with him from Chartres where the original is set into the Cathedral Notre-Dame de Chartres. It shows Michael the Archangel - who is the Judeo-Christian Type of Hermes/Mercury/Merlin weighing the Souls of the Dead at their Judgment over which Michael will preside. That's Satan waiting for his Cut. Notice how the Balance Beam is actually the Mercurial Dick of the Devil. Anyone who thinks that the Christian Image is Accidental does not understand the Medieval Mind of the Monkey and its reliance on Allegory and Typology to Organize the contents of a Cult. Medieval Cathedrals are covered with "Obscenities" which hide in plain site but which were clear and salient to the serfs and farmers who made up their audience.
Click on the Balance Beam Image right 4 times and grok the unders. Watch how the same Image gets rewoven. The Blanks change with the "Race, Place, et Milieu" - but the Ontology Abides. Our Categories - if rightly apprehended - are Products of the Monkey's Evolution up and out of the Garden towards kinds of Consciousness. Categories Separate Us and Everything. But then that's the point. Hermes is here to bring it all together.
The Name Hermes is Greek and means "a Pile of Stones." The piles were used to Mark the Way and later to Guard Sacred Space. It was the habit of Passersby to Add a Stone to the Pile as an offering and as a Prayer. Stop and recall how many Forms have arisen from that Pile of Stones. The gods are never finished until you think your way outside of them. Even then they hang around as Skeuomorphs & Decorations. Or kicked Upstairs as Logarithms.
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