Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Return of Mercurius: A Modern Alchemy Treatment of the Rosarium Philosophorum

The Return of Mercurius: A Modern Alchemy Treatment of the Rosarium Philosophorum

Selvaggio, Ben

Paperback

Metaphysical GeneralOccultSpeculation

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798171056278
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.51
Height: 0.39 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
For nearly a century, readers of C.G. Jung's landmark Psychology of the Transference have worked with half a book. Jung took the first ten of the Rosarium Philosophorum's twenty woodcuts - the great alchemical sequence of 1550 - and built from them one of the most influential psychological readings of the twentieth century. He said almost nothing about the ten that follow.

The Return of Mercurius completes what Jung began.

This is the first sustained, chapter-by-chapter treatment of all twenty woodcuts as a single continuous operation - two cycles of seven, framed by an opening triad and a closing triad - rather than a finished first half and a neglected second. Where Jung stopped at the white stone, this book shows why the tradition itself insists that stone was never the end: unfinished, floating, abstract, requiring a second, harder passage before the work is complete.

Each of the twenty chapters follows the same rigorous method - a plain reading of what the woodcut actually depicts, a grounded interpretation, its place within the alchemical doctrine of Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt, and a clear-eyed account of what each stage tends to feel like from inside a genuine passage through it. The book stays close to the images and the accompanying Latin verses throughout, arguing openly with the commentators who came before - Jung, von Franz, Edinger, Fabricius - while drawing on primary and archival sources rarely brought into a single accessible treatment: Paracelsus, Jabir ibn Hayyan, the Rosicrucian manifestos, Michael Maier, Heinrich Khunrath, and the Rosarium's own 1550 printing history, including physical evidence of the censorship its images once faced.

At the center of this book is an argument that reframes the entire sequence: the figure who rises in the final woodcut, wounded, bearing a banner above an open tomb, is not Christ. He never was. Every one of the preceding nineteen images already shows this same figure at work - the water of the fountain, the go-between dove, the bath, the twin tombs, the cloud that carries the soul up and down, the vitriol of the green lion. He is Mercurius, present since the first fountain poured its three streams into a basin with no visible source, wearing a costume history required of him before he could be recognized as anything but heresy. This book removes that costume, not to reject the tradition that wore it, but to name plainly what it was always protecting.

Structured in four parts - the establishment of the prima materia, the first lunar cycle of conscious union and unconscious death, the harder solar cycle of chosen sacrifice, and the final return - The Return of Mercurius traces a psychological sequence with genuine developmental logic: the naive overreach of a first encounter, the grief that follows total union, the boredom that ends more inner work than any crisis does, the loneliest stage in the entire sequence - asking only a single sustained choice with no evidence offered in return - and the settled, hard-won recognition that whatever has carried a person through transformation was never, even at its darkest, actually absent.

This is a work of genuine scholarship - complete with a full historical prologue tracing alchemy from Hellenistic Egypt through the Arabic transmission to Paracelsus and beyond, a glossary, a plates list, a full bibliography, and a cross-referenced index - written to be read by the newcomer and the serious practitioner alike. It does not require prior familiarity with alchemy, Jungian psychology, or Latin. It asks only patience with images that reward being looked at slowly, and honesty about what they still have to say.

The garden was never a metaphor for something else. It was always the thing itself, still growing.

Mercury in you, the hope of glory.

Also from

Selvaggio, Ben

View All

Also in

Metaphysical General

View All