Mercury and the Alchemy of Dissolution

There’s always some form of alchemy taking place in the sky: the planets churning our reality into form through the elements they rule over.

Jupiter: Ether

Saturn: Air

Mars: Fire

Venus: Water

Mercury: Earth

As these five elemental planets move through the zodiac they bring the karma they carry (through their associated element) to different areas of life. A sadness in the heart could be Saturn bringing air (and its concomitant separation) into your 4th house, which rules over the heart and emotions. A sudden desire to improve your diet and finances could be triggered by Jupiter bringing a spaciousness (through the element ether) into that area of life, so that everything can take its proper place.

It can be helpful to see our own desires as connected to these larger forces which are constantly shifting beneath our feet, and often below our awareness.

Mercury—the planet governing over the element of earth (stability, fixity, form and weight) is currently debilitated in Pisces, meaning that its qualities and somehow less accessible to us. This is because Mercury, being the ruler of Virgo, likes organization, rules and boundaries. It is the garden of the zodiac, where nature meets culture and something grows. But this growth requires careful tending, a certain amount of organization and rule-following. In Pisces, this meticulous Mercury is thrown into the ocean. All rules dissolve and are consumed by the maw of the mother waters.

In alchemy the name for this process is the solutio. It is purification by water, requiring surrender to forces larger than oneself, letting go of structure, coming apart. it is a bit like the process of making clay, which will eventually be made into a form which can hold something. If you’ve ever witnessed the way that clay is made from the beginning, you know that the earth must first be completely saturated. It be agitated in a pool of water for some days, then is scooped out and sifted through to remove any debris. This is, undoubtedly, not the most comfortable process for the earth itself, which dissolves into the water.

The solutio is the transformation of matter. Of what matters. And its hallmark is a feeling of disorientation. it is really a diffusion of energy for the purposes of reorganization—like the clay pot that might come out of the chaos of dissolution. This disorientation could be experienced right now in anything related to Mercury’s significations and also his house placement in your natal chart. This could mean that finances become overwhelming, communication is suddenly difficult (you can’t quite find the right words) or you suddenly feel like a child. But one very important signification of Mercury is the rational mind. Mercury loves to think in black and white, because he wants to keep things clean and separated. But Pisces threatens to dissolve that false rational structure, sinking him into the buoyant and terrifying reality of gray.

We may all get a taste of this right now. Mercury is in Pisces (with a brief retrograde into Aquarius) until May 2. Given that the planets work on a primarily subconscious level—carrying karma that we generally see only after it’s been put into action—it makes much more sense to align yourself with the desire of the planet than to resist. Resistance, in this case, would look like desperately clinging to the thought patterns which feel somehow safe but are ignoring some oceanic aspect of reality (the gray space between your black and white assumptions). Aligning with this aspect of the energy in the sky—the alchemy of the cosmos—would look like spending some time evaluating your own thoughts in various areas of life, attempting to see them objectively and considering what pattern they might keep you trapped in. Where are your blind spots? What fertility might lie in the unconsidered spaces between the ‘either-or’ which we are all so conditioned to operate inside of?

There might be an entire ocean of possibility foaming beneath the mental structure you’ve created.