August 20, 2026 • 55 mins
In this series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe turn their attention to the innermost hellworld of our solar system: Mercury. Join them as they discuss the planetary science, exploration history, mythology and sci-fi of Earth’s smallest sibling.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 4 (00:17):
And today on the podcast, we're going to begin a
series of episodes talking about the planet Mercury, which I
recently realized has received very little love from us. Over
the years, We've done a bunch of episodes, particularly on
the moons of the big planets. We did a good
series on the moons of Jupiter, We've done plenty of
(00:38):
stuff on Mars, on Venus, more on the moons of Saturn,
but I think almost nothing about Mercury. So today we're
going to change that.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, the closest we've really come to any kind of
like dedicated Mercury analysis was a single episode that we
did on why Mercury and Venus have no moons? Like basically,
we were rounding out our coverage of the Solar System
Them's moons by talking about a couple of planets that
don't have moons and why that is the case.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I remember we talked a lot in that episode about
past false sightings of moons going around Venus and Mercury,
that where we now know today there actually are no
such moons, at least currently. But you know, in the past,
people have thought like, oh, yeah, Venus has a moon,
here's you know what it's like, or oh yeah, here's
something we think we see going around Mercury.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
But that turned out.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
I think there was one sighting of like light around
Mercury that just turned out to be stars I believe,
in the background, as opposed to something actually in orbit
around the planet. But anyway, I got interested in talking
about Mercury today sort of in a roundabout way. First,
I was just looking at a particular surface feature of
Mercury that we're going to come back and focus on,
(01:49):
I believe in part two of the series that has
been called the Giant Spider of Mercury. So that's in
store for you listeners in the future. But another way
I was thinking about it was that of all the
planets in the Solar System, Mercury is really the one
that seems to exist most within the blast zone of
(02:11):
the Sun. It's the one that it is, of course
the closest to the Sun, and so I always think
of it as a planet that is kind of bullied
or exists in a space of violence by this much more,
much larger and more powerful force. And now, of course
all the planets in the Solar System go around the Sun,
so you know, the Sun does dictate sort of the
(02:33):
plane of the Solar System, the gravitational movements of the
Solar System. But it's Mercury that feels like it's really
in there in the middle. It's like trapped with the
beast in the cage.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, right up there,
the closest one to the campfire at the center of
our universe, the most hellish of the hell worlds.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Yeah, well that's arguable something It might say Venus as words.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Venus is Venus Man is worse, but it is closest
to the fire, and that doesn't mean that it's immune
from our sci fi visions about potentially going there colonizing it. Well,
we'll get into some more of that, I think maybe
the third episode in this series. But I do remember
(03:19):
as a kid reading a particular Isaac Asimov's story I
believe was run around. Yeah, that takes place on Mercury,
and so this was one of I think this was
one of my, if not my first fictional experience with
the planet.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
That was one of the laws of robotics stories where
it has that I forget the name of these two characters,
but they're you know, in the robot robopsychology stories you have,
is it Susan Calvin the main robopsychologist, and in some
of these stories is trying to investigate the conflicts between
the three main laws of robotics that are guiding robotic behavior.
(03:53):
But then other stories you get these two technicians whose
names I'm blanking on right now, but they're always trying
to troubleshoot problems and run around. There is a robot
that gets into a kind of loop on and its
behavior because I think it is stuck between the rule
that says it must carry out orders given to it
by humans versus the rule that says that it can't
(04:16):
bring harm to itself.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
And of course, you know, being out on.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
The surface of Mercury, there's a lot of harm you're
subject to. Yeah, as far as literary references go, I
think this is only loosely justified by our subject today.
Because the planet Mercury, as far as I could find,
is not mentioned in this poem. I thought maybe it was,
but it's not. But on my mind going into this
was the poem The Testimony of the Suns by the
(04:41):
American poet George Sterling.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Did you know this one?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Rob, If I had read about it, I had forgotten
it is that I know. This poet was much admired
by various authors, including some from the weird fiction era. Yeah,
but I am not super familiar with this work.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Now, there is a weird fiction sensibility in this poem.
So it's like an epic cosmic poem that feels like
the kind of poem that would be enjoyed by Conan
or something. You know, it's just very It's a very
muscly poem that frames its description of the sort of
(05:17):
evolution of the cosmos in terms of battle and war
and that kind of thing. So, just to read one
brief example to kind of give you a taste of it,
he is talking about, you know, stars and constellations, and
Sterling writes, quote all tear, what captains compass thee, what
foes aldebrah are thine?
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Read? With?
Speaker 4 (05:38):
What blood of war's divine glows? That immortal panoply? What
music from capella runs? How hold the Pleiades they're bond?
How storms the hidden War beyond Orion's dreadful Sword of Suns.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That's pretty heavy, pretty heavy.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
If somebody made a metal album out of this, I
really should. If they haven't, Yeah, yeah, deem We, their
enginery was not far in the dim eternal past. Deem
We Eternity at last will find their thunders unbegot.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So it goes on talking about a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Eventually it talks about kind of the search, the search
for other life in the cosmos. But I was thinking
about it again because of that idea of Mercury just
being within this inner space that's like the closest of
the planets to the Sun, in a space where where
it feels that dreadful sword of the star is kind
(06:33):
of reaching out upon it. And we'll talk about some
actual scientific ways that that that kind of sword of
the Sun can manifest.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
But anyway, that was on my mind making these notes.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, it's it's, you know, especially when we factor in
the Goldie Locks scenario. The you know, it's it's easy
to think of our Sun as kind of a brutal tyrant,
but a powerful and protective one in some respects. So
you don't want to be too close, you know, you
don't want your orbit to be too close, because then
(07:06):
you're perhaps susceptible to the worst of their rages. You
also don't want to be too far away from them,
because then you are further away from their graces. You
want to be where we are, which and there are
other factors as well that we've talked about, you know,
the relationships with the other members of the Great Royal
House here. But we're in just the right place. We're
(07:29):
not too far away, and we're not too close.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
We're close enough to still receive the gift packages they're
coming through, but we're not so close that we're getting
the full wrath when you know.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, and we have an ally or two in the
outer Court as well.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
So I thought we should start off with a basic
physical overview of Mercury, and then I think we're going
to talk about some mythological connections and dimensions as well
later in the episode. But to start with the basics.
Mercury is, as we've been saying, the innermost planet in.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
The Solar System. It's the closest to the Sun.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
It has a diameter of about forty nine hundred kilometers
or roughly three thousand miles, and that makes it also
the smallest planet in the Solar System, even smaller than Mars,
a bit bigger than Earth's moon. But despite the fact
that it is low in size and mass compared to
the other rocky planets, it is high in density. And
(08:24):
this is in part because it is mostly iron. Only
thirty percent of Earth's mass is iron, similar ratio for Venus.
Only about a quarter of Mars is iron, whereas something
like sixty to seventy percent of Mercury's entire planetary mass
is concentrated in its iron rich core. So as a result,
(08:48):
Mercury is a dense boy. Now, why so much iron
compared to the other rocky planets. That's a question we
can come back and revisit later. Now, as we mentioned earlier,
Mercury and Vas have no moons of their own. Interesting
question is why is that? As we said, you know,
we did a whole episode on this several years back
(09:09):
on the moonlessness of Venus and Mercury. But I'll try
to do a short version of the answer here, like
why no moon for Mercury. Now, in the case of Venus,
it's a somewhat different question because it seems there's nothing
in particular that prevents Venus from having a moon, and
in fact, it may have once had a moon that
(09:30):
it lost. There are papers discussing this as a hypothesis. Ultimately,
we don't know, you know, maybe it had one in
the past, but there's no strong reason that Venus couldn't
have a moon. The same is true of Mercury. There's
no reason it couldn't, but there are clear obstacles that
mitigate against Mercury's ability to hold onto a moon for
(09:51):
a long time to you know, have a moon for
billions of years. And those obstacles are rooted in two
facts about the planet, one that it is and two
that it is very close to the Sun. There's a
concept in astrophysics called a hill sphere. You can picture
this as the region of space around a planet in
(10:13):
which the planet's own gravity can maintain long term orbits
despite the influence of the host star. So this is
roughly the space in which it is possible for a
planet to maintain a moon. Now that doesn't mean that
anything within the space will definitely become a moon. The
(10:33):
ability to maintain the orbit depends on multiple factors, like
what kind of object, what kind of orbit, you know,
they're like prograde and retrograde orbits, and there are different
types of eccentricity in an orbit, so there are a
lot of factors involved, but generally, the estimates I've seen
are that long term stable orbits for normal moons need
(10:55):
to be in the inner part of the hill sphere.
This is sometimes expressed as roughly the inner half of
the hillsphere is kind of the safe zone.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
For normal moons.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
The size of a planet's hillsphere depends on the mass
of the planet, the mass of the star its orbiting,
and the planet's distance from the star. So because Earth
is larger and farther from the Sun, it has a
pretty comfortable hillsphere with a radius of about one and
a half million kilometers, and the Earth's moon is comfortably
(11:28):
inside the inner half of this at about three hundred
and eighty thousand kilometers away. Now, what about Mercury's hillsphere.
Mercury has a relatively eccentric orbit, so you can picture
the orbits of planets like Earth and Venus. They have
a much more circular orbit, you know, not perfectly circular,
(11:48):
but much closer to a perfect circle, whereas Mercury's orbit
is much more like an egg shape or an oval.
Its actual distance from the Star changes a lot over
the course of a murcat year, which by the way,
lasts about eighty eight earth days, so it's got a
very fast orbit around the Sun as well. The semi
major axis of Mercury's orbit is about zero point thirty
(12:11):
nine astronomical units, which means it's about thirty nine percent
of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In
raw numbers. The Earth is on average about one hundred
and fifty million kilometers from the Sun. Mercury is only
about fifty eight million kilometers away. And this means, and
this will be a theme that we return to throughout
(12:32):
the series, that while all of the planets in the
Solar System orbit the Sun, and thus they are all
sort of gravitationally ruled by the influence of the Sun,
and while they are all affected by things like solar
radiation and solar wind, Mercury is a planet that is
truly dominated by these factors. I would say Mercury is
(12:54):
dominated both energetically and gravitationally by the Sun beause Mercury
is relatively small, and because its orbit is so dominated
by the Sun's gravitation. It's hill sphere is also very small.
It's only a fraction of Earth's. So there's only this
relatively narrow radius in which an object could be trapped
(13:16):
in a stable orbit around Mercury without either being perturbed
by the Sun's gravity and like pulled out of orbit
or destroyed by being brought too close to the planet.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
So while it.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Would be it would not be impossible for Mercury to
have a stable moon, it would be difficult. There's just
not a big range for that to happen. As a
side note, I found this interesting as a point of
comparison while I was researching this. Even the dwarf planet Series,
which is about five times smaller than Mercury, has a
slightly bigger hill.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Sphere than Mercury does.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
And Series is basically just a big asteroid, Like It's
the biggest asteroid is big enough, you know, to have
been gravitationally rounded, but it's basically still just a big asteroid,
And it has a slightly larger realistic zone for the
parking of a moon than Mercury does. And I think
this just illustrates that distance from the Sun matters a lot.
(14:25):
So that's one example of how Mercury is gravitationally dominated
by the influence of the Sun, but I also mentioned
that it is energetically dominated by the Sun. On average,
the day side of Mercury is blasted by solar radiation
at about seven times the intensity of what reaches Earth,
you know, And that's just the average. At its perihelium.
(14:47):
When it comes closest to the Sun, the solar flux
can be like more than ten times what we receive
on Earth. And I remember thinking about this years ago, Like,
you know, if I went out onto the day side
surface of Mercury with my skin exposed, how long before
I got a sunburn? I think sunburn might be too
(15:07):
gentle of a framing. I don't know if there's I
don't think there's really any experiment that can say exactly
what would happen to a human body here, But I
think it would be pretty pretty rough, pretty fast. So
ignoring the effects of the near vacuum, which in reality
would probably be the thing that would kill you first,
you would I expect you would suffer very bad or
(15:29):
even fatal burns quite quite quickly. So Mercury's day side
can reach temperatures of about eight hundred degrees fahrenheit or
four hundred and thirty degrees celsius. This is incredibly hot
lead meltingly hot. Though it would be a very different
kind of heat from what we are familiar with here
(15:50):
on Earth, because on Earth, basically all of our experiences
of heat are heat within a gas medium or a
liquid medium. So when you standing outside on a hot day,
or even just feeling the inside of a hot oven
with your hand, there is hot air to conduct the heat.
Mercury is often said to have basically no atmosphere. It
(16:13):
does have a very very thin exosphere, but it's only
like the faintest suggestion of an atmosphere. It's a near vacuum,
so there would be no real heating by convection or
contact with hot gas. All of the heat you felt
would be coming from a few different sources, So there'd
be direct radiation from the Sun overhead, and then there
(16:36):
would be thermal radiation from the burning hot rocky ground,
so radiation coming up off the ground. And if you
think about this, this rocky ground is going to be
heated by the sun over the course of Mercury's incredibly
long solar day, which lasts about one hundred and seventy
six earth days, so on mercury, this is another weird fact.
(16:58):
A day is longer than a year. It takes eighty
eight earth days for mercury to go around the Sun,
versus it takes one hundred and seventy six earth days
to go from noon to the next noon on mercury. Now,
that can be complicated when you're talking about different types
of days because the actual rotational period of mercury is
(17:21):
shorter than that, but relative to its quick orbit around
the Sun, the solar day actually ends up taking so
much longer. It takes one hundred and seventy six earth days.
So by the time a slice of the day side
of Mercury reaches noon, it has been preheating for weeks.
They did a thorough preheat on that oven, and then
(17:42):
finally I guess there'd be another heat source, which would
potentially be direct contact with the hot ground, which again
has been preheating for a long time. So trying to
imagine standing on the surface of mercury is just a
very different mental exercise. I think it would be a
very intense but all so weird and unfamiliar kind of heat,
(18:03):
like being in space. But also standing on a hot
frying pan and standing under a giant magnifying glass that's
focusing the Sun's rays on you.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, it would give you a lot to think about,
but maybe not for a very very long period of time.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Maybe for a few seconds. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
So I don't know exactly how long it would take
to incinerate you, but at the very least we can
say an incredibly hostile thermal environment. And again this is
on top of the other factors that would probably kill
you even faster, like the basically vacuum exposure. So for
these reasons, among others, Mercury is usually not considered a
very good place to look for life in the Solar System. Now,
(18:42):
of course, there are always people who want to play
around with possibilities. They're like, oh, what, you know, what
could live there? But people who do that kind of
exercise are really more they're playing a game of looking
for exceptions. You know. It's not like Mercury is the
kind of place we would generally expect to find life forms.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah yeah, but you get into like, well, okay, if
there was life there, what could it possibly look like
or have looked like? Likewise, the other scenario, like if
we were to try and colonize mercury, what form could
it possibly take? And I think we'll get into some
some of the more noteworthy examples in both of these
columns later on in the series.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Now, there's a flip side when it comes to the
thermal environment, which is that also because there's no meaningful
atmosphere to trap and recirculate any of that heat. The
night side of Mercury regularly drops to negative one hundred
and eighty degrees celsius or negative two ninety fahrenheit, so
very hot day, very cold night. The surface of Mercury
(19:43):
actually goes through the most extreme temperature swings of any
planet in the Solar System. However, despite the intensity of
the solar flux, Mercury is not the hottest of the
inner planets. Venus is actually hotter, and that's because it
has this very thick heat trapping atmosphere, kind of a
(20:04):
hyper greenhouse effect, which wraps the planet's surface in this
blanket of searing hot carbon dioxide.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
So Venus is.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Closer to the Sun than Earth is, and it's got
this super thick atmosphere which traps the heat in once
it reaches the planet.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah, Mercury is the hot, hot frying pan, but Venus
is the hot, hot pressure cooker.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Yes, so another weird fact about what it would be
like to dwell on Mercury if you were really to
go there. Of course, we mentioned the fact that Mercury's
solar day is longer than it's year. It gets even
stranger because at certain places on Mercury's surface, at certain
times of year, you would also experience a kind of
(20:49):
a false sunrise or a double sunrise, where coming out
of this freezing night, the sun would rise briefly and
then set, going back under the horizon that it rose from,
and then rise again before performing the full arc over
the sky. And then you might get the same thing
(21:09):
in reverse at sunset, where the sun would set and
then oh.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
No, peekaboo again back up over the.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Horizon, and then fully set again for the complete night.
That's just sort of a weird feature of the interaction
between the timing of Mercury's rotation and the end its
orbit around the Sun. So another question to address is
why does Mercury lack a significant atmosphere. Again, it has
(21:36):
this very thin, very tenuous exosphere, but it's almost nothing.
It's very very little gas, and interestingly, the lack of
a significant atmosphere seems to be in part for the
same reasons that make it hard for Mercury to hold
onto a moon. Because the planet is small and because
it's so close to the Sun. So because of Mercury's
(22:00):
relatively low mass, its gravity is weak, meaning it has
less power less gripping power gravitational gripping power to hold
on to gases and volatiles that float above its surface,
so its grip is weaker. Meanwhile, because it's so close
to the Sun, Mercury is blasted by high solar radiation
(22:21):
and intense solar winds now. On one hand, these forces,
along with other factors like micrometeoroid impacts, actually continuously liberate
new gas and volatile particles from the surface of Mercury,
so these factors these contribute to the generation of new atmosphere.
(22:41):
Mercury's thin exosphere is always being replenished, replenished by violence
in a way, but at the same time, other forces,
including solar radiation, pressure, and solar winds are constantly pushing
atoms out of this thin exosphere into space. So what
little gas and vapor particles are liberated and floating around
(23:05):
above Mercury's surface. Lots of those are always getting blasted
off out into the dark. In fact, this brings me
to a thing I had no idea about before. Did
you know that under certain imaging conditions, Mercury actually has
a tail like a comet.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I did not know this, and I got excited at
first because I'm like, oh, wow, maybe this could factor
into some of what we're going to discuss mythologically, but
I guess it's not the case.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Well, unfortunately, this tail is not visible to the naked eye,
so it's not something that say, ancient peoples would have seen.
But of course Mercury was. It is one of the
naked eye visible planets. So you know, ancient peoples knew
about this planet. It wasn't one of those planets we
had to wait for the invention of the telescope to discover.
(23:55):
So you know, ancient peoples knew about Mercury for a
long time, but they could not see this tail. Because
you actually need a lens filter. I think you need
magnification too. Probably you need magnification and a lens filter
that helps you see the wavelength of yellow light emitted
by sodium atoms, because it seems that sodium atoms are
(24:15):
the most visible atoms found in this sun driven plume
pointing off of Mercury. But you get this process where
intense solar radiation liberates sodium from the planet's surface. Or
I think there are multiple factors, but you know, by
multiple factors, including radiation from the Sun, sodium gets liberated
from the surface and then these gas particles get pushed
(24:39):
out into space in this long trailing jet. And Rob,
I've got a couple of pictures you can look at
in the outline here. People at home, you can look
this up. Just look up mercury sodium tail and it
looks like a comet. It looks almost exactly like a comet.
You know, it's just zooming off into space. And in
the second picture I have for you here, Rob, you
can really see the the sodium yellow color.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Ooh nice.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Kind of a fascinating fact that I did not know before.
So Mercury the planet has a salty tail that is
millions of kilometers long, just bullied into space by the Sun.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow, as it speeds along its journey.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Now we're going to continue to talk about physical features
of Mercury, and scientific research about the planet in future
parts of the series, but I think for the rest
of today, maybe we should talk a bit about the
literary and mythological history of Mercury and it's especially its
mythological counterparts.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, this is always one of the fascinating areas of
discussion about any of the naked eye visible planets, because
you get into the history of observation as well, and
how that observation factored into these different world views, and
you get kind of like, you know, a feedback loop
between the two, like there are things observed about the cosmos,
(26:05):
and then there are these ideas that could attach to
them deities and stories and so forth, and they can
kind of inform our understanding of each other to varying decrees,
you know, with the obvious difference being, of course that
a planet or star does have a physical reality and
a god is something rather different. The planet Mercury is
(26:26):
of course named for the Roman god Mercury, a counterpart
of the Greek Hermes. Mercury is the son of Jupiter
and Maya, a Roman earth goddess, and he acts. We'll
get into all the things he does, but in broad strokes,
and this is the version, like if you know virtually
nothing about the god, you know that he acts as
a messenger to and from the gods, and it is
(26:47):
also there are also all these other roles that he
ends up taking on as well, because he is also
a god of science and commerce as well as thieves
and rogues. He is, so he is a messenger and
a thief, and Hermes has much the many of the
same connotations as we've discussed before. You know, you get
(27:08):
into the duality of Greek and Roman deities, you know,
there's there's often a lot more nuance, you know, like yeah,
you can say, like, okay, you know you have two
different gods of war, but there's a slightly different flavor
when you compare them, right, And there's there's a little
bit of that going on here as well. But Hermes
(27:29):
does have much of the same flavor. A god of
messengers and thieves, of those who travel not only in
this world but through the afterlife. And he is also
a psychopomp as well, because he is one who can
traverse realms. He can move from Olympus to Earth to
the underworld. And therefore, if you need somebody to take
(27:50):
you part of the way to the afterlife, he is
the one that is going to be sent to do
it right.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
So psychopomp often is translated as like soul guide or
soul conductor. And we see scenes of this in ancient literature.
For example, in the Odyssey, in the scene where you know,
where Odysseus comes back and kills all of the suitors.
There is a scene in the Odyssey where Hermes comes
in and says, okay, souls, you're coming with me, and
(28:17):
rounds up the souls of all the suitors and leads
them there. They're kind of like baffled and wailing, and
he leads them into hell or into hades.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, so you know. Mercury is often credited, especially about
Roman authors such as Horace and Avid, as a culture
bearer of language and wrestling. So it's fascinating, really, all
told this trickster god, and he's a trickster, as we'll
get into, is a god of so many different things
(28:46):
of let's say, boundaries, shepherds, travel, roads, hospitality, diplomacy, trade, merchants, invention, thieves, orators,
wit and cunning, language and ripe again, wrestling, measurements, astrology
and astronomy, sleep in dreams, magic, fertility, athletics, gymnastics, guard dogs,
(29:09):
and much more.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
That's almost too many things.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, it's interesting. There's this notion, and comic artist and
author George O'Connor covers this well in his Olympian series
hermis Tales of the Trickster. This is a series. I'll
hold it up for our viewers on video. This is
a series that my kiddo was very much into when
they were younger. And I've had Georgie O'Connor on the
show before and talk to him about his approach. He
(29:35):
really knows his stuff, really does as research. Highly recommend
the he's to anybody looking for a graphic novel treatment
of Greek mythology. But also he's gotten into Norse mythology
and I think has three volumes out, so wonderful stuff.
But he discusses this notion that Hermes, left to his
own devices, is going to cause mischief, is going to
(29:56):
get up to no good. And therefore Zeus keeps him
just very very busy with this whole grocery list of tasks,
always setting him out to, you know, to do this,
to spy in this person, to bring this person, drag
this person in, and it makes sense, given some of
the things he's he's charged with skill sets and areas
of culture that perhaps you could make a strong argument
(30:17):
they benefit from oversight of some sort or another. They
need to stay on task and busy, otherwise they might
get up to they might get into trouble.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
That's a really interesting take. But I thought you were
going somewhere totally different when you said, like since as
a trickster. I thought you were going to say that
as a trickster, Hermes has bluffed his way into many
many jobs.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
You know, that's an interesting I don't know if anybody's
ever given it that exact treatment.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Yes, I do have five years of expertise in gymnastics.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
I know all about that, you know.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Oh yeah, yeah, astrology too, I know about that.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I get the
the I get the idea from these various treatments of
Mercury and or Hermes that they they're very skilled at
the things they do, so they're not just bluffing their way.
But I think it also you could make the case
that as he is a traveler, uh and he has
he's and he has wit, and since he has those
(31:13):
two things, they are all these different tasks that he
ends up taking on just because he is the one
that moves across the realms, and he has his wits
about him, so he has his cunning. Now I want
to read, uh, some some bits from from Roman poetry
about Mercury. Here, Uh, this one I'm gonna read from.
This is an as Kleine translation of Avid's FASTI from
(31:38):
this is from the year eight CE. And this one's
this one's really cool. It goes as follows, or this
is the excerpt goes as follows. Come Mercury, Atlas's famous grandson,
you whom apply ad once bore to jove among the
Arcadian hills, arbitr of war and peace to gods on
(31:58):
high and those below you who make your way with
winged feet hoo to light in the sounding liar and
the gleaming wrestling you through, who's teaching the tongue learned
eloquence on the odds. The Senate founded for you a
temple facing the circus. Since then today has been your festival.
All those who make a living trading their awares offer
(32:19):
you in since and beg you to swell their profits.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
Man, I love the modifier of the word wrestling being leaming?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Is that for fun to oiled up bodies? Is that literally?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Like I'm assuming I didn't look at any alternate translations
of this to see how it might be treated in
other translations. But that's that I love. It's certainly giving
me that mental imagery. And I was, I was examining
this a little bit. It's like, well, why is this
guy the one who brings wrestling to humanity? And I'm
to understand it has to do in a large part
(32:52):
with the cunning aspect of it. So wrestling grappling, you know,
if you're if you've never done it, or you don't
have a very close relationship with it, or I don't know,
you've never gotten into the details of it. You know,
you can just think of like it's brute strength. It's
just bodies slamming together. But of course there is cunning
in it. It is not just about the strength. That
(33:14):
is about then, like shifting out of holds and so forth.
And that seems to be what's bound up in this idea.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
It's like having the right like grapples and a sort
of tactical knowledge of what to do.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, And so this particular passage it refers to several
aspects of Mercury that are interesting. The sounding liar. He
is the inventor of the liar, the musical instrument made
from like a tortoise's shell and it's enterds. And then
also the bringing of language. Also his association with trade
(33:46):
and profit. He's a god that you should lift up
if you want to make money in your business, which
is fascinating as well. Also, again he's the traveler, so
it makes sense he's very much involved in trade. Now. Physically,
he the depictions of him will vary to a certain extent,
but he's usually depicted as a youthful man in a
(34:07):
winged cap. This is like a traveler sun hat because
he is a traveler with wings to denote swift and
unstoppable speed. He also has winged sandals. Again he's fast,
you know, flying straight ahead. And he also carries the
cadusius as a sign of neutral, independent travel as well
as a signifier of his status as messenger of the gods.
(34:30):
And of course the cadusius also brings with it other
powers that will refer to and just a bet. He
also frequently carries a purse or marsupium. This is a
coin bag, and this signifies his rule over commerce, so
you know he's he's carrying coin on him as well.
And again he is, to be sure, a cunning tricks
to God. And there are a number of stories in
which he engages in trickery just to some form or another.
(34:54):
One of them is, of course, when it occurs when
he is a baby. He is like like, he's baby
mur And he steals the sacred cows of Apollo by
having them walk backwards, which is classic, right because in
the footprints of the cows make it seem like they
were going in the other direction.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Hmm.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
I mean, I'm impressed that somebody could tell what direction
cows are going in by looking at the footprints.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, and again he's a baby. This is kind of
an interesting trope onto itself, the trickster baby God or
you know, divine figure. It reminds me a bit of
some of the stories of Krishna as a baby being
something of a trickster.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
Oh, I thought you were going to say that. I
think you should leave sketch. He's one of the most
aggressive babies I've ever Yeah, he'd be one of the
most deceitful babies ever.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well, this would be the case here as well. I
believe in that same encounter he turns a witness into
stone to keep them from spilling the beans. There's also
this is one that we've referred to on the show before,
perhaps in one of our episodes about mythological treatments of
multi eyed entities. But he mesmerizes Argus the hundred eyed
giant into slumber in order to free a Io, and
(36:05):
then he goes ahead and murders the giant his way.
He slays the giant cold blooded while it sleeps, just
to be sure. He of course bribes the gods with
a liar, which he invents on the spot, you know,
created out of a tortoise to get out of some
of the punishment for the whole cattle incident. And in
classical poetry as well, he's always stealing the signature weapons
(36:26):
of various gods. So you know, whatever your you know,
your trident or what have you, if you leave it
setting around too long. And again, if Mercury doesn't have
enough tasks on his grocery list, he might just steal
what you've got just for the heck of it.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Okay, so you can understand why he is also patron
of thieves. He does a lot of yoinking himself.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Yes, yeah, and yeah, he's more than just a mere
traveler or a mere messenger. Yeah, he's a god who
kind of does what he wants and goes where he wants.
And it's up to the gods and mortals if they
want to take advantage of this or not. According to
the writings of Juvenile Marble, heads of Mercury were erected
(37:08):
on poles wherever two roads met. Again, he's a liminal
god and a lord of thresholds. He can cross over
these dominions of Olympus Earth in the underworld, where others,
even other gods, cannot. Again, makes him an ideal psychopomp,
and he factors into various myths in which someone is
crossing or made to cross between these barriers. And again,
(37:33):
the most of the imagery you encounter of him, and
certainly the images that I encountered growing up depicted yeah
just kind of this, like youthful naked fella with a
cap with wings on it and sandals with wings on it,
which I have to admit, when I was a kid,
I tended to find this a little silly looking and
may think that might have factored into my sort of
dismissal lot of and I think also in a lot
(37:55):
of the versions of the of, particularly the Greek myths
that I was reading, Hermes was just kind of relegated
to Messenger. And I don't know, I don't remember a
lot of direct exposure with more involved tales involving this figure,
this god, but there are some really really intense images
(38:15):
of him out there. One particular painting that I recommend
looking up is The Souls of Asheron from eighteen ninety
eight by Adolf Hermi Herschel. You can find this online
and off the top of my head, I'm not sure
where this one is collected as a physical painting or
if there are different versions of it. Is this sometimes
the case with these works, but this one is really
(38:36):
really intense. You see like the souls of the departed,
like Ashen and their coloration standing around this brilliant and
kind of brooding version of Mercury, and you see his
wing at him, you see the Cadusius and he has
these robes on. I feel like this image in particular
captures a lot of the power of the figure that
(38:57):
you see and you read about in some of the
like the works of the Roman poets, but is maybe
a little missing from some of our modern conceptions of
the figure.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Oh yeah, this is full of dark, grieving pathos. That's
like seeing all the people reaching out to him and
this kind of pleading posture. They're all below and he's
standing looking very impassive and be like he's he's not
providing much comfort to them.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
It reminds me a little bit of what you were
talking about earlier. This is something that again ancient observers
would not have known, but the idea that Mercury is
a planet that can be incredibly hot but also incredibly cold, right, Like,
he's very hot blooded and can be very passionate in
some of the tales, you know, it's a fathering children
on the you know, in mid task at times, but
(39:44):
in this case, very cold to the people around him. Yeah,
the souls around him, and this darker side of Mercury. Yeah,
can definitely be found in the Roman literature considered. This
excellent quote from Virgils the Eneid, in which Mercury is
essentially suiting up to enact Jupiter's will, goes as follows.
(40:06):
The god, the god being Mercury prepared to obey his
great father's order and first fastened the golden sandals to
his feet that carry him high on the wing over
land and sea like the storm. Then he took up
his wand he calls pale ghosts from Orcus with it,
sending others down to grim Tartarus gives and takes away
(40:28):
sleep and opens the eyes of the dead. So this
really to me, like it seems to suggest an idea
of Mercury as an enforcer, as a hit man or
a bounty hunter, really reminding me in many ways of
the sort of form that certain angels, messenger angels, and
angels of death take in like Judeo Christian traditions, where
(40:52):
you know you never want to meet an angel because
it's this terrifying entity. And likewise, this is against something
I didn't really I'd never thought about until this week
researching this episode. But Mercury feels like a god you
would never actually want to meet, because if you're meeting him,
you know, hopefully you've just happened to meet him on
the way to something. But if he has been sent
(41:13):
to you, well, probably nothing good is going to come
with it. I guess it depends on how well you
sit with his father Jupiter.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Either way, it's a clutch tight your valuables.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah. Yeah, he also might steal something. Yeah, this is
more of an aside really that I was reading that
there was a Roman practice of the mercury fig, and
this would be the devoting of the first fig of
a tree's harvest to mercury, applied more generally at times
to first fruits, first works, and the like, So essentially
(41:47):
kind of like one for mercury. Reminds me a little
bit of how I think you will still see the
practice of a business will have that first dollar bill
that they make tacked up on the wall. That's essentially
the mercury fig, let's see. And then I was reading
(42:11):
more there's a lot of interesting stuff concerning the worship
of mercury in Roman gaul in Roman Britain. I was
reading a twenty nineteen paper published in Studio Antiqua at
Archaeologica by Nadezda s. Shirokova. Again, this was twenty nineteen,
(42:32):
the cult of Mercury and Roman Gaul in Roman Britain,
and this author points out that Mercury eventually becomes for
a while the most popular deity of worship in Roman
Gaul in Roman Britain, And part of this seems due
to the fact that these were far flung corners of
the Empire, and the people there would have you know,
they had a heightened sense of the importance of travel
(42:55):
and trade. You want a god with an eye on
the supply chain, right. The author also points out that
in both areas there was also a fusing of wing
helmet Mercury with the Celtic hornet god of fertility, Also
differing from traditional vision of Mercury. In these areas, he
(43:15):
also became considered more of a guardian of military affairs,
which the authors suggest might have to have more to
do with the synthesis of Celtic beliefs with Roman beliefs
and different Celtic gods. But I also couldn't help but think,
and this is just me, that you could also see
this sort of metamorphosis taking place for people again that
would be acutely aware of the necessity of movement and
(43:37):
commerce for sustaining a far flung province, not only in
terms of supplies, but also military protection. And in some
cases Gollic Mercury had horns or antlers instead of those
hat bound wings in some cases he had three faces
emerging with Lucas, I believe, the Celtic god of trade
and crafts. So you see a number of these different
(44:01):
ways that Mercury becomes compared to and merged with some
of these indigenous deities. Now this is possibly confusing this
a little bit. Is the fact that if you read
the journals of Julius Caesar earlier, upon visiting the region,
he wrote of the locals worshiping Mercury there. He this
(44:25):
is from Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. He says,
they principally worship the god Mercury. There are many images
of him. They regard him as the inventor of all arts.
They consider him the guide of their journeys in march marches.
They believe him to have to have very great power
for the acquisition of money and for trade. These, of course,
are all things that match up with Mercury. But basically
(44:49):
it seems like what was happening here is that Caesar
was observing examples of Lucas or other gods among the
the the Gallic people, and then was just saying, oh,
that's Mercury, Like yeah, this sort of classic Roman synthesis
of deities, which would go both ways, like interpreting other
gods as your gods, but then also borrowing or readily
(45:13):
and incorporating the gods of others into your own pantheon.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Yeah and yeah, Romans did both both assumed equivalences and
absorbed what they encountered.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, and there's some more interesting details concerning the history
of the I really found this interesting in this idea
that like sometimes the wings on his hat would become
horns or antlers in comparison to these other gods, because
I did find some other sources that I may explore
more for future episodes here talking about like the history
(45:45):
of showing wings on the head and it's comparison with horns,
particularly when you get into into you know, purely Christian
era like demonology and so forth. But perhaps more on
that later. Now, as we previously discussed the show, Mercury
is an elusive star to spot. It's actually the we
were just talking about this in our dog Day's episodes,
(46:07):
but it's actually the thirteenth brightest object in the sky.
But as Richard Talcott discusses in the Astronomy Magazine article,
Mercury at its best in the evening sky from twenty twelve.
You know, it's still difficult to make out. You know,
it's bright and obviously number thirteen out of all those
stars up there, that's still something. But it's closer to
(46:30):
the Some than any other planet, as we've been discussing,
So from our perspective, it never ventures much beyond the
glare of the Sun and never appears fully against a
totally dark sky, So you could, despite its brightness, it's
almost kind of like a deeper cut in most traditional
astronomies and astrologies like it was known of, but it
was it was difficult to spot and maybe a little
(46:51):
more complicated to understand.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
Now I didn't make notes about this for this episode,
so I can't be certain, but it seems like I
remember reading some thing a long time ago that maybe
some of the ancients actually thought Mercury was two different stars.
Have you come across that.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
I didn't come across that particularly. We may have to
come back to that. But there was this idea that
it was the leaping star, that it moved so much
from night to because again it's it's fast moving and
has a tight orbit, and so from our perspective it
seems to move around with great speed, and so from
night to night it could be in drastically different places,
which again feeds and then feeds off of this idea
(47:33):
of a deity that has great speed.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Well, I mean, certainly I see the association between the
speed of the actual planet's orbit and the speed of
the god, you know, the winged god, the fast moving messenger.
But the distinction I remember reading was something about there
being a confusion that like Mercury was separately like an
evening star and a morning star. And then later there
(47:58):
was the connection that, oh, these are actually the same
object that we're seeing in some cases in the in
the morning, you know, before dawn, in some cases at night.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Okay, we'll have to come back to that then and
look at that in more detail. So obviously, yeah, humans
have been observing Mercury, the planet Mercury, for a very
long time, observing it well before the idea of a
god named Mercury, because yeah, the Romans end up in
inventing the name Mercury well after Hermis, so Hermes comes first,
(48:27):
Romans create Mercury. I believe the route there MRK is
related to like commerce and trade, as they absorb some
of these ideas about Hermes. But the oldest recording recorded
sightings of Mercury date back to the fourteenth century BCE
and the likely Assyrian mold dot appen tablets. If I'm
(48:48):
saying this out loud correctly, we've talked about these before,
and I can't remember how we actually said this. Is
it mold dot appen or just mold appen tablets.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
Mold dot appen like it's a web address.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
It's a web address.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Don't try it. I don't know where it dot happened.
But in these we have the oldest recorded sightings of Mercury,
but also the oldest recorded traditions of the planet being
associated with concepts of wisdom, and particularly they deal with
the Babylonian d d Nabu, son of Marduk, whose agility
(49:21):
of the mind was linked with the observed speed of
the planet, which again was sometimes called the leaping Star
due to its speed. Again, Mercury fastest planet in our
solar system eighty eight day year, and this is this
is observable and its apparent location in the night sky
again shifts a lot night tonight based on this fast
(49:42):
small orbit, earning it this traveler's reputation and this Nabu
connection becomes the foundation of these various other connections between
the planet and God associated with speed or wisdom. So
out of Nabu eventually comes Hermes, for example. And yet
there are actually multiple examples of this that can be
(50:03):
tied into this tradition, not only Mercury and Hermes and
the Greco Roman tradition, but also Buddha, not to be
confused with the Buddha like the historic Buddha, not Buddha
with two d's, but Buddha with one d. You'll find
this personification in the Vedic Hindu tradition, and I believe
Ganesha is sometimes associated with mercury as well, and Ganesha
(50:27):
is also associated with wisdom to a very large degree.
In the Norse tradition, you have Odin, of course, also
associated with wisdom, and then in ancient Egypt eventually thought
as well. But this only applies to later traditions, as
the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic is primarily lunar,
but the Greco Roman and later Occultist traditions recast him
(50:51):
as mercury aligned. So this is again one of those
cases where you know myths change, myths respond to other myths.
Myths respond to obs in the night sky as well,
but mercury is more traditionally associated with set or set
in ancient Egypt. Now, the Chinese treatment of mercury was
(51:12):
seemingly somewhat unique and set apart from these traditions, seemingly
unrelated disconnected from those ideas. It was the so called
hour star, and it was connected to concepts of water,
winter and astrological connections to unexpected legal or military shifts
or even natural disasters. Meanwhile, you also find some fascinating
(51:34):
traditions in the Americas, and I might have to come
back to some more of these, but some of the
big ones that are often brought up. Myan traditions also
focused on its speed, seeing mercury as being aligned with
the owl and being a psychopomp. And then the Aztecs
focused primarily on its proximity to the sun, so you know,
picking up on the fact that it is solar aligned
(51:56):
and therefore perhaps some manner of like minor so deity.
So that's just a brief overview focusing mostly on the
Roman mercury given our use of the Roman names and
the naming of the planets. But I feel like just
Roman Mercury alone is such a fascinating god and again
one that I feel like I've not paid enough attention
(52:19):
to over the years, Mercury or Hermes, where when you
dig down into it a really fascinating, you know, at
times funny and at times frightening individual and member of
the pantheon.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Absolutely so, I think we'll have to keep this rather
large host of associations in mind as we rather explore
the planet itself. What exactly is it about the planet
Mercury that's not only messenger, fleet footed, thief, trickster, but
maybe gleaming wrestler, maybe a little bit you know, trade
(52:52):
in commerce.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
I don't know. I bet we'll see a lot of
angles there.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah. Yeah, we'll get into the history of pro that
have been sent to Mercury or near Mercury. We'll get
into that again. We'll talk a little bit about science
fiction as well as just ideas of regarding well, if
life did exist there, how would that even look what
would that even look like? In the same question regarding
possible human visitation and or colonization of the.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
World, I don't think it's near the top of the list.
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
But you know, the human mind, you know, in the
spirit of Mercury, the cunning. We can't help but apply
ourselves to that scenario, like, yeah, we probably shouldn't. We
almost maybe we couldn't, but we've got to sort of
peace out exactly how we might attempt it. We can't
help ourselves.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
All right, does that do it for today?
Speaker 2 (53:44):
I think it does. We're going to go and close
this episode out, but stay tuned. There will be more
Mercury episodes in the future. Here in the meantime, we
would just remind you as usual that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays,
and then on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns,
So just talk about a weird film on Weird House
(54:05):
Cinema wherever you get the show, if you get the
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That just helps us out. Likewise, if you watch and
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Speaker 4 (54:24):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 4 (00:17):
And today on the podcast, we're going to begin a
series of episodes talking about the planet Mercury, which I
recently realized has received very little love from us. Over
the years, We've done a bunch of episodes, particularly on
the moons of the big planets. We did a good
series on the moons of Jupiter, We've done plenty of
(00:38):
stuff on Mars, on Venus, more on the moons of Saturn,
but I think almost nothing about Mercury. So today we're
going to change that.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yeah, the closest we've really come to any kind of
like dedicated Mercury analysis was a single episode that we
did on why Mercury and Venus have no moons? Like basically,
we were rounding out our coverage of the Solar System
Them's moons by talking about a couple of planets that
don't have moons and why that is the case.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I remember we talked a lot in that episode about
past false sightings of moons going around Venus and Mercury,
that where we now know today there actually are no
such moons, at least currently. But you know, in the past,
people have thought like, oh, yeah, Venus has a moon,
here's you know what it's like, or oh yeah, here's
something we think we see going around Mercury.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
But that turned out.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
I think there was one sighting of like light around
Mercury that just turned out to be stars I believe,
in the background, as opposed to something actually in orbit
around the planet. But anyway, I got interested in talking
about Mercury today sort of in a roundabout way. First,
I was just looking at a particular surface feature of
Mercury that we're going to come back and focus on,
(01:49):
I believe in part two of the series that has
been called the Giant Spider of Mercury. So that's in
store for you listeners in the future. But another way
I was thinking about it was that of all the
planets in the Solar System, Mercury is really the one
that seems to exist most within the blast zone of
(02:11):
the Sun. It's the one that it is, of course
the closest to the Sun, and so I always think
of it as a planet that is kind of bullied
or exists in a space of violence by this much more,
much larger and more powerful force. And now, of course
all the planets in the Solar System go around the Sun,
so you know, the Sun does dictate sort of the
(02:33):
plane of the Solar System, the gravitational movements of the
Solar System. But it's Mercury that feels like it's really
in there in the middle. It's like trapped with the
beast in the cage.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, right up there,
the closest one to the campfire at the center of
our universe, the most hellish of the hell worlds.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
Yeah, well that's arguable something It might say Venus as words.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
Venus is Venus Man is worse, but it is closest
to the fire, and that doesn't mean that it's immune
from our sci fi visions about potentially going there colonizing it. Well,
we'll get into some more of that, I think maybe
the third episode in this series. But I do remember
(03:19):
as a kid reading a particular Isaac Asimov's story I
believe was run around. Yeah, that takes place on Mercury,
and so this was one of I think this was
one of my, if not my first fictional experience with
the planet.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
That was one of the laws of robotics stories where
it has that I forget the name of these two characters,
but they're you know, in the robot robopsychology stories you have,
is it Susan Calvin the main robopsychologist, and in some
of these stories is trying to investigate the conflicts between
the three main laws of robotics that are guiding robotic behavior.
(03:53):
But then other stories you get these two technicians whose
names I'm blanking on right now, but they're always trying
to troubleshoot problems and run around. There is a robot
that gets into a kind of loop on and its
behavior because I think it is stuck between the rule
that says it must carry out orders given to it
by humans versus the rule that says that it can't
(04:16):
bring harm to itself.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
And of course, you know, being out on.
Speaker 4 (04:19):
The surface of Mercury, there's a lot of harm you're
subject to. Yeah, as far as literary references go, I
think this is only loosely justified by our subject today.
Because the planet Mercury, as far as I could find,
is not mentioned in this poem. I thought maybe it was,
but it's not. But on my mind going into this
was the poem The Testimony of the Suns by the
(04:41):
American poet George Sterling.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Did you know this one?
Speaker 2 (04:43):
Rob, If I had read about it, I had forgotten
it is that I know. This poet was much admired
by various authors, including some from the weird fiction era. Yeah,
but I am not super familiar with this work.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Now, there is a weird fiction sensibility in this poem.
So it's like an epic cosmic poem that feels like
the kind of poem that would be enjoyed by Conan
or something. You know, it's just very It's a very
muscly poem that frames its description of the sort of
(05:17):
evolution of the cosmos in terms of battle and war
and that kind of thing. So, just to read one
brief example to kind of give you a taste of it,
he is talking about, you know, stars and constellations, and
Sterling writes, quote all tear, what captains compass thee, what
foes aldebrah are thine?
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Read? With?
Speaker 4 (05:38):
What blood of war's divine glows? That immortal panoply? What
music from capella runs? How hold the Pleiades they're bond?
How storms the hidden War beyond Orion's dreadful Sword of Suns.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
That's pretty heavy, pretty heavy.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
If somebody made a metal album out of this, I
really should. If they haven't, Yeah, yeah, deem We, their
enginery was not far in the dim eternal past. Deem
We Eternity at last will find their thunders unbegot.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
So it goes on talking about a lot of things.
Speaker 4 (06:11):
Eventually it talks about kind of the search, the search
for other life in the cosmos. But I was thinking
about it again because of that idea of Mercury just
being within this inner space that's like the closest of
the planets to the Sun, in a space where where
it feels that dreadful sword of the star is kind
(06:33):
of reaching out upon it. And we'll talk about some
actual scientific ways that that that kind of sword of
the Sun can manifest.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
But anyway, that was on my mind making these notes.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah, it's it's, you know, especially when we factor in
the Goldie Locks scenario. The you know, it's it's easy
to think of our Sun as kind of a brutal tyrant,
but a powerful and protective one in some respects. So
you don't want to be too close, you know, you
don't want your orbit to be too close, because then
(07:06):
you're perhaps susceptible to the worst of their rages. You
also don't want to be too far away from them,
because then you are further away from their graces. You
want to be where we are, which and there are
other factors as well that we've talked about, you know,
the relationships with the other members of the Great Royal
House here. But we're in just the right place. We're
(07:29):
not too far away, and we're not too close.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
We're close enough to still receive the gift packages they're
coming through, but we're not so close that we're getting
the full wrath when you know.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, and we have an ally or two in the
outer Court as well.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
So I thought we should start off with a basic
physical overview of Mercury, and then I think we're going
to talk about some mythological connections and dimensions as well
later in the episode. But to start with the basics.
Mercury is, as we've been saying, the innermost planet in.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
The Solar System. It's the closest to the Sun.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
It has a diameter of about forty nine hundred kilometers
or roughly three thousand miles, and that makes it also
the smallest planet in the Solar System, even smaller than Mars,
a bit bigger than Earth's moon. But despite the fact
that it is low in size and mass compared to
the other rocky planets, it is high in density. And
(08:24):
this is in part because it is mostly iron. Only
thirty percent of Earth's mass is iron, similar ratio for Venus.
Only about a quarter of Mars is iron, whereas something
like sixty to seventy percent of Mercury's entire planetary mass
is concentrated in its iron rich core. So as a result,
(08:48):
Mercury is a dense boy. Now, why so much iron
compared to the other rocky planets. That's a question we
can come back and revisit later. Now, as we mentioned earlier,
Mercury and Vas have no moons of their own. Interesting
question is why is that? As we said, you know,
we did a whole episode on this several years back
(09:09):
on the moonlessness of Venus and Mercury. But I'll try
to do a short version of the answer here, like
why no moon for Mercury. Now, in the case of Venus,
it's a somewhat different question because it seems there's nothing
in particular that prevents Venus from having a moon, and
in fact, it may have once had a moon that
(09:30):
it lost. There are papers discussing this as a hypothesis. Ultimately,
we don't know, you know, maybe it had one in
the past, but there's no strong reason that Venus couldn't
have a moon. The same is true of Mercury. There's
no reason it couldn't, but there are clear obstacles that
mitigate against Mercury's ability to hold onto a moon for
(09:51):
a long time to you know, have a moon for
billions of years. And those obstacles are rooted in two
facts about the planet, one that it is and two
that it is very close to the Sun. There's a
concept in astrophysics called a hill sphere. You can picture
this as the region of space around a planet in
(10:13):
which the planet's own gravity can maintain long term orbits
despite the influence of the host star. So this is
roughly the space in which it is possible for a
planet to maintain a moon. Now that doesn't mean that
anything within the space will definitely become a moon. The
(10:33):
ability to maintain the orbit depends on multiple factors, like
what kind of object, what kind of orbit, you know,
they're like prograde and retrograde orbits, and there are different
types of eccentricity in an orbit, so there are a
lot of factors involved, but generally, the estimates I've seen
are that long term stable orbits for normal moons need
(10:55):
to be in the inner part of the hill sphere.
This is sometimes expressed as roughly the inner half of
the hillsphere is kind of the safe zone.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
For normal moons.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
The size of a planet's hillsphere depends on the mass
of the planet, the mass of the star its orbiting,
and the planet's distance from the star. So because Earth
is larger and farther from the Sun, it has a
pretty comfortable hillsphere with a radius of about one and
a half million kilometers, and the Earth's moon is comfortably
(11:28):
inside the inner half of this at about three hundred
and eighty thousand kilometers away. Now, what about Mercury's hillsphere.
Mercury has a relatively eccentric orbit, so you can picture
the orbits of planets like Earth and Venus. They have
a much more circular orbit, you know, not perfectly circular,
(11:48):
but much closer to a perfect circle, whereas Mercury's orbit
is much more like an egg shape or an oval.
Its actual distance from the Star changes a lot over
the course of a murcat year, which by the way,
lasts about eighty eight earth days, so it's got a
very fast orbit around the Sun as well. The semi
major axis of Mercury's orbit is about zero point thirty
(12:11):
nine astronomical units, which means it's about thirty nine percent
of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In
raw numbers. The Earth is on average about one hundred
and fifty million kilometers from the Sun. Mercury is only
about fifty eight million kilometers away. And this means, and
this will be a theme that we return to throughout
(12:32):
the series, that while all of the planets in the
Solar System orbit the Sun, and thus they are all
sort of gravitationally ruled by the influence of the Sun,
and while they are all affected by things like solar
radiation and solar wind, Mercury is a planet that is
truly dominated by these factors. I would say Mercury is
(12:54):
dominated both energetically and gravitationally by the Sun beause Mercury
is relatively small, and because its orbit is so dominated
by the Sun's gravitation. It's hill sphere is also very small.
It's only a fraction of Earth's. So there's only this
relatively narrow radius in which an object could be trapped
(13:16):
in a stable orbit around Mercury without either being perturbed
by the Sun's gravity and like pulled out of orbit
or destroyed by being brought too close to the planet.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
So while it.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Would be it would not be impossible for Mercury to
have a stable moon, it would be difficult. There's just
not a big range for that to happen. As a
side note, I found this interesting as a point of
comparison while I was researching this. Even the dwarf planet Series,
which is about five times smaller than Mercury, has a
slightly bigger hill.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Sphere than Mercury does.
Speaker 4 (13:52):
And Series is basically just a big asteroid, Like It's
the biggest asteroid is big enough, you know, to have
been gravitationally rounded, but it's basically still just a big asteroid,
And it has a slightly larger realistic zone for the
parking of a moon than Mercury does. And I think
this just illustrates that distance from the Sun matters a lot.
(14:25):
So that's one example of how Mercury is gravitationally dominated
by the influence of the Sun, but I also mentioned
that it is energetically dominated by the Sun. On average,
the day side of Mercury is blasted by solar radiation
at about seven times the intensity of what reaches Earth,
you know, And that's just the average. At its perihelium.
(14:47):
When it comes closest to the Sun, the solar flux
can be like more than ten times what we receive
on Earth. And I remember thinking about this years ago, Like,
you know, if I went out onto the day side
surface of Mercury with my skin exposed, how long before
I got a sunburn? I think sunburn might be too
(15:07):
gentle of a framing. I don't know if there's I
don't think there's really any experiment that can say exactly
what would happen to a human body here, But I
think it would be pretty pretty rough, pretty fast. So
ignoring the effects of the near vacuum, which in reality
would probably be the thing that would kill you first,
you would I expect you would suffer very bad or
(15:29):
even fatal burns quite quite quickly. So Mercury's day side
can reach temperatures of about eight hundred degrees fahrenheit or
four hundred and thirty degrees celsius. This is incredibly hot
lead meltingly hot. Though it would be a very different
kind of heat from what we are familiar with here
(15:50):
on Earth, because on Earth, basically all of our experiences
of heat are heat within a gas medium or a
liquid medium. So when you standing outside on a hot day,
or even just feeling the inside of a hot oven
with your hand, there is hot air to conduct the heat.
Mercury is often said to have basically no atmosphere. It
(16:13):
does have a very very thin exosphere, but it's only
like the faintest suggestion of an atmosphere. It's a near vacuum,
so there would be no real heating by convection or
contact with hot gas. All of the heat you felt
would be coming from a few different sources, So there'd
be direct radiation from the Sun overhead, and then there
(16:36):
would be thermal radiation from the burning hot rocky ground,
so radiation coming up off the ground. And if you
think about this, this rocky ground is going to be
heated by the sun over the course of Mercury's incredibly
long solar day, which lasts about one hundred and seventy
six earth days, so on mercury, this is another weird fact.
(16:58):
A day is longer than a year. It takes eighty
eight earth days for mercury to go around the Sun,
versus it takes one hundred and seventy six earth days
to go from noon to the next noon on mercury. Now,
that can be complicated when you're talking about different types
of days because the actual rotational period of mercury is
(17:21):
shorter than that, but relative to its quick orbit around
the Sun, the solar day actually ends up taking so
much longer. It takes one hundred and seventy six earth days.
So by the time a slice of the day side
of Mercury reaches noon, it has been preheating for weeks.
They did a thorough preheat on that oven, and then
(17:42):
finally I guess there'd be another heat source, which would
potentially be direct contact with the hot ground, which again
has been preheating for a long time. So trying to
imagine standing on the surface of mercury is just a
very different mental exercise. I think it would be a
very intense but all so weird and unfamiliar kind of heat,
(18:03):
like being in space. But also standing on a hot
frying pan and standing under a giant magnifying glass that's
focusing the Sun's rays on you.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Yeah, it would give you a lot to think about,
but maybe not for a very very long period of time.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Maybe for a few seconds. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
So I don't know exactly how long it would take
to incinerate you, but at the very least we can
say an incredibly hostile thermal environment. And again this is
on top of the other factors that would probably kill
you even faster, like the basically vacuum exposure. So for
these reasons, among others, Mercury is usually not considered a
very good place to look for life in the Solar System. Now,
(18:42):
of course, there are always people who want to play
around with possibilities. They're like, oh, what, you know, what
could live there? But people who do that kind of
exercise are really more they're playing a game of looking
for exceptions. You know. It's not like Mercury is the
kind of place we would generally expect to find life forms.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah yeah, but you get into like, well, okay, if
there was life there, what could it possibly look like
or have looked like? Likewise, the other scenario, like if
we were to try and colonize mercury, what form could
it possibly take? And I think we'll get into some
some of the more noteworthy examples in both of these
columns later on in the series.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Now, there's a flip side when it comes to the
thermal environment, which is that also because there's no meaningful
atmosphere to trap and recirculate any of that heat. The
night side of Mercury regularly drops to negative one hundred
and eighty degrees celsius or negative two ninety fahrenheit, so
very hot day, very cold night. The surface of Mercury
(19:43):
actually goes through the most extreme temperature swings of any
planet in the Solar System. However, despite the intensity of
the solar flux, Mercury is not the hottest of the
inner planets. Venus is actually hotter, and that's because it
has this very thick heat trapping atmosphere, kind of a
(20:04):
hyper greenhouse effect, which wraps the planet's surface in this
blanket of searing hot carbon dioxide.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
So Venus is.
Speaker 4 (20:12):
Closer to the Sun than Earth is, and it's got
this super thick atmosphere which traps the heat in once
it reaches the planet.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Yeah, Mercury is the hot, hot frying pan, but Venus
is the hot, hot pressure cooker.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Yes, so another weird fact about what it would be
like to dwell on Mercury if you were really to
go there. Of course, we mentioned the fact that Mercury's
solar day is longer than it's year. It gets even
stranger because at certain places on Mercury's surface, at certain
times of year, you would also experience a kind of
(20:49):
a false sunrise or a double sunrise, where coming out
of this freezing night, the sun would rise briefly and
then set, going back under the horizon that it rose from,
and then rise again before performing the full arc over
the sky. And then you might get the same thing
(21:09):
in reverse at sunset, where the sun would set and
then oh.
Speaker 3 (21:13):
No, peekaboo again back up over the.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Horizon, and then fully set again for the complete night.
That's just sort of a weird feature of the interaction
between the timing of Mercury's rotation and the end its
orbit around the Sun. So another question to address is
why does Mercury lack a significant atmosphere. Again, it has
(21:36):
this very thin, very tenuous exosphere, but it's almost nothing.
It's very very little gas, and interestingly, the lack of
a significant atmosphere seems to be in part for the
same reasons that make it hard for Mercury to hold
onto a moon. Because the planet is small and because
it's so close to the Sun. So because of Mercury's
(22:00):
relatively low mass, its gravity is weak, meaning it has
less power less gripping power gravitational gripping power to hold
on to gases and volatiles that float above its surface,
so its grip is weaker. Meanwhile, because it's so close
to the Sun, Mercury is blasted by high solar radiation
(22:21):
and intense solar winds now. On one hand, these forces,
along with other factors like micrometeoroid impacts, actually continuously liberate
new gas and volatile particles from the surface of Mercury,
so these factors these contribute to the generation of new atmosphere.
(22:41):
Mercury's thin exosphere is always being replenished, replenished by violence
in a way, but at the same time, other forces,
including solar radiation, pressure, and solar winds are constantly pushing
atoms out of this thin exosphere into space. So what
little gas and vapor particles are liberated and floating around
(23:05):
above Mercury's surface. Lots of those are always getting blasted
off out into the dark. In fact, this brings me
to a thing I had no idea about before. Did
you know that under certain imaging conditions, Mercury actually has
a tail like a comet.
Speaker 2 (23:25):
I did not know this, and I got excited at
first because I'm like, oh, wow, maybe this could factor
into some of what we're going to discuss mythologically, but
I guess it's not the case.
Speaker 4 (23:33):
Well, unfortunately, this tail is not visible to the naked eye,
so it's not something that say, ancient peoples would have seen.
But of course Mercury was. It is one of the
naked eye visible planets. So you know, ancient peoples knew
about this planet. It wasn't one of those planets we
had to wait for the invention of the telescope to discover.
(23:55):
So you know, ancient peoples knew about Mercury for a
long time, but they could not see this tail. Because
you actually need a lens filter. I think you need
magnification too. Probably you need magnification and a lens filter
that helps you see the wavelength of yellow light emitted
by sodium atoms, because it seems that sodium atoms are
(24:15):
the most visible atoms found in this sun driven plume
pointing off of Mercury. But you get this process where
intense solar radiation liberates sodium from the planet's surface. Or
I think there are multiple factors, but you know, by
multiple factors, including radiation from the Sun, sodium gets liberated
from the surface and then these gas particles get pushed
(24:39):
out into space in this long trailing jet. And Rob,
I've got a couple of pictures you can look at
in the outline here. People at home, you can look
this up. Just look up mercury sodium tail and it
looks like a comet. It looks almost exactly like a comet.
You know, it's just zooming off into space. And in
the second picture I have for you here, Rob, you
can really see the the sodium yellow color.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Ooh nice.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Kind of a fascinating fact that I did not know before.
So Mercury the planet has a salty tail that is
millions of kilometers long, just bullied into space by the Sun.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Wow, as it speeds along its journey.
Speaker 4 (25:26):
Now we're going to continue to talk about physical features
of Mercury, and scientific research about the planet in future
parts of the series, but I think for the rest
of today, maybe we should talk a bit about the
literary and mythological history of Mercury and it's especially its
mythological counterparts.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, this is always one of the fascinating areas of
discussion about any of the naked eye visible planets, because
you get into the history of observation as well, and
how that observation factored into these different world views, and
you get kind of like, you know, a feedback loop
between the two, like there are things observed about the cosmos,
(26:05):
and then there are these ideas that could attach to
them deities and stories and so forth, and they can
kind of inform our understanding of each other to varying decrees,
you know, with the obvious difference being, of course that
a planet or star does have a physical reality and
a god is something rather different. The planet Mercury is
(26:26):
of course named for the Roman god Mercury, a counterpart
of the Greek Hermes. Mercury is the son of Jupiter
and Maya, a Roman earth goddess, and he acts. We'll
get into all the things he does, but in broad strokes,
and this is the version, like if you know virtually
nothing about the god, you know that he acts as
a messenger to and from the gods, and it is
(26:47):
also there are also all these other roles that he
ends up taking on as well, because he is also
a god of science and commerce as well as thieves
and rogues. He is, so he is a messenger and
a thief, and Hermes has much the many of the
same connotations as we've discussed before. You know, you get
(27:08):
into the duality of Greek and Roman deities, you know,
there's there's often a lot more nuance, you know, like yeah,
you can say, like, okay, you know you have two
different gods of war, but there's a slightly different flavor
when you compare them, right, And there's there's a little
bit of that going on here as well. But Hermes
(27:29):
does have much of the same flavor. A god of
messengers and thieves, of those who travel not only in
this world but through the afterlife. And he is also
a psychopomp as well, because he is one who can
traverse realms. He can move from Olympus to Earth to
the underworld. And therefore, if you need somebody to take
(27:50):
you part of the way to the afterlife, he is
the one that is going to be sent to do
it right.
Speaker 4 (27:56):
So psychopomp often is translated as like soul guide or
soul conductor. And we see scenes of this in ancient literature.
For example, in the Odyssey, in the scene where you know,
where Odysseus comes back and kills all of the suitors.
There is a scene in the Odyssey where Hermes comes
in and says, okay, souls, you're coming with me, and
(28:17):
rounds up the souls of all the suitors and leads
them there. They're kind of like baffled and wailing, and
he leads them into hell or into hades.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, so you know. Mercury is often credited, especially about
Roman authors such as Horace and Avid, as a culture
bearer of language and wrestling. So it's fascinating, really, all
told this trickster god, and he's a trickster, as we'll
get into, is a god of so many different things
(28:46):
of let's say, boundaries, shepherds, travel, roads, hospitality, diplomacy, trade, merchants, invention, thieves, orators,
wit and cunning, language and ripe again, wrestling, measurements, astrology
and astronomy, sleep in dreams, magic, fertility, athletics, gymnastics, guard dogs,
(29:09):
and much more.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
That's almost too many things.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
Well, it's interesting. There's this notion, and comic artist and
author George O'Connor covers this well in his Olympian series
hermis Tales of the Trickster. This is a series. I'll
hold it up for our viewers on video. This is
a series that my kiddo was very much into when
they were younger. And I've had Georgie O'Connor on the
show before and talk to him about his approach. He
(29:35):
really knows his stuff, really does as research. Highly recommend
the he's to anybody looking for a graphic novel treatment
of Greek mythology. But also he's gotten into Norse mythology
and I think has three volumes out, so wonderful stuff.
But he discusses this notion that Hermes, left to his
own devices, is going to cause mischief, is going to
(29:56):
get up to no good. And therefore Zeus keeps him
just very very busy with this whole grocery list of tasks,
always setting him out to, you know, to do this,
to spy in this person, to bring this person, drag
this person in, and it makes sense, given some of
the things he's he's charged with skill sets and areas
of culture that perhaps you could make a strong argument
(30:17):
they benefit from oversight of some sort or another. They
need to stay on task and busy, otherwise they might
get up to they might get into trouble.
Speaker 4 (30:26):
That's a really interesting take. But I thought you were
going somewhere totally different when you said, like since as
a trickster. I thought you were going to say that
as a trickster, Hermes has bluffed his way into many
many jobs.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
You know, that's an interesting I don't know if anybody's
ever given it that exact treatment.
Speaker 4 (30:44):
Yes, I do have five years of expertise in gymnastics.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
I know all about that, you know.
Speaker 4 (30:50):
Oh yeah, yeah, astrology too, I know about that.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess I get the
the I get the idea from these various treatments of
Mercury and or Hermes that they they're very skilled at
the things they do, so they're not just bluffing their way.
But I think it also you could make the case
that as he is a traveler, uh and he has
he's and he has wit, and since he has those
(31:13):
two things, they are all these different tasks that he
ends up taking on just because he is the one
that moves across the realms, and he has his wits
about him, so he has his cunning. Now I want
to read, uh, some some bits from from Roman poetry
about Mercury. Here, Uh, this one I'm gonna read from.
This is an as Kleine translation of Avid's FASTI from
(31:38):
this is from the year eight CE. And this one's
this one's really cool. It goes as follows, or this
is the excerpt goes as follows. Come Mercury, Atlas's famous grandson,
you whom apply ad once bore to jove among the
Arcadian hills, arbitr of war and peace to gods on
(31:58):
high and those below you who make your way with
winged feet hoo to light in the sounding liar and
the gleaming wrestling you through, who's teaching the tongue learned
eloquence on the odds. The Senate founded for you a
temple facing the circus. Since then today has been your festival.
All those who make a living trading their awares offer
(32:19):
you in since and beg you to swell their profits.
Speaker 4 (32:23):
Man, I love the modifier of the word wrestling being leaming?
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Is that for fun to oiled up bodies? Is that literally?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
Like I'm assuming I didn't look at any alternate translations
of this to see how it might be treated in
other translations. But that's that I love. It's certainly giving
me that mental imagery. And I was, I was examining
this a little bit. It's like, well, why is this
guy the one who brings wrestling to humanity? And I'm
to understand it has to do in a large part
(32:52):
with the cunning aspect of it. So wrestling grappling, you know,
if you're if you've never done it, or you don't
have a very close relationship with it, or I don't know,
you've never gotten into the details of it. You know,
you can just think of like it's brute strength. It's
just bodies slamming together. But of course there is cunning
in it. It is not just about the strength. That
(33:14):
is about then, like shifting out of holds and so forth.
And that seems to be what's bound up in this idea.
Speaker 4 (33:19):
It's like having the right like grapples and a sort
of tactical knowledge of what to do.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Yeah, And so this particular passage it refers to several
aspects of Mercury that are interesting. The sounding liar. He
is the inventor of the liar, the musical instrument made
from like a tortoise's shell and it's enterds. And then
also the bringing of language. Also his association with trade
(33:46):
and profit. He's a god that you should lift up
if you want to make money in your business, which
is fascinating as well. Also, again he's the traveler, so
it makes sense he's very much involved in trade. Now. Physically,
he the depictions of him will vary to a certain extent,
but he's usually depicted as a youthful man in a
(34:07):
winged cap. This is like a traveler sun hat because
he is a traveler with wings to denote swift and
unstoppable speed. He also has winged sandals. Again he's fast,
you know, flying straight ahead. And he also carries the
cadusius as a sign of neutral, independent travel as well
as a signifier of his status as messenger of the gods.
(34:30):
And of course the cadusius also brings with it other
powers that will refer to and just a bet. He
also frequently carries a purse or marsupium. This is a
coin bag, and this signifies his rule over commerce, so
you know he's he's carrying coin on him as well.
And again he is, to be sure, a cunning tricks
to God. And there are a number of stories in
which he engages in trickery just to some form or another.
(34:54):
One of them is, of course, when it occurs when
he is a baby. He is like like, he's baby
mur And he steals the sacred cows of Apollo by
having them walk backwards, which is classic, right because in
the footprints of the cows make it seem like they
were going in the other direction.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Hmm.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
I mean, I'm impressed that somebody could tell what direction
cows are going in by looking at the footprints.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Yeah, and again he's a baby. This is kind of
an interesting trope onto itself, the trickster baby God or
you know, divine figure. It reminds me a bit of
some of the stories of Krishna as a baby being
something of a trickster.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
Oh, I thought you were going to say that. I
think you should leave sketch. He's one of the most
aggressive babies I've ever Yeah, he'd be one of the
most deceitful babies ever.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Well, this would be the case here as well. I
believe in that same encounter he turns a witness into
stone to keep them from spilling the beans. There's also
this is one that we've referred to on the show before,
perhaps in one of our episodes about mythological treatments of
multi eyed entities. But he mesmerizes Argus the hundred eyed
giant into slumber in order to free a Io, and
(36:05):
then he goes ahead and murders the giant his way.
He slays the giant cold blooded while it sleeps, just
to be sure. He of course bribes the gods with
a liar, which he invents on the spot, you know,
created out of a tortoise to get out of some
of the punishment for the whole cattle incident. And in
classical poetry as well, he's always stealing the signature weapons
(36:26):
of various gods. So you know, whatever your you know,
your trident or what have you, if you leave it
setting around too long. And again, if Mercury doesn't have
enough tasks on his grocery list, he might just steal
what you've got just for the heck of it.
Speaker 4 (36:42):
Okay, so you can understand why he is also patron
of thieves. He does a lot of yoinking himself.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Yes, yeah, and yeah, he's more than just a mere
traveler or a mere messenger. Yeah, he's a god who
kind of does what he wants and goes where he wants.
And it's up to the gods and mortals if they
want to take advantage of this or not. According to
the writings of Juvenile Marble, heads of Mercury were erected
(37:08):
on poles wherever two roads met. Again, he's a liminal
god and a lord of thresholds. He can cross over
these dominions of Olympus Earth in the underworld, where others,
even other gods, cannot. Again, makes him an ideal psychopomp,
and he factors into various myths in which someone is
crossing or made to cross between these barriers. And again,
(37:33):
the most of the imagery you encounter of him, and
certainly the images that I encountered growing up depicted yeah
just kind of this, like youthful naked fella with a
cap with wings on it and sandals with wings on it,
which I have to admit, when I was a kid,
I tended to find this a little silly looking and
may think that might have factored into my sort of
dismissal lot of and I think also in a lot
(37:55):
of the versions of the of, particularly the Greek myths
that I was reading, Hermes was just kind of relegated
to Messenger. And I don't know, I don't remember a
lot of direct exposure with more involved tales involving this figure,
this god, but there are some really really intense images
(38:15):
of him out there. One particular painting that I recommend
looking up is The Souls of Asheron from eighteen ninety
eight by Adolf Hermi Herschel. You can find this online
and off the top of my head, I'm not sure
where this one is collected as a physical painting or
if there are different versions of it. Is this sometimes
the case with these works, but this one is really
(38:36):
really intense. You see like the souls of the departed,
like Ashen and their coloration standing around this brilliant and
kind of brooding version of Mercury, and you see his
wing at him, you see the Cadusius and he has
these robes on. I feel like this image in particular
captures a lot of the power of the figure that
(38:57):
you see and you read about in some of the
like the works of the Roman poets, but is maybe
a little missing from some of our modern conceptions of
the figure.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Oh yeah, this is full of dark, grieving pathos. That's
like seeing all the people reaching out to him and
this kind of pleading posture. They're all below and he's
standing looking very impassive and be like he's he's not
providing much comfort to them.
Speaker 2 (39:21):
It reminds me a little bit of what you were
talking about earlier. This is something that again ancient observers
would not have known, but the idea that Mercury is
a planet that can be incredibly hot but also incredibly cold, right, Like,
he's very hot blooded and can be very passionate in
some of the tales, you know, it's a fathering children
on the you know, in mid task at times, but
(39:44):
in this case, very cold to the people around him. Yeah,
the souls around him, and this darker side of Mercury. Yeah,
can definitely be found in the Roman literature considered. This
excellent quote from Virgils the Eneid, in which Mercury is
essentially suiting up to enact Jupiter's will, goes as follows.
(40:06):
The god, the god being Mercury prepared to obey his
great father's order and first fastened the golden sandals to
his feet that carry him high on the wing over
land and sea like the storm. Then he took up
his wand he calls pale ghosts from Orcus with it,
sending others down to grim Tartarus gives and takes away
(40:28):
sleep and opens the eyes of the dead. So this
really to me, like it seems to suggest an idea
of Mercury as an enforcer, as a hit man or
a bounty hunter, really reminding me in many ways of
the sort of form that certain angels, messenger angels, and
angels of death take in like Judeo Christian traditions, where
(40:52):
you know you never want to meet an angel because
it's this terrifying entity. And likewise, this is against something
I didn't really I'd never thought about until this week
researching this episode. But Mercury feels like a god you
would never actually want to meet, because if you're meeting him,
you know, hopefully you've just happened to meet him on
the way to something. But if he has been sent
(41:13):
to you, well, probably nothing good is going to come
with it. I guess it depends on how well you
sit with his father Jupiter.
Speaker 3 (41:22):
Either way, it's a clutch tight your valuables.
Speaker 2 (41:25):
Yeah. Yeah, he also might steal something. Yeah, this is
more of an aside really that I was reading that
there was a Roman practice of the mercury fig, and
this would be the devoting of the first fig of
a tree's harvest to mercury, applied more generally at times
to first fruits, first works, and the like, So essentially
(41:47):
kind of like one for mercury. Reminds me a little
bit of how I think you will still see the
practice of a business will have that first dollar bill
that they make tacked up on the wall. That's essentially
the mercury fig, let's see. And then I was reading
(42:11):
more there's a lot of interesting stuff concerning the worship
of mercury in Roman gaul in Roman Britain. I was
reading a twenty nineteen paper published in Studio Antiqua at
Archaeologica by Nadezda s. Shirokova. Again, this was twenty nineteen,
(42:32):
the cult of Mercury and Roman Gaul in Roman Britain,
and this author points out that Mercury eventually becomes for
a while the most popular deity of worship in Roman
Gaul in Roman Britain, And part of this seems due
to the fact that these were far flung corners of
the Empire, and the people there would have you know,
they had a heightened sense of the importance of travel
(42:55):
and trade. You want a god with an eye on
the supply chain, right. The author also points out that
in both areas there was also a fusing of wing
helmet Mercury with the Celtic hornet god of fertility, Also
differing from traditional vision of Mercury. In these areas, he
(43:15):
also became considered more of a guardian of military affairs,
which the authors suggest might have to have more to
do with the synthesis of Celtic beliefs with Roman beliefs
and different Celtic gods. But I also couldn't help but think,
and this is just me, that you could also see
this sort of metamorphosis taking place for people again that
would be acutely aware of the necessity of movement and
(43:37):
commerce for sustaining a far flung province, not only in
terms of supplies, but also military protection. And in some
cases Gollic Mercury had horns or antlers instead of those
hat bound wings in some cases he had three faces
emerging with Lucas, I believe, the Celtic god of trade
and crafts. So you see a number of these different
(44:01):
ways that Mercury becomes compared to and merged with some
of these indigenous deities. Now this is possibly confusing this
a little bit. Is the fact that if you read
the journals of Julius Caesar earlier, upon visiting the region,
he wrote of the locals worshiping Mercury there. He this
(44:25):
is from Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. He says,
they principally worship the god Mercury. There are many images
of him. They regard him as the inventor of all arts.
They consider him the guide of their journeys in march marches.
They believe him to have to have very great power
for the acquisition of money and for trade. These, of course,
are all things that match up with Mercury. But basically
(44:49):
it seems like what was happening here is that Caesar
was observing examples of Lucas or other gods among the
the the Gallic people, and then was just saying, oh,
that's Mercury, Like yeah, this sort of classic Roman synthesis
of deities, which would go both ways, like interpreting other
gods as your gods, but then also borrowing or readily
(45:13):
and incorporating the gods of others into your own pantheon.
Speaker 4 (45:16):
Yeah and yeah, Romans did both both assumed equivalences and
absorbed what they encountered.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
Yeah, and there's some more interesting details concerning the history
of the I really found this interesting in this idea
that like sometimes the wings on his hat would become
horns or antlers in comparison to these other gods, because
I did find some other sources that I may explore
more for future episodes here talking about like the history
(45:45):
of showing wings on the head and it's comparison with horns,
particularly when you get into into you know, purely Christian
era like demonology and so forth. But perhaps more on
that later. Now, as we previously discussed the show, Mercury
is an elusive star to spot. It's actually the we
were just talking about this in our dog Day's episodes,
(46:07):
but it's actually the thirteenth brightest object in the sky.
But as Richard Talcott discusses in the Astronomy Magazine article,
Mercury at its best in the evening sky from twenty twelve.
You know, it's still difficult to make out. You know,
it's bright and obviously number thirteen out of all those
stars up there, that's still something. But it's closer to
(46:30):
the Some than any other planet, as we've been discussing,
So from our perspective, it never ventures much beyond the
glare of the Sun and never appears fully against a
totally dark sky, So you could, despite its brightness, it's
almost kind of like a deeper cut in most traditional
astronomies and astrologies like it was known of, but it
was it was difficult to spot and maybe a little
(46:51):
more complicated to understand.
Speaker 4 (46:54):
Now I didn't make notes about this for this episode,
so I can't be certain, but it seems like I
remember reading some thing a long time ago that maybe
some of the ancients actually thought Mercury was two different stars.
Have you come across that.
Speaker 2 (47:10):
I didn't come across that particularly. We may have to
come back to that. But there was this idea that
it was the leaping star, that it moved so much
from night to because again it's it's fast moving and
has a tight orbit, and so from our perspective it
seems to move around with great speed, and so from
night to night it could be in drastically different places,
which again feeds and then feeds off of this idea
(47:33):
of a deity that has great speed.
Speaker 4 (47:36):
Well, I mean, certainly I see the association between the
speed of the actual planet's orbit and the speed of
the god, you know, the winged god, the fast moving messenger.
But the distinction I remember reading was something about there
being a confusion that like Mercury was separately like an
evening star and a morning star. And then later there
(47:58):
was the connection that, oh, these are actually the same
object that we're seeing in some cases in the in
the morning, you know, before dawn, in some cases at night.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
Okay, we'll have to come back to that then and
look at that in more detail. So obviously, yeah, humans
have been observing Mercury, the planet Mercury, for a very
long time, observing it well before the idea of a
god named Mercury, because yeah, the Romans end up in
inventing the name Mercury well after Hermis, so Hermes comes first,
(48:27):
Romans create Mercury. I believe the route there MRK is
related to like commerce and trade, as they absorb some
of these ideas about Hermes. But the oldest recording recorded
sightings of Mercury date back to the fourteenth century BCE
and the likely Assyrian mold dot appen tablets. If I'm
(48:48):
saying this out loud correctly, we've talked about these before,
and I can't remember how we actually said this. Is
it mold dot appen or just mold appen tablets.
Speaker 4 (48:55):
Mold dot appen like it's a web address.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
It's a web address.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Don't try it. I don't know where it dot happened.
But in these we have the oldest recorded sightings of Mercury,
but also the oldest recorded traditions of the planet being
associated with concepts of wisdom, and particularly they deal with
the Babylonian d d Nabu, son of Marduk, whose agility
(49:21):
of the mind was linked with the observed speed of
the planet, which again was sometimes called the leaping Star
due to its speed. Again, Mercury fastest planet in our
solar system eighty eight day year, and this is this
is observable and its apparent location in the night sky
again shifts a lot night tonight based on this fast
(49:42):
small orbit, earning it this traveler's reputation and this Nabu
connection becomes the foundation of these various other connections between
the planet and God associated with speed or wisdom. So
out of Nabu eventually comes Hermes, for example. And yet
there are actually multiple examples of this that can be
(50:03):
tied into this tradition, not only Mercury and Hermes and
the Greco Roman tradition, but also Buddha, not to be
confused with the Buddha like the historic Buddha, not Buddha
with two d's, but Buddha with one d. You'll find
this personification in the Vedic Hindu tradition, and I believe
Ganesha is sometimes associated with mercury as well, and Ganesha
(50:27):
is also associated with wisdom to a very large degree.
In the Norse tradition, you have Odin, of course, also
associated with wisdom, and then in ancient Egypt eventually thought
as well. But this only applies to later traditions, as
the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic is primarily lunar,
but the Greco Roman and later Occultist traditions recast him
(50:51):
as mercury aligned. So this is again one of those
cases where you know myths change, myths respond to other myths.
Myths respond to obs in the night sky as well,
but mercury is more traditionally associated with set or set
in ancient Egypt. Now, the Chinese treatment of mercury was
(51:12):
seemingly somewhat unique and set apart from these traditions, seemingly
unrelated disconnected from those ideas. It was the so called
hour star, and it was connected to concepts of water,
winter and astrological connections to unexpected legal or military shifts
or even natural disasters. Meanwhile, you also find some fascinating
(51:34):
traditions in the Americas, and I might have to come
back to some more of these, but some of the
big ones that are often brought up. Myan traditions also
focused on its speed, seeing mercury as being aligned with
the owl and being a psychopomp. And then the Aztecs
focused primarily on its proximity to the sun, so you know,
picking up on the fact that it is solar aligned
(51:56):
and therefore perhaps some manner of like minor so deity.
So that's just a brief overview focusing mostly on the
Roman mercury given our use of the Roman names and
the naming of the planets. But I feel like just
Roman Mercury alone is such a fascinating god and again
one that I feel like I've not paid enough attention
(52:19):
to over the years, Mercury or Hermes, where when you
dig down into it a really fascinating, you know, at
times funny and at times frightening individual and member of
the pantheon.
Speaker 4 (52:31):
Absolutely so, I think we'll have to keep this rather
large host of associations in mind as we rather explore
the planet itself. What exactly is it about the planet
Mercury that's not only messenger, fleet footed, thief, trickster, but
maybe gleaming wrestler, maybe a little bit you know, trade
(52:52):
in commerce.
Speaker 3 (52:53):
I don't know. I bet we'll see a lot of
angles there.
Speaker 2 (52:56):
Yeah. Yeah, we'll get into the history of pro that
have been sent to Mercury or near Mercury. We'll get
into that again. We'll talk a little bit about science
fiction as well as just ideas of regarding well, if
life did exist there, how would that even look what
would that even look like? In the same question regarding
possible human visitation and or colonization of the.
Speaker 3 (53:18):
World, I don't think it's near the top of the list.
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (53:22):
But you know, the human mind, you know, in the
spirit of Mercury, the cunning. We can't help but apply
ourselves to that scenario, like, yeah, we probably shouldn't. We
almost maybe we couldn't, but we've got to sort of
peace out exactly how we might attempt it. We can't
help ourselves.
Speaker 3 (53:42):
All right, does that do it for today?
Speaker 2 (53:44):
I think it does. We're going to go and close
this episode out, but stay tuned. There will be more
Mercury episodes in the future. Here in the meantime, we
would just remind you as usual that Stuff to Blow
Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with
core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episode on Wednesdays,
and then on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns,
So just talk about a weird film on Weird House
(54:05):
Cinema wherever you get the show, if you get the
audio version, wherever you get your podcast, rate review, subscribe.
That just helps us out. Likewise, if you watch and
view the show on Netflix, we are in video form
on Netflix. We ask that you give us a couple
of thumbs up, and you have to be reminded about
new episodes.
Speaker 4 (54:24):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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