noü2you

The Serpent and the Solar Will

This image feels like a symbolic portrait of mastery over the lower and higher forces of the self.

The serpent has long been tied to hidden knowledge, instinct, transformation, and renewal. It moves close to the earth, shedding its skin and returning again and again as a symbol of death, rebirth, and secret wisdom.

But here, the serpent is not crawling aimlessly.

It is joined to a crowned, bird-like figure — something more solar, alert, and commanding. The rooster especially has associations with dawn, awakening, vigilance, and the arrival of light after darkness.

So symbolically, this image can be read as the awakening of consciousness over instinct.

Not the destruction of the serpent. Not the denial of the body. Not the rejection of shadow.

But the ordering of raw force through awareness.

In Hermetic and alchemical thought, transformation does not happen by pretending we are only spirit. It happens by bringing the earthly, animal, emotional, and instinctive parts of the self into harmony with the higher mind.

The wand or cord in the hand suggests direction. The light in the other suggests illumination.

Together, they show the work of inner alchemy:

to descend into the hidden parts of the self, to understand them without fear, and to raise them into conscious power.

Gustav Stettler

Gemäldegalerie II, 1963–1964

Mercurius

“When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it, he means quicksilver, but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed in matter.

Mercurius stands at the beginning and the end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and dies, to rise again as the lapis.

He is the play of colors in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements.

He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the traditional brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novem, the stone.

He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all opposites.

The multiple aspects of Mercurius may be summarized as follows:

(1) Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites. He is thus quite obviously a duality, but is named a unity in spite of the fact that his innumerable inner contradictions can dramatically fly apart into an equal number of disparate and apparently independent figures.

(2) He is both material and spiritual.

(3) He is the process by which the lower and material is transformed into the higher and spiritual, and vice versa.

(4) He is the devil, a redeeming psychopomp, an evasive trickster, and God’s reflection in physical nature.

(5) He is also the reflection of a mystical experience of the artifex that coincides with the opus alchymicum.

You Stepped out of a Dream 2025