Agrippa: The Philosophy of Natural Magic, Chapter XXIX — What Things Are Under the Power of Mercury, and Are Called Mercurial · 1 of 1 · tr. Henry Morley; L. W. de Laurence ed.
Chapter XXIX, Section 1
CHAPTER XXIX. What Things Are Under the Power of Mercury, and Are Called Mercurial . Things under Mercury are these: Amongst Elements, water, though it moves all things indistinctly. Amongst humors, those especially which are mixed, as also the animal spirit. Amongst tastes, those that are various, strange, and mixed. Amongst metals, quick-silver, tin, and the silver marcasite. Amongst stones, the emerald, achate or agate, red marble, and topaz, and those which are of divers colors and various figures naturally; and those that are artificial, as glass; and those which have a color mixed with green and yellow. Amongst plants and trees, the hazel, five-leaved grass, the herb mercury, fumitory, pimpernel, marjoram, parsley, and such as have shorter and less leaves, being compounded of mixed natures and divers colors. Animals, also, that are of quick sense, ingenious, strong, inconstant, and swift; and such as become easily acquainted with men, as dogs, weasels, apes, foxes, the hart and mule; and all animals that are of both sexes, and those which can change their sex, as the hare, civet cat, and such like. Amongst birds, those which are naturally witty, melodious and inconstant, as the linnet, nightingale, blackbird, lark, thrush, the gnat-snapper, the bird calandra, the parrot, the pie, the bird ibis, the bird porphyrio, the black beetle with one horn, and the sea-bird trochilus, which goes into the crocodile's mouth for its food. Amongst fishes, the fish called pour-contrel, for deceitfulness and changeableness; the fork-fish for its industry, and the mullet, also, that shakes off the bait on the hook with his tail.
Themes
◆Cosmic Sympathycosmology
The Stoic and Plotinian doctrine that all parts of the cosmos are bound by hidden affinities, so that a movement in one part resonates through the whole; the metaphysical basis for astrology, magic, and divination.
The text lists specific affinities between Mercury's nature and certain animals and plants that are under its power.
Form-mutability as a constitutional property of divine and preternatural beings — gods, heroes, spirits, and their human practitioners possessing inherent capacity to alter form across human, animal, plant, or elemental states. Loki and Odin's transformations in Norse, Math's pigs and Blodeuwedd's owl-shape and Pwyll's exchange with Arawn in the Mabinogion, the Greek Proteus, the Indian dasavatara, Vainamoinen's bird-flight in the Kalevala, Ovid's metamorphoses, the shamanic and witch's capacity for ritual form-change. Distinct from anthropomorphism (divine taking specific human form, single embodiment) in that anthropomorphism establishes a stable form whereas this concept establishes form's plurality and instability.
Animals like the hare and civet cat are explicitly listed as under Mercury's power because they can change their sex.
Chapter XXIX, Section 1 — Agrippa: The Philosophy of Natural Magic, Chapter XXIX — What Things Are Under the Power of Mercury, and Are Called Mercurial — Guru