The Golden Snitch - Alchemy, Mercury, and Attention
Pay attention to the things that call your attention
Hey friend,
I hope you've been well!
Fall is just about here, summer feels like it’s wrapping up soon. This time of year always makes me feel the need to watch Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and get cozy on the couch. Sometimes I will put them on in the background and work on music, send emails, or work on something else. These movies are so nostalgic for me, and I watch them at least once every year.
There is an old symbol from medieval alchemy that is strangely similar to something in Harry Potter, and that is the Golden Snitch.
In Harry Potter, if you haven’t seen the movie, there is a game called Quidditch that is essentially a high stakes ball game played on flying broomsticks. The team has to score points with one ball, attack each other with other balls, and each team has one “seeker” whose task is to ignore the rest of the game and pursue a higher game. The seeker’s goal is to catch the extremely hard to catch Golden Snitch, which if captured, wins you the game.
In alchemy there is a symbol known as the round chaos, and it is associated with the ancient god Mercury who is the winged messenger of the gods.
The modern understanding of the gods in ancient times was that each god represented a different psychological state of mind. Some of these emotions are so strong it feels like they take over us at times. We understand the nuances of these emotions today, but back then they would have explained it as a god coming over them or commanding them.
Ares/Mars was war and anger, Venus/Aphrodite was love and lust, Athena/Sophia was wisdom, etc. Mercury was known as the messenger because he was the one who drew your attention to something, for good or bad.
Something calls you to study a certain subject, or to pursue music, or play a specific sport. What is it that calls you? The greeks called this Mercury, and the alchemists knew it as Mercurius.
This image represents the entirety of Alchemy in one image. The overarching idea is to unite the opposites, so here we see the masculine and the feminine, represented by the hermaphrodite, as well as the sun and moon. At the bottom we see the “round chaos” with the dragon of chaos on top of it. On the left side we see the symbols for Venus and Mars, or man and woman, and on the right side we see the symbols for Jupiter and Saturn, which represent both the growth and evolution of Jupiter and the dark shadow side of Saturn. At the very top of the image we see the symbol for Mercurius which is essentially saying that it is the uniting factor between all opposites. It is also interesting to note that Mercurius is often represented as a dragon, had a solar side and a lunar side, and also has a masculine and feminine side, as well as a positive and a negative side. He is the quintessential symbol for uniting of the opposites.
If we take this apart psychologically, attention is the thing that guides you to transformation and growth. Pay attention to the things that call your attention. Maybe you see a video online that inspires you to take a trip to Japan, and along your travels you meet somebody who changes your life in ways you could never have imagined. Or maybe you are a kid and you are drawn to pick up a guitar for the first time, not knowing that years later you would still be writing music and expressing yourself through this instrument you happened to stumble upon as a child. Or maybe you had a traumatic experience when you were younger and this led you to want to become a therapist. Following your attention and your interests leads you to growth, it is your life’s adventure.
On the other hand, things that annoy you are the shadow side to the Mercurial and you are meant to pay attention just the same. There are an infinite amount of things that could annoy you, and something that annoys you may not bother someone else. The real question to ask is, why does this bother me so much? Is there some way that I also do this? Is this annoyance simply just a projection that I am too cowardly to look at?
Attention in the truest sense will guide you forward, as each moment you are presented with an infinite amount of possible directions you could go, yet the direction that your attention is drawn to is the one that will lead you to growth. What you pay attention to will inform what it is that you see in the world, and what paths you see laid out before you.
This idea has fascinated me for a long time, and it is baked into a children’s movie that we grew up with and none of us had any idea how old some of the symbols in it were. The interesting question is, did JK Rowling have any idea about the symbology of the round chaos, or did this just come from some Mercurial unconscious drive she couldn’t explain either?
When it comes to creativity and music, I do find this perspective interesting because it does feel like ideas come to you out of nowhere. It’s like you are an antennae and you are just capturing the ideas while you are in the flow state and often times question how it is that you created this? Understanding this Mercurial idea gives more depth to my experience as a musician because it adds merit to what most creatives say when they state that it feels like they are channeling something. We all feel it and that is why the ancients felt the need to personify it.
Have you ever experienced this while you are creating something? Like something is coming through you? This is what the alchemists would have called Mercurius and it fascinated them for centuries.
If any of this sounds interesting to you at all, then I suggest you get into Carl Jung! This book is far too complex to break down so I will just link it and if it sounds interesting check it out!
Take care my friend,
- Niko