By Water & Blood

Book 1, Chapter 19: Mars and Mercury as the Sun

What has been said of Father Liber shows that Mars too is the same as the sun: since most people join Liber with Mars, showing them to be one god. Whence Bacchus is surnamed Enyalius, which is among the proper names of Mars. There is also worshipped among the Lacedaemonians an image of Father Liber marked with a spear, not a thyrsus. But even when he holds the thyrsus, what else does he carry but a hidden weapon? Its point is covered by ivy licking about it, which shows that the impulses of war are to be bound by a certain bond of patience. For ivy has a nature of binding and fastening. And the heat of wine, of which Father Liber is the author, often drives men even to martial frenzy. Therefore, because of the kindred heat of either effect, they wished Mars and Liber to be one and the same god. Certainly the Romans venerate both under the title of father, naming the one Father Liber, the other Marspiter, that is Father Mars. Hence also Father Liber is proved powerful in wars, because they first published him as the author of triumph. Since therefore Father Liber is the same as the sun, and Mars is the same as Father Liber, who would doubt that Mars is the sun?

The Accitani also, a Spanish people, celebrate with the greatest religion an image of Mars adorned with rays, calling it Neton. And certainly natural reason requires that the parent deities of celestial heat be divided more in names than in reality and substance: but the fervor by which the spirit kindles and is stirred, now to anger, now to virtues, sometimes to an excess of temporary madness — through which things wars also arise — they have surnamed Mars; whose force the poet, expressing it and applying it to the likeness of fire, says: "he raged as when spear-brandishing Ares or destructive fire." In sum it must be declared that the effect of the sun, from which the fervor of spirits and the heat of blood are excited, is called Mars.

But that Mercury may be proved the sun, what was taught above supports it. For that Apollo and Mercury are the same appears even from this: that among many nations the star of Mercury is referred to Apollo's name, and that Apollo presides over the Muses, while Mercury imparts speech, which is the Muses' gift. Besides this there are also many proofs that Mercury is reckoned for the sun. First, that images of Mercury are adorned with feathered wings, which shows the sun's speed. For since we believe Mercury powerful in mind and understand him so named from interpreting (apo tou hermeneuein), and the sun is the mind of the world, and the speed of mind is supreme, as Homer says, "as a feather or a thought," therefore Mercury is adorned with feathers as with the very nature of the sun. The Egyptians resolve this argument more clearly, fashioning images of the sun itself winged, for which among them the color is not one. For they fashion one of blue appearance, the other bright. Of these they call the bright one upper and the blue one lower; but the name of lower is given to the sun when it completes its course in the lower hemisphere, that is in the winter signs; of upper, when it traverses the summer part of the zodiac. The same fiction about Mercury is under another fable, when he is reckoned messenger and servant between the upper and the lower gods.

Moreover he is surnamed Argiphontes not because he slew Argus, whom they say, adorned about the circuit of his head with the lights of many eyes, by Juno's command watched Io daughter of Inachus, that goddess's rival, changed into the form of a cow: but under a fable of this kind Argus is the heaven marked with the light of stars, in which there seems to be a certain appearance of celestial eyes. But it was decided to call heaven Argus from brightness and speed, from the white and the swift (para to leukon kai tachu). And he seems to watch the earth from above, which the Egyptians, when they wish to signify it in hieroglyphic letters, set down the figure of a cow. That circuit of heaven, then, adorned with the lights of stars, is reckoned slain by Mercury when the sun in daytime, by obscuring the stars, as it were slays them, taking away from mortals the sight of them by the force of his own light.

Most images of Mercury also are fashioned in a square stance, marked only by a head and with the male parts erect — a figure which signifies that the sun is the head of the world and the sower of things, and that all his force consists not in some ministry of divided members but in mind alone, whose seat is in the head. Four sides are fashioned for the same reason for which a tetrachord is also believed attributed to Mercury. For this number signifies either as many regions of the world, or the four turns of the seasons by which the year is enclosed, or that the scheme of the zodiac is distinguished by two equinoxes and two solstices — just as Apollo's lyre of seven strings makes known the motions of as many celestial spheres, of which nature has made the sun the moderator.

That the sun is worshipped in Mercury is also clear from the caduceus, which the Egyptians fashioned for consecration to Mercury in the form of male and female serpents joined. These serpents are bound in the middle part of their coil by a knot which they call Hercules', and their foremost parts, bent back into a circle, join the circuit of the circle with pressed kisses, and after the knot the tails are drawn back to the hilt of the caduceus and are adorned with wings rising from that same part of the hilt. The Egyptians also extend the argument of the caduceus to the generation of men, which is called genesis, recalling that four gods attend a man at birth as patrons: Daemon, Tyche, Eros, Ananke. And the first two they wish to be understood as sun and moon, because the sun, author of breath, heat, and light, is the begetter and guardian of human life and is therefore believed the Daemon (that is, god) of one being born; the moon is Tyche, because she is the president of bodies which are tossed by the variety of chance; Love is signified by the kiss, Necessity by the knot. Why wings are added has already been explained above. For arguments of this kind the coil of serpents especially was chosen because of the winding path of either star.