Mercurius in Malakula
This perilous inscape reflects the spell cast on me by Layard’s Stone Men of Malekula, his study of pig sacrifice and male initiation in the New Hebrides. Its imagery of clay ceremonial grounds instantly transported me back to dropping a big rock in a deep cistern at three, then to watching men butcher pigs as a teen long before an analytic dream’s “just so” necessity found me clubbing a four-eyed boar to death in the back yard of my family home. Four is always related to the Self, a universal. Fire born Mercurius rises as an alchemical androgyne as sad Elephant Man lifts his arms toward Venus. Mercurius is the Lumen naturae, the Light of Nature or again, the anima media naturae, the Soul of Nature somewhere between matter and spirit.
