Spring 2024 Book Launch!
We’re proud to present the next round of Mercurius books!
Mercurius’s Future World(s) is an anthology of essays that look beyond nihilistic neoliberalism.
Mercurius No. 2: Local Nature Devas is a selection of texts and images from the Poetry of Life, Society, Transitions, and Images sections of the website.
As-if or As-Is: A Cretan Encounter
On a quest for the skull we enter Aghios Titos, sit on a back bench in the main chamber and survey the interior. In the center a wagon-wheel chandelier of filigreed olive wood, inset with foot-high stained-glass portraits of saints, topped by as-yet unlit (electric) candles.
Saw My Soul on the Side of the Road
I feel the constant business of life chip away at any wonder and curiosity in a concept like the soul. Connecting to spiritual ideas feels close to impossible in the scheduled days. The desire to progress in a world that doesn’t value something like the soul ends up meaning less priority to spirituality.
The Elegy Season
Everything talks in requiems. The mountains cry out in forested waves, leaves speak from vanished syllables, the sun shatters the world through magnetic spots…
Genesis
I believe prose poetry is a portal to opening people up to the idea of poetry. When it is surreal or absurd prose poetry, the reader is suddenly, God forbid, having fun with a form of poetry. vAs much as this applies to poetry and Mercurius, I think the same is true of the Bible, as we try to make meaningful and relevant ways to make it accessible to modern living.
Heat and Money
When I came to “A Dream Within a Dream,” I felt both repelled and attracted not by the common thought that we are all characters in someone else’s dream but by the idea of a dream within a dream, suggesting to some the interminable repeating images in a mirror before and behind one.
Communion
Good poems traffic in realities that are strange, ambiguous, and (at times) incommunicable. Since the spiritual realm (as I understand it) is strange, ambiguous, and incommunicable, maybe poems are our best windows into that place.
The Tower of Babel
In the summer of 2010 I found myself collecting and downloading reproductions of works of art that referenced the Tower of Babel which I pasted into a new sketchbook. By the end of the summer, I had painted a series of 12 towers on A1 paper, another 12 ‘Small Towers’, this time around a foot square in format, and a number of studies and sketchbook pages on the same theme.
The Climate and the Dreamers
Two poems
Five Poems
While referencing the Judea-Christian tradition, these poems were influenced by my encounters with Zen, Shinto, and religious naturalism in Japan, where I have lived most of my adult life.
Terrestial Zodiacs in Britain
Terrestrial, or landscape, zodiacs have always been at the outer edge of antiquarian studies, and remain the eccentric uncle of that trendier activity, psycho-geography. Disdained by the orthodox, they prompt questions about how we interact with the numinous in certain landscapes, and about the potency of occult symbols.
Local Nature Devas
The energy of the plants in the park near my home has a visionary quality. The nature devas appear. They radiate a soft, peculiar luxury, with distinct characteristics sculpted from light. Waves of light, wind blown fields of light.
Pessoa’s Dream
Pessoa’s Dream” is a stream-of-consciousness poem that begins and ends as a reflection on Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and which, in between those reflections, emerges as a whistle-stop tour of literary and philosophical associations — James Joyce, Henry David Thoreau, Slavoj Zizek and Stefan Zweig all get a mention whilst René Guenon, although not mentioned by name, lingers in the periphery.
The Surprising Abundance of Fire
As he investigates the causes of dissatisfaction in the 21st century, Michael Swatton draws on a wealth of deeply-felt observations that illustrate the dislocation of mind-body-spirit in the hyperreal of the everyday. His tentative solutions gesture towards the curative properties of immersion in nature and the “eternal here”.
Tara's Playground
This is where I had my most powerful experience of unity consciousness, standing on another bridge, overlooking the park, the trees and the grass and the stream dissolving into an ecstatic field of white light, where no single object existed as an individuated presence, and I was there, merging with the radiance as absolute being, pure, undifferentiated awareness.
A Song of Devotion
We can be devoted to anything that stirs the divine current in us. A mountain, a river, a tree. Even another human being, with all their flaws, but perhaps especially one who loves us unconditionally and inspires love in return. Or we can be devoted to a particular deity who blazes light and truth and appears as an expression of the unity of primordial ground or source consciousness at our core.
No answer
After receiving an impassioned Whatsapp voice message from Michael Swatton, Thomas Helm was inspired to transcribe the message, edit it, and turn it into a poem. Michael, who is a professional Canada-based actor, reads the poem aloud in this track.
Spiritual Pathology
Ever encountered a guru who used his so-called “wisdom” for darker, more selfish needs? Practicing Buddhist and Jungian scholar Rob Preece speaks candidly about the psychological pitfalls of spirituality, explaining why seekers of spiritual truth can sometimes get caught in webs of self-delusion.
Individuation or Institution?
Individuality, creativity and the development of organised religion do not always sit comfortable together. How does one negotiate one’s spiritual path between the homogenizing tendencies of institutions and the often unstructured inspiration and rebellions of individual creativity? Rob Preece explores Buddhism, individual spirituality and religious institutions through the lens of Jungian psychology, and specifically the Puer Aerernus and Senex archetypes.
A Brief Manifesto on Variety (For Dreamers, Poets and Tantric Artists)
Variety doesn’t exist just to appease Ennui; we each possess a psychic need to externalise inner forces, to find fresh images for buried depths.
The never-ending quest…
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