Mercury the Magician

I am the Mercury - light of the morning...

...like some windmill, weave light where it's stormy...

-Jimmie Spheeris, from Isle of View  

 full lyrics      listen (will play the entire song only once)

Mercuralia at the Ides of May celebrates the Greco-Roman Hermes-Mercury and his mother Maia, goddess nymph for whom this month is named.  Serendipitously, the central card in this year's Beltane tarot spread is the one most associated with Hermes-Mercury - The Magician.

The Magician stands like a herm stone in a garden of lily white and rose red, holding aloft the Firebrand, conduit between Heaven and Earth. On the table are symbols of the 4 elements air, fire, water and earth, and serve as keys to their mysteries.  The Magician stands in the centre of these 4 realms, poised to unlock their secrets.

This is card #1 in the tarot, thus linked to the Aces of the four suits, and the Magician hirself is the Ace of aces, the 1st born, the Magical Child.

Wendy Rule's album Zero features several songs inspired by the tarot. Written for the Magician, and for her son, "Child the First" brings to mind an image of Maia crooning to her precocious offspring Hermes-Mercury.  Mother's Day only a few days ago, I was happy to spend it with my own (full grown) Magical Child, Philip, and I dedicate the song to him:

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Child the First

Listen (a snippet)

Now you're here and now you're strong

With mind of sword and power of wand

Each sense a coin to spend along 

the path that you've been set upon

And now you're here with eyes as true

as sun is gold or ocean blue

And all is bright and all is new,

Magician child, in front of you.

     You drip with my blood (it's an offering),

     You slip thru my water, a softening

     of all that's before me and all that's before you,

     Child the First.

And you are    Ability

and you are    Dexterity

You're pure possibility

      and Magic   

      and Alchemy

And you will be changed,

But changing, change Destiny

And you can do anything, anything,

Everything!

Child the First

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Speaking of Alchemy - 

The royal couple, as Sol and Luna, stand beside a hill representing the "Philosophers' Stone," out of which flow water and fire.  

Mercurius stands uniting the two worlds - represented by two lions with a single stream flowing from its one mouth 

-from Avalon's Red and White Springs by Nicholas R. Mann and Philippa Glasson
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The red and white springs of Avalon are akin to the roses and lillies in the Magician's garden.  Mercury presides over the alchemical marriage of opposites, and is also born of it as the divine androgyne.

According to the Pythagorean Tarot

The Magician is the creator of a new cosmos [but] to create a new cosmos (order), the old cosmos must be turned upside down. Thus the Magician Hermes is the Lord of Contradiction. First, he is himself a contradictory figure: trickster yet savior, king of misrule yet obedient to justice, deceiving orator yet honest prophet, illusionist yet revealer of truth, fraudulent conjurer yet genuine mage, thief yet honest trader, diabolical yet angelic, material yet spiritual. [He is even identified with both Jesus Christ and Lucifer as the Morning Star (Mercury)]  Second, he governs contradiction, and shows the way that finds unity in opposition. In particular, he governs the transformation of a bad situation into a good outcome. Remember that on the day of his birth Hermes stole Apollo's cattle, tricked him and lied about it ["who,  me? I was only born yesterday"], yet these crimes eventuated in Apollo receiving the lyre [made from a tortoise shell by the infant Hermes] and becoming the patron of the arts, and in Hermes becoming the patron of divination and shepherds. Hermes teaches us that the worst evils can be transformed to good. He provokes us into new insights. 

Arianna Huffington, author of Gods of Greece, would agree.  Hermes is her favourite Greek God and she even brings him into her political discussions on the Huffington Post, which she co-founded and is editor in chief:

Winged messenger in perpetual motion, as an old man, or a fixed stone, Hermes embodies both action and serendipity, and that which never changes. He is the guide of our voyage and the guardian-spirit of our adventure.

Whenever things seem fixed, rigid, "stuck," Hermes introduces fluidity, motion, new beginnings. He is the primordial divine child -- the child who, if we're lucky, we never outgrow. Hermes' world is a magical world full of signs and significance. He was the god who first gave me, as a child, a sense of the miraculous all around me. His spirit is fluid, trusting, open. Introducing the element of the unexpected into our lives is one of the means he uses to spur us out of our complacency, to break through the inertia and confinement of habit and convention.

Hermes clearly represents a very important key to fearlessness: the freedom of not having to be in control all the time, of not always being the one who has to make things happen. His dual nature also helps us accept life's paradoxes - that the only constant is change. Which is why he is the god of connections, bridging realms and dissolving frontiers...full article here 
Some more Tarot Magicians:

Spiral                                    Renaissance                                   Mythic 

Alchemical

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Androgynous Mercury the Magician is pictured as female in some decks:

Romani                               Gendron