In Botticelli's lavish portrayal of the season of Venus, a moving counterpoint between a sensual presentation of nature's resurgence and that regular inner season of the soul when it experiences Venus's green, Mercury plays a role of crucial importance. He points up and beyond the garden of the senses, turning the display of color and texture inside out, exposing its inferiority. Now we can focus directly on this fascinating figure and consider more precisely the nature of his office and the style of consciousness of represents.
Although Mercury offers a kind of knowledge, insight, and understanding, his form of soul activity differs strikingly from that of other deities associated with knowledge. Saturn, for example, offers deep intuitive insight, but the way of Saturn is distant, aloof, cold, heavy, and dark. Mercury, in contrast, is most often depicted as bright, quick, and light; these are in fact the very qualities which account for his peculiar kinds of insight. In the Renaissance period Mercury's intelligence was also contrasted with that of Minerva-Athena, goddess of intellectual speculation.1 As in the Primavera, Mercury is close to the action, pointing beyond it perhaps, but still in the picture. Mercury can lift the soul out of the limitations of a materialistic view of things, but in that regard his role is limited. He is a relatively moist planet, close toexperience and feeling, and as he looks to the vaporous clouds his feet are on the ground. Nor does Mercurial understanding involve maniacal Dionysian penetration of experience or an irrational inner voyage.