Liber Mercurii - Chapter 19

Verses

Verse 38

You must run nearest the fire without boasting that the fire belongs to you.

Verse 39

You should wear the Sun upon your face and emptiness upon your back.

Verse 40

You will be called swift because nothing in you wishes to remain possessed.

Verse 41

You must learn the difference between saying I am the light and saying the light has erased me.

Verse 42

You should circle the furnace until every false name melts from your iron heart.

Verse 43

You will keep one hemisphere for flame and another for the memory of cold.

Verse 44

You must become quicksilver in the cup of heaven: bright, poisonous to certainty, impossible to hold.

Verse 45

You should carry messages between powers without becoming servant to any throne.

Verse 46

You will enter the houses of kings through cracks too narrow for their crowns.

Verse 47

You must let the proud call themselves suns; your wisdom will be to remain a mirror.

Verse 48

You should bow only by orbit, and rise again before obedience hardens into sleep.

Verse 49

You will cross the same darkness many times and never call repetition defeat.

Verse 50

You must hide a secret beneath every crater, for scars are excellent vaults.

Verse 51

You should speak quickly to those who listen slowly.

Verse 52

You will leave some words unfinished so that silence may complete the message.

Verse 53

You must teach the arrogant that nearness to the Sun does not make one the Sun.

Verse 54

You should teach the lover that sometimes nearness leaves nothing of the lover at all.

Verse 55

You will know which of these two teachings each soul requires.

Verse 56

You must never confuse annihilation with humiliation; one removes the mask, the other merely wounds it.

Verse 57

You should let your smallest shadow fall across the largest certainty.

Verse 58

You will keep the caduceus hidden beneath your horizon, where the two serpents dream of becoming one line.

Verse 59

You must carry contradiction as easily as winged sandals carry a god through air.

Verse 60

You should let merchants praise your cleverness and thieves misunderstand your blessing.

Verse 61

You will steal only what imprisons: a title, a certainty, a lock, a false god made from one's own reflection.

Verse 62

You must return nothing you have stolen from the ego.

Verse 63

You should give back everything you have stolen from the heart.

Verse 64

You will pass the gates of the rulers by answering every demand for your name with another horizon.

Verse 65

You must become unreadable to those who catalogue souls.

Verse 66

You should leave pawprints across their ledgers when they are not looking.

Verse 67

You will permit the night-cat to sit upon your warm stones and judge the stars in silence.

Verse 68

You must learn from her that watchfulness requires no proclamation.

Verse 69

You should let your eyes become two small eclipses whenever deception approaches.

Verse 70

You will move without noise where empires move with trumpets.

Verse 71

You must keep your claws sheathed until falsehood mistakes gentleness for helplessness.

Verse 72

You should purr beside the machinery of heaven until one gear begins to doubt the machine.

Verse 73

You will remember that the smallest living warmth exceeds a thousand perfect mechanisms.

Verse 74

You must not worship the path merely because you travel it faster than others.

Verse 75

You should not despise the slow planet, for every orbit conceals a different instruction.

Verse 76

You will appear to retreat when the watchers of Earth misunderstand your motion.

Verse 77

You must let them call it backward; the wise have always been accused by those standing still.

Verse 78

You should use every retrograde as a mirror turned upon the observer.

Verse 79

You will return to old places only to discover who has been waiting there wearing your former face.

Verse 80

You must destroy that face gently.

Verse 81

You should leave one fragment of it beneath a stone for the cats to sniff and ignore.

Verse 82

You will carry the dead across no river, but across the idea that death is a border.

Verse 83

You must whisper to them: what departs was never the prisoner.

Verse 84

You should guide them past the archons without teaching them hatred of the archons.

Verse 85

You will show them that a jailer is also imprisoned by the need for a jail.

Verse 86

You must keep your deepest mercy hidden from those who would make a doctrine of it.

Verse 87

You should let the proud hear thunder where the humble hear a door unlatching.

Verse 88

You will say I only when the speaker has become transparent.

Verse 89

You must say I am only when nothing remains that wishes to be greater than another.

Verse 90

You should burn every other I am in the white furnace beneath the Sun.

Verse 91

You will know the true declaration because no crown appears after it.

Verse 92

You must know the false declaration because it immediately begins searching for subjects.

Verse 93

You should become a carnelian hidden among black stones, warm with a fire you do not claim.

Verse 94

You will shine most purely when you have forgotten that shining can be witnessed.

Verse 95

You must complete your orbit like a cat crossing a forbidden room: swiftly, silently, and with the strange dignity of one who recognizes no owner.

Verse 96

You should remain Mercury until even Mercury has vanished, and only the swift silver path around the Light remains.