The pull of the sun would stop revolution. Obsessive love perhaps? Also observing the object of love.

Thank you very much for the message and the invitation. In the moment, I cannot find any appropriate answer as regards the connections with the scientific viewpoint.

It is a difficult question. I am reflecting on it.

Stanley Wilkin ,

Thank you for your answer to indicate that the relationship between the Sun and Mercury is one of attraction, rather than repulsion, both in mythological and in scientific terms! For instance, the following graphic description of the mythological relationship in classical pagan (Pre-Christian) Greek and Roman culture between Hermes (Roman divinity Mercury) and Apollo (also Greek and Roman Phoebus) suggests friendship and love:

" The friends Hermes and Apollo have a great deal in common. They are both gods of shepherds, flocks, and music. Hermes is a teenage Apollo, and his statues, herms, were to be found in gymnasia. Herms (sing: herm). A herm was a rectangular or square pillar equipped with male genitals and with the head or bust of Hermes on top. " Thus both Apollo and Hermes are symbolic of virility and male power in general. And, as you suggest, both the Sun and planet Mercury together may be interpreted as a macro-symbol of the cosmic message of divine love, which, for the sparsely populated pagan world connotes both Platonic love and male-female love. In our densely populated contemporary world, the Sun and Mercury are sending us a message about diminishing sources of energy and the necessity of using solar power to provide manmade forms of energy-conservation and production to heat our homes, schools, and work places during these cold winter seasons, and, moreover, to provide power to cool these habitable places during the increasingly hot spring, summer, and fall seasons (globally).

Nancy Anne Watanabe, I came across the below in a book by the philosopher A.C. Grayling discussing Isaac Newton, which might be of value here. Newton was not the first great rationalist but the last great occultist-an overstatement of course. Mainly he concentrated on the bible but also delved into paganism for his evidence. Newton perceived the old gods as symbolising elements. Helios gold of course, Aphrodite bronze (ok not element) and Ares iron. The stories within Greek myths about the gods indicated ancient transformation techniques using Hephaestus-fire.

the age of genius the seventeenth century and the birth of the modern mind

NASA points out that when Mercury rotates around the sun elliptically at its fastest, it doesn't have sunrise-set phenomena, so that might be part of the reason why it "doesn't turn its back" at these times. According to them the spin is slow actually. Thinking that if one got an idea of the Sun's distance to Earth by measuring Mercury's "transit-time" across the Sun's disk, I think it was Kepler who thought, by using trigonometric parallax, you could then get distances to other planets. Venus was used to measure solar distance from us as well; each 120 years,, you have two Venus transits spaced 12 (?) years apart. I saw the one from 2004 from the Swedish Academy of Sciences facilities at the Royal Technical College there with a grand, old fashioned ceremony. I have a history of the old observatory of the Swedish Academy of Sciences attached on my profile from James Cook University if you wish to read it about how that academy arranged to have different measurements of the 1761 transit measured across different parts of the world, in order to get a better solar-earth distance. As for modern studies, all planets are thought to exert a gravitational force on the Sun that might effect the Sun's internal behavior (like the barycenter shift each c. 179 yrs) that needs quantification - Mercury, included.

Stanley Wilkin ,

Thank you; I knew that Isaac Newton studied alchemy, which is, I believe, a pagan form of science, or scientific research into the elements, hence viewed as occult. Of the divinities you mention, Father Helios is associated with the element Au, or gold, and contemporary research indicates that this is a perfectly scientific and logical association. The current issue of Astronomy features an article titled "Gold from the stars," by Raymond Shubinski, of which the annotation in the Table of Contents states that "Humanity's fascination with this precious metal is increased by knowing it comes from the stars" (November, 2020, page 4). Stanley, you may be interested in the epigraph, which quotes Pindar, Greek poet, 5th century B.C., as follows: "Gold is a child of Zeus; neither moth nor rust devour it; but the mind of man is devoured by this supreme possession" (page 41). Since our Sun is a middle-age star, the gold here on Earth originally was given by the Sun. However, I agree with Pindar in the way he associates gold with the planet and deity Jupiter, because my research for my book on Yeats led me to agree with a Russian scientist, Joseph Veverka, who observes that "Jupiter and the sun have identical chemical compositions" (Veverka, "Jupiter's World: A Colossal Realm," The Planets, edited by Byron Preiss [New York: Bantam, 1985], page 116; quoted in Nancy Ann Watanabe, "The Hour Glass," Beloved Image: The Drama of W.B. Yeats - 1865-1939 [Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1996], pages 187; 398). Another Russian scientist named E.M. Drobyshevski, asserts that "By means of photoemission, Jupiter, the primary star, contributed to the formation of our sun" as part of a trinary star system ("Was Jupiter the Protosun's Core?" Nature 250, 5 July 1974, pages 35-36; quoted in Watanabe, pages 187, 398).

With regard to Mercury, the planet, and Hg mercury, the element, it may be that traits the planet exhibits as it speeds around the Sun will be providing scientists with factual data about the Sun, by inference or implication. In other words, as the middle-age Sun approaches the "red giant" phase in its lifetime, scientists are already predicting that Mercury will be devoured by the Sun; however, I hope that the Sun's companion will live up to the adjective associated with its name and be "mercurial" and suddenly and unpredictably use its elliptical orbital pattern to slingshot a path to get out of the Sun's way! Perhaps Albert Einstein was mesmerized by the Sun and Mercury duo because of these various phenomenal factors.

Thank you very much for your reference, The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind, by A.C. Grayling (Bloomsbury, 2016).

By the way, I was just looking up Bloomsbury publishing on LinkedIn earlier today. (I am not looking for employment on LinkedIn; however, I am looking for a publisher, and LinkedIn has listings of academic journal and book editors, as well as publishers, including Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury.) I thought that Bloomsbury is located in London, but the amazon.com/books website shows that The Age of Genius is published by Bloomsbury in New York City.

Bloomsbury is part of a larger group. My edition was published in London.

I think Alchemy also has monotheist roots, more so I suspect than pagan. The Jewish Kabbala is one influence. It creates mysticism from words and text etc. At a guess, it might have originated in Zoroaster and this Persian, or Iranian, religion was famous for this. The Magi in the Christian story and indeed the word magician.