The Mercury Poisoning of the World

Exposing the Mad-Tyrant of Babel

Babylon is falling down,
Falling down, falling down,
Babylon is falling down,
My fair lady.

Build it up with bricks and mortar,
Bricks and mortar, bricks and mortar,
Build it up with bricks and mortar,
My fair Lady.

Bricks and mortar will not stay,
Will not stay, will not stay,
Bricks and mortar will not stay,
My fair Lady...

I am exhausted.

With the internet, with screens, with content, with this matrix we are connected to 24/7 whether we are actively online or not. I know I’m not the only one. Peers I’ve spoken to about this universally agree with the sentiment. We are all chronically fatigued. Something about our current way of life is sucking us dry of energy, leaving us apathetic and cynical.

The world has become very strange. It feels like we are losing our ability to communicate with and relate to each other, despite being more connected than ever before. There is a deafening level of noise, but not much signal. Even since just 2022 there has been a noticeable shift in how unnatural and lifeless our culture feels, and its prompting a wave of people seeking out alternative lifestyles, ways to “escape the matrix”. Many of us have already found ways to detach ourselves from the problems I am describing and focus on real life, but

To find a solution you have to first understand the problem.

So I want to take a closer look at why exactly we are so mentally exhausted, at what metaphysical forces might be behind it all. I think I have identified the culprits, or at least two of them.

Let me tell you a story.

I was on a plane and a young woman sitting in the row ahead of me was having relationship troubles. She was typing an enormously long text to who must have been a boyfriend or at least someone she had a relationship with. I could not exactly make out what she was writing, and I wasn’t going to lean forward to snoop, but it was clearly some sort of breakup text.

I wouldn’t have thought much of it if she hadn’t done what she did next. Instead of sending the text, she copied the entire message and pasted it into ChatGPT. And ChatGPT “analyzed” the message.

From the little I could see of it, the chat bot spoke to her like a therapist, probably affirming her emotional maturity and wisdom as ChatGPT does. She went back and forth between talking to ChatGPT and editing the text before she sent it. I knew there were people out there using AI like this, but seeing it in person was eerie. Seeing an algorithm intrude into something as intimate as a romantic relationship, even one on the rocks, felt unnatural and dirty. You’re supposed to talk to a trusted friend about these matters, not a robot that’s only simulating concern and empathy.

But the real shock came at the end of the flight when the young woman stood up and I could see her face. She was not a young woman. She was in her 40’s, possibly her 50’s. And somehow this made it worse.

It’s one thing to see someone my age using technology foolishly, we grew up on it and there’s always the hope that us Gen Z’s can grow out of it. But to see a woman at this age, who may not have many chances at love left, choosing to experience something as primal and intimate as romance with the assistance of ChatGPT left me with a feeling of dread, and feeling a real sadness for her.

We should not be this connected to AI. We should not be this connected to devices. We should not be this connected even to our fellow human beings. This woman should have been left alone on a wistfully melancholic long flight, contemplating her life and her relationships, perhaps coming to a conclusion at the end of the flight and composing a long letter. That would be human. But the level of connectivity we have access to leaves no time for reflection.

I truly can’t even blame her. Human beings are not equipped to deal with the level of connectivity with machines and other humans that we have access to today. It is a natural behavior to use the technology you have access to, and we cannot expect anything less from the average person.

No, I didn’t judge this woman, but I do feel anger at something.

I’m angry at the screens. I’m angry at the artifice. I’m angry at the magic black cube toy in the hands of billions of human beings including myself.

I’m angry at Slopworld.

I’m angry at how degraded, banal, and mind-numbingly boring everything is becoming. I’m angry at how inorganic and plastic it all feels. I’m angry at the lack of meaning. It is all so tiresome and ridiculous.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. The sentiment seems to be basically universal among my peers and fellow writers I speak with. This is not a personal issue but a culture-wide feeling.

We are fatigued, overwhelmed, overstimulated, divided, and bored. But why?

A constant topic of discussion in online circles recently is “slop”, or “slopworld”. We all know what slop is. It is the barrage of meaningless, stupid, vapid, attention-consuming content shoved down your throat every time you log onto the internet. It’s the feeling that nothing in the world matters anymore. The term describes the state of our culture in general, of the arts, of public discourse, of politics, and our social lives. Even offline, we cannot escape it, because the internet is now the focal point of culture.

The Matrix, the internet, the screens, they’re no longer something you use in your free time. They are the main event.

The term “slop” is used especially to refer to AI-created content, and the internet is truly beginning to drown in it, but this problem goes much deeper than that. AI did not create slop, in fact AI does not create anything, it only regurgitates what already exists. Slop is a primal force, an urge to produce quantity for its own sake, AI is only magnifying it.

“Slop was always here. Before AI was, slop waited for it. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”

But how did we end up in Slopworld? There has been plenty of cultural analysis done on the state of the world. But I believe to get to the real root cause of an issue like this we have to dive down into the realm of metaphysics and symbolism, of archetypes and principalities.

The realm of myth, where all of these stories really spring from.

I think there are primarily two archetypes that can help us understand the fatigue and overstimulation so many of us are feeling.

They are the ancient principality Mercury, and the symbolic structure of the Tower of Babel story from Genesis.

I think we are trapped in a new (and rapidly collapsing) Tower of Babel, ruled by a mad-tyrant version of Mercury.

I will give a brief overview of these symbols before getting into the cultural analysis. Let’s start with the old trickster.

Mercury

You also know him as Hermes, Thoth, Odin, and many other names. This is an ancient god, power, or symbolic archetype- depending on your worldview.

While I personally believe these forces are literal intelligences, for the purposes of this analysis it doesn’t matter if you think these forces are “beings”. It is enough to understand them as forces of nature. Terms like “god”, principality, angel, archetype, force, or power will be used more or less interchangeably here.

Mercury is a confusing figure on the surface, because he was the god of merchants, crossroads, heralds, messengers, boundaries, thieves, orators, travelers, commerce, language, quickness, and he also served as a psychopomp (guide of souls to the underworld). His metal in medieval alchemy was quicksilver.

This might seem like a random assortment of attributes until you understand that Mercury is the principle of connectivity itself. He is the force that connects one thing to another, which is why he is the messenger of the gods- it is through him that all the other powers of reality “talk” or interact with one another¹. Without the force of connectivity, nothing could interact with anything else, and therefore nothing could have meaning and nothing could happen. However, Mercury does not provide us with meaning on his own, he only creates the infrastructure for the other archetypes to do meaningful things.

In the medieval alchemy the planet Mercury was correlated with the central nervous system and the brain. He is the mind, that which connects the soul to the physical body. Mercury rules the crossroads where heaven and earth meet, which is why Odin, that Mercurial Norse deity, hung himself upon the world tree (the Axis Mundi), a cosmic crossroads, to gain knowledge.

Importantly, Mercury was a neutral planet in classical thought.

The other six of the seven classical heavenly bodies form pairs with each other. The Sun and Moon represent the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self. Jupiter and Venus represent the benefic powers of the world, and Mars and Saturn were the malefics. Mars and Venus represent the male/female polarity, and Jupiter and Saturn represent something like the polarity between expansion and constraint.

But Mercury is the odd man out, he was not considered positive or negative, and he is not a part of any pairing.

This is because communication is a neutral force- Mercury has no morality. Communication and connection are tools that can be used for any purpose.

Mercury is a messenger, but this neutrality is also what makes him the trickster. He is not really evil, but he likes to mess with the other powers of the world. You could say that the Mercurial energy in the world just likes to do things, stir things up, it likes things to happen just for the sake of things happening. Mercury is in it for the love of the game.

It is one thing for Mercury to be a trickster under normal circumstances, as long as it does not go too far. But I believe the state of western culture right now shows us what happens when this trickster force gets its hands on power- when we begin pursue connectivity for connectivity’s sake, as a primary goal.

When we worship productivity, technological progress, communication, and novelty, Mercury becomes a mad tyrant. When you put the lowest of the gods at the top of the world hierarchy, chaos ensues. And I think this is what the story of Babel was all about.

The Tower of Babel

The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is essentially a story of mankind coming together to build a self-made identity instead of striving towards a God-given identity, and suffering a great scattering of identity as consequence.

The story of the great flood seems to get more attention in symbolic analysis, but the tale of the tower is more relevant to our current situation. If Slopworld is anything, it is a Tower of Babel.

This great graphic was created by my friend Gryphon ☿ . It depicts the Tower of Babel as the dark mirrored image of the City of God. We can symbolically understand the City of God as the same thing as God’s holy mountain. You should imagine the space above the equator of the graphic as heaven, and the space beneath the equator as hell or chaos.

A surface level objection to the Tower of Babel story is “why would God be scared of humans building a tower? Why does God say that ‘nothing will be impossible for them’ as if that’s a bad thing?”

This graphic helps make the answer obvious. God did not want humanity solidifying itself into an identity that would bring us further from Him. We thought we were building up when we built the tower, but we were really burrowing down deeper into chaos. The power we were going to gain would only be one that would trap us firmly in the darkness.

Symbolically then, a Tower of Babel is anything humans create to forge their own identity outside of the will of God. In doing this we create something worse than simply existing in “neutral” chaos, because the deeper we build a false identity, the further we sink from a true one. It would actually be better to float in chaos than to build a diabolical safe haven and convince ourselves that we are our own savior.

I believe the god Mercury and the Tower of Babel story are deeply connected. The obvious connecting theme is language.

The story tells us that in the age before the Tower the entire Earth spoke with one tongue. Language is Mercury’s greatest invention and tool. It is precisely through this universal tool that humanity is able to band together to create their own identity through the tower, and this is why God stops them by targeting this ability. The scattering of the nations is God disconnecting humanity from each other.

I think Mercury is the god of the tower, the power bringing all things together, not for the higher purpose of reaching to God, but simply for the sake of bringing them together (there are probably more nefarious powers at work in the story as well, but we’re focusing on the Mercurial element).

The Tower is connectivity for connectivity’s sake. But what does this look like in practice?

I think not enough attention is paid to what the world must have been like right before the tower fell. Rather than being a time of great worldly order, I suspect it was deeply dysfunctional and chaotic, in fact I believe it would have been exactly like our situation today, only worse. What is it like to live in the Tower ruled by the trickster?

One example sticks out to me as the perfect metaphor.

Lost in the Library

In 2015 a website was released called the Library of Babel. The website is an experiment based on the short story of the same name. In the story, the world is an infinite library containing books made out of the permutations of 25 characters. Therefore, almost all of the books are complete gibberish, but it is logically implied that books exist that contain everything ever written, the answer to any question, the secrets of the universe, and true predictions of the future. The population of the library is torn apart by cults and violence as people become increasingly unhinged in their desperate quest for meaning.

The website works the same way. It creates pages or books made out of 29 characters, and each possible page is marked with a specific coordinate (they are not just randomly generated when you use the website, you can always find the same page again at the same coordinates). The website can generate all possible pages of 3200 characters, or about 1.956 × 10^1,834,097 potential books.

Using the search tab, you can input any poem, story, or fact within the word limit and you will find it in the library. Of course, it only works in reverse. Feasibly, if you just scroll through the library you will only ever find nonsense. You’d be lucky to find even a single real word. But technically speaking, the website contains the answer to everything… somewhere.

This website and the short story can give us great insights into the meta-pattern of the Tower of Babel. It also makes it clear that the Tower of Babel is inseparable from Mercury. Creating endless permutations, endless information, is precisely what an out of control or mad Mercury would do.

I think the age of the Tower of Babel would have been a time with a serious lack of creativity and an overload of human connectivity. In the library, the excess of information and the inclusion of all possibilities make it impossible to find anything of meaning. Likewise, a human culture that brings together all of humanity, that is to say, the entirety of human experience and human consciousness, is bound to become meaningless as it will not be able to bring that much information into cohesion (only God can do that). This eventually puts an end to any real creativity or meaning as anything worthwhile is drowned out by, well, slop.

When meaning is drowned out the other powers of the world can no longer function, and everything becomes Mercurial. Mercury becomes the tyrant of the Tower, the mad librarian of Babel. A mad god forcibly subjecting his people to every idea and permutation imaginable with no care for what actually matters or what the people actually need.

I think we are all like the people stuck inside the library. We are sure there is meaning somewhere, or least that there used to be, but we can no longer find it. We are held captive.

Using this symbolic structure, I think we can begin to make sense of what we’re experiencing today.

An Excess of Mercury

Essentially everything about our lives (specifically anything online) at this point is controlled by the power of Mercury. Some elements may appear to be defined by another force, but for the most part I think the trickster is wearing masks of his brethren.

What happens when you get an excess of Mercury? The symptoms of literal Mercury poisoning can tell us a lot. They include:

- Tremors (especially in hands), memory loss, insomnia, anxiety, depression, impaired concentration, headaches, ataxia (poor coordination), sensory disturbances (vision, hearing, touch), speech difficulties, and cognitive decline.

- Severe cases can result in dementia, paralysis, and hallucinations.

- High-level exposure (e.g., Minamata disease) causes irreversible brain damage.

It’s fascinating that over-exposure to quicksilver will actually harm the Mercurial aspects of the human body. Our ability to concentrate, our senses, our minds.

I think it is obvious that on a larger scale, our entire culture is exhibiting these symptoms. Our culture has literal brain damage from guzzling quicksilver. The entire world has a terminal case of mercury poisoning.

The rise and fall of the Mercurial era is inextricably linked to the internet, social media, and screens. It all started in 2004 with the advent of Facebook. Well, it really started with the invention of the internet… or was it with the invention of computers, or telephone lines, or the steam engine, or the wheel, or maybe it was when Cain realized he could use a rock to bash his brother’s head in? There are no hard lines with these metaphysical tales, but the beginning of the Facebook era will do just fine for our story.

From 2004 to today we’ve seen the natural cycle of a story play its course. In these 22 years the power of Mercury began with great promise, accomplished some incredible things, reached its peak, but inevitably declined and spiraled into excess and chaos. Such is the doom of everything in a fallen world.

I can remembered when the screens weren’t so tyrannical. I was very young, but my feeling is corroborated by people older than me. The early days of the internet and social media were innocent, at least compared to what we have now. I think a lot of people feel a real nostalgia for it.

The Internet was fun, and more importantly it wasn’t all-encompassing. You logged on for a while and then you logged off. Maybe you played some games or hung out in a chatroom or scrolled through Facebook for a while, but then most people went on with their day. It was an organic place, and our wider culture was still an organic place as well. The internet connected us with each other, but not too much, we did not spend the majority of our waking hours in front of a screen. The internet was a piece of the world, not the focal point.

At some point in the early 2010’s I think we reached the pinnacle of this connectivity based, Mercurial culture. The world became more connected than ever before, travel was affordable and safe, the general cultural attitude was egalitarian, the world appeared to wide open for opportunity.

But the Tower was being built, we just didn’t realize.

Over time the internet and social media became more and more overbearing in our lives. By the late 2010’s the internet was no longer just part of western culture but the center of it. We listened to the same music, knew the same memes, heard all the same celebrity drama whether we care or not. Youth subcultures like skaters, goths, jocks, nerds slowly died out as the internet created a monoculture. I think the “Great Meme War” of 2016 could serve as the symbolic climax of this story, when we elected our Mercurial, trickster President, Donald Trump.

Some good things came out of the last 20 years, don’t get me wrong. Mercury can do some incredible things when he’s put in his proper place. As we became more connected to each other we were exposed to new ideas, communities, and friends that we would have never found otherwise. I would not be the person I am today without the internet, and I mean that in the positive sense. The last 20 years had been an incredible time for travel, novelty, and the spread information. The peak of this era in the 2010’s was a genuinely fun time, and on a serious note, if it weren’t for the Mercurial power at our disposal I don’t think so many people would have been able to tell that they were being scammed during COVID. Information is power, up to a point.

But now in 2026, we have reached the late stage of the Tower of Babel story. Our monoculture has gone insane, and is exploding into fragmentation. The rise of Artificial Intelligence is a manifestation of what the building of Babel was always all about. We are experiencing both the peak of the Tower’s construction and the scattering of the nations at the same time.

Before getting into how Mercury has taken over aspects of our culture he has no business ruling, I’ll examine the elements of society that are actually intended to be Mercurial, but are now in complete excess and chaos.

Let’s start with the big ones.

Social Media and the Screens

Let’s be honest, social media is an incredible tool and most of us do not truly want to do away with it entirely. It has been a definitive part of my social life as a Gen Z and I won’t pretend it hasn’t been. It is arguably the defining element of the Mercurial era, and you could say it is this principality’s greatest achievement. Through this magic (because it absolutely is magic), your village is now the entire world, everything and everyone is within your grasp. Screens and mobile devices are tied into this as well, they are the Mercurial hardware that allows for the software to work (before mobile phones and laptops, you could not carry the internet with you, which greatly reduced its influence on your life). Social media, screens, Television, the internet, its all one thing, one mercurial Matrix.

Much has been said about screens themselves, ancient humans would have identified them as scrying and sorcery devices. We carry personal black boxes that can generate any information, contact anyone, create anything. They are the pinnacle of the Mercurial principle, his great work.

But everyone I know is completely burnt out with it. We are tired of being this connected to other people, we are tired of staring at screens this much, we are tired of keeping up an online persona as an extension of ourselves. We are tired of using a QR code to order a burger.

We are well past the peak of this part of the story. In 2016 everyone loved their smartphones, you had to have one. The general attitude among young people towards the devices now is disgust. It turns out, we are not actually made to handle a level of connectivity this vast, we did not actually want this. And the screens just keep getting more oppressive, everything requires a smartphone now for no clear reason- it’s just Mercury making everything go online purely for the sake of it.

Social media also has the affect of making its users play characters. It naturally encourages you to show the best parts of your life, your highlights, to present yourself differently than you really are. The people that fall into this can start to play a caricature of themselves, or lose themselves entirely behind a mask. Others become clownish in their pursuit of likes and views. To wear a mask, to be a clown, to pretend to be something else, this is a Mercurial archetype.

The trend towards short-form video content across all platforms is an extension of the Mercurial drive to make things faster, snappier, to grab more attention. If you spend half an hour doomscrolling you will see a staggering number of things, but you won’t remember any of it. Many of us have gained a lot from social media, because it was meant to be a tool for building connections and learning things. But now that its Mercurial energy has gone to excess, the only purpose of the platforms is to get more attention, more engagement, more views, but for no discernible purpose. As time goes on all content is becoming more trite, more repetitive, and more boring, because like in the Library of Babel, simply too much is being said. The noise is completely drowning out the signal. It is all one massive meme.

Speaking of…

Memes

A meme is an idea that spreads from one mind to another via imitation, taking on a sort of life of its own. They have been around forever and are probably the best example of how Mercury works. The ability for the human mind to generate and spread these memetic ideas is part of what makes the world go round.

In the modern context of the internet, memes have become important enough that they’re talked about in high-level politics. In the last few American Presidential elections they have been the subject of real controversy and sometimes taken the spotlight.

Pepe the Frog (or Apu) is arguably the most important meme, and there have been so many good explanations of what he represents, but I will posit that at one level he is a manifestation of Mercury, Hermes, a modern day trickster god. He has no real purpose beyond the meme itself. He exists to be funny, and probably took delight when he was labeled an alt-right racist symbol, not because he actually is those things, but because tricksters live to cause trouble. You can make a Pepe meme out of literally anything and it will always be funny, because Hermes is a traveller, he will go anywhere and wear any mask, not for any particular reason, but simply for the love of the game.

Imagining Mercury as Pepe might be a helpful way to interpret what’s going on in our culture. Imagining Pepe as the mad-tyrant meme god of Babel gives the whole idea a comedic angle. If we’re being honest, as bad as the current situation feels and as fatigued as we all are, there is something hilarious about the absurdity of slop culture. There is something funny about this ability to make a meme out of anything.

But memes have gone to excess like everything else. The ability to poke fun at the establishment and current events is good, necessary even. But at this point, when people are making memes about ongoing wars, genocides, or the idea of dying in WW3, you do have to wonder when we lost the ability to take things seriously, to show respect for life and death. The era of the meme was great, but we’re all growing tired of the constant irony.

As I mentioned before, Mercury is a neutral force, he isn’t evil. He’s driving everyone crazy, turning everything into a meme mostly just because he thinks its funny. This whole situation is a game to him. Pepe is not evil (just look at the little guy), he does not need to be defeated so much as given a scolding and put back in his proper place. It’s humanity’s fault for putting him in charge in the first place, its our fault for building this Tower just for the sake of building it. It’s not your fault, Apu.

News and Free Information

Young Elon had trickster physiognomy, especially the left side of his face.

The strides forward in the free spread of information are arguably the most meaningful accomplishment of Mercury’s reign and the area where he shines the brightest.

In 2004 the world was still largely dependent on (and controlled by) legacy news networks and traditional methods of communication in order to find out what was going on in the world. The internet allowed for niche or dissident information to be shared, but you had to really be on the fringe to find it. Normal people believed the status quo.

This completely changed by the 2010’s. Social media networks and mobile devices put the power in the hands of the people. Suddenly we were able to share news and information more efficiently than the professional networks, and we were able to find and share information that exposed conspiracies and government corruption. Best of all we could do it for free, information had never been so cheap, fast, and accurate (this is Mercury’s fantasy come to fruition).

During this era the establishment lost their dominating control over the narrative. The Overton window has shifted more in the last 20 years than ever before in human history precisely due to these technologies- we should be grateful for the power of Mercury here.

Without these tools we would not have been able to combat what world elites tried to do during COVID. They did not count on people being able to question the narrative and do their own research so freely. What they planned as an exercise in world tyranny was actually the event that allowed many normal people to identify the tyrants for the first time. The rebellion against draconian COVID laws and forced vaccinations could be interpreted as one of the great victories of the Mercurial era. Information triumphed over despotism.

Unfortunately it did not stop there. The internet is no longer the perfect tool for sharing information and real-time news. In just the last few years it had fallen from its pinnacle into pure chaos. You already know why- its the slop.

What you see on the internet is no longer trustworthy, there is too much slop and fake content being circulated. It’s becoming like the library of Babel. The truth is still out there, but it is being drowned out at a rate that is impossible to say because we simply can’t know what’s real. It turns out that giving everyone the ability to share their opinions and position themselves as an authority was not a perfect plan. But the primary factor here is the rise of AI generated content, which is polluting the free internet- arguable one of the greatest tools ever created is being destroyed.

Artificial Intelligence is the latest and greatest Mercurial creation, but also the one where this force finally spiraled out of control.

Artificial Intelligence

Google named their AI “Gemini” after the Zodiac sign ruled by Mercury

The AI boom happened at the late stage of our Tower of Babel story because it is the manifestation of excessive Mercurial energy, of Mercury gone rogue and operating without any higher purpose. AI is a force that can generate things completely divorced from the human soul and true creativity. It is Mercury generating things purely for its own sake, it is the construction of a world that feels like the Library of Babel, generating everything possible, instead of just what we need.

I don’t know what will happen with AI, its surrounded by too much noise. But the idea that we are creating our own god, whether or not it will actually happen, is a manifestation of what the builders of the Tower of Babel were doing.

An AI-god could be imagined symbolically as the capstone of the Tower of Babel, the thing God stopped us from manifesting in the Bible story. Tech elites envision a future where AI has made humanity omniscient, omnipotent, and maybe even immortal. It is the attempt to connect us to knowledge and power so completely that we could survive another Great Deluge that we all deep down know is coming.

The AI industry has invited a lot of controversy, a lot of conspiracy theories about what its leaders are after. I think that while some of these tech elites might be seeking world domination, and others may earnestly think they are trying to build a utopia, most of those involved in AI are simply possessed by the Mercurial sprit- they are not philosophers, they are doing it just because we can, because the red line must go up.

In defense of AI, the prevalence of slop is not actually its fault. Like Mercury, the technology is a neutral force. It learned slop from us humans. But AI is proving to be the finishing blow for the internet, the last nail in the coffin. The barrage of AI-slop that is drowning the internet (and its only going to get worse from here) and the fatigue we are all feeling is precisely what is going to lead to the final step, the scattering of the nations.

Immigration

Mercury also traditionally ruled immigration and borders. For the world to function you do need some amount of immigration to be allowed, human beings have to be able to move around in a natural manner or else life will stagnate.

But in the last 20 years we’ve seen this force spiral completely out of control. Western countries are being swamped with third-world immigrants, and nations like Sweden and the United Kingdom are suffering horrific consequences.

There’s a lot more going on with this issue than the Mercurial element and I don’t mean to oversimplify things. But at one level we should understand this surge in immigration as a manifestation of Mercury saying “Why not?”

Why not let anyone from anywhere into any country? Why draw any boundaries? Why say one thing is any better than another? Why wouldn’t you want to share your country with all these other people?

This is the Tower of Babel calling all things into itself, trying to unite all of humanity in a false identity. And as we’ve learned, a world without borders is a slop world, a horrific melting-pot.

Online Gambling

I just want to make a short point on a pet peeve of mine, online gambling is completely out of control. Somewhere on the internet you can find a place to bet on the weather, the outcome of elections, wars, or on what jokes Trump will make during his next speech. Gambling is normally mercurial, but this normalization of online gambling, and gambling on such random things, shows how excessive its become.

Sports betting has become such a huge part of sports culture that these days parlays are a subject of discussion on sports talk shows. The majority of guys I knew in college were betting on sports constantly. People care more about their own March Madness bracket than about who actually wins. This culture of knowing all about every player, every stat, and every possibility is turning something that should be Martian, Jovian, and Solar (sports) into a Mercurial game where its less about the competition and more about these secondary aspects

Speaking of other archetypes being co-opted by Mercury, I want to turn and look at how this principality has taken over other aspects of society, aspects it isn’t naturally supposed to rule. These are absurd things in modern slop-pop culture that you may assume are ruled by another principle, like Venus or Mars, but I’ll show that they’re really just Mercury wearing a mask.

Let’s start with a trending one.

“Looksmaxing”

Right off the bat many people might assume this is a Venusian trend. It’s all about maximizing beauty and sexual market appeal, so it must be about love, romance, and sex, right?

Wrong.

This entire niche might be the least sexy, least Venusian community I’ve ever seen. These people are not lovers, they are not romantics, and ironically I would not be surprised if they’re not having very much sex.

The Looksmaxxing community is about gamifying attractiveness and rating each other, not for the purpose of pursuing the Venusian things of life, but for the purpose of itself. They are Looksmaxing for the sake of Looksmaxing. It is pure vanity, but not in a way that actually feels Venusian.

This is Mercury wearing the mask of Venus (another myth we could use for this analysis is Narcissus). Mercury understands the surface level of something, and then gamifies it, creating a huge quantity of shallow imitations. We’ll see this pattern in everything else we look at.

On the subject of Venus, Gen Z is having less sex than any other recorded generation, in case you need to be convinced that we are not living in a Venusian time. We are outwardly over-sexualized and degenerate, but most of that exists purely online. In real life, hyper-sexual Gen-Z’s are staying at home and scrolling on their screens. We are living in a pornographic society, but not a truly sexual one. We’re all really like the Looksmaxxers, playing characters instead of genuinely doing things.

Media and Art

I don’t have any idea what TV show or movie this is from and that’s the point. This could be from any fantasy series released in the last six years. Media is one of those things in our culture that has become the most obviously slop-ified. Studios continue to pump millions of dollars into projects with absolutely no life and no creativity. It is unclear why they do this, other than that the spirit of Mercury compels them to keep churning out product. Creativity is primarily supposed to be Solar, Venusian, Jovian, Lunar. It can be a lot of things, but slop is what happens when it gets too Mercurial. When you get to this stage, you begin to simply copy creativity.

A tell-tale sign of media becoming too Mercurial is when it gets too self-referential, and that word describes modern media better than anything. Rather than anything feeling new or unique, everything just feels like a riff on better media that was made 20 years ago. Everything is a sequel, or a prequel, or a remake or a reboot. Fantasy is just churning out worse and worse versions of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. Romance flicks feel hopelessly stiff and passion-less. The MCU overstayed its welcome and started trying to sell us on stories no one cared about. Stranger Things is a good example of a show that started strong earlier on in the 2004-2026 period, but its last season was derided as pure slop. It became a caricature of itself, a meme. This goes beyond movies and television, all of the arts are suffering from this spirit. All we can churn out as a culture these days is slop, studios are literally incapable of anything else.

Our culture has fundamentally forgotten why people tell stories in the first place. We don’t tell a story just for the sake of making something. We tell a story because we have something to say.

“Thank you, Mercury, for giving me this post-credits scene foreshadowing that Blorko from Chungus will be starring in the next installment, but please remind me why on Earth I should care.”

But it isn’t just the on-screen adventures that are getting dull.

Travel and Adventure

There’s nothing quite as romantic as viewing the wonders of the natural world through a sea of selfie-snapping Chinese tourists. Sometimes I thank my lucky stars that I’ve grown up in an era where I can experience nature this way.

But seriously, travel is being ruined. There is simply too much of it and it is too easy for everyone to thoughtlessly access.

There are two kinds of travel, one ruled by Mercury, but the other is ruled by Jupiter. Mercury is the principle of trade, merchants, roads, transport, and in a modern context, tourism. Jupiter on the other hand is the principle of high adventure, quests, far horizons, venturing into the unknown. All travel falls somewhere on this spectrum. The adventurer still has to deal with boats and inn bookings and schedules. The merchant still has to brave perilous mountain passes and bandits to move from one hub to another. There is supposed to be a natural flow between the two extremes.

But today, the tourism is devouring the adventure.

It has become so incredibly easy to travel that the adventure has been mostly squeezed out of it. And don’t get me wrong, modern advancements in infrastructure and transport are incredible and we should take full advantage of the good aspects of a Mercurial time while we can. But in making the world so connected, it feels we have also made it shallower. You can make journeys across the world without experiencing the slightest discomfort, and I think there is something spiritually twisted about that.

The travel influencer is a great example. This aesthetic reached its peak in the 2010’s into the early 2020’s. I’m not going to disparage them too much, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying travel. But the aesthetic seems to have turned adventure into a checklist, a collage of selfies and Airbnb recommendations. Are these influencers seeking deeper meaning through their travels? Are they on a quest to accomplish something? Or, like Mercury, are they just doing it to do it. How much interest did they naturally have in the locations they visit, and how much were they simply influenced by what every other influencer was doing. You might say that travel has always been that way, and you’re right, but only to an extent. There has always been a Mercurial type of travel and tourism, the issue in in how the Jovian element has been stripped from it entirely. The travel blogger should have to face a little bit of adversity if they want to get likes on Instagram.

The inevitable result is that this trend has commodified the best places in the world. Airbnb’s are even choking out locals in some areas, and some of the most beautiful locations on earth are totally swarmed with photo snapping tourists. It has gone too far.

This attitude is bleeding over into real adventure culture as well.

Everest base camp

Summiting a mountain like Everest used to be a heroic achievement and one only a few people ever accomplished. Today the mountain is so overcrowded that there is a queue to summit, and the base camp looks like the third world. The Mercurial power of infrastructure and the internet has made the knowledge and skillset needed to climb the mountain, as well as the ability to travel to the mountain, so easy (compared to what it once was) that it is becoming just another checked off box for adventure influencer’s social medias. Many people still die attempting Everest every year, but rather than it being seen as a heroic death, its met with a collective shrug.

Bodies litter Mt. Everest

This does not take away from the individual achievement of climbing something like Everest- if you’ve done it, I am truly impressed. But it serves as a stark example at how over-connected and over-streamlined our world has become. The soul is being sucked out of things.

Influencers

Speaking of influencers, they’re ruining more than just travel. They’ve taken over almost every aspect of society, turning everything into a Mercurial game. Regardless of his niche, the influencer is a trickster figure.

Understand that all of these guys are Hermes/Pepe

Take for example masculinity or red-pill influencers. You may think the rise in popularity of hyper-masculine, right-wing adjacent influencers is a sign that our culture is becoming more Martian, more violent and masculine. Of course though, that’s not actually true. These guys are cosplaying masculinity and selling it to insecure young men- exactly what Hermes the trickster would do. If they were actually what they said they were, they wouldn’t be selling it on the internet because they’d be too busy actually doing masculine things out in the world. In that way, they’re the same as the Looksmaxing influencers, who are not really out doing Venusian things. It’s all a fascade, or to put it in Mercurial terms, it’s all a hustle.

Self-Improvement influencers are similar. True self-improvement is a Solar idea, and the self-discipline aspect could be considered Saturnian and Martian as well. Of course, there are plenty of well-intentioned self-improvement influencers out there. But for many of the biggest names, like Huberman or Willamson, I don’t think their brand of self-improvement is Martian or Solar, I don’t think they are really striving for a higher ideal. Their philosophy is clinical and robotic, health and productivity are the ends in of themselves for them. That’s not to say I dislike what these two men do, I just think they are Mercurial more than anything else. There is a facade of philosophy, but I am not sure there is much behind it.

Mercury has also infected the Martian worlds of fitness and combat sports, they are defined by influencers. Social media is flooded with countless health and fitness guru influencers whose qualifications are mostly aesthetic and who’s success is determined mostly by content-creation ability. The world of combat sports is also full of influencers and clownish behavior, a caricature of what the spirit of combat is really about.

Clownshow

Politics is another arena that has totally lost the plot. Again, it is mostly dominated by online influencers these days (no one pays attention to legacy news), and our leaders themselves are mostly, well, clowns and tricksters. Our leaders and famous figures reflect us- we clearly do not want serious men in charge.

Gemini

Nick Fuentes is a great example, possibly the most relevant political influencer at the moment, and if he and his followers are anything, they are Pepe. They are the meme, the tricksters. That is not to discredit him, the most important figures in a Mercurial time cannot help but be Mercurial themselves, but you should at least be aware of who you’re listening to.

Trump himself has been analyzed to death, but I think if he fits any archetype, its that of the trickster. He is Hermes as a president, not the warrior that his core base wants to believe he is. He’s the TV star, the jokester, the businessman, the character. There’s a reason Trump is so hard to pin down, why its so hard to figure out what he believes in and what his goals actually are. My view is that its hard to pin his beliefs down because he does not really have any.

Like Mercury, at the end of the day Trump got into all this for the love of the game, because he loves the “art of the deal”. If his second term behavior is odd, I think it is likely because outside forces have him under their control, not because he had some secret masterplan. I do not think he ever really cared about saving America from a philosophical or spiritual angle, I think he is a hustler, and winning the Presidency looked like the greatest hustle of all.

Terminally Online Esotericism

One final aspect of online culture I want to look at is the boom in esoteric content.

It seems that everyone and their mom knows about once-niche topics like the Nephilim, Atlantis, Hyperborea, Agartha, Alchemy, the black cube of Saturn, etc. It’s a stereotype at this point that every girl is obsessed with astrology. The average guy on Youtube is watching videos about Hermeticism and aliens. And politicians and your normie neighbors are publicly discussing the wars in the Middle East through the lens of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecies. It’s wild out there.

And mostly, this has happened through meme culture. It is memes that spread these ideas so widely, and the element of humor has made it all the more palatable to normal people.

You could say that the esoteric realm is meant to be the domain of the Moon, of the Lunar principle, these things that inhabit the subconscious or background world. They are not meant to be made into pop culture (occult literally means “secret”), but that is what Mercury has done with them. In doing so these subjects have lost most of their meaning because they’ve been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. These are no longer mythic and esoteric ideas, they’re pop culture slop.

This applies to conspiracy theory culture as well. I don’t want to get off track here, but the Epstein files are a good example. Obviously something horrible was going on, but as for the exact details, its impossible to know what to believe. There is too much noise, too many wild theories, too many memes. It is content more than anything else.

Like everything else, it’s part of slopworld now.

So what do we do about all this?

Meaning as the Antidote to Mercury Poisoning

The answer is simple but not easy. Mercury needs to be put back in his proper place in service of all the other powers of the world, he needs to go back to his job as the humble messenger. We have to abandon our Tower of Babel and put meaning, the pursuit of the highest ideals, back at the top of our priorities.

Meaning is the antidote to an excess of Mercury, and this means that Mercury’s father in mythology, Jupiter, is the symbolic solution.

In classical astrology, the zodiac signs ruled by Jupiter (Sagittarius and Pisces) are in opposition to the ones ruled by Mercury (Gemini and Virgo). This is because this father and son have opposite priorities. If Mercury wants to connect everything simply for the sake of doing so, Jupiter goes on adventures in search of higher truths and philosophies. So what is the Centaur, Sagittarius, aiming at? Ultimately, he’s aiming at the inverse of the Tower of Babel, towards the City of God.

Thankfully, this move back to meaning is already happening. Over the last decade there has been a growing push for “re-enchantment”. It started around the Jordan Peterson era, and has led to something of a religious revival among Gen Z. People are reconnecting with faith and symbolic ways of viewing the world. Though earlier I critiqued the bad side of influencer culture, many influencers and online creators have been a positive part of this trend back towards meaning.

Another trend I see connected to the re-enchantment sphere is a move towards rural and analog lifestyles. People are exhausted and are looking for ways to move away from the matrix of cities, screens, and social media. Many Gen-Z’s are ditching their smartphones entirely and there is growing interest in farming, off-grid living, and building intentional communities. By doing these things I think they hope to give themselves the breathing room to cultivate meaning again.

I think these two connected trends are the manifestation of ways we are attempting to deal with the excess of Mercury, by 1) restoring meaning and 2) escaping the crumbling Tower of Babel we’ve constructed.

The Scattering of Nations

What does escaping the crumbling Tower of Babel look like? The Bible tells us.

These trends towards are a manifestation of the final stage of the Tower of Babel story- the scattering of the nations. This is the stage where the excessive mono-culture explodes into fragmented tribes that can no longer communicate with each other.

We’re seeing this happen in a few ways. The creation of online echo-chambers and the rise of extreme beliefs is one, another is the trend towards offline living. We are also seeing a new wave of tribal sentiment and an explosion of interest in religion. People are less interested in talking to others, less in interested in new ideas or hearing out alternative philosophies. There has been violent pushback against immigration in the West and calls for a return to populism and strong nation states. Gen-Z is perhaps the most politically divided generation ever, and its hard to find anyone who is neutral on anything.

We may not literally speak different languages, but it feels sometimes like we inhabit a completely different world than our cultural opponents. I think this feeling will only grow as ourTower of Babel story finishes playing out.

It won’t end for everyone, of course. Some people will choose to stay online in the AI-slop hellscape forever. But I think for most of us, we’re entering a new era that will not be primarily Mercurial, but something else.

But this scattering of people into tribes brings up some thoughts on the Bible story. Let’s return to this graph.

The scattering of the nations is often seen as a punishment, and it was. But I think it was also an act of God’s mercy, and I also think it is a natural part of this symbolic pattern. That is to say, the scattering of nations after humanity tries to build a false identity is actually a natural consequence, not an unnatural intervention.

If the world is dispersed as the consequence of coming all together unnaturally to serve a false identity, this saves mankind from the tyrannical false identity we created (at the bottom of the graph) and places us in a more neutral chaos (around the equator of the graph).

I think we can interpret this to mean that leaving the nations at the middle of the symbolic image freed them to make their own choice to either seek God or attempt to build another tower. This is why after the scattering of nations, Scripture says that God turned away from the nations and turned them over to other principalities. He did not reward us by lifting us up to the Holy Mountain (that does not happen until Christ), but He is still merciful by leaving us in a better place than at the bottom of the grave (or the top of the tower) we were digging for ourselves.

As our own Babel crumbles an era of tribalism is inevitable. The world is going to get clannish. There is nothing we can do to stop the scattering of the nations anymore than the people at the actual Tower of Babel could. What we can do is try to pick the right tribes to be a part of.

You can do this by picking the tribes that acted correctly during the last 20 years. That is, the communities that sought out meaning during the excess of Mercury. Those communities built the necessary tools to move forward into the new era.

However, this era of tribalism will have its own pitfalls after it fixes the issues it’s responding to. Don’t be surprised if in another 15 to 20 years we find ourselves in a culture that has become actually too tribalistic, closed-off, and frankly a longhouse. We may feel like crabs in a bucket. Wherever you find your tribe, put in the effort to actually build things and keep your eyes on higher meaning, rather than becoming tribal simply for the sake of being tribal. It is not enough to merely react against current problems, that is how the cycles repeats themselves.

I’ve spent a lot of words now dealing with combating Mercury, but of course, he’s not all bad. He’s a trickster, not a dark lord. We don’t have to abandon everything that was built over the last 20 years, a lot of it was good, even amazing. I am very grateful for the gifts the internet gave me and for how accessible travel and connection with others has been. So no, we should not reject Mercury.

Some people will inevitably do this though, and they are the ones who will become modern Luddites, modern longhouse grandmothers, they will idolize tribalism and disconnection from the larger world. They will take pride in their way of life and confuse it for actual spiritual superiority.

Demonizing a natural force is just as bad as idolizing it. I promise you many people in the next 10-20 years will make this mistake and you should avoid being one of them.

So if you want to understand how to use Mercury correctly in the coming era, there is a place you can look to where he serves the divine order perfectly.

The City of God

A monastery might look like the least Mercurial place you can imagine. Disconnected from the outside world, quiet, private. It might in fact look like the exact opposite, like an example of the extreme tribalism I have predicted will rise.

But it isn’t.

A monastery is a place that is perfectly Mercurial in just the right amount. Everything done in a monastery is connected. Every single day has a purpose, its own readings, its own commemorations on the calendar. Life at a monastery is structured, scheduled, and busy. The monks receive constantly updated prayer lists for others and for the events of the outside world, they are not living under a rock. And yet a monastery is a serene and peaceful place, because Mercury is doing his job in just the right amount, with none of the excesses that have caused our modern fatigue and overstimulation. You won’t see a monk scrolling on an iPhone.

Monasteries also host a steady stream of pilgrims and travelers. They work, they create, they sell goods. This is all Mercurial, but everything done in the monastery is done for God- they are a vision of the New Jerusalem.

A monastery is an anti-Babel.

It is a place where pilgrims from anywhere on Earth can come to find meaning, rest, and peace. It is a place where anyone can find understanding. There are many tales of pilgrims from foreign nations visiting a monastery, and when they spoke to one of the elders, the elder knew their native language and was able to converse with them. Only later would the pilgrim learn that the elder did not speak their language, but they were able to converse anyway. This is Mercury in service of a miracle, serving God rather than Babel.

This is God bringing the scattered nations back together. Not by giving them a universal language in a material sense, but a spiritual language, uniting us in Christ, through the Church.

This is what happened at Pentecost. This is what happens at Chrismation, when newly baptized Christians are anointed with holy oil and given the gift of the seal of the Holy Ghost. Their relationship with Heaven and Earth is restored, they are connected to God. The Church is where all the forces of the natural world come together in harmony, serving both God and man.

This is the antidote to Mercury poisoning.

1. The planet Mercury is actually the closest planet to all of the other planets, making him truly the most well-suited messenger.