Hermes

The Greek god of roads, thresholds, messengers, thieves, traders, travelers, and the dead. For Kerényi, Hermes is not one function but a configuration: “he is the supra-individual source of a particular world experience and world configuration” (Kerényi 1944). To read Hermes is to read a whole mode of being-in-the-world — the mode in which boundaries are crossed, goods change hands, and the upper world and underworld communicate.

Kerényi insists on the god’s unity across his apparent contradictions. “To that world belongs also the rejected parts and the disavowed: the phallic as well as the spiritual, the shameless as well as the gentle and merciful, even if the connection between all these qualities does not seem to make sense” (Kerényi 1944). The reductive formula — “In the favor of the guide is revealed the true essence of the god” — Kerényi rejects. The whole Hermes is the god. The thief is not a flaw in the helper; the phallus is not an embarrassment to the psychopompos.

Hermes enters the depth tradition through the iliad, the odyssey, and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (where he invents the lyre and barters it to Apollo for the golden staff), and through Plato’s plato-symposium, where the figure of the mediating daimon — Eros between mortal and immortal — doubles the Hermes-mythologem (Kerényi 1944). In the Eleusinian narrative of the Hymn to Demeter, Hermes is the one Zeus sends to fetch demeter-persephone back from Hades: “Hermes obeyed and sprang from the Olympian abode down into the subterranean depths” (Kerényi 1951, p. 239).

Hermes is the psychopompos; he is also the patron of alchemy in its Hermetic lineage (Hermes Trismegistus, corpus-hermeticum). The god of the crossroads is the god the depth tradition cannot do without.

Relationships

• psychopompos
• daimon
• archetypal-image
• olympian-pantheon
• trickster
• wakdjunkaga

Primary sources

• kernyi-hermes-guide-souls (Kerényi 1944)
• kernyi-gods-greeks (Kerényi 1951)
• homeric-hymn-to-hermes