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Hermes as "Leader-On" (Pompos)

Hermes as “Leader-On” (Pompos)

Kerényi’s philological re-reading of the epithet πομπός in Hermes Guide of Souls (1944). The conventional gloss — “guide” — domesticates what the Greek preserves. Pompos, Kerényi insists, means “to lead on”: to conduct by nudging, deceiving, prompting the leap the soul would not otherwise make. Hermes is “the god who leads you on,” and the idiom is not innocent — “in American English this means he is deceiving you, taking advantage of your gullibility, ‘taking you for a ride’” (Boer, preface to Kerényi 1944).

This reading holds together the god’s apparently disparate offices: messenger of Zeus, escort of souls to the underworld, patron of thieves, travelers, traders, and hermeneuts. The psychopompos is not a kindly usher but the figure who moves the soul “even a hair off whatever rigid position you’re in — even off a Jungian position if that is where all your hair is” (Boer, preface to Kerényi 1944). Kerényi grounds the epithet in Arcadian cult — Cyllene, the cave of Maia — and in the Homeric ἐριούνιος, literally “the quick one,” whose original meaning “‘fast as death,’ suits the messenger Hermes, not only as an Arcadian or Cyllenian deity but also as an Olympian” (Kerényi 1944). The chthonic and the Olympian offices are one office: to move what does not want to move.

The concept is methodologically load-bearing: Kerényi’s own philology proceeds by Hermetic leading-on rather than by Altertumswissenschaft’s proof-by-reduction. Hillman inherits the posture whole-cloth, and the Lineage’s license to reason from image to image rather than from concept to concept descends from it.

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