Globalism feels like an overdose of Hermes, just as the age of reason suffered from an overdose of Apollonic sunlight and an excess of the normalizing rationality of Minerva. Or, for another example of divine hypertrophy, the madnesses of Mars that so seizes a people that any common man and woman can become an enraged killer. As the century turns, a monotheism of Hermes holds us in thrall. Not only his new instrumentarium, but the acceleration with which each new generation of these tools and devices is developed - obsolescence within eight months, each device surpassed by increasingly expanding improvements, ever wider reach, ever quicker connections. A second area where Hermes rules is the marketplace - the stock-market place. Mutual funds, speculations in currencies, commodities, futures, options, derivatives, hedges. The markets of the world connect today by instantaneous communications, allowing for giant shifts of money from one place to another, one currency to another, one market to another. What once was chronic long-term investment is now quick Hermetic turnover. The market as a game; as we say "playing the market." These giant shifts of money are shadowed by giant scams and thefts, by laundering and deceptions. Accounting systems can no longer keep up with the fast moves of the bankers who handle millions and billions of dollars per transaction. Governments cannot control the multinational corporations or govern the fluctuations of currency, the price of gold, and basic commodities, or the value and amount of their own money supply. Once Saturn ruled money. In the old books of symbolism, Saturn was called a moneybags. He was depicted with a tightly closed purse and declared god of the mint. Now, with this hypertrophy of Hermes, money is no longer solid coin nor backed by gold, only words and numbers, mere messages sent by electronic data processing and represented by a little oblong of embossed plastic. In many places where Hermetic finance has reached its apogee, the fundamental importance of home and land have fallen to Hermetic intoxication. The earth and its buildings that give stability and shelter find their value determined by speculative development and mortgage rates. Hermes, who himself has no resting place or permanent abode on earth, has brought his impermanence and quick turnovers of value directly into our human habitations. One aspect of Hermetic intoxication deserves special psychological attention. I refer to the appetite for information. If you recall, Hermes was the messenger of the gods, and an indiscriminate messenger. This because he carried all messages without actively entering into the content of what he carried. He had no opinions, values; he made no editorial comments; he did not censor. His task was to make communication possible, even communication with the realm of the dead and the world below. We may find Hermes as a painted and sculpted image in Greek pottery and marble, in easy association with both Apollo on the one hand and Dionysus on the other, with Aphrodite, and with Athene and Artemis, with Zeus and Hades, and even Hercules, though Hermes himself was not heroic by any means. Information takes no positions, carries no grudge, and thus has no limits - it is toujours disponible. In a culture that has lost the gods, a culture from which the gods have withdrawn, we have the messages but they do not carry the gods' meanings. Mere "information." Yet, Hermes in his dutiful faithfulness to his archetypal role, passes on the information, indiscriminately facilitating the messages regardless of their content, which may as easily be a blog, a joke, an ad, a sexual come-on, or a revelation of crucial political significance. The word "information" itself has become so inflated that it carries the code of an individual's DNA identity and destiny. Not wisdom, not knowledge, not inspiration, not learning, not comfort, not truth, not prophesy, not moral value or aesthetic beauty. Instead of messenger of the gods, Hermes has become servant of the Internet.
— James Hillman
Hillman's diagnosis cuts deeper than cultural criticism. When a god goes hypertrophic — when one archetypal principle floods the field without the counterweight of others — what is lost is not just balance but the specific content each god carries. Hermes moves messages. He always has. But when he carried Olympian intelligence, the message arrived as an event: Ares knew war, Aphrodite knew eros, Hades knew death, and Hermes brought their word intact. Strip the gods and you keep the velocity without the gravity. What circulates now is not divine speech but sheer connectivity — the channel mistaken for the transmission.
The appetite for information that Hillman names is its own logic of not-suffering. If I am connected enough, informed enough, current enough, I will not be caught unprepared — will not be subject to the blindness that suffering requires. Every notification is a small inoculation against being left behind, left out, left in the dark. Hermes, who carries everything without judgment, becomes the perfect servant of that appetite because he asks nothing in return and promises nothing in particular. Saturn — slow, bounded, the moneybags with the purse clasped shut — demanded patience, which is another word for tolerating what you cannot yet resolve. The Hermetic economy refuses that demand entirely. It does not promise transcendence; it promises speed, and speed turns out to be its own form of the same evasion.
James Hillman·Mythic Figures·2007