The phrase "innocence of becoming" cuts against one of the soul's most durable arrangements — the one that turns every movement of life into a debt to be settled. There is a logic that runs beneath much of Western interiority, barely audible but constant: suffering is owed, change must be earned, arrival follows reparation. Hermes disrupts this not by offering absolution but by arriving from somewhere the economy of sin and repayment simply does not apply. He comes from the springs of creation, Kerényi says — which is to say, from the place prior to the moral ledger, before becoming was burdened with the weight of having to justify itself.

This is not a consolation. Innocence of becoming is not the same as innocence restored. You do not return to a state before guilt; the concept of return is already the wrong frame. What Hermes carries is something more difficult: the possibility that movement itself — change, dissolution, transition, death as passage — requires no credentials, owes no apology, and cannot be judged by whether it is deserved. The guide of souls does not redeem the crossing. He simply knows the way.