Kerényi is pointing at something that resists every clean account of what a messenger does. We tend to imagine the intermediary as moving across already-existing ground — carrying word from one settled place to another, a letter-carrier on a road. But Hermes in Kerényi's reading stands where there is no road, no neutral territory, no third position above the conflict. The soul-realm beneath his feet is not a platform but an abyss between two refusals, and the way comes into being only in the act of crossing it.

This matters because the soul that asks for mediation — the psyche seeking connection, meaning, a bridge between what it is and what it wants — is always hoping the ground is already there, waiting. The desire beneath the asking is precisely that: to arrive at a place where the absolute opposites have already been resolved, where one does not have to stand in the nothing. Hermes refuses that comfort not by announcing suffering but by being what he is — the one who moves only where there is no footing, who creates the way by moving and by nothing else. The primordial mediator does not resolve the opposition between the two negatives. He inhabits it, and that inhabiting is what the soul actually receives: not resolution, but passage through the unresolved.