Kerényi is pointing at something the soul finds genuinely disorienting: that death arrives with a kind of logic — destined, necessary, the opposite that was always latent in the living thing — while generation, the overflow into more life, arrives as pure accident. We can build a relationship with necessity. We can steel ourselves against the conclusion we know is coming. But accident unmoors the whole project of preparation. Hermes appears precisely where the logic breaks, where the soul's careful accounting of fates and outcomes suddenly cannot hold the figure standing in front of it.

This is where the god becomes psychologically legible. He does not escort souls because he is death's agent; he moves between the realms because he is native to the threshold itself — to the place where one order of meaning cannot subsist and another has not yet arrived. The clandestine boundary-crossings Kerényi catalogs are not moral violations; they are structural ones. Hermes makes visible what the ordered world requires to remain invisible: that the dissolution of opposites, the passage from life into its necessary end, runs on a different logic than life's own fruitfulness. You cannot plan for either. You can only notice, suddenly, that the god is already there.