Kerényi is making a careful move here, and it is easy to miss how careful. He is not promising an exit from the ordinary world — not offering the vertical escape of spirit, the upward pull that makes suffering a problem to be solved by rising above it. Hermes guides horizontally, at the threshold, between registers of experience that were never meant to be sealed off from each other. The "Hermetic accent" Kerényi names is not mysticism in the usual sense: it does not require you to leave natural experience behind in order to encounter something beyond it. The transcendence is in the texture, not the altitude.

This is where the passage does its real work. The longing for a guide, for something that leads us through the opaque stretches of a life, tends to resolve itself in one of two directions: either the guide confirms what we already see, or the guide lifts us to where seeing is no longer painful. Kerényi's Hermes refuses both. He is thoroughly empirical — which means the wound stays visible, the darkness stays dark — and yet something moves. Not upward. Through. That distinction is not a consolation. It is an exacting demand: to remain within natural experience while allowing it to carry more than the natural attitude alone can hold.