Kerényi is tracking something genuinely strange about the *kerykeion* — the staff that lulls and re-awakens. In Homer, those words mean what they say: eyes close, eyes open. But when Hermes carries them into the underworld context, the same language holds two opposing realities at once. Death is not the fixed terminus it appears to be; re-awakening is not merely metaphor for recovery. The words have not changed, but they now carry a double valence that the earlier Homeric usage could not sustain.

This is why Hermes resists every attempt to make him the patron of spiritual ascent. The staff does not lift the soul out of death — it keeps the boundary between death and life genuinely ambiguous, unfixed, passable in both directions. The pneumatic reading wants a psychopomp who escorts upward, toward light, toward release; what Kerényi is recovering is a figure who holds the threshold open as threshold, who makes *escape from death itself* a real grammatical possibility without collapsing into promise. The lulling and the re-awakening are the same gesture. That grammatical doubleness — one word, two deaths, two awakenings — is what makes Hermes dangerous to any reading that needs the underworld to stay underneath.