Kerényi is pointing at something the rationalist tradition consistently domesticates: the same figure who guides the dead into the underworld also escorts them back. Not two functions, one journey with return — ducere and reducere held in a single divinity. The soul's movement is not one-directional. Descent is not terminus.

The Priapus connection sharpens this. We tend to reserve Priapus for comedy or embarrassment, but his ancient office was guardian of the boundary where growth and decay coincide — the garden and the grave sharing one threshold, mortis et vitae locus. What ripens also rots. What is buried also seeds. Neither state is the preferred state; the place is both simultaneously.

This is what the psyche finds so difficult to bear: that the same interior space that holds grief also holds germination, and no amount of management separates them cleanly. The impulse to grieve in one room and hope in another — to keep the dying away from the living — is exactly what these figures refuse. Hermes moves between, which means the boundary is permeable. Priapus stands at the threshold, which means the threshold is a location, not a crossing. You can dwell there. Most of the psyche's real business happens precisely at that site.