Hermes does not resolve the threshold — he is the threshold. Lord of the hinge: not the door swung open into light, not the door shut against darkness, but the pivot point where inside becomes outside and the distinction momentarily fails. Padel is reading a Greek image with full seriousness, and what she finds is a figure whose power is precisely that he belongs to neither side. The staff touches you into sleep and out of it. He ferries the dying down and summons the dead back — not because he commands death, but because he inhabits the passage itself.

What this does to how we hear psychological descent is not trivial. The pneumatic inheritance we carry tells us that going down is the bad part and coming back up is the point — that the guide's function is ultimately rescue, return, restoration to the waking world. But Hermes makes no such promise. He leads into the dark and out of it with the same indifferent mastery. The movement is the meaning. There is no side of the hinge that wins. Sleep is not a failure of waking; Hades is not a failure of daylight. To be touched by the staff at all is to be put into relation with a passage that runs equally in both directions.