---
slug: padel-psychopomp-ec78fd19
title: "Padel on Psychopomp"
author: "Ruth Padel"
work: "In and Out of the Mind   Greek Images of the Tragic Self"
section: ""
year: "1994"
tradition: post-jungian
themes:
  - psychopomp
fragment: |
  He is also Psychopompos, "Conductor of Souls," and Kataibates, "He Who Goes Down," and so connects to all his other activities the relation of upper world and lower world, the living and the dead. He leads both ways, from me to you, from the light to the dark, from waking to sleep, and back again.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Hermes moves in both directions — this is what makes him genuinely strange, and genuinely useful. Most guides we imagine go one way: the therapist who helps you surface, the teacher who leads you upward, the spiritual practice that promises ascent. Hermes refuses that economy. He is the one who takes you down and the one who brings you back, and crucially, he makes no distinction between those two offices. The same figure, the same gesture, the same unhurried competence in both directions.
  
  Padel's formulation — from me to you, from the light to the dark, from waking to sleep — suggests that the boundary he crosses is not only between worlds but between persons, between states, between modes of knowing. He is the god of threshold, which means he is the god of what cannot be held in one register. The soul that is suffering is often waiting for a guide who will only go down, or one who will only bring it up. Hermes refuses to be either. His Kataibatic office — the going-down — is not a failure of the Psychopompic one. They are the same work, seen from different ends of the passage.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The phrase "leads both ways" is the hinge on which the whole passage swings. Most mythologies assign their psychopomps a single direction — the ferryman goes one way, the guide descends. But Hermes holds both vectors simultaneously, and this is not incidental to his nature; it is his nature. Padel's list of pairings — me and you, light and dark, waking and sleep — accumulates quietly until you realize she is describing every threshold that consciousness crosses in the course of a single ordinary day. We do not reserve these transits for the dying. We enact them each time we fall asleep, each time we move from interior to world and back. The god of commerce, language, and theft is also the god of that — the shuttling intelligence that knows both sides because it belongs to neither. The door is not a wall with a hole in it; it is a god.
parent_id: Padel_1994_In_and_Out_of_the__par0009
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Padel writes:

> He is also Psychopompos, "Conductor of Souls," and Kataibates, "He Who Goes Down," and so connects to all his other activities the relation of upper world and lower world, the living and the dead. He leads both ways, from me to you, from the light to the dark, from waking to sleep, and back again.

— Ruth Padel

Hermes moves in both directions — this is what makes him genuinely strange, and genuinely useful. Most guides we imagine go one way: the therapist who helps you surface, the teacher who leads you upward, the spiritual practice that promises ascent. Hermes refuses that economy. He is the one who takes you down and the one who brings you back, and crucially, he makes no distinction between those two offices. The same figure, the same gesture, the same unhurried competence in both directions.

Padel's formulation — from me to you, from the light to the dark, from waking to sleep — suggests that the boundary he crosses is not only between worlds but between persons, between states, between modes of knowing. He is the god of threshold, which means he is the god of what cannot be held in one register. The soul that is suffering is often waiting for a guide who will only go down, or one who will only bring it up. Hermes refuses to be either. His Kataibatic office — the going-down — is not a failure of the Psychopompic one. They are the same work, seen from different ends of the passage.

---

Ruth Padel · *In and Out of the Mind   Greek Images of the Tragic Self* · 1994