Hermes does not belong to either shore. That is not a limitation — it is his function. The Greeks gave this quality a figure because they understood that passage cannot be accomplished by the traveler alone; something must escort the soul across the threshold, and that something cannot itself be fixed to one side or the other. What travels must be liminal by nature.

Notice what Vernant places in a single list: waking and sleep, life and death, one world and another. The Charites, the seasons, the turning of consciousness — all of it mediated by the same figure. This is not coincidence but argument. The Greeks were mapping a single logic: wherever a boundary exists that human will cannot simply cross by deciding to cross it, Hermes is already there, already the one who makes the traversal possible without being the destination. He brings you through; he is not what you find.

The modern temptation is to spiritualize this — to hear "mediator between mortals and gods" as an invitation upward, toward light, toward some resolved above. But the passage is careful: gods of the world above and gods of the underworld alike. Hermes serves both directions equally. Descent is not a failure of ascent. It is the same office, the same figure, working the other threshold.