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Hermes Guide of Souls
Hermes: Guide of Souls
Kerényi’s monograph on Hermes as psychopompos, first published in 1944 as Hermes der Seelenführer: das Mythologem vom männlichen Lebensursprung, issued in the Albae Vigiliae series as the first text after his break with Budapest, translated into English by Murray Stein for Spring Publications. The subtitle — the mythologem of the masculine source of life — names the dimension the English title does not: Hermes is not only the guide who conducts souls to Hades, he is the phallic, generative principle of a particular world-experience.
The book refuses reduction. Kerényi writes: “he is the supra-individual source of a particular world experience and world configuration” (Kerényi 1944). Hermes’s sphere is “deft guidance and sudden gain,” but it includes also “the rejected parts and the disavowed: the phallic as well as the spiritual, the shameless as well as the gentle and merciful” (Kerényi 1944). The god of the road at nightfall, of the traveler’s danger and the night’s wisdom, is read through the iliad, the odyssey, and the Homeric Hymn — where Hermes is named the herald appointed to Hades — and through Plato’s plato-symposium, where Kerényi identifies the Hermes-configuration with the great daimon Eros of Diotima’s speech.
Kerényi begins with the Arcadian birth of Hermes in the cave of Maia, the epithet ἐριούνιος (“the quick one, fast as death”), and the god’s connection to the chthonic gods who receive human sacrifice. He reconstructs the Homeric Hymn to Hermes as the record of an initiation — the infant god “ordained” as herald to Hades through a ceremony of τελεῖν, “making ready” (Kerényi, citing Hymn 572–73). The figure of Hermes as ram-bearer (κρῑοφόρος) at the festival of Tanagra reveals him as the carrier of sun-children, the begetter of divine children in the mysteries. His connection to the Cabeiri, to Silenus, to the hermaphroditic herm of the household — these establish Hermes as the god of the between in every register.
The final reach of the book is its identification of the Hermetic as a third configuration alongside the Apollonian and Dionysian — a mode of soul that is neither ordered clarity nor ecstatic dissolution but the quicksilver passage between. This is the mythologem the Corpus Hermeticum inherits and philosophizes.
The book is load-bearing for the Lineage because it is where the psychopompos is recovered as a depth-psychological figure without being either allegorized or moralized. It is the monograph Hillman extended into archetypal psychology’s soul-making.