What is it about Hermes? Why does he fascinate me?
I'm a very contradictory person. I live through books but long to live through action. I want to be in here, safely in my room, reading, listening to the radio, watching a classic movie on the VCR; at the same time, I want to get out and walk the streets, dance in the clubs, dig out bad weeds and plant trees. Then there are my less socially acceptable pursuits: walking my fingers, pen in hand, across a naked page (preferably clean and white, though yellow with blue lines will do), or trailing the same fingers across a naked breast (blue lines still acceptable).
Hermes is a very contradictory god-form. He must have been cobbled together from a number of local gods to become the amazingly varied figure we read about today. (Several of my Hermetical friends have told me that the Romans deliberately assimilated local gods into Mercury as part of their strategy, thus giving him some unexpected attributes.) Most people know of him as the messenger of the Greek pantheon. (Quick, can you name all twelve?) Alone, that makes him seem minor. But think of all the rest: he is the god of invention, lies, theft, business, writing, communication, ritual, alchemy and a host of other arts and crafts. Even more important to humanity, he is both a symbol of sexual power and the guide that leads us to the underworld. When we die, he's nearby.
Smart guys like Norman O. Brown have written whole books about Hermes, but I'm not going to go into a lot of detail in this article. I'm not doing a major research piece; instead, I'm going to try to relate Hermes to my own life and longings. I want to explore why all these various aspects of Hermes might hang together into one god-image, and see if I can guess why he was considered the psychopompos of the Eleusinian mysteries. It's a trip. Rev up your motors and turn on your headlights. It's a long, dark road.
My first introductions to the Greek myths were the popular books of Bulfinch and Hamilton. I was drawn to the stories of Odysseus, who didn't much want to fight in the Trojan War, and who used brains instead of brawn to get out of many a tight spot. (He was a brawny guy, too, as witness the bow that only he could bend, but I overlooked that.) I was a brainy type myself, and woefully unable to fight.
Hermes made an appearance or two in The Odyssey: He showed Odysseus the wonder plant moly, which protected Odysseus from Circe's magick potion. Obviously, Hermes appreciated a smart guy when he saw one. He also bustled around carrying messages and doing errands for Zeus. I never questioned why one of the great gods would be a gopher for the other great gods, or why gods couldn't simply appear wherever they wanted, and deliver their own messages. (The deities of the Greek pantheon weren't the only ones with this problem. Why does Y-h-v-h need to send angels when He's omnipresent, omniscient and all-powerful?)
Eventually I read further, including Brown's book mentioned above, Lewis Hyde's Coyote Made This World (discussing Hermes, Coyote, Loki and other trickster/culture hero figures), The Homeric Hymn to Hermes, and so forth. (Hyde's The Gift also influenced my ideas about boundaries and communities.) I found more things to attract me to his esoteric mix. While not a professional writer, I still expressed myself best through writing, and here was a god of writing, language and communication skills generally. His skill at language was such that he could obtain exactly the results he desired — in other words, he could do magick. (Precision in language means knowing exactly the words one needs to get a desired result, whether in naming the powers or devising oaths and contracts with desired loopholes.)
His language skills weren't Hermes' only magickal craft. In the myths, he devised rituals, knew herbs and medical potions, could confer invisibility, invented musical instruments, made protective amulets and was crafty in a hundred other ways. To many moderns, there's a firm boundary between the natural and the technological, and another equally firm between the natural and the supernatural. The ancient Greeks may not have recognized these boundaries, but I do, and to me Hermes acts as a gatekeeper at the fences between these worlds in the way his inventions and skills turn natural objects into crafted ones, or use crafted objects to call on supernatural powers.
Historically, Hermes was the god of human-defined boundaries, too: marketplaces, crossroads, anywhere where different tribes and cultures came together. A god of those places where cultures come together would need to be a god of language, like Hermes, wouldn't you think? And since cultures come together in these places most often to exchange things (goods, ideas, sex), Hermes seems to me to be the logical choice as a god of commerce, which, it will not surprise you, he was. (Interestingly, the boundary markers of the ancient Greeks were called "herms" and featured the head of Hermes on top of a stone pillar, with an erect phallus sticking out of the front. This sexual display of power may have, who knows, symbolized political power. It's a thought that deserves its own article.)
Hermes as a god of commerce seems relevant to me today, since I work in the financial industries. Not only am I involved in commerce on a daily basis, but I'm sharply aware that Hermes ruled money, too, the basis of most exchange. I'm sure he must have ruled barter, too, but barter can be crude and time-consuming, and money is an easier way to cross boundaries between the home tribe and all those strangers out there. To Hermes, it would have been just another language of symbols. Money expresses not only value but also willingness to travel, to reach over the boundary to others while at the same time marking those others as not of the same tribe. (The ancient Hebrews had rules against taking money from their tribesmen, or charging them interest. Outsiders were another story. I'm guessing the same would have been true of the Greeks.)
And coins have something to do with death, don't they? The ancient Greeks and Romans needed coins to pay Charon, the ferryman who took them over the river Styx. Who gave them the coins, if not Hermes?
We've arrived at Hermes, the guide of souls into the afterlife, or psychopompos. As Norman O. Brown merely hints, Hermes must have been people's guide into death not because he was a messenger boy for the other gods and did all the odd jobs, but because he was a specialist in marking and crossing boundaries.
It's the biggest boundary of all, death. It's the one I'm most afraid to cross. Stepping over the crest of that hill may be easy as strolling up First Avenue, or as difficult as scaling the Space Needle, but what makes me pause, paralyzed, is the thought of the unknowable on the other side. I need someone like Hermes. (Every religion or spiritual movement has dealt with this differently: there are guides, intercessors, judges. Sometimes there's a slow or swift turnover into a new life here, or a long sleep until judgment day, or the end of a painful illusion. But they all speak of it. We'd better, too.)
I think of Hermes as the one who always knows. He knows the pathways. He knows how much to pay the ferryman. He speaks the language of every soul he guides and every guardian he passes. He knows every boundary and every crossroad. His whole mythic life has been a training exercise for this task, and every skill he has developed, every cultural item he has created has been to lead me and others like me — which would be the entire human race — to the last gate and through the final labyrinth.
End of the road for you; turn off your headlights and let the engine cool. Where are we? Why do I like this Hermes so well? As I said at the beginning, I'm apparently a contradictory guy, and so is Hermes. But his contradictions are only apparent. At a deeper level, the contradictions disappear. His roles in Greek religion have an inner logic about them; syncretizing Romans or not, each must have suggested the next. There are certainly more connections than I could find or point out in this article; there are probably more than even the scholars have discovered.
I don't literally believe in Hermes (or the other gods and goddesses); when it comes to the absolutes of spirit and the unseen world, I believe little and nothing know. But Hermes is still quite an inspiration as a mishmash of ideas and characteristics that add up to a complex, yet unified, whole. If Hermes adds up this way, maybe someday I will, too. His underlying unity is my goal, the end of my road.
You stay here. It's been great traveling with you. I have more driving to do.
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