Hermes
Messenger of the Gods
HER-meez
Messenger, trickster, and guide of the dead, the only god who moves freely between Olympus, earth, and the underworld.
The Story
He stole Apollo's cattle on the day he was born, walked them backwards to confuse the trail, invented the lyre from a tortoise shell, and talked his way out of the charge by handing over the instrument. Apollo, who could not stay angry at something that good, gave him the herd.
That range is the god: patron of merchants and of the thieves who rob them, of heralds and of liars, of boundary stones and of everyone who crosses them. As psychopomp he walks the dead down to Hades, the one crossing nobody else in the pantheon is willing to make routinely.
Did You Know?
- Athenian doorways and crossroads were marked with herms, square pillars with his head on top and an erect phallus on the front. When they were all vandalised in one night in 415 BC, the city treated it as a coup attempt.
- The word hermetic comes to us through Hermes Trismegistus, a Greco-Egyptian fusion of Hermes and Thoth, by way of the sealed vessels of alchemy.
- His caduceus, two snakes around a winged staff, is not a medical symbol. The rod of Asclepius has one snake and no wings, and the swap is a nineteenth-century American mistake that never got corrected.