Who Is Hermes? The God of Boundaries, Messages and Theft

The list looks miscellaneous and coheres around crossing and transition:

• •Messenger of the gods, carrying communication between divine and human realms, which is a crossing
• •Guide of souls, conducting the dead to the underworld, which is the ultimate one and gives him the title psychopomp
• •Protector of travellers, roads and boundaries, with stone heaps and later carved pillars called herms marking crossroads and property lines
• •Patron of trade and commerce, since exchange happens at the boundary between one owner and another
• •Patron of thieves and liars, which is the same crossing conducted improperly
• •God of eloquence and interpretation, which gives his name to hermeneutics, the discipline of interpreting texts
• •Inventor and trickster, credited with the lyre, the pipes, the alphabet in some accounts, weights and measures, and athletics

The iconography is immediately recognisable and each element is functional. The winged sandals and winged hat indicate speed and the ability to move between realms. The caduceus, a staff with two snakes entwined and wings at the top, is his herald's staff, given in some accounts by Apollo in compensation for the cattle, and is persistently confused in modern usage with the rod of Asclepius, a single snake on a plain staff, which is the actual symbol of medicine; the substitution appears to have entered American military medical usage in the early twentieth century and spread from there, so a great many hospitals display the symbol of commerce and theft. He is shown young and beardless in classical art, unlike most Olympians, and the herms that stood at boundaries throughout Attica were square pillars bearing only his head and an erect phallus, which was an apotropaic device against harm rather than a decorative choice, and whose mutilation across Athens in 415 BC was a political scandal that contributed to the recall of Alcibiades.

The birth narrative, told in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, establishes him as a member of a category that appears across world mythology. He is clever rather than strong, he wins by deception rather than by force, he creates useful things as a side effect of mischief, and he negotiates his way out of trouble by charm, which is the structure that also describes Loki, Anansi, Coyote and the Monkey King. What distinguishes the Greek version is that he is fully incorporated into the pantheon with recognised responsibilities rather than remaining an outsider, which is unusual for the type. That incorporation is itself instructive: a society whose prosperity depended on trade, travel and negotiation gave a formal divine office to the qualities involved, including the ones it also punished, since the god of merchants and the god of thieves being the same figure is a comment about commerce that the Greeks appear to have made deliberately.

The figure had an unusually productive afterlife. The Romans identified him with Mercury, a god of trade whose name shares a root with merchandise and merchant, and who supplies the name of the planet and of the element. In Hellenistic Egypt he was identified with the Egyptian god Thoth, patron of writing and wisdom, producing the composite figure Hermes Trismegistus, meaning thrice-greatest, to whom a body of philosophical and magical texts was attributed. Those Hermetic writings, composed in the first centuries AD and rediscovered in Renaissance Florence, were believed to be far older than they were and had an enormous influence on Renaissance thought, on alchemy and on the Western esoteric tradition, which is why hermetic still means both sealed and occult. The name survives in hermeneutics, in the caduceus on commercial and medical insignia, in a French fashion house and in the messenger imagery of countless logistics companies, which is an appropriate distribution for a god of boundaries and traffic.

Hermes covers messages, roads, boundaries, trade, theft, eloquence and the conducting of souls to the underworld, and the apparently unrelated list coheres around crossing from one state or place to another. His birth story, in which he invents the lyre and steals Apollo's cattle on his first day, places him in the trickster category alongside Loki and Anansi while being fully incorporated into the pantheon. His caduceus is widely and wrongly used as a medical symbol, and his identification with Thoth produced the Hermetic texts that shaped Renaissance esoteric thought.