Ἑρμῆς Hermês

The Cult

Hermês' cult was a street cult, decentralized, aniconic, everywhere. Its primary object was the herm, a squared pillar with head and phallus set up at doorways, crossroads, and gymnasia; pious practice fed and anointed them, and Theophrastus' "superstitious man" (Characters 16) pours oil on the roadside stones and kneels before them.

His named feasts were athletic, the Hermaia, gymnastic games honouring him with Heracles as patrons of the palaestra. In the agora he stood as Hermês Agoraios, guardian of fair dealing; beneath the earth he received the dead, for Attic curse tablets of the fourth century hand their victims over to "Hermes of the underworld, Charon, and the Furies." On his birth-mountain, Cyllene in Arcadia, Pausanias saw the sanctuary's ancient Hermes carved from fragrant thuon wood (8.17). No priestly college governed him; his priesthoods were small, local, and often hereditary, fitting for a god who lived at every threshold and therefore belonged to none.

The Image

Hermês' oldest image is a head on a post; the aniconic herm remained his primary portrait throughout antiquity. When he took flesh in art, late-seventh-century craftsmen gave him the herald's equipment: the traveller's petasos, the short chlamys, the winged sandals, and the kerykeion, his snake-twined staff.

The archaic types are bearded: the shepherd, and the kriophoros carrying a sacrificial ram across his shoulders, a type Pausanias saw at Tanagra (9.22). The fourth century made him beautiful: Praxiteles' Hermes at Olympia (Archaeological Museum of Olympia), cradling the infant Dionysos while he pauses to fasten his sandal, is widely accepted as the only surviving original marble of the master. Hellenistic and Roman workshops multiplied the ephebic god, Hermes fastening his sandal, the orator Hermes Logios, and, in his mercantile guise, Hermes with the money-bag, while on gems and coins the caduceus alone suffices.

Afterlives

Rome renamed him Mercurius and lodged him in the week itself: dies Mercurii still echoes in French mercredi, Spanish miércoles, Italian mercoledì. His second career ran through the Hermetica, Greek treatises fathered on Hermes Trismegistus, which survived the Middle Ages above all in one fourteenth-century Venetian manuscript (Marcianus graecus 251).

Renaissance Europe believed the sage a contemporary of Moses: Cosimo de' Medici made Ficino interrupt his Plato to translate the Pimander in 1463 (printed 1471), and for two centuries Hermes Trismegistus ranked among antiquity's greatest minds, until Isaac Casaubon's Exercitationes (1614) redated the corpus to the Christian centuries and collapsed the primordial sage into a pious fiction, one of philology's decisive victories.

The alchemists kept his name in another register: their sealed vessels gave English hermetically sealed. Modern scholarship restored the Greek herald, Karl Kerényi's Hermes der Seelenführer (1942) reading him as guide of souls and god of the threshold, and hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, still carries his name, fittingly for the god who invented the trade of meanings.