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Hermēs (Greek: 'Έρμης': 'pile of marker stones'), in Greek mythology, is the god of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of orators, literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures and invention and commerce in general, of the cunning of thieves, and the messenger from the gods to humans. A lucky find was a hermaion. An interpreter who bridges the boundaries with strangers is a hermeneus. Hermes gives us our word "hermeneutics" for the art of interpreting hidden meaning.

Hermes and Dionysus are the youngest of the Olympian pantheon (illustration, right). Son of Zeus and a primordial nymph named Maia, Hermes was born in a cave on Mt. Cyllene in Peloponnesus, between Achaia and Arcadia. His origin on Mt. Cyllene explains the origin of an epithet for Hermēs: Hermēs Cylleneius. He was also referred to as Enagonios.

The Romans found that Hermes was equivalent to their characteristic god Mercury, who may have been the descendent of the Etruscan Turms. The Roman Mercury, with his bulging wallet of the goods of life, later absorbed the Dei Lucrii, early gods of commerce and wealth, and were referred to by that name. In the syncretic religious atmosphere of the Roman Empire, Hermes was combined with the Egyptian Anubis to form Hermanubis. In a similar fashion, the name Hermes Trismegistus was used later by alchemists and their like to refer to a syncretic god combining elements from Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth.

Hermēs or Mercury was commonly identified by Roman observers with the Germanic god Wotan/Woden/Odin, hence Latin dies Mercurius corresponds to English Wednesday from Wodnes dæg 'Woden's day'.

The modern post office in Greece uses Hermēs as its symbol.

Cult (religion)

Though temples to Hermēs existed throughout Greece, a center of his cult was at Pheneos in Arcadia, where festivals in his honor were called Hermoea.

As a crosser of boundaries, Hermēs Psychopompos' ("conductor of the soul") was a psychopomp, meaning he brought newly-dead souls to the underworld, Hades. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter Hermes conducts the Kore safely back to Demeter. He also brought dreams to living mortals.

Hermes as an inventor of fire is a parallel of the titan Prometheus. In addition to the syrinx and the lyre, Hermes invented many types of racing and the sport of boxing. In the 6th century the traditional bearded phallic Hermes was reimagined as an athletic youth (illustration, top right); statues of the new type of Hermēs stood at stadia and gymnasiums throughout Greece.

Hermai

In very ancient Greece, Hermēs was a phallic god of boundaries. His name in the form herma referred to a wayside marker pile of stones; each traveller added a stone to the pile. In the 6th century, Hipparchos, the son of Pisistratus replaced the cairns that marked the midway point between each village deme at the central agora of Athens with a square or rectangular pillar of stone or bronze topped by a bust of Hermēs usually with a beard; an erect phallus rose from the base. In the more primitive "Cyllenian" herms, the standing stone or wooden pillar was frankly simply a phallus. The hermai were used to mark roads and boundaries. In Athens, they were placed outside houses for good luck. "That a monument of this kind could be transformed into an Olympian god is astounding," Walter Burkert remarked (Burkert 1985).

In 415 BCE, when the Athenian fleet was about to set sail for Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, all of the Athenian hermai were vandalized. The Athenians at the time believed it was the work of saboteurs, either from Syracuse or the anti-war faction within Athens itself. Socrates' pupil Alcibiades was suspected to have been involved, and Socrates indirectly paid for the impiety with his life.

Hermes' iconography

Hermēs was usually portrayed wearing a broad-brimmed traveller's hat or a winged cap, wearing winged sandals and carrying his Near Eastern herald's staff, entwined by copulating serpents, called the kerykeion, more familiar in its Latinized form, the caduceus. He wore the garments of a traveler, worker or shepherd. He was represented by purses, roosters (illustration, left) and tortoises.

Birth

Hermes was born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia to Maia. As the story is told in the Homeric Hymn, the Hymn to Hermes, Maia was a nymph, but Greeks generally applied the name to an midwife or a wise and gentle old woman, so the nymph appears to have been an ancient one, one of the Pleiades taking refuge in a cave of Arcadia.

The god was precocious: on the day of his birth, by midday he had invented the lyre, using the shell of a tortoise, and by nightfall he had rustled the immortal cattle of Apollo. For the first Olympian sacrifice, the taboos surrounding the sacred kine of Apollo had to be transgressed, and the trickster god of boundaries was the one to do it.

His epithet Argeiphontes, or Argus-slayer, recalls his slaying of the many-eyed giant Argos who was watching over the heifer-nymph Io in the sanctuary of Lady Hera herself in Argos. Putting Argos to sleep, Hermes dispatched him with a cast stone, like a hero faced by a giant in the land of Canaan.

Other roles

Hermēs saved Odysseus from both Calypso and Circe, by convincing the first to let Odysseus go and then protecting him from the latter bestowing upon him an herb that would protect him from Circe's spell. In addition, Hermēs brought Eurydice back to Hades after Orpheus looked back towards his wife for a second time. He also changed the Minyades into bats. He taught the Thriae the arts of fortune-telling and divination.

King Atreus of Mycenae retook the throne from his brother, Thyestes using advice he received from the wise trickster Hermes. Thyestes agreed to give the kingdom back when the sun moved backwards in the sky, a feat that Zeus accomplished. Atreus retook the throne and banished Thyestes.