Hermes (episode)

***Miscellaneous Myths: Hermes*** is the forty-fourth episode of the *Miscellaneous Myths* series by Red. This video focuses on the Greek god Hermes, and it's more oriented on the origins and development of the god from Archaic times to later antiquity without a focus on a particular myth of his. This is one of three (so far) deep-dive videos on the origins of a particular Greek god; the other two are *Aphrodite* and *Dionysus* (compare also Norse mythology's *Loki*).

## Summary

Hermes is a god that often shows up in modern culture all the time, from art and literature to corporations bearing his name or his imagery and symbols, even down to the chemical element Mercury, named after his Roman equivalent. But what makes Hermes so prevalent, and where does his story begin?

Hermes was born from the union of the Pleiad nymph Maia and Zeus, the king of the Olympians, in Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Hermes was said to have been mischievous and cunning and demonstrated this literally hours after his birth. His first course of action was to find and kill a tortoise then turn its shell into a lyre. Hermes soon found himself craving for food, and he ventures off to steal fifty of his half-brother Apollo's sacred cattle, though he makes sure to reverse their hooves to make it appear as though they are walking backwards. Hermes takes the cattle and sets a fire so he can not only feed himself but also sacrifice the meat to the gods to gain their attention. His mother questions him on his actions to which Hermes, still as an infant, explains that he wishes to be honored and respected by the gods instead of living in a cave.

Apollo, however, soon discovers that his sacred cattle was missing and after a long search he tracks the culprit to the cave where he finds Hermes himself. Apollo demands that Hermes return his cattle but Hermes, being the conniving trickster that he is, insists that he is a mere infant and knows nothing about his dilemma with the cattle. Apollo then brings the infant Hermes to Zeus to face the consequences for his actions but Zeus finds the situation rather hilarious than serious. In the end, Zeus tells Hermes to guide Apollo to the cows and on the way Hermes was able to win Apollo over by playing his lyre for him. Apollo was quite impressed and enchanted with Hermes' skill on the lyre that he secures him a seat among the Olympians, appointing him as messenger of the gods, and will be honored alongside his mother. Apollo also gives him the caduceus in exchange to never rob him again. Hermes promises.

Hermes makes several appearances through Greek mythology; in *the Iliad* he sides with the Greeks and helps King Priam naigate through the Greek camp when he goes to ask for his son Hector's body; in *the Odyssey* Hermes provides regular help to his great-grandson Odysseus through his son Autolycus, a notorious bandit and shapeshifter, and in the myth of Io he frees her by killing Argus, which earns him the epithet "Argeiphontes", the killer of Argus. Hermes often helps various heroes with the means of trickery, as god of liars and thieves; and while that might seem unheroic, heroes were not always brawn and muscles; many times they had to use their brains as well. Heracles himself, noted for his great strength, had to use his wits from time to time, like when he tricked Atlas.

Hermes is closely related to his mythological son Pan, a half-god half-human rustic god of fertility, nature, shepherds and flocks, the wild and groves. Pan is very old, and traces of his origins and development are often blurry. He was worshipped in the region of Arcadia, which is also the birthplace of Hermes. Pan was usually worshipped in groves and caves rather than state-sponsored temples. Pan is said to have given Artemis her hunting dogs and taught Apollo the gift of prophecy. Pan is notable for two things; the word **pan**ic, a feeling of sudden terror attributed to Pan creeping up on people from the behind and scaring them, and the panpipes, created when Pan chased a nymph named Syrinx who transformed into reeds in order to escape him. Pan cut the reeds and created the panpipes from them. Pan is probably older than Mycenaean Greece; in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion (a hypothetical religion from which Norse, Greek, Roman, Vedic and various other mythologies derive) Pan, or an ancestor of his, is found as \*Péh₂usōn, a pastoral deity. \*Péh₂usōn's only other descendant is the Vedic god Pūṣan. Due to lack of information, it's unclear what Pan's deal was pre-Greece, but Pūṣan was characterized as a god of marriage, road and journey, cattle-herding, the sun, travel, pastoralism, goats and was a psychopomp, a leader of the dead souls to the Underworld. If original Pan was anything like Pūṣan, then he probably split in or before Mycenaean times into Pan (who took the herds, forest and wilderness) and Hermes (who got the roads and journeys, herding and soul-leading). Hermes and Pan are naturally very connected; in many versions, they are father and son, and they both share a "large penis" imagery.

This brings us to the herms: herms (literally: "piles of stone") were boundary and border markers in the shape of steels with Hermes' head and penis found along roadways connected to Hermes' name. Before the sculpted statues, roads were marked with large heaps of piled stones, which, despite not being humanoid, were not any less sacred and revered; it was common to add another stone to the pile or anoint it with oil. Pan was probably revered through the herms, as god of journeys, in the old times, and might have a Hermes-related epithet (like "Pallas Athena") and perhaps this epithet split from Pan to form an entirely new deity in the form of Hermes.

Hermes is attested in Mycenaean records as (𐀁𐀔𐁀), *e-ma-\*25*, either Hermes himself or something related to him, like a festival, meaning the split happened long before we have any written sources on it. By the 800s BC Hermes was properly established given his role in *the Iliad*, Homer's epic. Pan at this point has already been reduced to a wilderness deity. Pan also has a fun anecdotal story about him; according to Plutarch (100s AD) a few decades years earlier than his writing during the reign of Tiberius, a divine voice called out to a sailor named Thamus that the great god Pan was dead. Thamus did so, and thus making Pan a deity that died. However people did not stop worshipping Pan, and his cult continued on like nothing had happened. This in fact might be a translation issue; Tammuz, the consort of the goddess Ishtar ho died, had his cult had been brought over to Greece. In Greek, "Thamus, the great god Pan is dead" is written as "Θαμούς, Πὰν ὁ μέγας τέθνηκε" (*Thamoús, Pan ho mégas téthnēke*). However Pan means "all" in Greek, so what that voice might have actually said was "Θαμούς πανμέγας τέθνηκε" ("Thamous panmégas téthnēke", *Tammuz the all-great died*), meaning some sailors possibly overhead the cult of Tammuz lamenting their dead hero, and mistaking it to be that Pan was dead.

In early Greek art, Hermes was not too dissimilar to Pan; despite not having goat legs, between the period of 800s BC- 500s BC Hermes was depicted in pottery as a mature, bearded man. In Classical and Hellenistic Greece, on the other hand, Hermes was always a youthful, athletic beardless man, the image we recognise now. As for the Romans, while they already had their own pantheon with gods that had development independently from their Greek equivalents (for example, Ares's counterpart Mars had agricultural associations), there wasn't really anything for Hermes. The name Romans gave Hermes, "Mercurius", etymologically is derived either from the Latin word for "merchant" or an older word meaning "boundary", more of a description of Hermes' domains rather than an actual name. This name has no other history before that, and Hermes perhaps absorbed also a number of minor Roman deities, known as the *Dea Lucrii*, but beyond that Mercury did not exist before (Apollo similarly does not have a pre-existing Roman equivalent god; but in his case, the name was kept).

During Roman era, Mercury was extremely important as the god of trade and travel in an empire that kept expanding. He turned up in coinage, in sculptures and frescos at Pompeii, and another thing that made him popular was syncretism. Rome had the tendency to equate the gods of the people they conquered to their own; when he Romans took over the Celts, Mercury was syncretized with Lugh, a great warrior and creator of all arts. When they interacted with the Germanic peoples, Mercury was equated to Odin, possibly due to their connections to travelling and soul-guiding. The Ptolemaic Greeks in Egypt on the other hand syncretized Hermes with gods like Thoth and Anubis; Thoth because of their cleverness and connection to writing, Anubis as they both are Underworld soul-guiding gods. Hermes also turns up a lot in many Aesop fables.

In short, Hermes due to his versatility and mobility is an extremely iconic god, which is why he is still part of modern society.

## Credits

In the credits Red sings *Country Roads* by John Denver.

## Characters appearing

Maia

Hermes

Apollo

Zeus

Artemis

Odysseus

Autolycus

Io

Argus

Pan

Syrinx

Pūṣan

Ishtar (flashback)

Tammuz (flashback)

Aphrodite (flashback)

Persephone (flashback)

Adonis (flashback)