So in our English class we’re covering Greek mythology right now, and we were each supposed to choose one of the major gods and goddesses (sorry Asclepius and Triptolemus, my two first possible thoughts, and also Hestia, my third, who, despite having been one of the Olympians before giving up her seat to Dionysus, apparently doesn’t count as a major goddess either). Lacking my first few preferences, I turned to the Olympians that hadn’t been chosen by other groups yet and scanned through them. Being a Percy Jackson fan, I knew a decent amount about each of them already, but ended up choosing Hermes since he was the one about which I easily knew the least.
So I looked and said, “Huh, Hermes, he’s cool, god of thieves, messengers, those winged sandals, that caduceus people always associate with medical stuff even though that should be Asclepius’s single snake staff, not Hermes’ double… oh yeah and he’s probably the god of a couple of other small things too. Sounds like a fun project.”
Well, it turns out the Hermes is the god of a ton of things. Besides being the god of thieves and messengers (as the Messenger of the Gods), he’s also the god of commerce and trade, eloquence, travelers, roadways, merchants, sports and athletes, gymnastics, border crossings, boundaries and transitions, herdsmen/shepherds, land travel, orators and wit, literature and poets, art, invention, luck, and sometimes also fertility. Beyond that, he’s the intercessor between mortals and the divine, and the Divine Herald – basically he guides the souls of the dead to their final place, the one role in which he is not jovial and sly, but solemn, because, come on, dead people are depressing. His symbols, beyond the ones I already listed, include the lyre, which he invented to appease Apollo after he stole his sacred cows, the rooster, no idea why, and the tortoise, which seems counterintuitive since Hermes is supposed to be “as fleet as thought,” but hey, since when do the gods make sense? Oh, yeah, he’s also the only person besides Hades and Persephone who is allowed to leave the Underworld without consequences.
Rumor has it Hermes also appears in more of the myths than any of the other gods. Basically, the point is that this guy is crazy busy and way cooler than I thought he’d be to research.
