Hermes

Hermes is generally portrayed with wings on his head and winged sandals, and with a wand (the kerykeion, which later developed into the caduceus):

THE DIVINE MESSENGER

Hermes is the divine messenger and hence implies something similar to what is symbolized by angels. He is a wind god and he moves with the wind. He is the god of revelation, the bringer of dreams, the guide of the dark way, and the psychopomp. He led souls to the Underworld, including Orpheus when he sought Eurydice. He was also depicted as a good shepherd, caring for the sheep, the souls of men. The later image of Christ as the good shepherd derived from this original image of Hermes. According to Aristophanes, he was the friendliest of the gods to men ED ¶ 0

GOD OF BOUNDARIES

In ancient Greece he was the god of boundaries. It is generally agreed that the name Hermes is derived from the word berm, the name for a pile of stones marking a boundary. But as often happens, the god of something is the one who is greater than that thing, the one who transcends it ED ¶ 0

So, though Hermes is a guarantor of boundaries in the human realm, he is the one who is beyond them. Hermes is the great trespasser, a crosser of boundaries, the god of travelers and the patron saint of merchants, the principal travelers in early days ED ¶ 0

PATRON SAINT OF THIEVES

On the darker side, he was also the patron saint of thieveson the first day after his birth he stole Apollo's cattle. The boundary between what is mine and what is yours is one that he crosses. The Hermetic principle can deceive the Apollonian principle: Hermes does not always need to be truthful. He can be ambiguous and false and cunning, and that gets him into places that absolute light and truth and clarity could never enter ED ¶ 0

MAGICIAN WITH A MAGIC WAND

He is a magician with a magic wand, and his ability to cross boundaries makes him a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or in psychological terms, between the personal psyche and the unconscious. He is a helper of heroes, a guide to secret regions; some of his functions are those indicated by his namehermeneutics, for instance, which is the science of the interpretation of the scriptures, extracting the hidden meaning. We can think of him as the patron deity of depth psychology, because depth psychology tries to relate consciousness to the unconscious depths and so repeatedly crosses the boundary between them, thus assuming the functions of Hermes ED ¶ 0

MAKER OF SYNCHRONICITY

There is always an uncanny quality about Hermes. The ancients used to say, when silence fell on a group, that Hermes had come in, as though another dimension had been tapped. We can consider him, in modern terms, as the maker of synchronicity, the bringer of unexpected coincidences, windfalls that cannot be rationally explained ED ¶ 0

There are people who are Hermes personalities, whose guiding direction seems to be an interest in the hidden, who are carriers of secret lore, of things that are not on the surface. They tend to be expositors of the symbolical and the dark, transcenders of the ordinary boundaries of human understanding ED ¶ 0

IDENTIFICATION WITH HERMETIC PRINCIPLE

If a person falls into an identification with the Hermetic principle, he might be compulsively obliged to convey meaning or point out hidden references, making a nuisance of himself in the process. This would be a negative identification with the principle ED ¶ 0

INNER GUIDE TO THE UNCONSCIOUS

As the principle is encountered internally, it can serve as an objective inner guide to the unconscious. A good example was Virgil's function in The Divine Comedy. Virgil was Dante's Hermes, his psychopomp to the Underworld. One encounters dream figures that allude to the Hermes principle, generally winged beings who are associated with the wind and are carriers of a mediating spirit, who have one foot in each world, so to speak, and therefore can serve as guides between the two realms ED ¶ 0