Hermes

Like Dionysus, Hermes appears in the Linear B tablets of Mycenaean Greece, his name recorded in a form read as e-ma-a2 at both Pylos and Knossos, evidence that the boundary-god and his cult objects are as old as any Greek deity attested in writing, long before the herald myths of Homer took their familiar shape.

Those cult objects, the squared herm pillars set at doorways and crossroads across the Greek world, were themselves once the centre of a genuine political scandal. On a single night in 415 BCE, on the eve of the great Athenian expedition against Sicily, unknown vandals mutilated the herms standing throughout Athens, smashing their carved faces and phalluses. Thucydides records the panic that followed, the fear that the act signalled a conspiracy against the democracy, and the accusations that fell on the general Alcibiades, who was recalled from the fleet to stand trial and fled into exile rather than face it, a defection that historians count among the causes of Athens's eventual defeat. A single act of vandalism against Hermes's most ordinary public image thus became entangled with one of the pivotal political crises of the Peloponnesian War. No culprit was ever conclusively identified, and the mystery itself became a recurring subject of ancient historical speculation, discussed by Thucydides and other writers without final resolution.

Hermes's image, like Dionysus's, grew younger over time. Archaic herms and early vase paintings show a bearded, dignified figure; by the Classical period sculptors increasingly gave him the athletic, beardless youth familiar from the statue traditionally attributed to Praxiteles at Olympia, showing Hermes cradling the infant Dionysus, an attribution debated by modern scholars but long taken as the model for how the messenger god ought to look, quick and youthful rather than solemn.

In late antique Egypt, Greek settlers identified Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, and the fusion produced Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-great Hermes, credited as the author of a body of Greek philosophical and magical writings later called the Corpus Hermeticum. Those texts vanished from Western Europe until Cosimo de' Medici obtained a manuscript and had Marsilio Ficino translate it in the 1460s, ahead even of Ficino's planned translation of Plato, because Cosimo believed Hermes Trismegistus to be an ancient sage older than Moses. The mistaken dating was corrected only in the seventeenth century, but by then the Hermetic corpus had already shaped Renaissance magic, alchemy and philosophy, carrying the boundary-crossing god's name into the whole later Western esoteric tradition this site documents.

Sources The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) with Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to CampanellaD. P. Walker