What's the Greek god you see the most influence of in your everyday life? Wrong, it's Hermes. Hermes, Hermes, Hermes, Hermes, Kinda hope you're not dealing with that daily, but still, Hermes.
Hermes, known to the Romans as Mercury, was the ancient Greek god of roads, journeys, merchants, thieves, athletes, trickery and a handful of other related things. He was predominantly recognized as a messenger god, but he was also revered as an underworld god and a psychopomp responsible for guiding the souls of the dead. He also pulled a triple shift guiding dreams and had a hobby on the side of helping out mortal heroes when they got wrapped up in sticky situations.
With that many jobs, it's no wonder why he's so widespread these days! What a millennial icon. So before we start in on the whole historical context/character development thing, let's do a quick rundown of where exactly Hermes stands in mythology of ancient Greece.
♩ Hermes is very young by Olympian standards; only Dionysus is canonically younger. He's born to the pleiad Maia in the mountain in Arcadia, and is unsurprisingly the son of Zeus, like roughly 7% of all of ancient Greece. But Hermes sets himself apart from the other Olympians by getting his shenanigannery underway literally the day he's born.
According to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the first thing he does after being born is find a tortoise, kill it, and turn its shell into a lyre. Then he gets hungry, so he does the only rational thing and steals 50 of Apollo's sacred cattle. Oh, but what if Apollo notices they're missing?
Well, obviously Hermes reverses their hooves first so it looks like they're walking backwards. Duh, you guys. Anyway, Hermes stows the cows and starts a fire so he can sacrifice the meat to the gods including himself, of course.
Then he scoots back home and puts on a helpless baby act, but his mom isn't buying it. So instead Hermes explains to her that this is all part of his cunning plan to put himself on the Olympians' radar so he can get them both the respect and honor they deserve instead of, you know, living in a cave. Meanwhile, Apollo has finally noticed his cows are missing and after a little detective work, he tracks down Hermes in Maia's cave.
Apollo interrogates Hermes who insists he's just a widdle baby who doesn't know anything about any cows. So Apollo brings him to Zeus who thinks this entire situation is absolutely hilarious. Zeus tells Hermes to guide Apollo to the cows, and, on the way, Hermes wins Apollo over by playing the lyre for him.
Apollo is so enchanted that he promises Hermes will be the messenger of the gods and he and his mother will be honored among the Olympians. He trades his role of herdsman for Hermes's lyre, and the two of them return to Olympus. And in exchange for Hermes promising never to rob him again, Apollo also gives him his caduceus, a small staff with two snakes coiled around it, usually seen as a symbol of like, messengers and heralds, but it's also very specifically a symbol of Hermes.
So Hermes makes his debut as a trickster underdog wrangling an improbable victory through cunning and trickery. And despite winning untold power and fame in the process, somehow still manages to come across as a tricksy underdog for centuries to come. Neat trick!
Hermes makes regular appearances in the mythology, playing a supporting role in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the Iliad, though he was allied with the Achaeans for the majority of the book, he also protected King Priam when he traveled to the Achaean camp to retrieve the body of his son Hector. And in the Odyssey, Hermes provided regular help and advice to Odysseus including helping him confront Circe to break her enchantment on his men and later guiding the dead souls of the suitors to the afterlife.
This extra-special deific assistance might have been because Odysseus is actually his great-grandson, the grandkid of his son Autolycus, who was a notorious bandit trickster and shapeshifter. Runs in the family, I guess. One of Hermes's most well known accomplishments is killing the hundred-eyed giant Argus.
In the myth of Io, for. . .
somewhat complicated reasons the nymph Io ends up getting turned into a cow and kept under the watchful guard of Argus. Zeus asks Hermes to free her, so Hermes disguises himself as a simple shepherd, lulls Argus to sleep with a long and boring story about the creation of the panpipes, then cuts off his head. To commemorate the occasion Hermes is most frequently referred to with the epithet "Argeiphontes" meaning "Argus slayer.
" Hermes has a handful of other appearances in popular Greek mythology. He frequently helps out errant heroes like Perseus and Orestes by giving them the means to sneak around invisibly or fool their enemies. In fact, this trickery is a major characteristic of Hermes.
Hermes is the god of liars and thieves along with all the other stuff in his purview. And while these may seem like kind of unheroic qualities for a god to instill, actually, most Greek heroes were tricksters or underdogs on some level. Even Heracles, who was the best-equipped person on the planet to solve all his problems with sheer brute force, still had to be clever on occasion.
Like when he tricked Atlas into taking back the sky. So even though Odysseus got a bit of a bad rap for being all trickery all the time, in practice trickery was a well respected heroic trait when used in moderation and it was thanks in large part to Hermes' influence. Now before we get to the history, there's one wacky thing to know about Hermes that we're gonna look into a little more later, and that's these things.
These are called Herms. They were boundary and border markers found along roadways. They usually had Hermes's head although that varied and they always had a dong.
I don't know why the dong is non-negotiable, but yeah. With Hermes being a god of boundaries and borders, it kind of makes sense that he'd be on most of these road markers but at the same time it's still a little weird and not just because of the dong situation. So let's hold off on investigating that for a bit and get to the history.
♩ So, uh. . .
First things first. . .
Hermes. . .
used to be Pan. Let me explain. Now, the Greek god Pan is a mysterious figure.
Not purposefully, he's just really old so there's not much clear information available about his origins or development. Pan, as he was characterized in the era of ancient Greece, is generally considered to be a rustic wild god. Officially he's the god of forests, mountain wilderness, fertility, shepherds, and flocks but he's also got a bunch of other wacky characteristics on the side.
His worship was almost exclusively found in the mountainous inland region of Arcadia, which is also Hermes' birthplace, and Arcadia was known for being inland, forested, and very old compared to the rest of Greece. Pan, as a wild god, wasn't really worshipped in built structures. He was worshipped in natural caves and only ever had two constructed temples, one of them in Peloponnese.
In the mythology, Pan is considered older than the Olympians. He's credited with having gifted Artemis her hunting dogs, and Apollo his gift of prophecy. He's most commonly known for two things that both bear his name: PANpipes and PANic.
Pan created the syrinx, or panpipes, when a nymph he was chasing turned herself into reeds to escape. So he turned her into a musical instrument he could put his lips all over. .
. Bit twisted. Now panic as we all know describes a kind of fear so intense that it borders on madness.
Pan is specifically credited as being responsible for panic. He would yell in the woods and anyone who heard it would be inflicted with panic. He could supposedly rout entire armies with it.
Now we know some stuff about Pan, but there's a lot about him that's very vague and fuzzy. His parentage, for example, is incredibly vague and varied, suggesting he's very old because that's the kind of myth that takes a while to drift. And in fact Pan is probably older than Mycenaean Greece.
See, those comparative mythology scholars working to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European religion that spawned off the Vedic, Norse, and Greek mythologies theorized that Pan is an offshoot of the Proto-Indo-European pastoral god. . .
. . .
. . .
THIS. . .
whose only other known offshoot is Pushan, a Vedic pastoral deity. The Rigveda, which mentions Pushan might be as old as 1700 BC So if Pan is an offshoot of the same god, he most likely predates the Mycenaean age that started in 1600 BC. Now the thing is, due to a lack of written sources we don't know much about how Pan was characterized before ancient Greece.
But Pushan can give us a lot of information by proxy. Pushan is the Vedic deity of journeys, roads, travel, pastoralism, herding, and a handful of other things. He's also a psychopomp.
Did you notice these are all things Hermes is a god of? So the theory -- and it's not actually my theory, this is generally accepted these days -- Is that WAY back in or before the Mycenaean Age, Hermes was split from Pan and before that, original Pan was very similar to Pushan, a liminal god of navigating between places like roads, the general wilderness, and the journey to the afterlife. When this original Pan was subdivided, Pan retained his pastoralist and herding connotations but all the roads and journey stuff went to Hermes, leaving Pan quite reduced.
And it's worth noting that Hermes also has some herding associations. Now this theory isn't just based on the fact that Hermes has general similarities to a Vedic deity. Pan and Hermes also have some other weird connections.
For one, their origins are both in Arcadia as are their centers of worship. For another, in some versions of mythology, Pan is Hermes's son? Now that's a damn weird connection, but it makes sense to link them in a backwards kind of way and it's surprisingly relevant; Hermes and Pan are both mythically notorious for having some serious dongage going on.
So let's circle back to the Herms. ♩ Now the word Herm literally means "piled stones". It's not a name.
Hermes' name is not a name. And Herms are a very old concept in that region, older than ancient Greece, and older than Hermes. Before they were sculpted statues, roads were demarcated with heaps of stones.
But the lack of human features didn't make them any less sacred. Herms were revered. It was customary to throw another stone on the heap or anoint it with oil if you were feeling particularly devout.
And messing with them, or later defacing them, was seen as this horrible affront. And Pan, as the old deity of roads and journeys, was probably the god revered through the Herms. Now remember back in the Aphrodite video when I mentioned divine epithets and how they describe the capacity a god was being worshipped in?
We don't actually know for certain, but it seems very likely that way back in the day, Pan had some kind of Herm-related epithet describing him as Pan of the piled boundary stones. And also way back in the day, this epithet got separated from him into its own deity, Hermes. Now, this all happened VERY early, so we don't really know why Hermes separated from Pan.
It might have been because Pan was a fairly specialized deity and his worship was having trouble expanding beyond the more rustic wild lands. So they peeled off this brand spankin' new deity with so much mass-market appeal he's literally STILL showing up on brand labels. Whatever the original reason, we know Hermes is attested in Mycenaean Linear B inscriptions or at least a word that sounds like Hermes, and that means Hermes split from Pan well before we have any sort of proper records.
By the time the 800s hit and Homer starts writing his epics Hermes is firmly established as evidenced by his role in the Iliad and Pan has already been reduced to a simple wilderness god. Oh, and before we move on here's a fun fact about Pan. Some of you who are well acquainted with Greek mythological esoterica, or just read the Percy Jackson books, may have heard that Pan is canonically dead.
According to Plutarch writing around 100 AD, a mere handful of decades earlier during the reign of emperor Tiberius, a divine voice called out from the isle of Paksi to a sailor named Thamus and told him to tell everyone that the great god Pan was dead. Thamus obliged and everyone was slightly bummed to hear that Pan was dead. However, Pan didn't actually seem to be dead in any meaningful sense.
His shrines were still frequented, his worship still happened. So what was all that about? Well.
This whole thing might be a hilarious misunderstanding. Do you remember in my old underworld myths video I mentioned that Ishtar had a dead boyfriend named Tammuz? And in my Aphrodite video I elaborated that Tammuz had his own cult that had been brought to Greece?
Well, in ancient Greek the sentence: "Thamus, the great god Pan is dead! " is read as "Thamus Panmegas tethneke". But there's this funny little thing in Greek.
Pan- along with being the god's name is a prefix meaning "all". So this sentence could be: "Thamus, Pan the great is dead! " or it could be "Tammuz the all-great is dead!
" So this whole thing about Pan being dead might have been the result of some sailors overhearing the cult of Tammuz praising Tammuz for his sole accomplishment and thought they were hearing them tell some dude named Thamus that the god named Pan had died. Anyway, I thought that was the funniest thing in the world when I learned it. You're welcome for that wacky anecdote to share at parties.
Back to Hermes! ♩ Now in the early days of ancient Greece Hermes didn't actually look too dissimilar to Pan. In the Archaic Age between 800 and 500 BC Hermes was always represented as an older bearded man.
In Classical and Hellenistic Greece, his image changed to the one we recognize now. An athlete, young, beardless and mostly naked. Dionysus also underwent a similar transformation.
Maybe the Romans just weren't into older dudes. Speaking of, we should really talk about Mercury, the Roman version of Hermes. ♩ Now most Roman versions of Greek gods started off as fully developed deities in their own right.
For example Mars, the parallel to Ares, was originally an agricultural deity as well as a war god and most notably wasn't treated with anywhere near as much contempt as Ares was within his own pantheon. For the most part, the other Roman gods were also full-fledged deities though sometimes they got a little confused and accidentally mashed other gods together. Like Pluto, Hades's Roman equivalent, who was accidentally both the underworld god Pluton and the wealth god Plutus.
But Mercury? Mercury didn't exist! The name Mercury has uncertain etymology but it probably derives either from the Latin root of "merchant" or from an older word for "boundary".
Either way, the name is a literal descriptor of one of Hermes's divine duties and has no history beyond that. Mercury did seem to absorb a handful of minor Roman deities called the Dea Lucrii, a collective of minor gods of profit, specifically immoral profit that comes from bad sources, but basically, Mercury was literally just the Roman name for Hermes. I'm not sure why they bothered; they didn't make up a Latin name for Apollo, but it is what it is.
Now during the Roman era Hermes/Mercury was incredibly popular. Since Rome was all about that expansion, Hermes's status as the god of trade and merchants saw a lot of use. He turned up on the coinage, the sculptures are all over Pompeii, and there is one other quirk of his that made him so popular.
See, Rome had this policy that whenever they subsumed another culture they treated that culture's gods as their own. Literally. They found the Roman god that most closely resembled the local god and insisted they were the same.
First they did it with the Greeks, and then when they dealt with the Celts this led to Mercury being syncretized with Lugus. Known in Ireland as Lugh and in Wales as. .
. Lleu. Lou.
. . Also Lou?
I don't know man. I'm- I'm sorry Wales. .
. who was broadly seen as a big stonkin' deal as in the creator of all arts, along with being a badass warrior-hero-king and stuff. The Romans saw him as a patron of commerce, so he was equated with the commercial-friendly Mercury.
And if that's not wacky enough for you, when the Romans dealt with Germanic peoples, They equated Mercury with MOTHER F***ING ODIN! Was it cuz they were travelers? Was it cuz they were psychopomps?
Was it that stylin' hat-staff combo? Unclear! But the Romans were certain that the Germanic people worshipped Mercury as Odin.
The Ptolemaic Greeks also syncretized Hermes with a few different gods including Thoth and Anubis. Thoth because of their mutual cleverness and I guess tendency to write stuff down and Anubis because of their shared psychopomp duties. Hermes was all over the place, which is honestly very appropriate!
Hermes also turns up in a lot of Aesop's fables for some reason. . .
Dunno what's up with that. ♩ Hermes is a versatile god but I can't say for certain why he's so literally iconic. There are some possibilities.
Maybe his speed and mobility resonates well with our modern high-speed society. Maybe he's one of the few Olympians to combine likable character traits with a general lack of distractingly awful character flaws. Maybe it's just because medicine, communication, and capitalism are kind of central to most societies and they're also central to what he represents.
I dunno! Whatever the reason Hermes's liminal status helps him get into the cracks of almost any society and then just. .
. stay there forever! Turning up in unexpected places centuries down the line.
He's got this certain je-ne-sais-quoi keeping him in the popular consciousness long after the rest of his pantheon faded into novelty or obscurity. I mean, I get it. He's just fun!
I always liked the trickster gods. What do you want from me? ♩ Country Roads, Take Me Home ♩ ♩ To the place.
. . I belong!
♩ ♩ West Virginia! Mountain Mama! ♩ ♩ Take me home, ♩ ♩ country roads.
