Hermes

Excerpts Ginette Paris

I long felt that I was wearing Hermes’ hat—a hat that made me invisible. Invisibility allowed me to see without being seen. No one paid attention to me because, consciously or not, I was taking pains to be ordinary, to be as unremarkable as possible. Neither very beautiful nor very ugly, neither a queen nor a tramp, I was gliding like the mist and I never openly opposed authority. It wasn’t enough to be ordinary: I wanted to be extraordinarily ordinary. When you can go unnoticed you are truly invisible. To retire thus from power offers a privileged view of the world; the comic, the tragic and the magic sides of life can be perceived. But once you become important, socially important, you lose this hat and the immunity that ordinariness offers. That’s the sign that Hermes is being left behind and another myth is being approached.

I lost this hat with adulthood and social responsibilities, but I will never forget the lightness of being that comes with Hermes’ hat and winged sandals. Too often the reaction against the domination of rationalism and positivism has led to the defense of the simple-minded and ignorant, those who are excluded from the Apollo-Zeus system. But this sells short the Hermes intellect, for he is, along with Dionysos and Aphrodite, an archetype to stand up to the champions of Logos. These champions (the sharpest minds, the strongest wills, the highbrow and the powerful) are more vulnerable to the cleverness and astuteness of Hermes than to what they usually perceive as a threat—the uprising of the oppressed.

Winning while appearing to lose is a strategy that a hermetic person knows how to play to advantage. The power of humor and ridicule in the face of harsh authority, the role of the court jester, the uses of flight over fight and of artful speech in negotiation—all these can be rediscovered in Hermes. David and Goliath, Tyl Eulenspiegel, Robin Hood—all have in common outwitting a powerful opponent, so that his blow strikes only water or air. Women, who are said to be wily, know these strategies, as do men who are endowed with that form of intelligence known to the Greeks as metis, that is, an intuitive intelligence. To picture Hermes will require a word-portrait in small successive brushstrokes with frequent changes of perspective, because Hermes-Mercury is many-faceted, shimmering, impossible to pin down.

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Metis is the name the Greeks gave to an intuitive intelligence often attributed to women. A statement like “there’s no understanding women” reflects an ignorance of metis, for the path of metis is sinuous, unpredictable, and unsettling for those who have none of it in themselves. Synonymous with prudence, reflection and wisdom, metis is the opposite of deductive knowledge and is contrary to the linear logic of Apollo. Essentially an intuitive quality, it is what we might today call “situational intelligence.” Rooted in an inner knowledge, an intuitive perception of contexts, and a sense of intimacy with all of nature’s ways, it belongs to mythic thought, where logic does not apply. This is Hermes’ brand of intelligence which he gets from the Goddess Metis herself and shares with the great seductresses Aphrodite, Pandora, Ariadne, the sorceress Medea, the magician Circe, the strategist Athena (daughter of Metis) and many Greek heroes, especially Ulysses.

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