Hermes: Encyclopedia II - Hermes - Blue Oyster Cult

Hermes - Blue Oyster Cult

General article: Cult (religion).

Though temples to Hermēs existed throughout Greece, a center of his cult was at Pheneos in Arcadia, where festivals in his honor were called Hermoea.

As a crosser of boundaries, Hermēs Psychopompos' ("conductor of the soul") was a psychopomp, meaning he brought newly-dead souls to the underworld, Hades. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hermes conducts the Kore safely back to Demeter. He also brought dreams to living mortals.

Hermes as an inventor of fire is a parallel of the Titan, Prometheus. In addition to the syrinx and the lyre, Hermes invented many types of racing and the sport of boxing. In the 6th century the traditional bearded phallic Hermes was reimagined as an athletic youth (illustration, top right); statues of the new type of Hermēs stood at stadia and gymnasiums throughout Greece.

Hermes - Hermai

In very ancient Greece, Hermēs was a phallic god of boundaries. His name in the form herma referred to a wayside marker pile of stones; each traveller added a stone to the pile. In the 6th century, Hipparchos, the son of Pisistratus replaced the cairns that marked the midway point between each village deme at the central agora of Athens with a square or rectangular pillar of stone or bronze topped by a bust of Hermēs usually with a beard; an erect phallus rose from the base. In the more primitive "Cyllenian" herms, the standing stone or wooden pillar was simply a phallus. The hermai were used to mark roads and boundaries. In Athens, they were placed outside houses for good luck. "That a monument of this kind could be transformed into an Olympian god is astounding," Walter Burkert remarked (Burkert 1985).

In 415 BCE, when the Athenian fleet was about to set sail for Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, all of the Athenian hermai were vandalized. The Athenians at the time believed it was the work of saboteurs, either from Syracuse or the anti-war faction within Athens itself. Socrates' pupil Alcibiades was suspected to have been involved, and Socrates indirectly paid for the impiety with his life.

Hermes - Hermes' iconography

Hermēs was usually portrayed wearing a broad-brimmed traveller's hat or a winged cap (petasos or more commonly petasus), wearing winged sandals (talaria) and carrying his Near Eastern herald's staff, entwined by copulating serpents, called the kerykeion, more familiar in its Latinized form, the caduceus. He wore the garments of a traveler, worker or shepherd. He was represented by purses, roosters (illustration, left) and tortoises.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Blue Oyster Cult", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki