What is it about shepherds that makes them so important in our sacred texts and mythologies, asks Mark Vernon

Shepherds appear at decisive moments in many myths. Endymion was a handsome herdsman with whom Selene, goddess of the Moon, became infatuated. She asked Zeus to place him in a perpetual sleep so as to enjoy his youth forever. She hoped that timeless beauty might transcend the decay of mortality.

Polyphemus, the cyclops, was a solitary herder of sheep who imprisoned the wandering Odysseus in his cave. But Odysseus was crafty. He pierced the one eye of Polyphemus with an olive branch, freeing himself, if only to continue his directionless voyage across the wine-dark sea.

Enkidu, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, is taught by shepherds how to keep domesticated animals. The shepherds steer Endiku from the wild life of a hunter-gatherer to the ways of settled dwelling and the promise of predictability.

Then there are the shepherds who are gods. Pan comes to mind, often appearing as a man-goat chimera. He is lusty and rural, luring human beings with the music of his pipes into shady places and causing terror there – hence the word “panic”.

Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu, took the form of a herder of cows in his youth, revealing his qualities as protector and guide, as well as inhabiting the simplicity of life that sees divine things.

A babe called Oedipus is rescued by a herdsman on a hillside, before a second shepherd takes him to the king and queen whom he fatefully believes to be his parents. The oracle at his birth, which predicted the horrors of parricide and incest, was thereby fulfilled.

There are more tales. But what is it with the shepherd? Why does the figure, who lives in between rugged and cultured places, still capture the imagination? After all, Jesus said he was a shepherd, too. Many sing the hymn that begins with the line, “The Lord’s my shepherd”.

The god of the herds provides a clue. Hermes, in the Greek tradition, gained his association with creatures of the pasture when, after his birth, he clambered out of his cradle and stole cows from his prickly brother, Apollo. A trickster from the get-go, he then tied a broom to each of the cows’ tails. As he herded them, they covered their tracks. Furious Apollo was appeased by a gift from his precocious brother – a lyre, with which he could make beautiful music to satisfy his pride.

The tale, therefore, tells of the disruption of Apollo’s life. Into it erupts an unwanted other. Hermes and herds have a life of their own; we still call behaviour in which people lose control “herd-like”. Hermes is present on such occasions, though paradoxically he also thereby can connect us to aspects of life from which we have become uncoupled. In other words, Hermes is a psychopomp, traversing the borderlands of life and the afterlife, of inner and outer, of that which we’re conscious and that which we’re not. Called fleet-footed Mercury by the Romans, he, like the planet that orbits dangerously close to the blazing Sun, dodges in and out of the light that illuminates – sometimes seen, sometimes not. We know his power when assumptions that seemed set, dissolve; when relationships that seemed reliable, crumble; when the ground beneath our feet cracks and shakes.

But the wonderful thing about Hermes is that he is both herd and guide: sheep and shepherd. He confuses because the path he indicates is not the one expected. He comes, therefore, in a crisis, at the turning point. Responding to his shepherding, in those moments, requires an artful combination of care and daring, of patience and insistence, of learning and unlearning. Hermes might then bridge between who we are and what otherwise is, so that we might become more than we currently are.

Hence in historical writing on alchemy – a subject in which the balance of opposing forces is a central idea – Hermes is shown as the caduceus, a wand with wings, entwined by two snakes: a staff that halts the snakes’ fight by showing them how to transcend the conflict.

Another story about Hermes concerns Argus Panoptes – a giant with a hundred eyes – and Io, a beautiful princess who was one of the ever-rapacious Zeus’s lovers. Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, loathed Io and charged Argus with guarding her to keep her away from Zeus’s insatiable embrace – which prompted Zeus to charge Hermes with freeing her. Hermes devised a plan to undo Argus’s all-seeing surveillance. He went for the eyes. Enchanting music issued from his pipes, lulling all one hundred of them to sleep. The rest is history. Hermes slew Argus, removing Io’s guard.

That said, Hermes can bring peace too. Context is all. This flip side of Hermes is remembered in the part he played during the birth of Dionysus, the deity who brings collapse, ecstasy and death, as well as being the god of wine. The story goes that Dionysus was in the womb of Semele, another lover of Zeus, who asked the Lord of lords to reveal to her his true nature. Zeus did and his glory burnt Semele to ash. However, Dionysus survived. He was rescued by Hermes, who sowed the premature infant into the thigh of his father. Safe in his divine incubator, Dionysus was born, though the fiery trauma that occurred during the pregnancy haunted him in life. That wild frenzy is what might seize you when imbibing Dionysus’s liquor, though it might equally just knock you out.

I believe that many are calling on Hermes today, wittingly or unwittingly. He is the god of rewilding, the philosophy in which fields are transformed by swapping monocrops for species that unleash all manner of diverse others. He is the god of uncertainty, who might reveal a way forward that is not a solution but a transformation. He is the god of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation that reveals insights previously unseen – though beware of ever taking him literally; that way lies not the astonishing shifts that bring fulfilment but the deadly stasis of fundamentalism.

William Blake understood the hermetic path when he wrote of the tygers of wrath being wiser than the horses of instruction, and the ruins of time building mansions in eternity. The shepherding of Hermes is available to us today.

This article is from Idler #107.

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