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HERMES: GUIDE OF SOULS

Jay Livernois

The title of this lecture, "Hermes: Guide of Souls," came from Karl Kerenyi, the famous, late Hungarian classicist, Eranos lecturer, and all around difficult person. "Hermes: Guide of Souls," is the title of his excellent short book on the Greek god, Hermes (published by Spring Publications). Yet the purpose of this lecture was two-fold, and it was definitely not just an explication or critique of Kerenyi’s work.
First I had thought to try to roughly describe who this god was for the Greeks as I find the general knowledge of the ancient Greek pantheon-like our present knowledge of pornography--lacking.

Surprisingly I have found that in terms of both subjects, most people claim to know all about them, but when actually questioned, come to find out, they really know little about either. Yet most people do have strong opinions and feelings about both subjects.

Secondly I would have liked to expand on an idea I have of polytheism, soul, and our contemporary reading of mythology. I first began to present this idea in my lecture, "Aphrodite Goes to Haiti," at Myth and Theater 1993 when the focus was on the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. This piece was to switch the focus from Aphrodite to Hermes and leave the living polytheism of Haiti for the contemporary mono-vision of our world.

As James Hillman says in his essay, "A Note on Hermes Inflation" which I read yesterday at this festival, for the gods to be understood polytheisticly, they must be understood not as a monism but in their relatedness and multiplicity. Otherwise we are still stuck in a monotheistic mindset expressed as the modernist ego with all its narcissism and potential for inflation and attendant bad behavior which of course can then be psychologized (read deepened) or drugged away.

However I found that I could not go on with this talk and these ideas. I confess that after listening to Charles Boer’s lecture, I feel that I should just throw my lecture in the air, and yell, "Party! Everyone to a bar, martinis and cosmopolitans on me!" After all how can I possibly follow such a brilliant lecture as Charles Boer’s, and think that I could say anything intelligent. Plus I also know that Sonu Shamdasani will follow me at 7 this evening. I would like to mention to the people here that at the last Myth and Theater Festival, Sonu gave a talk on the intellectual origins and history of C. G. Jung’s ideas. He did this with no notes, no prepared lecture, just his iron trap mind and memory. He spoke for almost two hours. At the end of it Nor Hall said, "Sonu just destroyed everything I do, wrecked everything I believe in." It is not that Charles Boer did this to me with his lecture, but Christ, how do you follow it up?

In my despair I want to simply parrot a phrase uttered by Samuel L. Jackson, one of the hit men in the movie "Pulp Fiction," and in front of everyone here, look at Charles and Sonu and say, "Well will you look at da big brains on dem." And instead of shooting them (which happens after this phrase is said in the movie), I would shoot myself. This would be one way of stealing the show, not having to continue with my lecture, and bringing down the curtain all at once. However this would be too messy and melodramatic.
Believe you me, I now understand better something that never quite made sense to me. I have always heard from James Hillman and other Eranos speakers about the terror and pressure they felt at presenting a paper at, what I call, the golden age of Eranos. This was a ten-year period from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies.

The old Eranos Conferences, for those of you who might not have heard of them, were an annual conference for about ten days at the end of August in Ascona, Switzerland. Each conference had a theme, like "The Soul of Beauty," and the papers delivered, in German, French, and English, were put together in a series called The Eranos Yearbook. This is where Joseph Campbell got his start, Jung lectured there in the thirties and forties (and Glen Cater, Jung also moored his boat there on Lago Maggiore for free), and Erich Neuman in the forties and fifties. Plus, according to James Hillman, his whole career as a psychologist was saved by Eranos because he was still invited to lecture there even after he was thrown out as the Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zürich.

During this golden era of Eranos, the speakers consisted regularly of the psychologist James Hillman, the Kabbala scholar Gerschom Scholem, the Islamacist Henry Corbin, the biologist Adolf Portman, Thomas Mann’s classicist son Ulrich Mann, the French psychologist Gilbert Durand, the German Egyptologist Erich Hornung, and the American scholar of religion David L. Miller. Occasionally thrown in were a Nobel Prize winner or two, or an Alfred Ziegler or Wolfgang Giegerich. The maestro of ceremonies was the I Ching expert Rudolf Ritsema. Charles Boer, Albert Cook, and Bianca Garufi were in the audience, and Paul Kugler was selling the Spring books.

What this meant was tremendous pressure on the lecturers to produce. So, the lecturers were continually rewriting their talks according to what was said either the previous day or just the previous lecture in the morning. The result was many lunches and dinners skipped due to this continual rewriting. Again, I never understood why the Eranos speakers were always rewriting their lectures until this conference.

Okay, so what to do? I decided to rewrite my lecture; forget about the basic Hermes and his myths and my multiplicity of souls theory. Yet what do I say now about Hermes, connect to Charles Boer’s lecture, and maybe work in this place called New Orleans? How can anyone except Sonu get up here and not look dumb. Intellectually, if I may draw a metaphor from pornography, I am in a position of being DPed, doubly penetrated, in a mind fuck sandwich, definitely in the middle. Needless to say, like the "meat" in any good double penetration scene, I couldn’t sleep last night.

Then it came to me. Yes, tear up my lecture. Start again. Rewrite. After all there is a tradition of this at Eranos. And Myth and Theatre began as an idea on Charles Boer’s porch, a luncheon, early summer 1986, Liza Mayer, myself, and the idea that as the Eranos Conferences were passe, as its great lecturers were dead, and/or dying (Zimmer dead, Jung dead, Neuman dead, Portman dead, Olga Froebe dead, Kerenyi dead, Scholem dead, Corbin dead, Benz dead, Portman dead, Eliade dead, Brun dead, and the near dead-Joseph Campbell, Morton Smith, Alfred Ziegler, Jean Brun a few steps behind) start again with something new, performance, theater, ideas, and for the Gods’ sake comfortable chairs. So here we are 13 years later in New Orleans.

Punks and American youth culture-which is at least a part of American culture, although it permeates everything-is not dominated by Hermes, but by Dionysus and Hades and the cult of the dead. Let me explain how I see this, and differently than Charles Boer.
In the ancient world, the secret at the heart of the mysteries of Eleusis, probably the most important mystery cult of the ancient world, was not some Demeter pig goddess mother fertility krone woo-woo mysticism you too can become a god or goddess. And it is not true that no ancient writer ever revealed the secret of the Eleusinian mysteries. Karl Kerenyi, in his book on Eleusis, clearly shows that many ancients blabbed what the secret was, beginning with, I believe, Euripedes in some of his plays. The secret was that Dionysus and Hades are the same. This meant that Dionysus is also the Lord of the Dead, the Lord of the Underworld.

I would argue that punks, youth culture, is dominated by Dionysus and Hades and the Dead. The youths in Littleton, dressed in black with death-mask white faces, were the minions of Hades, and they set off an orgy of Dionysian death. Sure, they hated the Apollonian jocks, just as Dionysus and his women tore apart Pentheus, but they also killed the short, black, popular Hermes-type kid who always told jokes and moved between worlds. They looked to get anyone popular-read alive-in their school and culture. They also killed a girl who was one of their gang but became a born-again Christian. They sent her to meet Jesus who is also in their imaginations seemed to be a Dionysus-Hades figure. And they carried it all out as a laughing, mad, Dionysian joke, not a sly, hermetic prank.

The massive copy-catism in schools and among young people (which was greater than the public knows as most of the incidents were suppressed by the police and school authorities to not set off a public panic) points to the fertile, mythological ground for the return of the dead. The blackness of punks, the darkness of their images, their love of death art (from Joe Coleman’s blood and guts dead eroticism to Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s psychopathic clowns to Jack Kervorkian to death row painters-all which can be bought here at Barrister’s in New Orleans), and the number of punk-youth culture suicides (from Nancy and Sid to Wendy O’’Williams to Kurt Colbain to G. G. Alin to our own friend Rob MacDonald) speaks to the grip of Dionysus and Hades, powerful archetypes, gods moving through a culture not of hermetic paradox or the straddling of boundaries but of a descent into (as is feared in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes by Hermes when Apollo picks him up) dark Tartaros. American, Dionysian, youth culture with its drugs and guns brings you down and dead. Remember many of the names of rock and punk bands carry momento moris. Just a few examples are the Dead Kennedys, the Velvet Underground, and even the Beatles were named as an ironic death tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

Yet let us not lay this all on the young. As Charles Boer correctly points out there is a market in cemetery artifacts coming from New Orleans. These artifacts are not sold in New Orleans. They come from New Orleans because more than any American city, New Orleans is dedicated to Dionysus and hence Hades. These artifacts are sold in L.A., the city of eternal youth, of film eternity, a heaven, an idealized place. Why? Because of our Christianism, our belief in everlasting life. Death tries to creep in with cemetery art and artifacts, reminders of our mortality in our American heaven on earth, our city of Angels, the place, the L.A. cosmology of stars.

However, New Orleans is the place, the city ripe with the cult of death. It is filled with ghosts, corruption, putrefaction, Anne Rice, voodoo, hoodoo, alcohol everywhere, the living dead, a continual flow of the most fanatical Christians who believe in a fantasy land of the dead, and tourists who are not really alive otherwise they would never dress that way. New Orleans also has an oppressive, humid heat that needs to so over cool the living, it makes it seem as if everyone is a corpse in need of preservation.
Still I would like to remind everyone that the cult of death is also the cult of life. Cults and celebrations of death flourished in the Italian Renaissance. These reminded people to live life to its fullest with all the beauty and pleasures possible. In fact I believe the Renaissance was not the neo-Platonic world so pushed by academic Renaissance scholars like Paul Kristellar and Eugenio Garin, but an Epicurean world and a hidden philosophy pushed by Marsilio Ficino that hid behind Platonism so as not to be burned because of an indulgence in epicurean heresy.

I hope that this small critique of Charles Boer’s brilliant lecture last night will not change the mood of what has been so far an excellent conference. I know that Enrique has been looking for polemics, tribunal subjects, or what I call his "intellectual bug fights in jars." I also realize that my contrariness will make me vulnerable to the ferocious wit and devastating humor of Charles Boer. Today, I feel that I too, like the 3rd century Greeks, live in an age of anxiety. But my fear is not of terrible sky demons or gods, it is simply having to follow an all too real lecture by Charles Boer.