Hermes (Bolen)

Definition

Bolen’s Hermes is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek messenger of the gods. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the second of the favoured sons, with Apollo, and her chapter title gives it three roles: communicator, trickster and traveller. The man in whom Hermes predominates, as she describes him, has a quick mind and a quicker tongue; he sees connections and opportunities, moves easily between people, places and ideas, enjoys new beginnings, and questions the conventional rules of success rather than working for grades or approval. Bolen’s Hermes is also the guide of souls, the only god who went freely in and out of the underworld, and she gives the pattern a helping side in the teacher or friend who accompanies another person through a dark passage. The difficulties she attaches are the other face of mobility: reluctance to commit to a partner or a career, and a gift for many things that can leave him master of none.

The grouping matters. Bolen sorts Zeus’s sons by his attitude to them, and Apollo and Hermes are the favoured pair whose patterns help a man get ahead in a patriarchal world. Two exclusions apply. This is not Hermes the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not the trickster or Mercurius of Jung’s psychology, though she borrows from both. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), whose Hestia shares a Homeric hymn with Hermes.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 7 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), in part III, “The Generation of the Sons”. The chapter follows the book’s standing order, the god, the archetype, the man, his difficulties and ways to grow, and adds a section on Hermes and alchemy. Bolen’s sources for it include the Homeric hymn in Charles Boer’s translation, Norman O. Brown’s Hermes the Thief (1947), Rafael López-Pedraza’s Hermes and His Children (1977), which she quotes on the god’s friendliness, and Jung, whom her index cites for Hermes on pp. 166 and 170. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The founding myth is public domain. The Homeric hymn to Hermes tells how Maia bore him in a cave on Cyllene:

For then she bare a son, of many shifts, blandly cunning, a robber, a cattle driver, a bringer of dreams, a watcher by night, a thief at the gates, one who was soon to show forth wonderful deeds among the deathless gods. — Homeric Hymn to Hermes (6th century BCE), ll. 13–16, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

On his first day he invents the lyre and steals Apollo’s cattle; when the brothers come before Zeus, the father laughs at the infant’s denials and orders him to show where the cattle are (ll. 387–396), an episode Bolen retells (p. 174) to show Zeus’s leniency towards this son. The hymn ends with Zeus making Hermes the one appointed messenger to Hades (ll. 568–573), and the Odyssey shows him leading the suitors’ ghosts below with his wand (24.1–14). Bolen’s claim to build on Jung is direct here: she cites his reading of the alchemical Mercurius, quicksilver and spirit of transformation, as an aspect of her Hermes.

The debate

Bolen’s Hermes and the classical trickster share a god but not an object. Jung’s trickster, in his commentary on Paul Radin’s Winnebago cycle (1954), is a collective shadow: an image of an earlier, barely human stage of consciousness that a people keeps alive in story and festival. Karl Kerényi’s essay in the same volume made Hermes the Greek representative of the type, and Lewis Hyde (1998) read Hermes as the culture-making thief who opens new paths. Jung’s Mercurius (“The Spirit Mercurius”, 1943/1948) is something else again: the paradoxical spirit of alchemy, duplex, chthonic and divine, which he read as an image of the unconscious itself. Bolen keeps “trickster” as one word in her title and takes Mercurius as one aspect, but her subject is a man’s style of living, his talk, his work and his relationships, not a collective image or a spirit of the unconscious. Read beside Jung, her Hermes is the trickster domesticated into a personality.

It also borders the puer aeternus. Bolen calls the Hermes man’s scattered superficiality an aspect of “the Puer Eternus”, which she attributes to Jung (index, p. 187), and her bibliography lists Marie-Louise von Franz’s lectures on the puer. The overlap is real, but von Franz’s puer is a neurosis of the provisional life tied to the mother complex, and Bolen’s Hermes is a temperament with a puer risk.

The archetypal school would object to the move itself. López-Pedraza, whom Bolen quotes, treats Hermes as the god who has no centre and so befriends the complexes of the other gods, a function within everyone’s psyche rather than a kind of man (1977, chapter 1). James Hillman wrote that gods, for psychology, are “adjectival” rather than substantive (A Blue Fire, p. 42). Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) put the objection plainly: “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17). David Tacey (1997) criticised Bolen for inviting readers to look up an archetype to find out who they are (p. 20), and Publishers Weekly (1989) quoted her line that a Hermes man finds settling down difficult as one of the book’s thunderbolts.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Hermes as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Research on extraversion, novelty-seeking and commitment in relationships describes neighbouring traits but makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the infant thief of the hymn, the messenger and the guide of souls. Popular discussion of her types has named fictional con men, rescuers and witty younger sons as Hermes men, as in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the favoured sons. Apart from Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars, which keep the guide-of-souls side apart from the trickster entry, are marked as such.

Sources

• Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 2 and 7, p. 174; index, pp. 166, 170, 187; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
• Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
• Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
• Homeric Hymn 4, to Hermes, ll. 13–16, 387–396, 568–573; Homeric Hymn 29, to Hestia. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• Homer, Odyssey 24.1–14 (S. Butler, Trans., 1900). Project Gutenberg #1727.
• Brown, N. O. (1947). Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. University of Wisconsin Press; Lindisfarne edition 1990. ISBN 978-0-940262-26-3.
• López-Pedraza, R. (1977). Hermes and His Children. Spring Publications; revised ed., Daimon Verlag, 3rd ed. 2020. ISBN 978-3-85630-905-3. Chapter 1, “Hermes – Psychotherapy – the Hermaphrodite”.
• Jung, C. G. (1943/1948). The spirit Mercurius. CW 13.
• Jung, C. G. (1954). On the psychology of the trickster-figure. CW 9i. English first in P. Radin, The Trickster (1956), with K. Kerényi’s essay on the trickster in Greek mythology; Schocken reprint ISBN 978-0-8052-0351-6.
• Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-27928-8.
• von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (3rd ed. 2000). Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-88-5.
• Hillman, J. (1981). Psychology: monotheistic or polytheistic? (1971, with postscript). As excerpted in T. Moore (Ed.), The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire (Routledge, 1990), p. 42. ISBN 978-0-415-05303-7.
• Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
• Tacey, D. (1997). Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14241-0. Chapter 1, “Archetypes, gods, men and women”, p. 20.
• [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
• Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0237, “Gods in Everyman: The Favorite Son God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0237-gods-in-everyman-the-favorite-son-god-archetypes/