A god of transitions and boundaries Hermes, as psychepompos, guided the souls of the dead to the underworld.

Above all Hermes was interlocutor, translator, mediator, messenger of the gods, signal carrier.

Of his powers of interpretation and decryption we might ask — What has happened? Where has everyone gone? Have they just left? What do these remains tell us of what happened here? Are these the remains of what we were? Are we still like this now? Or, are the people who left all this quite different to us?

Hermes gives access to secret knowledge. Hermetic wisdom includes that of alchemy. Investigating the spiritual constitution, or life, of matter and material existence through an application of the mysteries of birth, death, and resurrection, alchemists explored metamorphosis, particularly in the quest for the philosophers’ stone, through chemical distillation and fermentation, quickening nature's processes.

Herms are a kind of shrine and statue of the god. From earliest times Hermes was worshipped in the form of a heap of stones or a shapeless column of stone or wood, by the sides of roads, especially at their crossings, and on the boundaries of lands. Later herms combined a head atop a column which carried a phallus on the side.