CHAPTER FOUR
Hermes's Presence in the City
If one tends to find nymphs in grottoes, one can be even more certain of meeting Hermes wherever there are crossroads and intersections, be they as different as those of a conference or of a city. He even seems to wait at the places where one city intersects with another, so as to enter each one under a different guise. Thus we find him in the city of a Hermetic myth: Adocentyn, a fictional town belonging to esoteric tradition; in Amsterdam, a propitious place for initiatic wanderings, in Gustav. Meyrink's novel The Green Face; in a Mexican suburb, as short of hope as it is of bread, in Luis Buñuel's film Los Olvivados; and finally in a fictional setting reflecting contemporary fears and obsessions, in George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Two imaginary cities, two real ones. Two texts, two films. And five Hermeses…
Hermes the Architect, or Hermetistic Harmony
Considered as a mythical place, the city of Hermopolis deserves a lengthy study. We know that the local divinity of Khmonou (the modem Achmouein) in Middle Egypt was Thoth, called Hermes by the Greeks and credited with the role of urbis conditor, founder of the city. The tradition vacillates between identifying this personage with the god Hermes and with Hermes Trismegistus, a significant ambiguity which points to the meeting-place of Myth with History. The reader should refer here to the passage in Chapter 3 (see pages 88-89), translated from the famous Arabic book of magic, the Picatrix, whose supposed author Magriti or Madjriti lived in the second half of the tenth century. A Latin translation made in 1256 at the command of King Alphonsus of Castile was widely distributed in Europe.
The rich symbolism of this passage invites an interesting historical and comparative study. The city's fluidity (water), mobile colors (like a science-fiction decor), and therapeutic talismans are so many attributes of Hermes, bestowed on the city which he founded and adorned. To this text I would like to juxtapose a witness to a cultic practice, or rather a form of popular magic, interesting here because of its urban setting. It evokes Hermes within the city, rather than as the god who presided over its conception. We read this in Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationum, a Latin work of Michael Maier, which appeared in Frankfurt in 1617. The reader will find the passage in Chapter 3 of the present book.1
It is a lively description, which in few words sketches the whole scene with its several tableaux. The citizens, presumably numerous, cover the distance between the temple and the forum with their fingers in their ears, then mingle with the crowd and await their illumination. This is the image that Maier passed on to his late Renaissance contemporaries. But in the Renaissance itself, there is no lack of Hermes figures connected with the town. Many of them illustrate Hermes's euphemization, his transition to the status of a psychological type or a decorative motif. In his posthumous “Hymn to Hermes,” Ronsard places him in the crossroads of the city, where he performs his sleight-of-hand tricks like the Conjuror of the Tarot:
Tu es des charlatans le seigneur, et de ceux
Qui des peuples béans amusent autour d'eux
Vendeurs de thériaque, et de ceux qui aux places
Jouants des gobelets font tours de passe-passe
You're the lord of all charlatans, and of those
Amused by the faces that gape all around them;
Of theriac hawkers, and those in the squares
Who play with the cups and do conjuring tricks.2
I will now take three images from the repertory of our own time, drawn from fiction and the cinema. Here we meet Hermes again, only he is disguised and rechristened.
At the Crossroads of Amsterdam, or the Initiatic Message
One might be tempted to see in the city of Amsterdam, a place of hallucinatory expressionistic density, and in Chidher Green or Hermes, the two principal characters of a marvelous novel by the Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink: Das Grüne Gesicht of 1916 (The Green Face). Around them gravitate the other personages of the drama, more stereotyped than psychologized, since the essence of the work, as in all traditional stories, is the initiatic pilgrimage. The book opens with the writing on a shop-sign in an Amsterdam street: “Jokes and Tricks, Salon of Chidher Green,” and we are very soon plunged into a world of thoroughfares, passages, canals, little shops, and mysterious communications between places as well as people—a labyrinth at whose center is Chidher, invisible or diaphanous, ungraspable and always in disguise. Hauberisser, the neophyte on whom destiny inflicts the trials that make up the novel's plot, believes he has read somewhere the name of this mysterious character, then thinks he was mistaken; he wanders in the city trying to recompose his mind and gather his thoughts:
“All right, Miss, that's enough of that; at least tell me who this Chidher Green is, the one whose name is out there on the sign.”
“What sign, please?”
“For heaven's sake, Miss! Outside on the shop-sign!”
The salesgirl opened her eyes wide. “Our shop-sign says Zitter Arpad!” she stammered in amazement.
Hauberisser snatched up his hat and hurried outside to make certain. Mirrored in the glass door, he saw the shopgirl tapping her forehead with a look of astonishment. Once outside, he looked up at the proprietor's sign and read it. His heart nearly stopped beating as he saw that under the words “Jokes and Tricks” there was indeed the name of Zitter Arpad.
Not a letter of “Chidher Green.”
He was so confused and felt so ashamed of himself that he left his walking-stick in the shop's rack and hurried straight off, so as to get into another neighborhood as quickly as possible….
For a good hour, he wandered mindlessly through all sorts of streets, coming into deathly quiet lanes and cramped courtyards in which churches would suddenly rise up before him, dreaming in the warm sunlight. He walked through dark doorways, cool as cellars, and heard his steps echo as if in a monastery cloister.
The houses were dead, as if no human being had lived there for centuries. Here and there an angora cat slept among flowerpots garish with color on baroque windowsills, blinking in the golden noontide light; not a sound.
High elm trees with motionless branches and leaves loomed out of tiny green gardens, surrounded by a host of ancient gabled houses which, with their black fronts and bright wood-framed windows, clean as Sunday, seemed to reach towards each other like friendly old matrons.
[Hauberisser finds himself in a medieval part of the city]
Sundials on the walls, above splendid and flowery coats-of-arms, dazzling window-panes, red tiled roofs; little chapels sunk in shadow, and the golden balls on towers shimmering upwards towards chubby white clouds.
A grille stood ajar, leading to a cloistered courtyard. He went in and saw a bench beneath the branches of a weeping willow. Around him was tall, rank grass. Not a soul in sight anywhere; not a face behind the windows. All was still as death.
He sat down to gather his thoughts.3
His name is Chidher Green, but also Ahasver; he is “a precursor of primordial man, who knew nothing of death.” He wears on his forehead a black headband, under which is hidden the symbol of etemal life:4 Like Thoth-Hermes, Chidher is connected with Egypt. Someone says that they have seen his portrait in the Museum of Leiden; in fact, this museum does not contain the picture, “but only Egyptian antiquities.” The symbol of the scarab reinforces this connection, as does the appearance at the end of the story of Thoth himself in a vision, as a man “with an Ibis head” holding in his hand the Egyptian sign of life: the cross surmounted by a ring, symbol of eternal life. His other name, Ahasver, readily leads one to take him for Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew: the unhappy man condemned never to die as he expiates over the centuries the sin committed at Golgotha, where he refused to help Jesus carry his cross. He certainly possesses this character's quality of traveler or wanderer; and one also thinks of the immortality attributed to St. John the Evangelist (John 21.20-23). But he is even more evocative of the prophet Elijah, as one character in the novel is careful to remind us: “I knew that he was Elijah, although my wife pretended that he was called Chidher Green.” Finally, the color green obviously recalls that of the Emerald Tablet, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.
At the end of the novel, the destruction of the city by a terrific hurricane follows the final revelation that Chidher grants Hauberisser by means of a manuscript which goes back to a very ancient Egyptian fraternity, the Brotherhood of Heliopolis. It is an apocalypse brought about by the element of air, which extends far beyond Amsterdam to take on cosmic dimensions, leaving hope only for the redemption of individuals favored by Chidher-Hermes, the guardian of mysteries and of magic, seeker and gatherer of the elect upon earth. As hierophant, the only truly living man, he awakens to the mystical resurrection, like St. John in the Gnostic legends. Legend come to reality: that is the theme of Meyrink's novels The Golem, The Green Face, and Walpurgis Night. In each instance it is the city that becomes the place “where the frontier between here and the beyond is thinner than anywhere else.”5 Like Prague, Amsterdam is saturated with culture, history, and an infinitude of memories; in these cities there is a more tenuous frontier than usual between the visible and the invisible.6 It is a fragile place, whose decomposition was already a theme of Decadent literature, and which culminates in an apocalypse whose prelude presents Hermes as the supreme figure of the Mediator.
Little-Eyes, or the Discreet Presence of Mercury
In chronological order, my third example of the Hermesian figure is that of a Hermes euphemized, discreet in his presence, reduced to a supporting role, and powerless in the midst of misery and desolation while still keeping his traditional attributes. I detected him in a famous film of Luis Buñuel, made in 1950: Los Olvivados, which takes us into the sordid world of a Mexico City suburb.7 It is certainly a realistic film, but its mythical aspects come as no surprise from such a poetic director who, besides, is marked by surrealism. The city here is the centerless and peripheral world of the subproletariat, a world of waste grounds, of garbage dumps where dead babies are sometimes thrown; yet it still has a market where there is a merry-go-round to delight the children, and also meeting places for young hooligans. Shortly after the beginning of the film it is here, at a crossroads and at the foot of a fountain, that a little peasant of twelve or thirteen appears, called Ojitos (“Little-Eyes” in Spanish), dressed in a poncho and straw hat. We soon learn that his father has abandoned him here a few hours earlier, probably for good. One might expect a heroic mission to await him, since this scene evokes the theme of the exposed child, left in this transitory place that is the world with its armed robbers, murderers, and all its perils—an exposure that seems to be symbolized by the fountain—just as the child-heroes of tales and myths are often given to the waters. But there is nothing of this, any more than in the myth of Hermes. Ojitos meets a blind old man who lives by singing and playing crude musical instruments; he helps him cross the street, then serves him as guide and finds onlookers for him. Later one sees him teaching Meche, a girl from a poor family, that to keep from falling sick one should carry a dead man's tooth. He offers Meche the necklace on which is threaded the one he wears, which he himself went to find in a cemetery by moonlight. He also teaches her that to keep one's skin smooth and young-looking, one should rub it with a rag soaked in milk. He serves several times as news-bringer to a gang of children. Still at the crossroads of the market place, it is again Ojitos who tells his friend Pedro that the latter is no longer wanted by the police
Ojitos thus possesses most of the attributes of Hermes. Cross-roads: this little vagabond hovers between country and town, having left the one without ever belonging to the other, and hangs about by day at the intersection marked by the fountain in the market place. Communication: he is a mediator, however modest, between the world of the dead and that of the living (the allusion to the cemetery), and carries messages. Games and Shows: he participates indirectly by helping the blind musician. Therapeutics and Magic: he shows a flair for cures, for prolonging youth and life. His status in the film is the very special one of marginal among the marginals, since in the end practically nothing happens to him while all around him are nothing but thefts, violence, and murders—beside some acts of real humanity. When Pedro is killed, Ojitos leaves the story as if he had only passed through it as a temporary guide, and tells Meche simply that he is going off to look for his father again.
Hermes euphemized, like the decorative elements found in certain mythological emblems of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this little Mercury of the slums is brother to the one in Joseph Losey's Messenger (1971), but without occupying a lead part. Ojitos remains a supporting role, albeit the most important one. On a higher plane, going beyond the message of the film, he is by far the most interesting character in it precisely because he is enigmatic and traditional, reminding one of the child with the light in Rembrandt's Night Watch. That Buñuel does not seem to have intended to be “mythical” makes Ojitos all the more authentically symbolic. Thanks to Hermes as go-between, Myth is discreetly present in the city of desolation.
The Meeting of Two Hermeses in the City of Screaming Metal
We conclude with a more recent work, also a film: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the second sequel of the original Mad Max (1979), highly successful since its first screening.8 The historical framework is the same as in its two predecessors: near the former city of Sydney, destroyed—as we know from Mad Max II (1981)—along with the rest of the world in a nuclear war. The survivors live among a heterogeneous mess of salvaged. objects, instruments turned from their original purposes, constructions out of junk. By showing micro-societies and embryonic towns where people are evolving in the midst of an incredible bric-à-brac, the director George Miller and his designers give full rein to their imaginations as they sketch this new world.
At the beginning of the film, Mad Max, the hero, discovers the little urban settlement of Bartertown. It is a sort of surreal platform for swapping the most varied and improbable sorts of goods, but most of all it is the scene of merciless combats. The locals’ regular and favorite spectacle is a fight between two gladiators, of whom one is invariably killed. This show, pitiless and completely amoral, takes place in an improbable transparent structure called the Thunderdome. Here we meet Dr. Dealgood, the master of ceremonies of these combats and Bartertown's auctioneer.9 He wears a black cape that suggests Dracula more than Hermes, but also a scepter that indicates his hermesian role, for it is tipped by a winged wheel. He is flanked by two girls, which is quite concordant with the trinitary character of Hermesian figures.10
Dr. Dealgood is an incredible braggart, whose Word transforms the sordid into a demoniacal beauty; a commentator on the brutal reality, encouraging Evil by the magic of a speech that is wonderfully glib and invisibly effective. He is a degenerate Hermes, a perverted Mercury, “fallen” because he is the spokesman for humans who have usurped the Gods, as appears in his superb harangue before and after the combat in the Thunderdome. The latter stands as the mythical center of the town, presented as an arena with a function comparable to that of ancient Rome. The principles that rule this town do not rest on divine will, but on a double egotistic power. There is the Master, the old dwarf who rules beneath the town in the midst of a herd of pigs—traditional symbol of fecundity—whose excrement is used as a source of energy, just as the gnomes and kobolds of legend are masters of the energies of the earth. The degeneracy is underlined by the equally unchallenged power of “Aunt Entity,” the usurper of a sovereignty that is both uranian and lunar, as the silvery scales of her armor and her aerial residence suggest.
But Dr. Dealgood is not the sole Hermes. We see another in the person of Jedediah, the airborne robber who at the start of the film uses his his old plane to surprise Mad Max in the middle of the desert and steal his team of camels—which he will swap for something or other in Bartertown, just as Hermes stole Apollo's herd of cows. Like the god, Jedediah makes his home in a cavern and appears with a child whose weapon recalls the bow of Eros. Above all, this wily and elusive character who is master of the air is devoted to the juncture between past and future. At the end it is he who takes the place of the captain awaited by the surviving youngsters—Captain Walker, whose role he takes on; and he allows the myth to reach total accomplishment and realization, just as Chidher Green, in Meyrink's novel, ensured that of the soteriological and apocalyptic myth. Here the power of the magician-warrior, incarnated by the people of the Fault, reestablishes a society to which Myth is central—the return to the “wasteland,” the promised city, former Sydney—as opposed to the society of Bartertown, founded on wheeling and dealing (=capitalism) and brute force (=totalitarianism). Mad Max himself is no Hermes. The role devolves on Dr. Dealgood in its perverted form, and on the robber-pilot under the form of the Trickster, well known to mythologists and ethnologists. This Trickster, as Jedediah, leads the children of the Fault (the paradisal Green Land, as opposed to the “waste” land of the desert) back to the land of their ancestors, the great city destroyed by nuclear war, so as to restore life to the dead city and allow the film to end with a glorious galaxy of lights which, in the last image, shine in the remains of Sydney as if proclaiming a new civilization and a new humanity.
The presence of Hermes has been detected by Jean Lorente in another movie: Notorious, by Alfred Hitchcock (1946). In this topnotch espionage tale, Cary Grant is a kind of messenger of the Gods who salvages a girl (Ingrid German) thanks to a trick, takes her to the skies (in a plane, of course). The journey proves to be initiatic and ends up on a new Promised Land. Finally, like Hermes delivering Io from the watching eyes of Argus, the hero delivers the heroine from the prison of a shotgun wedding.11
These very different examples reflect imaginal modes in which the god and the city have linked roles:
(A) Hermes as urbis conditor, ruling from the heights the city which he has built and which he links to the cosmos and the archetypal world. Here we are in the realm of Myth. The Picatrix does not present itself as a work of fiction: the Arab author believes what he is telling us, and addresses believers. Adocentyn is the model city, utopian (but not in the sense of modern history), oriented to the above. Utopias are projected into the future, not the past, but this city is, like them, static, its structure and symbols conferred on it by the divine image.
(B) Hermes as initiator in the labyrinthine and expressionistic city: without him, Amsterdam would be Kafka-esque, a tangled mass working the decay of its stones and its souls. Thanks to Chidher, the final catastrophe of the hurricane that devastates the city takes on a more metaphorical than real character. Chidher-Hermes is the psychopomp par excellence, favoring ruses and disguises. Unlike the preceding example, the author has written a text of explicit fiction, while the mythic figures and the descriptions of the city serve an esoteric teaching: an “orientation”—an Orient—is possible thanks to the deciphering of the signs, helped by the best of guides.
(C) Hermes exiled, lost in the peripheral world of a town without East or West, in an excrescence of the tentacular city with its sprawling suburbs. To my mind, Ojitos is the Hermes who brings the most precious and most original message of all these four works. He seems to tell us that it is up to us to discover the discreet presence of mythological figures beyond the greyness and the misery of our real and figurative cities.
(D) The “transient” Hermeses, degenerate or reduced to the role of tricksters in the multiple and mobile city, moving from Sydney to Bartertown and back again to Sydney. It is the passing from a state of Fall to a Redemption or reintegration: one of the rare examples where the city takes part in a process of metamorphosis based on myth. Bartertown is at the same time the affirmation, or the suspicion, that Myth is the founder of all culture, and that without it, a humanity that has forgotten its lost civilization cannot make a new beginning.
What these four examples have taught us is perhaps a method for reassembling the scattered elements of our dissociated universe, and of reconstituting it. They teach us how to make good use of our Myths.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. See Chapter 3, under “Statues and Cities of Hermes.”
2. Quoted by Ludwig Schrader in Panurge und Hermes: Zum Ursprung eines Charakters bei Rabelais (Bonn: Romanisches Seminar der Universität Bonn, 1958), p.ll9.
3. Gustav Meyrink, Das griine Gesicht (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1921), pp. 133-136.
4. Ibid., p. 71.
5. J. J. Pollet, “La ville fantastique de Gustav Meyrink,” in Ecritures de la ville dans les lettres allemandes du XXè siècle (U.E.R. Etudes Germaniques, Université de Lille III: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 1985, no. 10), p. 125.
6. Ibid., pp.12 7, 131.
7. The script has been published by Claude Beylie, in L'Avant-Scène (Paris), no. 13 7, June 1973.
8. See the interesting file devoted to Mad Max in L'Ecran Fantastique (Paris), no. 60, September 1985.
9. Ibid., p.51.
10. Gilbert Durand, Les Structures anthropologiques de l'Imaginaire (Paris: Bordas, 1969), pp.229ff. (new edition, Dunod, 1985).
11. Jean Lorente, “Hermès au cinéma: Notorious d'Alfred Hitchcock mythocritiqué,” in Colloqui International sobre els Valors Heristics de la Figura Mitic d'Hermes. Collective work edited by Alain Verjat, in the series MYΘ0Σ of the Grup de Recerca sobre l'Imaginarii Mitocrítica (Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona, Facultat de Filologia, 1986. Acts of the Proceedings of the Conference in Barcelona, March 1985), pp.283–285.