I look like a cattle driver? A big strong guy? That is not my kind of work. I am interested in other things: I care for sleep above all, and the milk of my mother’s breasts, and a blanket over my shoulders, and warm baths.
“I’d advise you not to talk like this in public; the deathless gods would think it odd indeed, a day-old child bringing field animals into the courtyard. You’re talking wildly. I was born yesterday; my feet are tender and the ground is rough beneath them.
“Still, if you insist, I am willing to swear a great oath by my father’s head, and vow that I didn’t steal your cows and that I haven’t seen anyone else steal your cows—whatever ‘cows’ may be, for, to tell you the truth, I only know of them by hearsay.”
The straight-shooting god of sunlight and order is momentarily charmed out of his anger: “Far-working Apollo laughed softly then, and said to Hermes: ‘My dear boy, what a tricky-hearted cheat you are!’” This is the first of two Olympian chuckles in the Hymn, each of which offers Hermes an opportunity to change the world into which he has been born. In this case, Apollo’s laugh marks the moment at which he first loosens his grip on the cattle; his laughter melts his righteous anger and a touch of detachment enters.
With such humor, trickster’s first lie differs from the way I earlier imagined a child lying about a theft. Trickster feels no anxiety when he deceives. He is often dependent on others, to be sure, but that dependence rarely constrains him. He does not fear separation from his elders and so can tell his lies with creative abandon, charm, playfulness, and by that affirm the pleasures of fabulation. Krishna or Hermes, Coyote or Raven—when one of these speaks his first lie he is the eternal child who cannot be significantly damaged and so may cleave to the pure and playful delight of floating fiction in the face of stern reality.
But to come back to the idea that trickster’s lies somehow call the truth into question, let me juxtapose Hermes’ fibs to those that Krishna tells in a similar situation. In the typical tale of Krishna as a child, his mother Yasoda has to leave the house and tells her boy not to steal the household butter while she’s gone. As soon as she leaves, Krishna goes to the larder, breaks open the pots full of butter, and eats it hand to mouth. When Yasoda returns she finds her child on the floor, his dark face besmeared with creamy white. To her reprimands Krishna has many clever replies. He says, for example, “I wasn’t stealing butter; there were ants in the butter jars and I was simply trying to keep them out.” Or he says that his apparent naughtiness is actually her fault: “These little bracelets you gave me chafed my wrists; I tried to soothe the sores by smearing butter on them.” For our purposes, however, the most telling reply is this: “I didn’t steal the butter, Ma. How could I steal it? Doesn’t everything in the house belong to us?” At this point Yasoda, like Apollo, laughs, charmed by her cunning and shameless child.
Our ideas about property and theft depend on a set of assumptions about how the world is divided up. Trickster’s lies and thefts challenge those premises and in so doing reveal their artifice and suggest alternatives. One of the West African tricksters, Legba, has been well described in this regard as “a mediator” who works “by means of a lie that is really a truth, a deception that is in fact a revelation.” That’s how Krishna works, too. When he is the thief of hearts, for example, he disturbs all those who have been foolish enough to think their hearts are their own property, not the property of god. As the thief of butter Krishna upsets the categories that his mother has established to separate him from that food of foods. It is in this sense that his lies subvert what seemed so clear a truth just moments ago. Suddenly the old verities are up for grabs. Who gave Apollo those cattle in the first place, anyway? Who exactly decides how the sacrifice should be apportioned? Who was the original owner of the butter that Yasoda guards so carefully? Who gave all of Pennsylvania to William Penn?
For trickster’s lies to provoke doubt in this way, he must draw his adversaries into his own uncanny territory. It is a space ruled by the disarming charm of the very young child. It is a traveler’s space where everything is on the road, cut loose from any clear locale. Here the citizens walk their livestock backward and speak a weird reversing language. Krishna’s lie belongs to a class of statements that double back to subvert their own contexts. His is cunning or crooked speech because it undercuts the situation from which it takes its meaning. In Greek philosophy it was Parmenides who declared that “Cretans are always liars,” but the joke is that Parmenides himself was a Cretan, so the sentence plus its speaker make a befuddlement, an aporia, an inky sea.
The same joke is built into the Cretan lies that Odysseus tells, though, as I said earlier, only one of his auditors gets it. After Odysseus is set on the shores of Ithaca, Athena appears to him, disguised as a shepherd. She asks who he is and wary Odysseus pretends to another identity, inventing a tale to explain why he might be left alone on this shore: he killed an evil man, but had to flee; his shipmates abandoned him, and so forth. The tale begins with the words, “Far away in Crete …” and Athena is amused. Her smile is the facial gesture of those who knowingly occupy the space of trickster’s lies, for mind itself is amused by these reversals.
Athena’s smile, then (like Apollo’s and Yasoda’s), must also indicate that we are in the presence of that consciousness called nóos. The sequence of Cretan lies points to this conclusion. Not long after his conversation with Athena, Odysseus deals with the oafish suitor whom he must defeat to regain his kingdom. He lies to this man, too, but the fellow hasn’t a clue what’s going on, a point that Homer underscores with the man’s name: Antínoös. This man is wholly unable to hear the complexity of Odysseus’ words and pays for his deafness with his life. Only nóos gives the mental poise needed to navigate in deep ambiguity. Antínoös is little more than fish bait in those seas.
The thieving and lying that initiate the trip into this inky territory give trickster the chance to remake the truth on his own terms. Another look at the Hymn to Hermes will illustrate how this might work. As I read the story, Hermes, born in a cave of a secret liaison, is out to change his station in life. To that end, he not only steals the cattle and lies to everyone; once he has gotten their attention, he makes a kind of peace with Apollo. At the appropriate moment he turns on the charm. Taking out his lyre and playing a beautiful melody, he begins “to soften that stern, far-shooting archer,” and before long, “bright Apollo laugh [s] for joy as the sweet throb of that marvelous instrument stole into his heart, and a gentle longing seized his listening soul.” Hermes sings Apollo a theogony, “the story of the gods … how each came to be … and how each came to have what now is theirs.” I suspect we are meant to imagine this as a theogony of Hermes’ own design, a reshaping of old stories, as Hesiod must have reshaped old stories. In addition, I suspect that this new Hermetic theogony includes both Hermes and Apollo in its cast and as such amounts to simultaneous self-promotion and flattery. At the end Apollo is helplessly enchanted, whereupon Hermes gives him the lyre. In return, Apollo “placed his shining whip in Hermes’ hand, ordaining him Keeper of the Herds.” From now on, this newcomer will “tend… the ranging, twisted-horned cattle.”
By the end of the Hymn, then, Hermes has been made the Keeper of the Herds and, in scenes I haven’t cited, much more: he is admitted to the Pantheon, he is an acknowledged son of Zeus, he has been given a share of prophetic powers, he has become the messenger of the gods, the guide to Hades, and so on. None of this would have happened had he confessed guilt when Apollo first approached him. On the contrary, a true confession would have been an accession to the status quo and would have locked him in it forever. Spoken at the boundary of what is and is not the case, however, his lies unsettled and moved that boundary. Thieving and lying were not his only tools, to be sure (he is a charmer and enchanter as well), but the theft and the lie are the crucial first steps.
Moreover, once he has been ordained the Keeper of the Herds, Hermes’ profession of innocence seems less like a lie, for when the keeper of a thing takes possession of it he is not rightly called a thief. Hermes might take a leaf from Krishna’s book and say, “I didn’t steal
