Trickster and messenger gods across cultures: which ones match Hermes

The short answer

Hermes holds several jobs in one body, and among the figures in the table only his Roman form, Mercury, holds them all. He is herald of the gods, guide of souls, patron of travelers, merchants and thieves, and the divine trickster. Mercury is the same god under a Roman name. Anubis and Odin share his guiding of the dead, Thoth shares his role as a god of knowledge and interpretation, and Eshu shares his place between gods and humans. The trickster side appears in Loki, Anansi and Coyote, but none of their pages mention Hermes.

Of nine entries below, three are Attested, two Scholarly and four Popular claim. The sorting matters more than the marks here, because the real difference is which job each tradition separates from the others.

The Greek baseline: Hermes and Iris

Hermes is an Olympian who acts as the herald of the gods and as protector of heralds, travelers, thieves, merchants and orators. It calls him the divine trickster, and the best-known account of that side is the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Born to Zeus and Maia, he stole cattle from his half-brother Apollo on his first day and invented the lyre from a tortoise shell.

When Zeus sided with Apollo, Apollo traded the cattle for the lyre. Hermes also guides souls between the underworld and the world above, and his image often appeared on classical Greek gravestones. He was originally tied to boundaries, and herms, pillars topped with his bust, stood outside Athenian houses and at crossroads. His symbols are the caduceus, winged sandals and a winged hat.

Iris shows what a messenger without the other jobs looks like. Iris is the personification of the rainbow and a messenger and servant of the gods, especially Hera. In the Iliad she is frequently a divine messenger, and at Zeus's command she carries water from the Styx. She carries a caduceus too. She played a small part in Greek religion, with no known temples, shrines or festivals, while Hermes had herms at doors and crossroads. The Greeks kept the messenger role apart from the trickster, the merchant and the boundary god, and gave all four to Hermes.

Trickster and messenger figures across cultures

Each row gives the tradition, the figure, the role the page describes, and what the reference pages record about a match to Hermes. The marks are explained near the end of the article.

Where the matches hold and where they fail

Mercury

Britannica describes Mercury as a Roman god of shopkeepers and merchants, travelers, transporters of goods, and thieves and tricksters, commonly identified with the Greek Hermes. He sometimes appears holding a purse, which reflects the business role. Tradition dates his temple on the Aventine Hill to 495 BCE, and the Mercuralia on May 15 marked its dedication day and honored both Mercury and Maia. The Romans merged Hermes with the Etruscan god Turms under the name Mercury, combining attributes and worship. The entry about Greek and Roman gods sets out the other Greek and Roman differences.

Anubis, Odin and Thoth

Three gods share one part of Hermes. Anubis guided souls into the afterlife, often leading the deceased by the hand toward Osiris, and he merged with Hermes in the Ptolemaic period to form Hermanubis because both guided souls. Odin's comparison with Hermes is covered in Greek and Norse gods: Tacitus calls Odin Mercury, and the Hermes page lists the staff, the wide-brimmed hat, travel, the dead and secret knowledge as shared traits.

Thoth shares the knowledge side. Greek writers, starting with Herodotus, identified Hermes with Thoth, the two were worshipped as one in Ptolemaic Egypt, and this gave Hermes his links to knowledge and interpretation and the title Hermes Trismegistus. Each of the three covers one slice of Hermes and none covers the trickster.

Eshu

This section reports the Eshu page without comment on beliefs, since Yoruba religion, Santería, Candomblé and Umbanda are living traditions. The entry calls Eshu an orisha known for trickery, chance, crossroads, judgement, duality and languages, a primordial divinity sent by Olodumare and the chief enforcer of natural and divine laws. He relays between the Ajogun, the Oriṣa and human beings, and oversees the distribution of the sacrifices humans make.

He stands at the crossroads between opposing forces and regulates both joy and destruction. Unlike other deities, he is honored on every day of the four-day Yoruba week. The entry lists Hermes as a Greek equivalent. The crossroads, the messenger work and the trickster label line up with the Hermes of herms and heralds. The entry also records that nineteenth-century missionary translations rendered Èṣù as devil or satan, and that later campaigns and academic work have challenged this reading.

Loki

Loki is a trickster and a figure tied to the coming end of the world. Snorri Sturluson describes him as having tricks for every purpose, often getting the Æsir into trouble and then out of it. He takes several forms, including a mare, a salmon and a fly, and as a mare he bore the eight-legged horse Sleipnir. He engineers the death of Baldr, is bound with the entrails of his son while a venomous snake drips poison onto his face, and is foretold to break free and join the jötnar in battle at Ragnarök.

The entry stresses how uncertain his nature is. Turville-Petre wrote that more ink has been spilled on Loki than on any other figure in Norse myth, Schjødt notes there is no evidence of Loki being venerated, and theories have called him a fire god, a form of Odin, a trickster figure or a spider. The entry does not mention Hermes. Hermes steals cattle and trades them for a lyre, while Loki's tricks end in death and war.

Anansi, Sun Wukong and Coyote

Three trickster figures from different continents carry the role without any Greek link in their pages. Anansi is a spider trickster in Akan religion and folklore, who outsmarts more powerful opponents and wanted the stories held by the sky god Nyame. Nyame set four challenges: capturing the python Onini, the hornets Mmoboro, the leopard Osebo and the dwarf Mmoatia. Anansi succeeded and the stories became known as Spider stories. The tales spread through oral tradition to the Caribbean, Suriname and Sierra Leone, largely through the Atlantic slave trade, and in the Americas Anansi was often seen as a symbol of resistance and survival.

Sun Wukong is a literary and religious figure from the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, born from a stone, trained in Taoist arts and imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha for five hundred years after rebelling against Heaven. His 72 transformations let him take many forms, and the page says 72 is metaphorical for an endless variety. Hu Shih suggested influence from the Hindu Hanuman, but the page notes most scholars, including Lu Xun, believe the author could not have accessed the Ramayana, and Lu Xun proposed the 9th-century Wuzhiqi instead.

Coyote is a figure in many Indigenous North American cultures who is sometimes a creator, sometimes a comical and malevolent trickster and often a benefactor who steals fire or the sun for the people. Stories vary widely: in California he is often a sacred figure, in the Great Basin mostly a malevolent trickster, and in Navajo tradition the tutelary spirit of the Coyoteway healing ceremony. These are living traditions with their own sacred stories, and the table records only what the pages summarize.

Sorting the jobs

The Trickster entry defines the character as one with great intellect or secret knowledge who uses it to play tricks, break normal rules and defy convention, and quotes Lewis Hyde's phrase boundary-crosser. That phrase fits Hermes at the crossroads and Eshu at the same place. The entry also says Hermes is the patron of thieves and the inventor of lying, a skill he passed to Autolycus, who passed it to Odysseus. It adds that in many native traditions tricksters are essential to contact with the sacred and to creation and birth, and that Franchot Ballinger sets the Native American trickster apart from the European picaro.

The result is four separate jobs. Messenger is shared by Iris, Mercury and Eshu. Guide of the dead is shared by Anubis and Odin. Knowledge and writing belong most to Thoth. The trickster who defies authority belongs to Loki, Anansi, Sun Wukong, Coyote and Eshu. Hermes holds all four jobs at once in the Greek pages, and Mercury inherits them by merger. Eshu holds the messenger and trickster jobs together.

What the strength marks mean

On this page the mark rates the match to Hermes. Attested means a named ancient writer or a documented identification makes it: Roman merging with Turms, Plutarch for Hermanubis and Tacitus for Odin. Scholarly means a reference page records the match, as for Thoth and Eshu, and the Thoth mark rests on the Hermes page naming Herodotus, which the Thoth page itself does not repeat. Popular claim means no page read for this article records a match to Hermes, though each figure is a real trickster or messenger in the tradition that holds the story.

The reference pages are secondary sources. Herodotus, Plutarch, Tacitus, Snorri and Wu Cheng'en were read only through them, and Britannica was used for Mercury. The Trickster page is a general survey, and the individual pages do not always agree with its examples.