You've Been Serving Hermes All Along
A field guide for engineers who pull cards
Howdy, folks.
Quick test. Pick the column that sounds more like your actual week:
Column A: Reviewed three architecture docs. Debugged a distributed trace. Unblocked a migration. Wrote a design doc. Made peace with a legacy system that’s been keeping you up at night.
Column B: Pulled a card before a hard meeting. Noticed a repeated number and paid attention. Had a dream you half-remember that keeps tugging at you. Lit something. Said a thing out loud that was meant for no one in particular.
If you have a job title that involves systems or software and you also have a tarot deck in the top drawer of your desk — I’m calling you out. Both columns describe your Tuesday. And you’ve been pretending they’re different practices for years.
They’re not.
You’ve been serving Hermes the whole time.
The archetype you’ve been performing without naming
Hermes is the god of translators, messengers, boundaries, roads, the agora, tricksters, thieves, and psychopomps. That last one — psychopomp — means guide of souls through the underworld. Hermes is the patron of every crossing, every in-between, every moment where meaning has to pass from one domain to another without losing itself in transit.
He wears winged sandals because his job is motion. He carries a caduceus — a staff entwined with two snakes — which became the symbol of medicine by mistake, but was always really the symbol of the reconciliation of opposites. He walks the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead and he does it so routinely that Greek funerals invoked him by default.
He’s also the god you call when nothing else works. When the message absolutely has to get through. When two hostile parties need to speak a common tongue. When a system needs to absorb a change without losing its soul.
You know who else does that for a living?
You. You do that for a living.
The correspondences
Every function you perform in your technical work has a hermetic analog that long predates the domain of software.
API design is diplomatic translation. You’re defining the common tongue between two systems that will otherwise talk past each other forever. Hermes is the god of translators. You are a minor priest in that lineage every time you argue about field naming at 3 PM on a Thursday.
Stack traces and debugging are psychopomp work. You follow the trail of a call as it descends from the conscious layer of the application down through frameworks, runtimes, kernels, into the underworld of hardware — and you guide the soul of the crashed request back up to the light. You do this so often you forgot it was strange.
Interface and abstraction design is boundary-keeping. Hermes of the crossroads was petitioned at actual physical boundaries in the ancient world — property lines, doorways, thresholds. You set interface boundaries all day. You’re the boundary-god of whatever service you maintain, whether anyone there calls you that or not.
Refactoring is trickster work. The rules say the code has to do exactly this. Your refactor says yes, technically, but also — watch this. You bend the letter to serve the spirit. Hermes the thief was also Hermes the one who could steal back what was supposed to be lost. You’re stealing back clarity from complexity every time you clean up a mess the previous team left behind.
Documentation is messenger work. You’re the herald. You’re carrying the intent of a system forward in time to people who won’t read it but will desperately need it in six months when the person who wrote it has left the company.
Migrations and legacy-system work is the deepest hermetic practice of all — guiding a thing from one world to another without letting it die in the transit. Every data migration is a psychopomp ritual. Every legacy system you’ve gently retired is a funeral rite you conducted with more care than most actual funerals get.
You didn’t know that’s what you were doing. But the god knew.
The split you’ve been maintaining
Most of you who have read this far have been keeping the two practices separate because you thought you had to.
At work: the rational architect, the systems thinker, the person with the receipt for every decision.
At home: the one who lays a spread before a hard week. The one who notices which card came up on Monday and which one showed up on Friday, and who sits with what that means. The one who knows the house rules of a good ritual and keeps them with precision nobody at your day job would believe you were capable of.
Two people. Two vocabularies. One inside each skin.
I did this for twenty-five years. I built my career on the rational side and did the mystical work in the margins. I split them because the cultures I operated in didn’t have language for the integration, and making the case would have cost more than I thought the integration was worth.
I was wrong about the cost. The cost of maintaining the split is enormous and mostly invisible — until, one day, it isn’t. One day the two columns bleed into each other and you realize the whole time you were pretending, both columns were doing the same fucking work.
You were serving the god of the in-between in both lives. You just called it different things.
The integration isn’t theological. It’s structural
I’m not here to sell you on a pantheon. I don’t care whether you believe in Hermes as a real being, a Jungian archetype, a psychological pattern, or a poetic frame. That argument is beneath the actual point.
The point is: the pattern is real whether or not you call it by a name. The person who designs APIs and the person who reads cards are performing the same operation on different substrates. Translation. Meaning-crossing. Boundary-tending. Making the incommensurable commensurable.
If you’ve been doing both for decades, the question isn’t whether you have permission to integrate. The integration is already true. Your vocabulary just hasn’t caught up to your practice.
Naming it is the first act of integration. That’s why this piece exists. Not to tell you who you are. To give you the word for what you’ve been.
The invitation
If you pull cards and write specs — you’re a priest of a very specific kind, in a lineage older than the profession you think of as your career.
You don’t have to convert anyone. You don’t have to come out at work. You don’t have to hang a caduceus in your cube (although if you do, nobody there will know what it means anyway).
You just have to stop pretending the two practices are different jobs.
They aren’t. They never were. The god of the crossroads has been drawing you a map this whole time. You’ve been following it. You just hadn’t noticed there was a map.
Feral Architecture is where I write this integration out loud — the technical and the mystical held as one practice, the irreverence and the reverence in the same sentence, the work of building structures that hold fire without smothering it. If you want more of it, subscribe. Free gets you everything.
You’ve always been welcome. The crossroads has been waiting.
Stay feral, folks.
— Matt