What do you do when a deity’s gift challenges your morals? Refuse their gift? Complain and accept it grudgingly? Say nothing at all? It’s a difficult position, especially if you don’t want to offend them.
I ended up there last summer when Hermes dropped a gift card in my purse. Yeah, you read that right. I was scandalized.
Hermes: Busy, Wily One
As you might know, Hermes is a god of many things, including commerce and thievery.
Sometimes I think he views business and theft as similar, since they both involve a redistribution of wealth. Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
Hermes is also a trickster deity within the Greek pantheon, a playful, quirky mischief-maker at times.
Now I like Hermes a lot, and we’ve collaborated together in various ways. I find him to be kind and generous, but I have never been comfortable with his trickster aspect.
It’s nothing against him; I’m just not comfortable with tricksters in general. Just prior to this gift card incident, he and I had discussed that very issue. And then it happened.
Yeah, Hermes has a fine sense of humor.
An Ethical Struggle
But I wasn’t amused by the idea of free money.
My morals protested that accepting this gift card was the same as condoning theft. And I have always believed that stealing is wrong, unless it’s a matter of life and death.
If a deity steals something, does that make theft more acceptable somehow?
Polytheists have a number of opinions about this.
The most obvious ones state that we should hold the gods to the same standards that apply to the rest of us. Or conversely, that perhaps we should cut the gods some slack due to their divinity.
I can’t wholeheartedly vote either way.
Do we have the right to insist that the gods live by our laws? Since they are deities and have greater power than we do, probably not.
Furthermore, their motivations are complex and we might not be capable of fully understanding them. So a deity’s actions that look ‘bad’ by our standards might result in positive change over time, and we might not be able to see that until later.
I have occasionally told a deity ‘no’ because their request violated one of my ethics and I didn’t think that was right.
But there have been plenty of other times when a god has asked me to do uncomfortable things and my obedience led to personal growth. Unfortunately, there isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ answer to these situations.
My Response
I turned the situation this way and that, thinking that perhaps I could understand it differently or reconcile it to my belief system.
But I couldn’t, and remained profoundly uncomfortable.
I had heard that other devotees of Hermes described money spontaneously appearing. So I had very little doubt who had given it to me. One might say this is one of his calling cards.
Unable to come to moral terms with the situation, I did nothing. Each time I reached into my purse, there was that gift card. I side-eyed it for a couple weeks.
Eventually Hermes commented that Pan wasn’t the only person who wanted to give me things. Translation: I needed to accept his gift like I had those from my other gods.
I finally asked Artemis about it one day, in a desperate attempt to gain some perspective.
She didn’t think the gods could be held to the same standards as humans, especially trickster deities. And she asked questions that made me squirm.
Since it’s part of Hermes’ nature to steal on occasion, was I going to accept that?
Further, I can’t change Hermes to fit my morals. He is what he is, and was I willing to interact with the person he is or not?
I didn’t want to hear that. It didn’t fit my worldview.
Tricksters Cause Disruption
We have laws to punish things like thievery, because we humans function better in a world with predictable rules.
We feel safer that way, but trickster deities challenge our comfort levels.
Tricksters are everything but proper. They traipse over our boundaries while whistling a merry tune, disregarding our protests with airy assurances that everything will be better, eventually.
Their pranks might exasperate and anger us, as our well-ordered worlds splinter and fall on our heads.
Or perhaps we can’t help but laugh as their antics make room for change at the expense of others’ neat, tidy lives.
Trickster deities force us to think outside the box and to face our self-imposed limitations, our notions of what should be. And often the joke’s on us.
And do we like that? No, not usually.
We tend to scream things like, “But that’s against the rules! It’s just not done!”
Oh but it is, because if somebody didn’t do it, we’d be a bunch of stuffy, staid humans too well-behaved for our own good.
Tricksters add color, flash, surprise, and yes, sometimes consternation to our lives.
But no deity or human is perfect, so who are we to get up on our high horse and judge the gods?
From the larger perspective then, the theft of one gift card wasn’t a big deal.
Resulting Change
What was a big deal is how it forced me to confront my discomfort with Hermes’ trickster aspect and my concerns about interacting with trickster deities in general.
Am I okay with them now? Um, not fully.
As I write this, I still have a niggling worry or two about what else Hermes might do, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But I’m definitely more comfortable relating to him, which was probably his point.
So what did I do with the gift card?
It took me a full month to come to terms with all of this. By that time, Artemis informed me that Hermes would be offended if I didn’t show my acceptance of his gift by spending it.
That made sense, so I asked him how he’d prefer it spent and did as instructed.
In the end, maintaining my relationship with Hermes was more important to me than arguing over morals.
But I don’t plan to take up thievery anytime soon and, for the record, I still don’t condone it.
But neither do I think any less of Hermes for acting in keeping with his nature.
That’s the definition of integrity, and I admire those brave enough to align their actions with their values despite the opinions of others.
So while I might not agree with Hermes’ theft even when it benefited me, I can respect his integrity. He is a patron of thieves, whether I like it or not, so he is simply being himself.
And I will still worship him.
Someone once said that relating to deities is an education in shades of grey.
I agree. Some of us get to choose the shades of grey that we find comfortable, and others of us get strongly encouraged (ahem) to adopt the shades of grey that certain deities prefer in our interactions with them.
And tricksters, with their proclivity for scorning rules, seem to favor the latter.
I think when our sense of ethics is challenged by a Deity, that we have to sit and pray and stretch. The Gods cannot, by virtue of being Gods, be held to our human standards. they are far, far more than we are, and moreover than we can see. This is where we’re called upon to trust Them and that is terrifyingly hard. It’s also an ongoing process and I think trust is developed as we wrestle and struggle to make sense of the Gods in our lives and the challenges They present. So you’re right: there is no one right answer — sometimes I think the Gods challenge us to force us to examine our values and beliefs. Sometimes though, I think They do it so we will grow.