Liar… Liar?

It’s late at night. A candle is flickering. The shadows play tricks on my mind. I feel the familiar static in the air, the goosebumps I know all too well.

“Why did you lie to me?” I ask.

The trickster chuckles.

“Why did you lie to yourself?” he responds.

I Accidentally Pierced The Veil

The past few months have been the most confusing and disorienting of my life, for those who have been following my updates. But after going on a week-long fast and pushing my body into a liminal state (I did this for medical purposes, please do not randomly try this at home), I came across the unexpected surprise that my senses were now sharpened and tuned into whatever is on the other side of the veil, which I had never truly experienced before.

After all, I had never really fasted in my life.

It was during this fast that good ol’ Hermes came back unannounced, or actually, let’s just say it like it is: I called upon him in a moment of weakness during a fast-related panic, and he responded.

During this single week, I got more answers than I could have gotten in the entire year. They weren’t in-your-face, but more like finally being able to see the topography ahead once a violent storm has settled.

The capacity to see things as they are, after months of confusion, was a huge relief.

I absolutely attribute this moment of clarity to the fasted state. Instead of clear-cut messages, I received a more sober picture of what the hell I had been put through, and possibly why. I can’t go too deeply into details because it involves a lot of oversharing I’m not comfortable with publicly, but I can say that the TL;DR of my quarrel with Hermes consisted of the following:

He started hinting at the end of last year that I was going to get a couple of things I didn’t know I wanted so badly, but apparently I wanted more than anything in the world.

A Recipe For Disaster

After months of basing my actions and directing my energy toward the fulfillment of these wishes, and after him one hundred percent playing along, making me drink the Kool-Aid and pretending he was fully on board with the entire thing, he suddenly, in May, sent me an unexpected notice that he was going to walk away from my life, that we were done, and that there was nothing further to talk about. He told me not to reach out.

You can only imagine how this left me absolutely devastated.

I won’t go into the details of my fall from grace, my wallowing in despair, and what it did to my mental health. What I will say is that with Hermes’ departure, and the realization that I was definitely not going to get any of those things he made me believe I would get, I endured a slow and painful ego death by a thousand papercuts. This also included the departure of some friends from my life.

At one point during this debacle, I was so livid, so hurt and betrayed, that I genuinely didn’t think it would ever be possible to have any kind of relationship with him again, not even as a casual spirit I might petition occasionally. Such was the severity of my wound.

Putting The Pieces Together

But after this week of clarity, and after speaking with a friend in the community who also went through something very similar with his own patron deity (also a trickster), I realized something important, and perhaps this is the whole point of this post:

I could not walk away from that winged threat.

Not even if I tried.

And it has nothing to do with the fact that I have Mercury in exaltation, in domicile, and dignified by triplicity in my natal chart.

It also has nothing to do with the fact that my ancestry may come from a line of Slavic sorcerers who obtained their knowledge from a certain Slavic deity of communication, commerce, and psychopompic nature.

It has more to do with the fact that I realized, reluctantly, with gritted teeth and white knuckles, that perhaps I actually needed all of this to happen.

See, here’s the thing about tricksters.

We know they are liars. Lying carries a terrible connotation in our modern paradigm of morality. But what did Hermes really do?

He showed me, through temptation and trickery, what it was I wanted most. Not what I could see with the naked eye, but the desires I had buried, the things I told myself weren’t important, that I was above. Oh, but when he offered them on a silver platter, boy did I fall flat on my face. Boy did I eat dirt.

So was it truly Hermes who lied like a sociopath, or…

The Sacred Role of The Trickster

Tricksters like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland often use mischief, riddles, or deception not to harm the protagonist, but to force them out of passive wandering and into active choice, which pushes the story forward. Hermes, Loki, Lucifer, Anansi... They do as tricksters do.

And so here I am, realizing with a big, cinematic 

“Oh”

like the drop of a pin in slow motion, that perhaps the role of the guide is to find the anima of your hidden desires, the ones keeping you stuck or unaware of who you truly are, pull them out of the miasma of stagnation and oblivion, and drag them into the light of day, where they are most embarrassing, so you can face them, integrate them, and finally move your adventure forward.

And so I am sitting here, the writer in me clapping slowly with a hint of irony, at the elaborate spectacle I was put through in the name of evolution.

Do I have respect for the trickster?

Absolutely.

Do I need a vacation, a blankie, and financial compensation?

You fucking bet I do.