at New York’s 1853 Crystal Palace Exhibition.^20 The lines describing the
classical gods were taken (some nearly verbatim) from Count Constantin
Volney’s Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires (1791), which
features representative heroes of various civilizations and faiths. But Whit-
man reworked this once-popular material to produce a powerful evoca-
tion of immortality and transcendence. According to myth, Hercules, the
epitome of physical and moral perfection, had been mistakenly presented
with a poisoned cloak by his wife, and sensing his impending death he
ordered his funeral pyre so that his resurrected spirit could join the other
gods on Mount Olympus. Bacchus was the god of grapes and honey
whose fermentation and transformation into wine and mead symbolize
resurrection, not unlike “the resurrection of the wheat” in “This Com-
post.” And, according to myth, Bacchus (whose picture, along with those
of Hercules and the satyr Silenus hung, in Whitman’s modest boarding-
house room) is said to have transcended death and returned from his
fatal dismemberment stronger than before.^21 Kneph, the blue-colored
creator-god of Egyptian myth, was also associated with resurrection. A
nineteenth-century French archaeologist explained that Kneph’s “jour-
ney to the lower hemisphere appears to symbolize the evolution of sub-
stances, which are born to die and be reborn.” The neo-Platonist Porphyry
called Kneph the “creator of the universe”; a father of the Church char-
acterized him as the “Divine intellect, which was the Demiurge of the
world, giving life to all things”; and the poet Petrarch called him the “un-
made and eternal deity.”^22 But it is Hermes, the fabled inventor of the lute
and, according to Homer and Hesiod, the patron god of eloquence—the
ur-poet in the succession of inspired bards—who is the most impressive
of these avatars. Hermes is a striking symbol of immortality—a mes-
senger of the gods, who leads the way from life to death. Of him Karl
Kerényi says, “It is as a god of Kabeirian mysteries that Hermes is ithy-
phallic and a guide of souls... the messenger and herald between the
realm of souls and the realm of the born.” The pairing of the phallic ¤gure
Hermes and Silenus is said to represent the sources of life, Hermes’s
“spiritual aspect [co-existing] on friendly terms with the animal-divine
aspect” associated with Silenus. Indeed, Hermes’s taming of the animal
world can be interpreted as the taming of the animal nature within each
human being.^23 “Salut au Monde!” calls Hermes “well-beloved.” by the
people in much the same way that Whitman describes his own persona
as “well-beloved, close held by day and night” as he wanders about “the
“The Progress of Souls” / 113