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beingness by the gods: beingness as released from yokes, beingness towards manifold forms.
Melodious in beauty, The Homeric Hymn to Hermes95 sings of the many shifts and forms (Gr. polytropos),96 of the many wily adventures and dexterity of the son of thundering Zeus with the modest nymph of lovely tresses, Maia.97 Born on a certain morning in a shady grotto, Hermes, perspicacious child of the secretive, furtive and illicit love of
Zeus and Maia, at once springs up from his shady grotto 3⁄4 as if he were a playful monkey or baboon reminiscent of Thoth 3⁄4 precociously creating a lyre at noon and stealing Apollo’s kine at evening. Having found a tortoise crawling outside his grotto, with his dazzling ingenuity, he makes, with its charming blotchy shell, during the day’s apogee, a most divine marvel: a singing tortoise 3⁄4 what sublime lyre of singing enchantment and desire.
95 West, Martin. Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer. London: Harvard University Press, 2003.
96 Derived from polupaipalos, suggesting full of finesse. An Aristophanic metaphor expressing cunningness, shrewdness, and subtleness, closely related to the idea of multiplicity: poluμῆτις, epithet given to Odysseus, Hephaestus and Hermes. l., I, 3 11; XXI, 355; [Orpheus], Lithica, 54. This involves using traps, snares, nets. Cf. supra, P. 38 ff. and Il., 11, 173. Cf. supra, p. 18-ig. Detienne, Marcel and Jean- Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. 1-54.
97 According to Hesiod and Apollod. 3.10.1.
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