Another paragraph about archetypes from Archetypes, Archons and Egregores:
In my experience, when an archetype is constellated, it creates a perceptible field of psychological energy, analogous to a magnetic field in the physical sphere. I have long maintained that a field of this sort might ‘attract’ psychological and physical occurrences belonging to a particular pattern, much as a magnet attracts iron filings that make its field visible. As a matter of fact, contemporary mathematicians and physicists seem to be speaking from a similar intuition when they use the word ‘attractor,’ describing the fact that a particular motion always settles into a specific pattern; and when chaos theory employs the term ‘strange attractors’ for uniquely individual patterns that are complex and unpredictatable, but nonetheless orderly.
Janet O. Dallett, from The Not-Yet-Transformed God
My hypothesis is that “Hermes” is a good name for a cluster of patterns that recurr around communication – everything from the alphabet to the Internet has similatr stories hanging around it.