There is a crossroads, and a gate, in all the old tales. On one side lies the known, the practiced, the familiar. And on the far side, unseen and unimagined, lies the Other: the one we left behind, who has been waiting all this time. That threshold is a holy place; it does not decay, nor can it be thwarted, nor can it be lost within the tangle of grooved and meandering ways. The crossroads remains, and is protected. The air is still, and warm. Drops of morning moisture lie upon the tips of slender grasses. A sound comes from the far side of the gate; the soft warbling, perhaps, of a stream in the near distance. You reach for that gate — we all do. It might be opened with a small and gentle push.

And on the other side one finds the ancient gods, the ones we have forgotten. They exist now only as dreams, as figments, as fragments of tales buried by the heedless weight of time. But it is from them that we learned to write, to sing, to measure, to craft the world into the shape of our own image. We left them behind long ago; but in all the myths, they were our first teachers.

In the oldest Egyptian tombs and temples, in rooms festooned with hieroglyphs, in texts that lay undeciphered for five thousand years, one may read of an ancient god who is the bringer of knowledge and of illumination. He is the mythological ancestor of the many guides and mentors who populate the tales of every culture. He is the original storyteller, the inventor of writing, the trickster and wayfinder. His name is Thoth. The Greeks called him Hermes. He illuminates the labyrinths, the lost and switchbacking tunnels, and he is keeper of that great and hidden ancient library that adventurers still seek but have not found.

It is Hermes — whose many titles include the bringer of dreams, the watcher by night, the thief at the gates — who so often appears, at the crossroads, as both guide and protector. He knows the paths to hidden things, is the patron of knowledge, and is capable of traveling through the underworld unscathed. He is the border-crosser, the wanderer, whom the ancient texts describe as the “master of spells and words of power, the voice of truth.” The wayfinder knows all the subterranean passageways. His symbol is the ibis bird, or the crane, whose beak is like the crescent moon, bright in the dark sky.

By whatever name he is called — Thoth, Hermes, Merlin, Gandalf, Yoda — his presence stretches far back. As long as we have told tales he occupies a central place within them, helping and healing. He stands at the gate, and watches by night, and wanders, and guides the heart home. He is the truth-teller. […]