Ask one question and the pairing resolves: was anyone ever worshipped? Hermes had shrines at every doorway and crossroads in the Greek world, a place in the Olympian order, and a portfolio of official duties. Loki has no attested cult of any kind — no place-names formed on his, no personal names, no altars, no evidence that a single human being ever made him an offering. Two figures who behave similarly in stories occupied completely different positions in the religions that told those stories, and that asymmetry is the interesting part.
The trajectory, which runs in opposite directions
Hermes' career goes up. He begins as an infant, steals cattle, lies about it, invents an instrument, is caught, negotiates, and ends the episode with divine office and permanent privileges. The theft is the interview. Everything he does subsequently — conducting the dead, delivering ultimatums, protecting travellers, patronising traders and thieves alike — is exercised as a recognised authority.
Loki's career goes down, and the sources arrange it that way deliberately. He begins as Odin's sworn brother and the gods' most useful problem-solver. He ends bound beneath a serpent whose venom drips onto his face, with his own son's entrails used as the binding, waiting to break free and lead the enemy at the end of the world. The story that marks the turn is the death of Baldr — after that, he is not a nuisance, he is an enemy.
Nothing comparable happens to Hermes. Greek religion never needed to expel him, because it had already found a use for him.
What each culture did with disorder
That is the real subject of this comparison, and it produces a genuine argument rather than a table.
Greek thought had a positive word for practical cunning: mētis, the intelligence that improvises, deceives and finds the angle. It was admired. It belongs to Odysseus, to Athena in her tactical mode, and to Hermes, and Greek culture built institutions in which it could be exercised — trade, rhetoric, litigation, diplomacy. A god of that capacity is a god of ordinary civic life. The herm outside a house is not a warding-off; it is a marker of the household's frontage, and it was so normal that when a large number of them were vandalised in one night in Athens the city treated it as a political emergency.
Norse sources have no equivalent positive category. Cleverness in the eddic material is frequently a warning — the shrewd guest, the false friend, the man who trusts too easily. Loki's utility is acknowledged constantly and never approved of. He fixes what he broke, and everyone knows he broke it. A society organised around oath, kin and reputation cannot institutionalise the being who exploits all three, so the only available narrative resolution is confinement.
The evidence, laid out
- Attested cult — Hermes: extensive, continuous, everywhere. Loki: none identified.
- Domain — Hermes: boundaries, roads, herds, trade, heralds, sleep, dreams, luck, and the conduct of souls. Loki: nothing. He is not the god of anything, which is unusual enough to be worth stating on its own.
- Family position — Hermes: son of Zeus, fully Olympian. Loki: of giant descent, admitted as Odin's blood-brother, father of a wolf, a serpent and the ruler of the dead by the giantess Angrboda, and mother of Sleipnir.
- Transformation — Hermes: disguises and travels invisibly, but does not change species. Loki: mare, salmon, fly, seal, old woman; the transformations are functional and sometimes costly. See shapeshifters.
- Signature theft — Hermes: cattle, and later the tools and possessions of other gods in comic tradition. Loki: he does not chiefly steal; he arranges losses and then recovers them, which is a different and more manipulative pattern.
- End — Hermes: none; he is still functioning at the close of every text he appears in. Loki: bound, then released for the last battle, where he fights Heimdall and each kills the other.
Dumézil, and how far the structural reading gets
Georges Dumézil devoted a book to Loki in 1948, comparing him to the Ossetic figure Syrdon and arguing that such a figure is structurally required rather than incidental — that a system of gods needs an agent of the unexpected. It is a serious argument and it is more persuasive for Loki than for Hermes, since Loki genuinely has no other function to fall back on.
Where the structural reading strains is in explaining the moral difference. Two traditions can both possess a disruptive figure and still disagree completely about whether disruption is tolerable, and a model that predicts the presence of the role says nothing about the verdict passed on it. That verdict is where the cultural information lives.
The Jungian reading, which reaches most readers through Joseph Campbell, treats both as manifestations of a shadow archetype. It is worth knowing that this is a twentieth-century psychological framework applied to the material, not a finding derived from it, and that folklorists have been consistently sceptical of the method — Alan Dundes among the sharpest — on the grounds that it can absorb any evidence.
How much of demonic Loki is Christian?
An honest comparison has to flag this. Much of the connective tissue of Loki's story — the systematic account of his descent into enmity — comes from a thirteenth-century Icelandic prose author writing two centuries after conversion, who had read Latin literature and had every reason to arrange a pagan pantheon into something legible. The bound figure awaiting release to lead the forces of destruction has obvious resonances with medieval Christian imagery.
Against that: the binding is attested in eddic verse independently, and picture-stone evidence suggests some of the material was current before conversion. The correct position is that Loki's arc is partly old and partly systematised late, and that nobody can currently say where the line falls. Compare the same problem at Ragnarok and the other endings.
Elsewhere
The wider category and its limits are examined at tricksters and culture-bringers; the mortal version at Odysseus and the trickster heroes. Individual entries: Loki, Hermes, Sigyn who holds the bowl, Mercury for the Roman recasting.
Questions readers put to this pair
Is Loki evil? The texts do not use that frame until the end, and even then the interest is in consequence rather than in wickedness. What makes him dangerous is not malice but indifference to obligation, in a moral system where obligation is the only thing holding anything together. That is a more specific and more frightening charge than evil.
Why does Hermes get away with everything? Because he settles. The hymn that tells his theft story is essentially about a negotiation between two gods that ends in an agreed division of rights, and Greek religion is comfortable with that because it was comfortable with the idea that gods have jurisdictions to be argued over. Loki never negotiates; he escapes.
Did the Norse worship Loki secretly? There is no evidence, and the absence is meaningful because we have quite a lot of evidence about who was worshipped: place-names, personal names, amulets, and outside observers. Modern religious practice that includes him is a contemporary development, entitled to exist on its own terms but not continuous with Viking-age religion.
Are there other gods with no cult who still get major stories? Yes, and it is a useful reminder that mythology and religion are not the same corpus. Several Greek figures who are prominent in poetry have negligible cult, and several deities with substantial cult have almost no stories. Ranking gods by how often they appear in narrative systematically misdescribes what people actually did.