Aristotle used the term for the logical structure of language conveying things; Plato distinguished hermeneutic knowledge, interpreting revealed or spoken meaning, from sophia, knowing truth itself. The word entered common philosophical use in the early seventeenth century as biblical and legal interpretation professionalized. Schleiermacher universalized it around 1800: every act of understanding another mind is interpretation, with grammatical and psychological dimensions. Dilthey carried it into the human sciences, Heidegger into existence itself, Gadamer into tradition. The scope kept widening until the discipline of reading texts became the discipline of being a reader at all.
Hermes is the patron because he embodies the discipline's anxiety: he is the intermediary, never the source, and the gods never appear to verify his rendering. Every interpreter since works under the same suspicion, priest, translator, critic, professor, delivering meaning they did not author and cannot fully warrant. The discipline's two-thousand-year evolution is one long attempt to license the messenger: rules, methods, canons, peer review. Hermes himself never needed a license. He had winged sandals and plausible deniability.
The claim: hermeneutics secretly describes politics, since whoever controls the authorized reading of a text, constitution, scripture, statistics, controls what the text can be cited to command, and interpretation is therefore not a scholarly act downstream of power but power's primary mechanism. Verdict: the archive's entire psyop wing is evidence, from Propaganda Fide onward. The messenger never shows the message. The question every entry in this archive asks is the one Hermes trained us to ask: whose translation is this?
If the messenger never shows you the message, only the translation, what are you actually holding?