Reference
- HephaestusIn Greek mythology, the god of fire and metalcraft (Roman Vulcan); the lame son of Zeus and Hera; and in Homer's Odyssey, husband of Aphrodite, goddess of love. He created armour for the Greek hero Achilles, Harmonia's magic necklace, and other objects famed in legend.
Myth According to Homer, Hephaestus was born lame and thrown down from Olympus by Hera immediately after birth. Rescued by the sea goddesses Eurynome and Thetis, he dwelt in their undersea grotto for nine years before returning to Olympus. He was then hurled earthwards a second time by Zeus, for taking his mother's part in a quarrel. He fell for a whole day, landed in the evening on the island of Lemnos, but returned to Olympus once more. Later writers attributed his lameness to this fall.
His workshop contained an anvil and 20 pairs of bellows which worked spontaneously at his bidding. It was originally sited in his palace in Olympus, where he was said to have made all the palaces of the gods, but later accounts placed the forge beneath various volcanoes.
In Homer's Iliad, Charis was depicted as the wife of Hephaestus, while according to the later Greek poet Hesiod, she was the goddess Aglaia, youngest of the three Graces.
Worship His original place of worship was probably Mount Olympus in Lycia, where natural gases still escape from the soil. The cult spread to other places in Asia Minor and to some islands, notably Lemnos. It reached Athens in about 600 BC, but did not appear to penetrate further into mainland Greece. He was also adopted in volcanic regions; for instance from the Lipari Islands, the cult spread to Sicily and parts of Campania. - Vulcan[Greek name Hephaestus]
The Roman and Greek god of fire and metalworking; the blacksmith of the gods. He suffered bodily deformities and lameness. According to some stories, he was married to Venus, the goddess of love and beauty; in other stories, he was married to one of the three Graces. Vulcan was a son of Jupiter.
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Perspectives
Gods and Robots
The fascinating untold story of how the ancients imagined robots and other forms of artificial life--and even invented real automated machines The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life--and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, "life through craft." In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements--and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines. As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha's precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for real automata. Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley. A groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Gods and Robots reveals how some of today's most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth--and how science has always been driven by imagination. This is mythology for the age of AI.
Hephaestus Reloaded / Efesto Reloaded
This bilingual (English/Italian) publication, whose five authors are from Greece, Italy, and the US, invokes as its first inspiration the myth of Hephaestus who embodied a twofold entity: both handicapped and technically capable. The myth of Hephaestus has been passed across the centuries as an ancient metaphor signifying the idea of becoming-world, in which any distinction between the natural and the artificial, or the organic and the technical is blurred. Human beings, by virtue of their very weakness or limits, have enhanced their technological powers to the point of transcending their own given nature. At present, a variety of critical discourses in disciplines such as philosophy, history, aesthetics, and cognitive sciences pay attention to our becoming-hybrid (organic and mechanical beings) - unleashing a space for research that probes the concept of transcendence. Each of the contributions in this book addresses a new way to approach the role of transcendence. In the occidental history of ideas, the notion of transcendence has received at least three canonical articulations that are challenged by this book: the religious one (Judeo-Christian traditions); the philosophical one (Platonic-intellectual universality of ideas); and the scientific one (the objective and technological turn of knowledge). Nonetheless, it is with the rise of cybernetics, with its digital and virtual modalities of systems, networks, and knowledge, that our human environment emerges as a source of knowledge in itself. Not simply as an object but rather as an agent molded and molding thinking and behavior. It is through this "immersive" view of nature, knowledge, and technique, that the notion of transcendence is approached in this book as mutually transitive to changes. What is explored here is how transcendence is ejected from the strictly theological, philosophical, or scientific grounding and emerges as a germinating point of becoming (something else).
Hephaestus, Persephone at Enna and Sappho in Leucadia.
Hephaestus, finding that his wife Aphrodite is loved by his brother Ares, voluntarily surrenders the goddess to this younger brother, whom, it is said, Aphrodite herself preferred.
Zeus, Olympic Rage
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Hephaestus was thrown from Mount Olympus by Zeus when he sided with his mother during a quarrel with Zeus.
Hephaestus Seeks Revenge
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowSuspicious that Aphrodite was committing adultery, Hephaestus fashioned a fine, strong chain-link net to capture Aphrodite and the war god, Ares as they lay together in bed.
Hephaestus & Athene - Great Craftsmen
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowHephaestus, a great craftsman, manufactured wonderful articles from various materials, primarily from metal. Athene invented the chariot, the potter’s wheel, and the plow.
Iliad: Episode 8 - Achilles' Revenge
- Films on Demand This link opens in a new windowThetis asks Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths to forge new armour and weapons for her son Achilles. At dawn, she hands them to him, knowing that they will lead to his death. But Achilles is determined. Agamemnon and the Greek kings, all of whom are injured, come to apologise...
Online Resources
- Hephaestus on Foot in the CeramicusIn the following pages I offer a new explanation of an iconographie contradiction in the Attic red figure vase representations of a myth widely referred to as "The Return of Hephaestus." In rivalry with Zeus, who has born Athena from his head in a seeming act of sexual self-sufficiency, Hera has conceived Hephaestus in a miraculous act of parthenogenesis, but Hephaestus is born lame—not the fully formed male ally Hera sought in her rivalry with Zeus. Accordingly, Hera hurls her unfit offspring from heaven. Hephaestus in response provides his mother with a cunningly devised throne: once she sits in it she cannot rise. Hephaestus at first resists releasing her, but under the influence of Dionysus's wine, his resistance is broken.
- Hephaestus the Hobbling Humorist: The Club-Footed God in the History of Early Greek ComedyThis article argues that Hephaestus, the only physically disabled Olympian deity, occupies an important position in the history of comedy and the Greek tradition of laughter. From the Homeric epics to fourth-century comedy and vase-painting, Hephaestus is consistently to be found in cultural contexts which explore the instrumentality of laughter in domestic and social relationships, rituals and entertainments. The article proposes that the structure of the mythical narrative of the Return of Hephaestus, with its estrangement of the protagonist from his community, riotous reconciliation, and procession, underlies several Old Comedies. It also suggests that his banausic profession and deformity helped to make him particularly popular in cultural artifacts—vases and dramas—produced in Athens in the democratic period because neither his trade nor his appearance would have disqualified him from wielding sovereign power, κράτος, as a citizen there.