Our Lord of the Forge

We have spoken of the the fire from heaven, and the fire that is made when two earthly things collide and the air gives their spark life. We have mentioned the smith fire of Wayland and Tubal Cain, the spiritual fire, the divine intelligence manifested by the Holy Spirit, and Hermes. We have seen that fire between heaven and earth in Agni, the God who carries sacrifices from the altar to the gods. But what of the fire born from the earth of the earth, the divine fire of burning stone expressed in the Goddess Pele, erupting in red and orange lava, spilling over the old earth to make new earth, destroying to create, constantly forming new lands? In the Hawaiian Islands you can see the work of creation right before your eyes. It is by this fire, erupting from the depths of the Mother, that the earth we know was made. At one point in time, all the land we treasure was either granite, gradually broken down by the great fungi, or lava belched up from the earth.

            This too, is the Smith’s fire, and the Earth his smithy.

            Hephaestos, the Greek deity of ingenuity, the smith of the Olympian gods counts for little by the time he is put into stories. He is the lame butt of many jokes, tossed from heaven by Zeus, unloved by Hera who, in other stories, tosses him away because of his ugliness. There is a wary space between he and the other gods. But does this truly speak of scorn, or of fear, of something uncanny, un… Olympian about the Olympian smith? He is, after all, the god who in the end is the husband of Aphrodite, another deity whose origin is not Olympos, who is alternately scorned in stories, but feared in actual cultic practice. If Aphrodite’s origins are in Inanna and Ishtar, in the great Asherah bride of Yahweh, what then is the true nature of her Smith husband?

            The stories we have now tell us Haphaestos was the son of Zeus and Hera, the sky god and goddess, the former the lord of the lightning bolts, and so Hephaestos is related to the heavenly fire. In the stories written down centuries later, he often snubbed by the Olympians and counted for little, but the reality of his worship may have been somewhat different. Often the soldier god and the farmer god are the same, and this is because the soldier and the farmer were the same, as was the farm field and the battlefield. Agriculture and war were related, for the first meant staking out permanent land, the other keeping it. But this intimate relationship between the farmer and the soldier meant that the smith who made the plough also made the sword. So the God of War and the God of the Forge would have been deeply honored. This may, by the way, be the reason both were seen as spouses to Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love and Desire. They may have even been a trinity of sorts.

Hephaestos is linked the the first generation of earth shaking monsters Mother Earth bore. They are said to be his servants and companions, and his forge is said to be under Mount Aetna in Sicily. Every time it erupts this is the work of Hephaestos and at mount Aetna and in all of Italy, he is known by his Latin name. Vulcan, for which is forges, volcanoes, are named.

            So Vulcan is the Lord of the Transformation, smithing far more than swords and horseshoes. Vulcan is not only the stirrer of the earth’s inner fires, but ours as well. He is counted as misshapen and ugly, but is this because, as some have said, smiths were lamed on purpose so that they could not leave a village, or is it because being in the midst of transformation and change is to always appear misshapen and unfinished, so this is the primary appearance of the Lord of the Forge?