HEPHAESTUS, the Smith-god, was so weakly at birth that his disgusted mother, Hera, dropped him from the height of Olympus, to rid herself of the embarrassment that his pitiful appearance caused her. He survived this misadventure, however, without bodily damage, because he fell into the sea, where Thetis and Eurynome were at hand to rescue him. These gentle goddesses kept him with them in an underwater grotto, where he set up his first smithy and rewarded their kindness by making them all sorts of ornamental and useful objects.
One day, when nine years had passed, Hera met Thetis, who happened to be wearing a brooch of his workmanship, and asked: ‘My dear, where in the world did you find that wonderful jewel?’
Thetis hesitated before replying, but Hera forced the truth from her. At once she fetched Hephaestus back to Olympus, where she set him upon a much finer smithy, with twenty bellows working day and night, made much of him, and arranged that he should marry Aphrodite.
b. Hephaestus became so far reconciled with Hera that he dared reproach Zeus himself for hanging her by the wrists from Heaven when she rebelled against him. But silence would have been wiser, because angry Zeus only heaved him down from Olympus a second time. He was a whole day failing. On striking the earth of the island of Lemnos, he broke both legs and, though immortal, had little life left in his body when the islanders found him. Afterwards pardoned and restored to Olympus, he could walk only with golden leg-supports.
c. Hephaestus is ugly and ill-tempered, but has great power in his arms and shoulders, and all his work is of matchless skill. He once made a set of golden mechanical women to help him in his smithy; they can even talk, and undertake the most difficult tasks he entrusts to them. And he owns a set of three-legged tables with golden wheels, ranged around his workshop, which can run by themselves to a meeting of the gods, and back again.
1. Hephaestus and Athene shared temples at Athens, and his name may be a worn-down form of hemero-phaistos, ‘he who shines by day’ (i.e. the sun), whereas Athene was the moon-goddess, ‘she who shines by night’, patroness of smith craft and of all mechanical arts. It is not generally recognized that every Bronze Age tool, weapon, or utensil had magical properties, and that the smith was something of a sorcerer. Thus, of the three persons of the Brigit Moon-triad, one presided o poets, another over smiths, the third over physicians. When the goddess has been dethroned the smith is elevated to godhead. That the Smith hobbles is a tradition found in regions as far apart as West Africa and Scandinavia; in primitive times smiths may have been purposely lamed to prevent them from running off and joining enemy tribes. But hobbling partridge-dance was also performed in erotic orgies connected with the mysteries of smith craft and, since Hephaestus has married Aphrodite, he may have been hobbled only once a year: at Spring Festival.
Metallurgy first reached Greece from the Aegean Islands. The importation of finely worked Helladic bronze and gold perhaps accounts for myth that Hephaestus was guarded in a Lemnian grotto by Thetis and Eurynome, titles of the Sea-goddess who created the raft verse. The nine years which he spent in the grotto show his subservience to the moon. His fall, like that of Cephalus, Talos, Sciron, Iphitus, and others, was the common fate of the sacred kings in many parts of Greece when their reigns ended. The golden leg-supports were perhaps designed to raise his sacred heel from the ground.
2. Hephaestus’s twenty three-legged tables have, it seems, much same origin as the Gasterocheires who built Tiryns, golden sun-disks with three legs, like the heraldic device of the Isle of Man, doubtless bordering some early icon which showed Hephaestus being married to Aphrodite. They represent three-season years, and denote length of his reign; he dies at the beginning of the twentieth year when a close approximation of solar and lunar time occurs; this cycle officially recognized at Athens only towards the close of the fifth century BC, but had been discovered several hundred years before (White Goddess). Hephaestus was connected with Vulcan’s fort in the volcanic Liar islands because Lemnos, a seat of his worship, volcanic and a jet of natural asphalted gas which issued from the summit Mount Moschylus had burned steadily for centuries (Tzetzes: On Lycophron; Hesychius sub Moschylus). A similar jet, described by Bishop Methodius in the fourth century A.D, burned on Mount Lemnos in Lycia and was still active in 1801. Hephaestus had a shrine on both those mountains. Lemnos (probably from leibein, ‘she who pours out’) was name of the Great Goddess of this matriarchal island (Hecataeus, quoted by Stephanus of Byzantium sub Lemnos).
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