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It has been on my mind for a while, how ugly the blacksmith god really could've been. OK he was disabled after a fall from Olympos, but how about the said ugliness. I mean all the gods were described as "beatiful" and he did after all inherited his parents look. Perhaps in a "bad" combination (whatever that one can have been) but if he looked "normal"in the eyes of a mortal like you and me, perhaps he was considered ugly in the eyes of the gods who had higher standards.

Or perhaps it wasn't really so much about the looks (and genes) as in the general appearence, perhaps he was dirty, smelly and work-clad most of the time, not bothering with the metrosexuality of gods like Apollo.

I don't think there is any testimony that Hephaestus was actually ugly, of face, that is. Sure he was deformed, either congenitally, or as a result of being thrown out of heaven. What seems clear is that the goddesses, in particular, and women, in general, weren't attracted to him. Otherwise, he'd have had more children. Among his recorded children are the Cabiri, who may have been dwarfs. Is it possible the Greek gods were proto-eugenists? The Greeks certainly believed that guilt carried over the generations; it's a no-brainer that deformity and 'ugliness' were also reaped from the seed.

I don't think Hephaistos' sparce amount of kids had anything to do with not being physically attractive. When push comes to show most women past their teens look for other things, like influence, wealth et cetera, and Hephaistos lacked nothing of that.

I think it was more like he was a workaholic compared to most of the other Olympians, save for perhaps Zeus and Athena. He was busy in the forge from morning to late night, creating everything from delicate jewelry to heavy arms and olympic palaces.

After all he was married but didn't even have time for his wife, Aphrodite she had to go see her brother-in-law to get her pleassures.

(Well Zeus DID have time for women but that's another story. He TOOK himself time most likely)

You could be right, Frida. Perhaps he was such a workaholic he only allowed himself the time it took to pleasure himself. I suspect his technique with the ladies was not up to scratch. Consider his ineffectual (ultimately, violent) attempt to possess Athene, and how his child, the serpent-man, Erichtonius, resulted from his spilling his seed. Onanism was probably a way of life for him. And, maybe this deformed god would have defended the practice in the spirit of the Woody Allen character who described it as, "Sex with someone I love".

Correct, and perhaps his way of getting pleased had to do with a tad of bad self confidence.

That marriage between H & A, oh how I'd love to hear just some exchange of words between them about who did what and with whom and why the....

There is that "net" story of course, showing that H at least cared and was bothered by A's manizing (is that a word- well it must be since womanizing is :o) ) but if it was because he cared about A herself or just his reputation remains unanswered, just as Hera's behaviour when Zeus had been out on the wild side.

I think some posts were lost when they restored the forum after the virus infection. I had cited further evidence of the questionable quality of Hephaestus' seed; namely, the infirmity of his son, Periphetes, who grew up with crippled legs, and took it out on travellers whom he killed with his crutch. Perhaps Aphrodite went with Ares to avoid giving birth to a crippled child by her husband.

I lost a neat post in here myself.

http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Hephaistos.html

Haphestus is sometimes compared to Ptah in Egypt. Sometimes called a midget. He appears in the Plato myth with the "National Deity of the Field".

Bury translates National Deity of the Field as "Ge"... it is probably Ceres or IO in the plato myth. It could even be Ptah and Neith.

There is supposedly a picture from Sais of Neith standing next to a midget who could be Haephestus.

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Cinyras in Cyprus is also compared with Haphestus. Haphestus is a complicated god who I haven't figued out yet.

Newton talks about Cinyras and says he is Baal-Cannan or Vulcan. His wife is Aphrodite Urania.... daughter of the muse Urania. She lives on Cyprus. His son Gingris was deified as Adonis.

This post has been edited by Rich on January 31, 2007 | 2:03 GMT

Island of Haephestos is Lemnos. It has a city Haephestia. It also has a city Myrina. The origin of Haephaestos on this island is unclear.

Maybe Kabira daughter of Proetus has something to do with this?
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http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NympheKabeiro.html
"mountain Kabeiros in Berekynthia [in Mysia]"
...
"Kadmilos the son of Kabeiro and Hephaistos"
...
"Kabeiroi are most honored in Imbros and Lemnos, but they are also honored in separate cities of the Troad; their names, however, are kept secret. Herodotos says that there were temples of the Kabeiroi in Memphis"

This post has been edited by Rich on January 31, 2007 | 2:53 GMT

On the Kaberoi, have a look at
http://www.mythography.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=1532&hl=cabiri

In his book Comparative Mythology, a treatise on Indo-European mythologies, Jaan Puhvel mentions something that's been "jabbing" at my mind ever since this thread began:

The names of both Hephaistos and Ares (the latter both as Ares and as Enyalios) are attested from Mykenaian-era inscriptions.

The problem is that although I obviously recalled the ubiquity of deformity as an aspect of the smith deity -- enough so to search until I found Puhvel's reference above, I don't recall any comprehensive review of the issue, with perhaps some understanding of why smith gods should as a rule be portrayed as deformed, or dwarf/gnome-like.

Sometimes I wonder if it's associated with the primitive (albeit sacred) technology of mining and smelting the ore, specifically with the biophysical dangers that must have been associated with such magical accomplishments. Perhaps an analogous situation would be the mercury poisoning involved in the 19th century processing of the leather for men's hats -- poisoning that resulted in the type-specimen portrayed by Alice's "Mad Hatter".

Well, I'll keep looking ...

Robert Graves, in his Greek Myths offers (or records) the suggestion that smiths were hobbled so as to prevent them from running off and joining other tribes, much as slave owners hobbled slaves who ran away and were caught.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazbog

Well everybody regards Hephaestos as the crippled one by the gods. But at least to me he comes off as one of the most sensible ones. How about the mental crippleness of some of the others?
* Ares' bloodlust?
* Zeus' constant womanizing, what was he searching for? He could have had sex within the marriage, was he so unsure of himself and needed confirmation that he was the sex god all the time?
* Dionysos I bet he was an alcoholic and he tended to have bad influences on the people around him
* Artemis', Hesita's and Athena's fear of intimacy with men. What had happened to them when they were young? Abuses wiped under the carpet?
* Apollo who simply seem like being unintelligent and had hard to bound to other people
* Hera's constant jealousy, not without ground of course, but she did not manage to handle her temper nevertheless, and taking out her angers on innocents.

And that's just some. A physical handicap seems far better than what crippled the other gods.

Thanks Grazacham; that website on "Lame Dazbog" was fascinating.

I decided I needed to review a summary of information on Hephaistos, and so turned to the section (2.11) on Hephaistos in Walter Burkert's Greek Religion (1977 German; 1985 English):

I tend to think of ancient smithcraft (widely, including functions from mining or finding the ores, through their smelting into pure and composite metal(s) and their shaping into specific forms, to the articulation of these distinct forms into a constructed implement) as shamanic in origin -- not only as a whole but also individually. An apprentice smith would not only been tutored in the skills of the craft but also would have undergone shamanesque rituals of passage, some of which might well have involved self-sacrifice to a degree (e.g. resulting often in lameness or crippling of the feet -- a payment of one's agility afoot for perfecting one's "agility" with the hands: one's "ability" to craft perfection).

I began to look at other peoples' smith gods/heroes by checking some entries in James MacKillop's Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, published by Oxford Univ Press. One perspective that he brought to my attention was the difference between the concept of smith and of craftsman. This is also something to pursue in the Greek mythos, for instance the differentiation between Hephaistos and Daidalos (irrespective of one being a god and the other a hero). Also Athena is a deity of craftspersons, and she too (of course) has an interesting association both in cult and myth with Hephaistos.

Also, above Burkert emphasizes the buffoonery of Hephaistos serving nektar at the Olympian assembly, (rightly I believe) assuming Hephaistos to have taken up this task that otherwise is that of Ganymedes or Hebe in order to defuse the tense antagonism between Zeus and Hera, seemingly about to erupt into full battle. Yet one of MacKillop's entries, in discussing a Celtic smith deity whose hospitality includes the serving of a nektar-like drink (i.e. one conferring something like immortality), relates this to Hephaistos' serving nektar to the gods.

None of these smith figures seems to be lame, and only one is sometimes identified as a dwarf. More common, in fact, is an association of the smith with healing arts; this association is likely a relict of the shamanism from which both the smith and the healer/"medicine man" evolved.

So here are a set of entries from the Dictionary of Celtic Mythology:

The Celtic comparisons are interesting in another way. Dian Cécht, the "leech" -- as he is sometimes decorously called, meaning somewhat paradoxically that he was a doctor (sounds like 'Deadwood'-speak) -- killed his son, Miach for getting above himself. Goibniu, the smith god, killed Rúadan, as he might have been expected to dispatch a son. Hephaestus' fall from grace, out of heaven that is, is exactly the kind of indignity a knowledge god should have inflicted on his son. Recall how Daedalus is resposible for Icarus' fall, to put a construction on the event. So Hephaestus is seemingly living out the experience of father and son. That he has a problem with his feet tallies with other fated souls like Oedipus ("swollen-foot") and Achilleus with his heel, that is, souls who fall mortally into this world. Hephastus is vunerable and should have died for it, but the Greek gods were not allowed to die so he was made fun of instead. Funnily enough, Hephaestus' most elemental expression, when he turned back the River Scamandros as fire, resulting in the Theomachia, the battle of the gods, elicits laughter from Zeus -- surely the most superior contempt Hormer conferred on the king of the gods, showing how removed divinty can be from the living and dying that was the subject of Homer's song.

O'Brien, in her Transformation of Hera, argues that Hephaistos replaced Typhon|Typhoeus in the Iliad's theomachia. I start quoting somewhat before...

I forgot to note that the Skamandros and the Xanthos are alternate names for the same river flowing near Troy (coming from Mt. Ida IIRC).

In an introduction to the Celtic material I quoted above, I mentioned the division between smith and craftsman, and suggested that in Greek mythology that division also occurred, one example being between Hephaistos and Daidalos. They come together, briefly, in a section of the Iliad's description of the shield of Achilleus (18.478-607) that Hephaistos forges at Thetis' request. In his Companion to the Iliad, Malcolm Willcock writes

By the way, Willcock takes note of the lines just preceding the description of the shield (lines 474-477) -- in Lattimore's translation (which Willcock cites throughout):
He cast on the fire bronze which is weariless, and tin with it
and valuable gold, and silver, and thereafter set forth
upon its standard the great anvil, and gripped in one hand
the ponderous hammer, while in the other he grasped the pincers.
Willcock:

The connection between Hephaistos and Daidalos occurs late in the description of the Shield's designs. Willcock writes:

Here are the lines 590-605 from Lattimore's translation:

My discussion has evolved. It began with my grabbing Kerényi's Dionysos from its shelf nearby, intending to post passages from his discussion of Daidalos. But while leafing through the volume on my way to these passages I came upon the following:

This is certainly not the first time I've taken not of these lines. In fact I have them preserved on my "symbol" WORD® document that I use for "importing" Greek letters and other symbols into Mythography's text entry boxes. Yet this is the first time that I made a connection between the honey and Ariadne's dance floor; for the words evoked memories from my early biological education (specifically my Invertebrate Zoology class -- about 1963 -- at Occidental College in LA with professor P. Wells, whose research was the dance language of the honey bee). The dance language of the honey bee, first described by Karl von Frisch, is still controversial (see 'The Elusive Honey Bee Dance "Language" Hypothesis.' 2002. Journal of Insect Behavior 15:859-878, by Adrian Wenner, one of the colleagues of my professor, Dr. Wells), specifically with regard to whether it actually is a language that a scout worker bee uses to direct other bees to a nectar source. The hypothesis is that a reversing circle or round dance is used for sources relatively close to the hive and for sources further away what's variously described as a figure-8 dance or a circle dance bisected by a line dance (at a specific angle to line of polarization of the sunlight) during which the bee waggles her abdomen producing a sound the frequency of which provides distance information. As Wenner notes, experimental verification of the information content of these bee dances is ambiguous. The problem is generally not that the scientists can identify the floral source of the nectar the worker is bringing back to the hive, but it remains questionable whether the other bees "understand" the dance and thus go straight to that floral source. BUT, that controversy is not important for us. WHAT IS IMPORTANT is that through the centuries during which honey mead was a sacred, intoxicating drink for the Cretans -- before its replacement with wine -- those dedicated to the husbandry of honey (i.e. "beekeepers") would quite likely have observed the "labyrinthine" dance of the bees. Thus the insight evoked by re-seeing the words "λαβυρινθοιο ποτνιαι μελι" was that the dance performed on the "Ariadne's dance floor" mimicked the dances of the honeybees. My subsequent examination (through Willcock and Lattimore's translation) of the dance described by Homer only strengthened my conviction that this was its major source.

Well, I began this posting as I mentioned with the intent of including passages from Kerényi's discussion of Daidalos. Perhaps it's not so inappropriate that this discussion has meandered, n'est-ce pas? I will have to post the passages on Daidalos in a subsequent reply.

It turns out that if I start the passages from Kerényi's Dionysos a little before where I had planned to begin, he adds some credence to my hypothesis of Cretan dances emulating those performed by bees.

One wonders at how similar the "winding and unwinding" dance of the human dancers was to the "reversing circle" dance of the honeybees.

Kerényi continues...

Thus the name "Daidalos" for a skilled craftsman evolved from the word (daidalon) describing an object skillfully crafted

We first meet the smith "Wayland" or "Volund" (the latter name Old Norse) in an Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor's Lament, which is cited by Lee M. Hollander in his The Poetic Edda, "translated with an introduction and explanatory notes by Lee M. Hollander." The citation occurs in his short introduction to Volundarkviða, "the Lay of Volund." Holland notes that Deor's Lament "is preserved in a manuscript of the eleventh century, but is manifestly much older." He presents the following lines from the poem's beginning:
Wayland learned bitterly banishment's way,
earl right resolute; ills endured;
had for comrades Care and Longing,
winter-cold wanderings; woe oft suffered
when Nidhad forged the fetters on him,
bending bonds on a better man.
That he surmounted: so this may I!
Beaduhild mourned her brothers' death,
less sore in soul than herself dismayed
when her plight was plainly placed before her--
birth of a bairn. No brave resolve
might she ever make, what the end should be.
That she surmounted: so this may I!

Also earlier than the edda, is a scene of the death of Beaduhild's brothers on the Franks Casket, "generally referred to the seventh century." "The brief glimpses of nature vouchsafed us in the poem leave little doubt that the poem originated in Norway. Both metre -- a free fornyrðislag -- and treatment place it among the earliest in The Edda; that is, perhaps, the ninth century. And this may account also in some degree for the sad condition of the text. It is preserved only in the Codex Regius."

I thought I'd begin by quoting the prose introduction to the Volundarkviða, from Hollander's translation, and then discuss the included story rather than quote the poetic portion itself. In addition to making use of Hollander's notes I may at times refer (especially for his somewhat different transliterations of Old Norse names) to Cassell's Dictionary of North Myth & Legend by Andy Orchard. His entry on Völund is essentially drawn from the Völundarkvida.

Níthoth is "Grim Warrior" (O.E. Nidhad). Orchard's transliteration is Nídud.

Bothvild is "War-Maiden" (O.E. Beaduhild). Orchard: Bödvild.

Slagfith is "Finn-Smith". Orchard: Slagfid. Slagfith's wife, Hlathguth the Swanwhite, is in Orchard's transliteration: Hladgud Svanhvít. Hollander identifies Hlathguth as meaning "the Necklace-adorned Warrior-Maiden."

Volund (note for Orchard Völund) is, in OE Weland and in OHG Walant, Welant. Hollander notes "The name has not yet received a satisfactory explanation. It may be connected with Old Norse vél, 'craft.'" His wife, Hervor the Allwise, is according to Orchard: Hervör Alvitr. Orchard writes "The meaning of the second element of her name is the subject of some dispute: current suggestions include 'all-wise' or, on the pattern of Old English œlwiht, 'strange creature'." Hollander identifies Hervor as meaning "the Warder of the Host."

Olrún (Orchard: Ölrún) is "Ale Rune". Hollander suggests "the One Knowing Ale Runes." Hollander also notes "The motif of the swanskins is but faintly stressed here. By taking the skins away, the brothers obtain possession of the maidens; but their departure is due, here, not to their regaining the swanskins, as one might expect, but to the inborn longing to be valkyries again.

King Hlothvér (Orchard: Hlödver), Hollander identifies as "corresponding to the Frankish King, Chlodowech, as Kíar may correspond to King Kiarval [Cearbhall] of Valland (here meaning "Wales"); or possibly, it may be derived drom Cæsar." (Orchard: Kjár).

I'll continue with more later this evening.