Hephaestus
God of the Forge
hih-FES-tus
The smith of Olympus, thrown off the mountain, lame ever since, and the only god whose work everyone else depends on.
The Story
Hephaestus was flung from Olympus, in one telling by Hera for being born imperfect and in another by Zeus for taking her side in a quarrel. He fell for a full day, and the limp is permanent. He is the one Olympian who is visibly not beautiful, in a pantheon that otherwise treats beauty as a birthright.
Everything of consequence in the mythology comes out of his forge: Zeus's thunderbolts, Achilles's shield, Hermes's winged sandals, the chains that hold Prometheus. His revenge is engineering too, a golden throne that trapped his mother until she acknowledged him, and an invisible net that caught Ares and Aphrodite in bed for the gods to come and laugh at.
Did You Know?
- The Hephaisteion above the Athenian agora is the best-preserved Doric temple anywhere, largely because it spent a thousand years as a church.
- In the Iliad he is attended by golden handmaidens with sense, speech, and strength in them, mechanical servants written down in the eighth century BC.
- Lemnos was the island he landed on, and it stayed his cult centre. Once a year every fire on the island was put out and new flame was brought in by ship.