Crippled Feet of Hephaistos
Greece: Archaic

The god Hephaistos returns to Olympus after being exiled for having crippled feet.
His return announces that our defects really are worthy of divine acceptance.

Found on more than thirty vases, the "Return of Hephaistos to Olympus" was a popular theme of ancient Greek painting. It was usually a lighthearted theme, as shown here, with all the figures smiling; but it is unusual to find the craftsman god so young, without a beard, and rare to find the condition of his feet so graphically displayed. On this vase, they are twisted backward in a disturbing way, toes curled, hardly capable of being walked on. Thus the god rides on a lively braying donkey of Dionysos. The bearded god of the vine faces this triumphal procession with his wine cup held high; for it was the ecstatic rites, the orgia, of Dionysos that made the return possible: the reluctant Hephaistos is actually drunk. Dionysos wears over his shoulder the skin of a wild leopard and holds in his hand a leopard cub. Behind Hephaistos strides a Maenad, a "maddened woman," dressed in the same leopard skin as her god and carrying as high as his wine cup a spotted snake. Behind her arrives a silenus with the legs of a horse, playing a double flute. And behind him, trailing the procession on the other side of the vase, Maenads and sileni engage in sexual intercourse.

CULTURAL CONTEXT
Although some said that Hephaistos was the child of both Zeus and Hera, Hesiod describes the divine metalworker as having been produced parthenogenetically by his mother alone, specifically from her thigh (Theogony 927). Hera, outraged that her husband had already given birth to Athena from his head without any use for his wife, contrived her own miracle. But it was a grave disappointment, as the Queen of Heaven explained:

Hear me, all of you, gods and goddesses, how Zeus undertakes to bring shame on me—how he is the first to do so, after having taken me to wife. Without me he has borne Athene, who is glorious amongst all the immortals, whilst my own son, whom I bore, Hephaistos, is the least of us all. I myself threw him into the sea. (Kerényi, 151)

Hephaistos was the "least" of all the divinities because his feet were deformed and therefore ugly—an arch defect among the ancient Greeks and especially among the perfectly beautiful Greek gods. Rejected by his mother, the infant was nursed by goddesses of the sea, notably Thetis of the "silver feet," whom Hephaistos would later revere "for saving me in my hour of agony, after my great fall, when my wicked Mother had tried to do away with me because I was a cripple!" (Iliad 18.395–397). Indeed, it was in the grotto of Thetis that this god who could feel "agony" learned his craft as a smith and produced, for the nurses who accepted him, beautiful bronze ornaments, buckles, bracelets, and necklaces.

Hephaistos could create these things because, despite his imperfection, he had mastered fire, specifically the fire of the forge; it was said that he was himself identical with the element of fire or at least the fire from natural gas or from volcanoes (see Iliad, book 21). Working for nine years in secret, this god was eventually discovered by his divine Olympic kin, for whom he was asked to provide golden thrones. He did so happily, it seems, and with particular pleasure sent his mother a special throne: when Hera sat on it, however, it seized her with invisible bonds that no one could release. The gods appealed to Hephaistos, who—still burning with resentment—responded that he had no mother. His brother Ares, god of war, was dispatched to force the vengeful smith to free Hera but was driven away by flames. Only Dionysos—a god of creativity like Hephaistos and something of an outcast himself, who was actually trusted by the divine smith—would succeed in getting Hephaistos drunk in the midst of a Dionysian orgia and bring the god home on an ass. It was a sight to behold! Probably the gods laughed.

Back home, the god of the "crooked foot" freed his mother but demanded in payment none other than Aphrodite, goddess of love, as his wife. Provided with extraordinary working conditions, twenty bellows working day and night, Hephaistos settled down to a life of creativity: for himself he made golden maidens to support him as he moved among his many forges; for the other gods he made palaces, thunderbolts for Zeus, a chariot for Helios, arrows for Apollo; and for the human hero Achilles, who would die from a vulnerable heel, he made the most marvelous shield and hammered into it an image of the entire world. Yet the wife he trusted would deceive him with Ares the Runner. Grieving, Hephaistos tells us in the Odyssey: "She loves ruinous Ares because he is handsome, and goes sound on his feet, while I am misshapen from birth" (8.310). But vengeance flared again; the divine craftsman caught the adulterous pair in a net of invisible bonds that he had constructed around his own bed. Called upon to witness the ridiculous sight, the gods laughed—at the conjoined deities of love and war but also at Hephaistos, who became the patron deity of cuckolds.

This divine laughter of which Hephaistos is the brunt seems also to be one of his creations. It is true that his appearance was vulnerable in a way that Hephaistos could not help—the exceptionally strong shoulders and arms, the hairy chest, the bulk of a torso sitting on legs that could barely stand—but he used this image of imperfection as if it were a tool in his own hands. At a dinner described in the Iliad, as he handed Hera a cup of nectar, Hephaistos advised his mother not to argue with dangerous Zeus (indeed, it reminded him of a time that Zeus had flung Hephaistos by the foot out of Olympus). He proceeded to shuffle around the table, in a pathetic imitation of the beautiful cupbearer Ganymede, serving the other immortals: "And a fit of helpless laughter seized the happy gods as they watched his bustling up and down the hall"(1.599–600). In this way Hephaistos defused a confrontation; and when the meal was over and Helios had set, "they all went home to bed in the separate houses that the great lame god Hephaestos had built for them with skillful hands."

ARCHETYPAL COMMENTARY
Mircea Eliade points out in his study Forge and Crucible that the image of the metalsmith has religious significance worldwide. The Yakuts of Siberia, for example, rank the smith just below that of their religious expert, the shaman. This is due to the fact that both the smith and shaman are "masters of fire" with special knowledge. The smith's knowledge extends to the magic of metals, the noise of his hammer keeps away evil spirits and gives the profession a healing aspect (79f). But metals come from the depth of the earth, which is itself sometimes associated with evil. Hence the smith's value can shift: he can find himself aligned with the dwarf, that questionable creature said to live underground and who can break out with the darkest emotions. The Teutonic smith Wieland is a case in point. In England, he is Wayland Smith, sometimes a dwarf but at other times a giant. Exceptionally gifted at his craft, Wayland was imprisoned by the king in order to serve his kingdom alone and deliberately lamed to keep him from running away. Wayland got his revenge, however, by beheading the king's sons, setting their skulls in silver and their eye sockets with ornaments, and sending these exceptional "gifts" back to the king (Newall, 2620). One is reminded of Hephaistos and the exceptional throne he made for his mother.

The only ugly god and the only god that works, Hephaistos is also the only deity in the Greek pantheon who has a major relationship to the earth, due to his "fall" from Olympus. Thus, as Edward Edinger tells us, he represents an archetypal reality that is related not to the abstract or theoretical but to the personal and concrete: it is in that realm that "Hephaistian energy" is productive. There is, moreover, a deliberate quality to the smith's creativity, a certain craftsmanship different from the creative "Dionysian energy" that comes in unexpected bursts of joyous accomplishment—a form of ecstasy which, as we can see from the picture, Hephaistos is not familiar. It is never quite clear from the myths whether his defective feet have brought about his parents' rejection or whether their rejection results in the crippling, an ambiguity that raises questions about how these experiences of rejection really begin. Whatever the case, his fate is to suffer a terrible deformity. Edinger remarks: "Hephaestus represents creativity that develops out of defect or out of need. . . . That makes him particularly precious, at least to man, since it gives imperfect man a partner in the divine realm, a partner related to creativity" (36). This Greek god anticipates the myth of Christ, who also descends from on high and experiences an excruciating rejection by his heavenly father, yet who is said theologically to bring about a new creation.

Our own defects may be akin to those of Hephaistos: an unacceptable physical appearance, a naïve tendency to trust the wrong people, some kind of sexual inadequacy. And they may drive us, as they did this deity, to bitter acts of vengeance. Or we may find that they spur us on, like a goad, to compensate with a degree of "Hephaestian creativity" that otherwise we simply would not achieve; exceptional athletes, including the fleet of foot, sometimes tell such stories. At the very least, our imperfections bring us "down to earth." They may even drop us deeper into the depths of ourselves to ponder the strange relationship of strength and weakness, success and failure, good and evil. Should we find ourselves there, Hephaistos advises that we keep handy one of his more useful tools: a sense of humor.