Hephaestus
I envy the ancient Greeks of Attica, particularly the freemen and citizens of Athens. They lived in a god-infused world. Not us. We inhabit a sterile, positivistic world. According to logical positivism only that which can be empirically measured, mathematically accounted for has ontological status. The mystery of being is fed into a reductionistic meat grinder. Being is heavily weighted in favor of everything that happens to materially exist. Grab it, hold it, measure it and test it. We live in a world shorn of divinities, and bereft of irrational, chthonic forces. The Periclean Greeks by contrast lived in a civilization enlivened by religious festivals, shrines, temples, and rites of purification. The ancient Greeks did not conceive of any aspect of 
life apart from religious observance.
The Reuters photo of several days ago. –a soldier pulling the lanyard on the 155 mm artillery piece outside of Fallujah, Iraq. This photo is iconic of our time. The technology is lethal, effective. Yet what of the solitary human framed by a background of fire, steel, and blood?
Hephaestus was the god of fire, metalworking, the forge and the art of sculpture. He was son of Zeus and Hera, married to Aphrodite. He was a smithing god, fashioning all of the weapons for Olympus — the god of clever invention. Hephaestus is the only god ugly in appearance. He was chosen by Zeus to marry Aphrodite to prevent the outbreak of war between the other gods vying for her hand. He is the workman of the immortals. It is said that Hephaestus taught men the arts alongside Athena. A Doric temple of pentielic and parian marble dedicated to Hephaestus and Athena overlooked the Agora of Athens.
And what of our artillery man? What can he call upon to make his connection to a cosmic reality? And what of the blood guilt, the psychological damage he will incur as a consequence of his work? Does anyone finish the soul numbing business of killing and then blithely return to normalcy? What rituals of atonement are available, to repair his humanity?
3 thoughts on “Hephaestus”
I doubt this qualifies as a ritual of atonement but it’s as close as I can get: VOLTAIRE
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Gary, the Voltaire quote is relevant. Modern societies legitimate killing in war without recognizing the psychological damage incurred by those that survive. The ancients did not make that mistake as their day to day ordinary lives were punctuated with ritual at regular intervals. The rituals involved sacrificing animals. Blood for blood, was required for a re-boot of the psyche in their world.
I would simply add here that it is best to keep in mind Pericles’s funeral oration in Thucydides. There Pericles is more open about his atheism and why Athens should than even Nietzsche – hence Nietzsche’s explicit love of Thucydides.
Further, and this gets to the deeper meaning of my first point. One must keep in mind the story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite from Homer’s Odyssey (the same Homer Pericles said Athens no longer needs in the funeral oration). Hephaestus catches his wife Aphrodite in the act of infidelity with Ares by trapping them in an unbreakable net – the god of love and beauty (Aphrodite) somehow belongs with the god of war (Ares). Moreover, while all the other male gods look upon them naked and ensnared with laughter, when asked if he would risk such an amorous affair, Hermes says yes – even if the net were tighter AND all the female gods were to look on with laughter as well. Thus, the messenger god of interpretation sanctions the internecine coupling of monstrous deeds done in the pursuit of an undisciplined pursuit of perceived beauty. And it is of no small point that this tale is told by Homer’s own poet in his poem, suggesting it is somehow fundamental in understanding the very meaning of the whole poem – namely the wanderings of Odysseus to learn the minds of men amid the various city reveals the unchanging tendency of an internicine relation between beauty and war to be at the core of man’s soul…