The Return of Hephaistos: Reconstructing the Fragmented Mythos of the Maker

Hephaistos the blacksmith is the Greek god of art and technology. Homer says he is the only Olympian god to suffer "mortal pain." Born to walk crookedly, Hephaistos is rejected by his mother, Hera, who throws the infant from Mount Olympus into the sea. There he is fostered by sea-nymphs, daughters of the primordial Ocean. Returned by order of Zeus, who has need of his skills, Hephaistos is said to be the only Olympian who works.

Hephaistos is paradigmatically representative of the mythic Maker archetype. Two themes emerge when tracking this archetype's manifestations through history. "Wounded Artist" pathologizes Hephaistos as emblematic of the mother-wounded and thus psychically impaired creative masculine. "Monstrous Technology" conflates the Hephaistean archetype with technological hubris, culminating in the military-industrial complex.

Contemporary norms image the artist and technologist as having divergent aims and values. Greek and other mythic texts/images and key etymologies show they were anciently revered as aspects of the same archetype. By Plato's time, technê, the Greek root of "technology," was conceptualized such that the Maker's mythically/metaphorically "skewed" gait situates the archetype in opposition to the "straight" gait of legitimate power in the Greek polis. This metaphorically crooked gait is associated with mêtis (roughly, "cunning intelligence") and connected with the primordial Oceanic powers of shapeshifting and ambiguity. This work recenters the Hephaistean archetype in a poetics of Making, reclaiming its ancient roots.