Hephaestus, brother of Ares, is the force forging new forms.
Hephaestus with the other gods attending the birth of Athena. Hephaestus is represented in the extreme left holding the axis – Louvre Museum
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This god is quite predictably presented as the opposite of his brother Ares and is a creator of mental forms. If the masters of wisdom have made Hephaestus a blacksmith and not a carpenter it is because his particularity as a builder of forms is to melt and weld them in the fire of his forge. Hephaestus is not only the one to mold mental forms, as does Daedalus who builds forms that only hold the ‘appearance’ of life, for he is the one who shapes through the use of fire and makes appear ‘true’ forms purified by the fire of the spirit. Similarly to the way in which Ares carries out his destruction, Hephaestus’ creations only concern the mental forms generated for yoga within the frame of a spiritual progression.
See Family Tree 17
Vulcan (1838) by Herman Wilhelm Bissen. CC BY-SA 3.0, Thorvaldsen-Museum, Kopenhagen
But Hephaestus is a crippled god: he is lame. Homer gives two different versions of the cause of his infirmity. In the first, he was lame from birth. Ashamed of his infirmity, his mother Hera had thrown him from the heights of Olympus. He was taken in by Thetis, one of the daughters of Nereus – “The Old Man of the Sea” – and Eurynome, an Oceanid who sheltered him in a cave on the seafloor for nine years. As a token of his gratitude, Hephaestus carved magnificent jewels for the two goddesses.
According to the second version, he was rendered lame during a quarrel between his parents. When he took the part of his mother Hera, Zeus inflicted him with the same punishment as had done Hera in the other version of the story. After a fall that lasted for an entire day he landed on the island of Lemnos, where he was received by the Sintians.
According to Hesiod, he was conceived by Hera alone, who sought vengeance on Zeus for giving birth to Athena.
In both of these versions it is either the power of limitation, Hera, or the force of expansion of the mind at the highest level of the overmind, Zeus, who refuses to consider the forms created by the inferior mental planes (those produced by Hephaestus).
This possibility of the creation of purified mental forms manifests itself from the appearance of the mental-vital in man (the cave on the seafloor), but must undergo a long period of gestation (nine years) under the supervision of the two goddesses, Eurynome, ‘vast order, divine harmony’, and Thetis, ‘the highest inner consciousness working at the roots of life’. The seeker will later have to give thanks to the divine powers that permitted him to develop his creative capacities: Hephaestus offers jewels to the goddesses.
Hesiod does not make him the son of Zeus, probably to avoid an association between the effects of the limitations o