(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

Am I remembering right that Hephaistos is not only a disabled deity but, at
least as far as the Hellenic pantheon is concerned, the only disabled deity?

Because there's a thought in the back of my head that I can't quite figure
out what it is, but it has something to do with that.

Comments

Hephaistus

[dialecticdreamer]

"Lame" Hephaestus-- who was forcibly married to Aphrodite to PUNISH HER-- always rubbed me the wrong way. As someone with CP, "lame" is a good description of my gait. That the ONLY less than perfect deity is the one in charge of doing all the SMITHING-- ie, WORK.Then, of course, HE gets stuck with a self-centered, vain wife, because she's being punished???? Talk about an abusive dynamic!!!!

Re: Hephaistus

[alexseanchai]

I both take your point and want to argue with you. I may come back later with cited sources.

Re: Hephaistus

[dialecticdreamer]

GRIN. I look forward to it!

Re: Hephaistus

[madgastronomer]

It turns out that the "punishment" version of the story is mostly a much more recent one, not a classical version at all. Thoroughly modern. The most common version is that Hephaistos, angry at his mother for literally throwing him away, made her a golden throne that trapped her when she sat on it. Aphrodite's hand in marriage was one part of the ransom he demanded to release her. There are other versions in which Eros made them fall in love... because Eros is Eros, as far as I can tell. And there are definitely stories in which Aphrodite seems to love Hephaistos, too, and do things specifically to please him.

Homer has it that after Aphrodite's affair with Ares, she and Hephaistos divorced, and he married Aglaia, goddess of beauty and one of the three Graces, apparently of her own free will.

And he wasn't god of work in the sense of labor (that's Herakles, or Athena, depending on what kind), but of invention and creation, of skill.

If you'll check further down in the comments on this entry, I gave Alex a list of less prominent gods who were also disabled.

Re: Hephaistus

[sylvaine]

This revisionist version of the myth from tumblr might be of interest to you?

Re: Hephaistus

[dialecticdreamer]

You know, that would've been a MUCH better story for me, even as a preteen? My school teachers universally described Hephaestus as ugly, crippled, rude, and generally all the undesirable qualities--- without ever making the distinction between the guy who inspired genius engineer (billionaire playboys) to NEW creations, rather than the guy who made another big mac to order.

If they stopped to think for ONE SECOND about the disabled kid in their class, I NEVER saw it. All I got was "here's why everybody hates the only visibly disabled character."

As for "madness"- that wasn't even brought up in a college mythology class. News to me, but in a good way.

Some days, I think the Classical-romance of the 1800s was just a way to re-imprint old stories with their current values, and they definitely wanted any kind of chronic illness kept OUT of sight.

[transposable_element]

Dionysus was driven mad by Hera and is generally associated with madness, but I'm not sure whether that's really equivalent to what we would call mental illness.

[alexseanchai]

Good point. Thanks.

[madgastronomer]

Herakles was driven mad by Hera. Dionysos, in most versions, is mad for other reasons. (I haven't seen a source prior to the 2nd century CE that says Hera drove him mad, and he was associated with madness for at least five hundred years before that.) Divine or divinely-inspired madness is not identical to medical models of mental illness (because the society that created the medical model is vastly different from the ones that worshiped Dionysos originally), but all things that fall under "madness" are treated as mental illness under those models, and he is the patron god of the mentally ill.

Yes, he counts as a god with what our society calls a disability. I say it as a mentally ill devotee of Dionysos.

[alexseanchai]

Thank you

[madgastronomer]

The Fates were sometimes depicted as lame. The Litai, Zeus' daughters and minor goddesses of prayer, were aged and hobbling old women. Asopos, a river god of Boiotia, had a wounded leg that didn't heal properly, and his mother Celusa, nymph of the spring that feeds that river. The Graeae, sea-foam nymphs, shared but one eye and one tooth between them, and passed them both around. Ploutos, god of wealth, later identified with Hades but originally separate, was blind so that he might bestow wealth based on things other than appearance.

[alexseanchai]

Thank you!

[madgastronomer]

You're welcome.

Oh, and Harpokrates, god of silence, was very possibly deaf.