by Terry McCombs
When modern people look for Vulcan, what they find — nine times out of ten — is Hephaestus: the malformed Greek god of the forge, son of Zeus and Hera, cuckolded husband of Aphrodite, comic figure of Olympus. This is an injustice. The original Roman Vulcan was something far more ancient and austere: a mysterious, powerful deity who had no parents, no wife, no children, no myths, and no human form. He was not associated with the forge. He was fire itself. Terry McCombs, writing his God/dess of the Month Club column for soc.religion.paganism in July 2008, makes the case that Vulcan's absorption by Hephaestus was an act of cultural violence, and that the original — presiding over bonfires and volcanoes, worshiped by throwing fish into flames on August 23rd, his temple built outside the city walls because fire was too dangerous to have close — was the more honest and the more interesting god.
McCombs notes the wry contrast: Hephaestus appeared in myths where he was involved with the creation of Pandora, the chaining of Prometheus, and the distinction of being "the first cuckold." Vulcan had none of this. He just was — as fire itself simply is. The profile is a reminder that Roman religion, before it became Roman mythology, was something older and stranger than the Greco-Roman synthesis usually allows.
NAME: Vulcan. Vulcanus. Later became associated with — and largely subsumed by — Hephaestus.
SYMBOLS: Volcano, bonfire. As Hephaestus: all things having to do with blacksmithing.
AREA OF CONTROL: Fire, volcanoes, the Tiber river. Later, metalworking (via Hephaestus conflation).
IMAGE: To the Romans he was seen as a somewhat nebulous being of fire. They did not seem to have an anthropomorphic image of Vulcan. The human images all come after his conflation with the Greek Hephaestus — who had one leg shorter than the other and is sometimes shown as a dwarf.
HOLY BOOKS: None. The big guy was not much into reading. In his later incarnation he can be found in Virgil's Aeneid.
HOLY DAYS: May 23, Tubilustrium — day for the purification of sacred long straight trumpets used in ceremonies. August 23, Vulcanalia — the main holy day of Vulcan, set during the hottest and driest part of the year, a good time to ask Vulcan to spare homes and crops from fire, and communities from destruction by volcano.
PLACE OF WORSHIP: Temple built outside the city — fire being too dangerous to have close. Presided over by a special priest known as a Flamen Volcanalis.
MAJOR TABOOS: Not being careful with fire. Vulcan was prayed to mainly to ask that one's house not be burned down, or that the local volcano not act up.
FORM OF WORSHIP: Throwing fish into a bonfire. Every August 23rd.
RELATIVES: Associated with Bona Dea (the Good Goddess), who was also honored during the Vulcanalia. As Hephaestus: placed in the middle of the Olympian soap opera — son of Zeus and Hera (or just Hera in some versions), kicked off Mount Olympus for a number of contrasting reasons, helped Zeus give birth to Athena by splitting his head open with a chisel, married Aphrodite and became the laughing stock of the gods, etc.
SYNODEITIES: Huhueteotl (Aztec), Pele (Hawaiian), Gabija (Lithuanian goddess), Gibil/Gerra (Mesopotamian), Hastsezini (Navaho), Me'mdeye-Eci'e (Siberian "Father Fire").
Details
When you look for Vulcan now, what you find — nine times out of ten, really — is Hephaestus, the malformed Greek god of fire and metalwork. That, however, is not how the Vulcan of Rome, or pre-Roman Italy, was viewed.
To them he was a mysterious and powerful major deity who had few, if any, myths associated with him. He was viewed not as misshapen but as fire itself — from the simple fires that cooked their food to the fearful destroying fire that sometimes erupted from the Earth.
Unlike Hephaestus, whose parents were Jupiter and Juno, Vulcan was not the son of anyone. He just was — just as fire itself simply was.
While Hephaestus appeared in myths where he was involved with the creation of Pandora, the chaining of Prometheus, and given the distinction of being the first cuckold (when his wife Aphrodite stepped out on him with Ares), there were few if any myths about Vulcan — and certainly none that make him look like a fool.
Just as Vulcan had no father or mother, he also had no children or wife (Hephaestus had a few, but they were all monstrous — who knew it could so thoroughly suck to be a god?), though he was associated with the equally mysterious Bona Dea, who shared with him the holiday of Vulcanalia.
When you look at him, it seems more than a tad unfair that he was combined with Hephaestus at all, as the only thing they had in common was an affinity with fire and an association with Mount Etna.
Perhaps if he had just had a few myths to carry along to the matchup, he might have been the one linked to Jupiter instead of Zeus, while Zeus had to make do dealing with being the butt end of Olympian disdain. Perhaps that would have put Vulcan in a better mood — sure there would have been more disgruntled lightning strikes, but at least Pompeii and Herculaneum might have been able to get off with just a warning.
Colophon
Originally posted to soc.religion.paganism on July 31, 2008, as part of Terry McCombs's long-running "God/dess of the Month Club" series. McCombs posted monthly cross-cultural deity profiles to this newsgroup from 2003 onward. This profile covers Vulcan as the August 2008 entry. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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