Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work was influential in the fields of psychiatry, archaeology, literature and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of the founder of psychoanalysis; the two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology. Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his "new science" of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as President of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung's research and personal vision, made it impossible for him to bend to his older colleague's doctrine, a schism became inevitable; this division was painful for Jung, it was to have historic repercussions lasting well into the modern day. Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation—the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual's conscious and unconscious elements.
Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex, extraversion and introversion. Jung was an artist and builder as well as a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication. Carl Gustav Jung was born in Kesswil, in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, on 26 July 1875 as the second and first surviving son of Paul Achilles Jung and Emilie Preiswerk, their first child, born in 1873, was a boy named Paul. Being the youngest son of a noted Basel physician of German descent called Karl Gustav Jung, whose hopes of achieving a fortune never materialised, Paul Jung did not progress beyond the status of an impoverished rural pastor in the Swiss Reformed Church. Emilie was the youngest child of a distinguished Basel churchman and academic, Samuel Preiswerk, his second wife. Preiswerk was antistes, the title given to the head of the Reformed clergy in the city, as well as a Hebraist and editor, who taught Paul Jung as his professor of Hebrew at Basel University.
When Jung was six months old, his father was appointed to a more prosperous parish in Laufen, but the tension between his parents was growing. Emilie Jung was an depressed woman. Although she was normal during the day, Jung recalled that at night his mother became strange and mysterious, he reported that one night he saw a faintly luminous and indefinite figure coming from her room with a head detached from the neck and floating in the air in front of the body. Jung had a better relationship with his father. Jung's mother left Laufen for several months of hospitalization near Basel for an unknown physical ailment, his father took the boy to be cared for by Emilie Jung's unmarried sister in Basel, but he was brought back to his father's residence. Emilie Jung's continuing bouts of absence and depression troubled her son and caused him to associate women with "innate unreliability", whereas "father" meant for him reliability but powerlessness. In his memoir, Jung would remark; these early impressions were revised: I have trusted men friends and been disappointed by them, I have mistrusted women and was not disappointed."
After three years of living in Laufen, Paul Jung requested a transfer. In 1879 he was called to Kleinhüningen, next to Basel, where his family lived in a parsonage of the church; the relocation lifted her melancholy. When he was nine years old, Jung's sister Johanna Gertrud was born. Known in the family as "Trudi", she became a secretary to her brother. Jung was a introverted child. From childhood, he believed that, like his mother, he had two personalities—a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more suited to the 18th century. "Personality Number 1", as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time. "Personality Number 2" was a dignified and influential man from the past. Although Jung was close to both parents, he was disappointed by his father's academic approach to faith. A number of childhood memories made lifelong impressions on him; as a boy, he carved a tiny mannequin into the end of the wooden ruler from his pencil case and placed it inside the case. He added a stone, which he had painted into upper and lower halves, hid the case in the attic.
Periodically, he would return to the mannequin bringing tiny sheets of paper with messages inscribed on them in his own secret language. He reflected that this ceremonial act brought him a feeling of inner peace and security. Years he discovered similarities between his personal experience and the practices associated with totems in indigenous cultures, such as the collection of soul-stones near Arlesheim or the tjurungas of Australia, he concluded that his intuitive ceremonial act was an unconscious ritual, which he had practiced in a way, strikingly similar to those in distant locations which he, as a young boy, knew nothing about. His observations about symbols and the collective unconscious were inspired, in part, by these early experi
Themis
Themis is an ancient Greek Titaness. She is described as " of good counsel", is the personification of divine order, law, natural law, custom, her symbols are the Scales of Justice, tools used to remain balanced and pragmatic. Themis means "divine law" rather than human ordinance "that, put in place", from the Greek verb títhēmi, meaning "to put". To the ancient Greeks she was the organizer of the "communal affairs of humans assemblies". Moses Finley remarked of themis, as the word was used by Homer in the 8th century BCE, to evoke the social order of the 10th- and 9th-century Greek Dark Ages: Themis is untranslatable. A gift of the gods and a mark of civilized existence, sometimes it means right custom, proper procedure, social order, sometimes the will of the gods with little of the idea of right. Finley adds, "There was themis—custom, folk-ways, whatever we may call it, the enormous power of'it is done'; the world of Odysseus had a developed sense of what was fitting and proper." The personification of abstract concepts is characteristic of the Greeks.
The ability of the goddess Themis to foresee the future enabled her to become one of the Oracles of Delphi, which in turn led to her establishment as the goddess of divine justice. Some classical representations of Themis showed her holding a sword, believed to represent her ability to cut fact from fiction. Themis was herself oracular. According to another legend, Themis received the Oracle at Delphi from Gaia and gave it to Phoebe; when Themis is disregarded, Nemesis brings just and wrathful retribution. Themis is not wrathful: she, "of the lovely cheeks", was the first to offer Hera a cup when she returned to Olympus distraught over threats from Zeus. Themis presided over the proper relation between man and woman, the basis of the rightly ordered family, judges were referred to as "themistopóloi"; such was the basis for order upon Olympus. Hera addressed her as "Lady Themis"; the name of Themis might be substituted for Adrasteia in telling of the birth of Zeus on Crete. Themis was present at Delos to witness the birth of Apollo.
According to Ovid, it was Themis rather than Zeus who told Deucalion to throw the bones of "his Mother" over his shoulder to create a new race of humankind after the deluge. Themis occurred in Hesiod's Theogony as the first recorded appearance of Justice as a divine personage. Drawing not only on the socio-religious consciousness of his time but on many of the earlier cult-religions, Hesiod described the forces of the universe as cosmic divinities. Hesiod portrayed Dike, as the daughter of Zeus and Themis. Dike executed the law of judgments and sentencing and, together with her mother Themis, she carried out the final decisions of Moirai. For Hesiod, Justice is at the center of religious and moral life who, independently of Zeus, is the embodiment of divine will; this personification of Dike stands in contrast to justice viewed as custom or law and as retribution or sentence. In the play Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus, Themis is the mother of Prometheus, gave him foreknowledge of what was to come.
It is said by Prometheus. In Greek mythology, Hesiod mentions six daughters of Gaia and Uranus. Among these Titans of primordial myth, few were venerated at specific sanctuaries in classical times; the only consort for Themis mentioned in the sources below is Zeus. One of her few children was called the Greek goddess of the forest. With Zeus she more bore the Horae, those embodiments of the right moment – the rightness of order unfolding in time – and Astraea. First generation: Auxo Carpo Thallo Second generation: Dike Eirene Eunomia Followers of Zeus claimed that it was with him that Themis produced the Moirai, three Fates. A fragment of Pindar, tells that the Moirai were present at the nuptials of Zeus and Themis. To compliment Pindar, Hesiod tells us in the Theogony that the Moirai were bore from Nyx who lay with no one. Clotho Lachesis Atropos Themis had several temples in Greece, though they are not described in any great detail by ancient authors, she had temples at the oracular shrine of Zeus at Dodona, at Tanagra, in Athens, a Temple of Themis Ikhnaia in Phthiotis, Thessalia.
Pausanias describe her sanctuary in Thebes in somewhat more detail than what was the case and it may therefore have been of more importance: "Along the road from the Neistan gate are three sanctuaries. There is a sanctuary of Themis, with an image of white marble. Themis was sometimes depicted in the sanctuaries of other gods and may have shared temples with them and she is mentioned to have shared a temple with Aphrodite in Epidauros: "Within the grove [of the sanctuary of Asklepios (Asclepi
Rhea (mythology)
Rhea is a character in Greek mythology, the Titaness daughter of the earth goddess Gaia and the sky god Uranus as well as sister and wife to Cronus. In early traditions, she is known as "the mother of gods" and therefore is associated with Gaia and Cybele, who have similar functions; the classical Greeks saw her as the mother of the Olympian gods and goddesses, but not as an Olympian goddess in her own right. The Romans identified her with Magna Mater, the Goddess Ops. Most ancient etymologists derived Rhea by metathesis from ἔρα "ground", although a tradition embodied in Plato and in Chrysippus connected the word with ῥέω, "flow", "discharge", what LSJ supports. Alternatively, the name Rhea may be connected with words for the pomegranate, ῥόα ῥοιά; the name Rhea may derive from a pre-Greek or Minoan source. Graves suggested that Rhea's name is a variant of Era,'earth'. According to Hesiod, Cronus sired six children by Rhea: Hestia, Hera, Hades and Zeus in that order; the philosopher Plato recounts that Rhea and Phorcys were the eldest children of Oceanus and Tethys.
Gaia and Uranus told Cronus that just as he had overthrown his own father, he was destined to be overcome by his own child. Rhea and Gaia devised a plan to save the last of them, Zeus. Rhea gave birth to Zeus in a cavern on the island of Crete, gave Cronus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he promptly swallowed, her attendants, the warrior-like Kouretes and Dactyls, acted as a bodyguard for the infant Zeus, helping to conceal his whereabouts from his father. In some accounts, by the will of Rhea a golden dog guarded a goat which offered her udder and gave nourishment to the infant Zeus. On, Zeus changed the goat into an immortal among the stars while the golden dog that guarded the sacred spot in Crete was stolen by Pandareus. Rhea had "no strong local cult or identifiable activity under her control", she was worshiped on the island of Crete, identified in mythology as the site of Zeus's infancy and upbringing. Her cults employed rhythmic, raucous chants and dances, accompanied by the tympanon, to provoke a religious ecstasy.
Her priests impersonated her mythical attendants, the Curetes and Dactyls, with a clashing of bronze shields and cymbals. The tympanon's use in Rhea's rites may have been the source for its use in Cybele's – in historical times, the resemblances between the two goddesses were so marked that some Greeks regarded Cybele as their own Rhea, who had deserted her original home on Mount Ida in Crete and fled to Mount Ida in the wilds of Phrygia to escape Cronus. A reverse view was expressed by Virgil, it is true that cultural contacts with the mainland brought Cybele to Crete, where she was transformed into Rhea or identified with an existing local goddess and her rites. Rhea was referred to in ancient times by the title Meter Theon and there where several temples around Ancient Greece dedicated to her under that name. Pausanias mentioned temples dedicated to Rhea under the name Meter Theon in Anagyros in Attika, Megalopolis in Arkadia, on the Acropolis of Ancient Corinth, in the district of Keramaikos in Athens, where the statue was made by Pheidias.
In Sparta there was further more a sanctuary to the Meter Megale. Olympia had both an altar as well as a temple to the Meter Theon: "A temple of no great size in the Doric style they have called down to the present day Metroion, keeping its ancient name. No image lies in it of the Meter Theon, but there stand in it statues of Roman emperors."Her temple in Akriai, Lakedaimon was said to be her oldest sanctuary in Peloponessos: "Well worth seeing here are a temple and marble image of the Meter Theon. The people of Akriai say that this is the oldest sanctuary of this goddess in the Peloponessos."Statues of her were standing in the sanctuaries of other gods and in other places, such as a statue of Parian marble by Damophon in Messene. The scene in which Rhea gave Chronos a stone in the place of Zeus after his birth was assigned to have taken place on Petrakhos Mountain in Arcadia as well as on Mount Thaumasios in Arcadia, both of which were holy places: "Mount Thaumasios lies beyond the river Maloitas, the Methydrians hold that when Rhea was pregnant with Zeus, she came to this mountain and enlisted as her allies, in case Kronos should attack her and his few Gigantes.
They allow that she gave birth to her son on some part of Mount Lykaios, but they claim that here Kronos was deceived, here took place the substitution of a stone for the child, spoken of in the Greek legend. On the summit of the mountain is Rhea's Cave, into which no human beings may enter save only the women who are sacred to the goddess."The center of the worship of Rhea was however on Crete, where the Ida Mountain was said to be the place of the birth of Zeus. There was a "House of Rhea" in Knossos: "The Titanes had their dwelling in the land about Knosos, at the place where to this day men point out foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress grove, consecrated to her from ancient times."Upon the Ida Mountain, there was a cave sacred to Rhea: "In Crete there is said to be a sacred cave full of bees. In it, as storytellers say, Rhea gave birth to Zeus. At the appointed time each year a great blaze is seen to come out of the cave, their story goes
Titan (mythology)
The Titans and Titanesses are a race of deities worshiped as part of Ancient Greek religion. They were considered to be the second generation of divine beings, succeeding the primordial deities and preceding the Olympians, but included certain descendants of the second generation; the Titans include the first twelve children of Gaia and Uranus, who ruled during the legendary Golden Age, comprised the first pantheon of Greek deities. Beekes connects the word "Titan" with τιτώ. Other scholars connect the word to the Greek verb τείνω, through an epic variation τιταίνω and τίσις. Hesiod appears to share that view when he narrates:But their father, great Ouranos, called them Titans by surname, rebuking his sons, whom he had begotten himself. Robert Graves suggested that Titans means'lords'. According to Greek mythology, the highest Titan, overthrew his father Uranus. In turn, the Titans were overthrown in an event known as the Titanomachy; the Greeks may have borrowed this mytheme from the Ancient Near East.
Greeks of the classical age knew several poems about the war between the Titans. The dominant one, the only one that has survived, was in the Theogony attributed to Hesiod. A lost epic, Titanomachia was mentioned in passing in an essay On Music, once attributed to Plutarch; the Titans played a prominent role in the poems attributed to Orpheus. Although only scraps of the Orphic narratives survive, they show interesting differences with the Hesiodic tradition; the classical Greek myths of the Titanomachy fall into a class of similar myths throughout Europe and the Near East concerning a war in heaven, where one generation or group of gods opposes the dominant one. Sometimes the elders are supplanted, sometimes the rebels lose and are either cast out of power or incorporated into the pantheon. Other examples might include the wars of the Æsir with the Vanir in Scandinavian mythology, the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the Hittite "Kingship in Heaven" narrative, the obscure generational conflict in Ugaritic fragments, Virabhadra's conquest of the early Vedic Gods, the rebellion of Lucifer in Christianity.
The Titanomachy lasted for ten years. The Titans were imprisoned in Tartarus. Tartarus is said to be the deepest part of the Underworld and the place where the evilest beings are tortured for all eternity. According to Hesiod, the first twelve Titans were the females Mnemosyne, Theia, Phoebe and Themis and the males Oceanus, Coeus, Cronus and Iapetus, they begat more Titans: Hyperion's children Helios and Eos. Surviving fragments of poetry ascribed to Orpheus preserve variations on the mythology of the Titans. In one such text, Zeus does not set upon his father violently. Instead, Rhea spreads out a banquet for Cronus. Rather than being consigned to Tartarus, Cronus is dragged – still drunk – to the cave of Nyx, where he continues to dream throughout eternity. Another myth concerning the Titans revolves around Dionysus. At some point in his reign, Zeus decides to give up the throne in favor of his infant son Dionysus, like the infant Zeus, is guarded by the Kouretes; the Titans decide to claim the throne for themselves.
Zeus, slays the Titans with his thunderbolt. This story is told by the poets Callimachus and Nonnus, who call this Dionysus "Zagreus", in a number of Orphic texts, which do not. Several sources from Late Antique concern the role of the Titans in the creation of the human race; the Neoplatonist philosopher Olympiodorus recounted in his commentary of Plato's Phaedo, affirms that humanity sprang up out of the fatty smoke of the burning Titan corpses. Pindar and Oppian refer offhandedly to the "Titanic nature" of humans. According to them, the body is the titanic part. Other early writers imply that humanity was born out of the malevolent blood shed by the Titans in their war against Zeus; some scholars consider that Olympiodorus' report, the only surviving explicit expression of this mythic connection, embodied a tradition that dated to the Bronze Age, while Radcliffe Edmonds has suggested an element of innovative allegorized improvisation to suit Olympiodorus' purpose. Some 19th- and 20th-century scholars, including Jane Ellen Harrison, have argued that an initiatory or shamanic ritual underlies the myth of the dismemberment and cannibalism of Dionysus by the Titans.
She asserts that the word "Titan" comes from the Greek τίτανος, signifying white "earth, clay, or gypsum," and that the Titans were "white clay men", or men covered by white clay or gypsum dust in their rituals. Martin Litchfield West asserts this in relation to shamanistic initiatory rites of early Greek religious practices; the planet Saturn is named for the Roman equiv
Tethys (mythology)
In Greek mythology, was a Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaia and wife of Titan Oceanus, mother of the Potamoi and the Oceanids. Tethys had no active role in no established cults. Tethys was one of the Titan offspring of Gaia. Hesiod lists her Titan siblings as Oceanus, Crius, Iapetus, Rhea, Mnemosyne and Cronus. Tethys married her brother Oceanus, an enormous river encircling the world and was by him the mother of numerous sons, the Potamoi and numerous daughters, the Oceanids. According to Hesiod, there were three thousand river-gods; these included: Achelous, the god of the Achelous River and the largest river in Greece who gave his daughter in marriage to Alcmaeon and was defeated by Heracles in a wrestling contest for the right to marry Deianira. According to Hesiod, there were three thousand Oceanids; these included: Metis, Zeus' first wife, whom Zeus impregnated with Athena and swallowed. Passages in a section of the Iliad called the Deception of Zeus, suggest the possibility that Homer knew a tradition in which Oceanus and Tethys were the parents of the Titans.
Twice Homer has Hera describe the pair as "Oceanus, from whom the gods are sprung, mother Tethys", while in the same passage Hypnos describes Oceanus as "from whom they all are sprung". Timothy Gantz points out that "mother" may refer to the fact that Tethys was Hera's foster mother for a time, as Hera tells us in the lines following, while the reference to Oceanus as the genesis of the gods "might be a formulaic epithet indicating the numberless rivers and springs descended from Okeanos". However, for M. L. West, these lines suggests a myth in which Oceanus and Tethys are the "first parents of the whole race of gods." As an attempt to reconcile this possible conflict between Homer and Hesiod, Plato, in his Timaeus, has Uranus and Gaia as the parents of Oceanus and Tethys, Oceanus and Tethys as the parents of Cronus and Rhea and the other Titans, as well as Phorcys. Tethys played no active part in Greek mythology, the only early story concerning Tethys, is what Homer has Hera relate in the Iliad's Deception of Zeus passage.
There, Hera says that, when Zeus was in the process of deposing Cronus, she was given by her mother Rhea to Tethys and Oceanus, for safekeeping, that they "lovingly nursed and cherished me in their halls". Hera relates this while dissembling that she is on her way to visit Oceanus and Tethys, in hopes of reconciling her foster parents, who are angry with each other and are no longer having sexual relations. Oceanus' consort, at a time Tethys came to be identified with the sea, in Hellenistic and Roman poetry Tethys' name came to be used as a poetic term for the sea; the only other story involving Tethys is an late astral myth concerning the polar constellation Ursa Major, thought to represent the catasterism of Callisto, transformed into a bear, placed by Zeus among the stars. The myth explains why the constellation never sets below the horizon, saying that since Callisto had been Zeus's lover, she was forbidden by Tethys from "touching Ocean's deep", out of concern for her foster-child Hera, Zeus's jealous wife.
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tethys turns Aesacus into a diving bird. Tethys was sometimes confused with another sea goddess, the sea-nymph Thetis, the wife of Peleus and mother of Achilles. M. L. West detects in the Iliad's Deception of Zeus passage an allusion to a possible archaic myth "according to, the mother of the gods, long estranged from her husband," speculating that the estrangement might refer to a separation of "the upper and lower waters... corresponding to that of heaven and earth," which parallels the story of "Apsū and Tiamat in the Babylonian cosmology, the male and female waters, which were united," but that, "By Hesiod's time the myth may have been forgotten, Tethys remembered only as the name of Oceanus' wife." This possible correspondence between Oceanus and Tethys, Apsū and Tiamat, has been noticed by several authors, with Tethys' name having been derived from that of Tiamat. Representations of Tethys prior to the Roman period are rare. Tethys appears, identified by inscription, as part of an illustration of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on the early sixth century BC Attic black-figure "Erskine" dinos by Sophilos.
Tethys, accompanied by Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth, follows close behind Oceanus, at the end of a procession of gods invited to the wedding. Tethys is conjectured to be represented in a similar illustration of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis depicted on the early sixth century BC Attic black-figure François Vase. Tethys also appeared as one of the gods fighting the Giants in the Gigantomachy frieze of the second
Hephaestus
Hephaestus is the Greek god of blacksmiths, carpenters, artisans, metallurgy and volcanoes. Hephaestus' Roman equivalent is Vulcan. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus was either the son of Zeus and Hera or he was Hera's parthenogenous child, he was cast off Mount Olympus, by his mother because of his deformity or, in another account, by Zeus for protecting Hera from his advances. As a smithing god, Hephaestus made all the weapons of the gods in Olympus, he served as the blacksmith of the gods, was worshipped in the manufacturing and industrial centers of Greece Athens. The cult of Hephaestus was based in Lemnos. Hephaestus' symbols are a smith's hammer, a pair of tongs. Hephaestus is associated with the Linear B inscription, A-pa-i-ti-jo, found at Knossos; the name of the god in Greek has a root which can be observed in names of places of Pre-Greek origin, like Phaistos. Hephaestus is given many epithets; the meaning of each epithet is: Amphigúeis "the lame one" Kullopodíōn "the halting" Khalkeús "coppersmith" Klutotékhnēs "renowned artificer" Polúmētis "shrewd, crafty" or "of many devices" Aitnaîos "Aetnaean", owing to his workshop being located below Mount Aetna.
Hephaestus had his own palace on Olympus, containing his workshop with anvil and twenty bellows that worked at his bidding. Hephaestus crafted much of the magnificent equipment of the gods, any finely wrought metalwork imbued with powers that appears in Greek myth is said to have been forged by Hephaestus, he designed Hermes' winged helmet and sandals, the Aegis breastplate, Aphrodite's famed girdle, Agamemnon's staff of office, Achilles' armor, Heracles' bronze clappers, Helios's chariot, the shoulder of Pelops, Eros's bow and arrows. In accounts, Hephaestus worked with the help of the chthonic Cyclopes—among them his assistants in the forge, Brontes and Pyracmon. Hephaestus built automatons of metal to work for him; this included tripods. He gave to the blinded Orion his apprentice Cedalion as a guide. In some versions of the myth, Prometheus stole the fire. Hephaestus created the gift that the gods gave to man, the woman Pandora and her pithos. Being a skilled blacksmith, Hephaestus created all the thrones in the Palace of Olympus.
The Greek myths and the Homeric poems sanctified in stories that Hephaestus had a special power to produce motion. He made the golden and silver lions and dogs at the entrance of the palace of Alkinoos in such a way that they could bite the invaders; the Greeks maintained in their civilization an animistic idea. This kind of art and the animistic belief goes back to the Minoan period, when Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth, made images which moved of their own accord. A statue of the god was somehow the god himself, the image on a man's tomb indicated somehow his presence. According to Hesiod Hera gave birth to Hephaestus on her own as revenge for Zeus giving birth to Athena without her. According to Homer Hera is mentioned as the mother of Hephaestus but there is not sufficient evidence to say that Zeus was his father. According to Homer there is not sufficient evidence to say. Hera is not mentioned as the mother. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus Hera gave birth to Hephaestus alone. Pseudo-Apollodorus relates that, according to Homer, Hephaestus is one of the children of Zeus and Hera.
Several texts follow Hesiod's account, including Hyginus and the preface to Fabulae. In the account of Attic vase painters, Hephaestus was present at the birth of Athena and wields the axe with which he split Zeus' head to free her. In the latter account, Hephaestus is there represented as older than Athena, so the mythology of Hephaestus is inconsistent in this respect. In one branch of Greek mythology, Hera ejected Hephaestus from the heavens because he was "shrivelled of foot", he was raised by Thetis and the Oceanid Eurynome. In another account, attempting to rescue his mother from Zeus' advances, was flung down from the heavens by Zeus, he fell for an entire day and landed on the island of Lemnos, where he was cared for and taught to be a master craftsman by the Sintians – an ancient tribe native to that island. Writers describe his lameness as the consequence of his second fall, while Homer makes him lame and weak from his birth. Hephaestus was one of the Olympians to have returned to Olympus after being exiled.
In an archaic story, Hephaestus gained revenge against Hera for rejecting him by making her a magical golden throne, when she sat on it, did not allow her to stand up. The other gods begged Hephaestus to return to Olympus to let her go, but he refused, saying "I have no mother". At last, Dionysus fetched him, intoxicated him with wine, took the subdued smith back to Olympus on the back of a mule accompanied by revelers – a scene that sometimes appears on painted pottery of Attica and of Corinth. In the painted scenes, the padded dancers and phallic figures of the Dionysan throng leading the mule show that the procession was a part of the dithyrambic celebrations that were
Twelve Olympians
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the twelve Olympians are the major deities of the Greek pantheon considered to be Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hephaestus and either Hestia or Dionysus. They were called Olympians. Although Hades was a major ancient Greek god, was the brother of the first generation of Olympians, he resided in the underworld, far from Olympus, thus was not considered to be one of the Olympians. Besides the twelve Olympians, there were many other cultic groupings of twelve gods; the Olympians were a race of deities consisting of a third and fourth generation of immortal beings, worshipped as the principal gods of the Greek pantheon and so named because of their residency atop Mount Olympus. They gained their supremacy in a ten-year-long war of gods, in which Zeus led his siblings to victory over the previous generation of ruling gods, the Titans, they were a family of gods, the most important consisting of the first generation of Olympians, offspring of the Titans Cronus and Rhea: Zeus, Hera and Hestia, along with the principal offspring of Zeus: Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hephaestus and Dionysus.
Although Hades was a major deity in the Greek pantheon, was the brother of Zeus and the other first generation of Olympians, his realm was far away from Olympus in the underworld, thus he was not considered to be one of the Olympians. Olympic gods can be contrasted to chthonic gods including Hades, by mode of sacrifice, the latter receiving sacrifices in a bothros or megaron rather than at an altar; the canonical number of Olympian gods was twelve, but besides the principal Olympians listed above, there were many other residents of Olympus, who thus might be called Olympians. Heracles became a resident of Olympus after his apotheosis and married another Olympian resident Hebe; some others who might be considered Olympians, include the Muses, the Graces, Dione, the Horae, Ganymede. Besides the twelve Olympians, there were many other various cultic groupings of twelve gods throughout ancient Greece; the earliest evidence of Greek religious practice involving twelve gods comes no earlier than the late sixth century BC.
According to Thucydides, an altar of the twelve gods was established in the agora of Athens by the archon Pisistratus, in c. 522 BC. The altar became the central point from which distances from Athens were measured and a place of supplication and refuge. Olympia also had an early tradition of twelve gods; the Homeric Hymn to Hermes has the god Hermes divide a sacrifice of two cows he has stolen from Apollo, into twelve parts, on the banks of the river Alpheius: "Next glad-hearted Hermes dragged the rich meats he had prepared and put them on a smooth, flat stone, divided them into twelve portions distributed by lot, making each portion wholly honorable."Pindar, in an ode written to be sung at Olympia c. 480 BC, has Heracles sacrificing, alongside the Alpheius, to the "twelve ruling gods": "He enclosed the Altis all around and marked it off in the open, he made the encircling area a resting-place for feasting, honoring the stream of the Alpheus along with the twelve ruling gods."Another of Pindar's Olympian odes mentions "six double altars".
Herodorus of Heraclea has Heracles founding a shrine at Olympia, with six pairs of gods, each pair sharing a single altar. Many other places had cults of the twelve gods, including Delos, Magnesia on the Maeander, Leontinoi in Sicily; as with the twelve Olympians, although the number of gods was fixed at twelve, the membership varied. While the majority of the gods included as members of these other cults of twelve gods were Olympians, non-Olympians were sometimes included. For example, Herodorus of Heraclea identified the six pairs of gods at Olympia as: Zeus and Poseidon and Athena, Hermes and Apollo, the Graces and Dionysus and Alpheus, Cronus and Rhea, thus while this list includes the eight Olympians: Zeus, Hera, Hermes, Apollo and Dionysus, it contains three clear non-Olympians: the Titan parents of the first generation of Olympians and Rhea, the river god Alpheius, with the status of the Graces being unclear. Plato connected "twelve gods" with the twelve months, implies that he considered Pluto one of the twelve in proposing that the final month be devoted to him and the spirits of the dead.
The Roman poet Ennius gives the Roman equivalents as six male-female complements, preserving the place of Vesta, who played a crucial role in Roman religion as a state goddess maintained by the Vestals. There is no single canonical list of the twelve Olympian gods; the thirteen gods and goddesses most considered to be one of the twelve Olympians are listed below. Most listings include either one or the other of the following deities as one of the twelve Olympians. Notes^ Romans associated Phoebus with Helios and the sun itself, they used the Greek name Apollon in a Latinized form Apollo.^ According to an alternate version of her birth, Aphrodite was born of Uranus, Zeus' grandfather, after Cronus threw his castrated genitals into the sea. This supports the etymology of her name, "foam-born"; as such, Aphrodite would belong to the same generation as Cronus, Zeus' father, would be Zeus' aunt
