Craftsmanship: The Marriage of Love and Labor
Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and the Creative Process
The creative process is rarely a straight line. Sometimes it’s a wave or a zigzag or a Jeremy Bearimy-shaped purgatory. (I see you, Good Place fans!) It may have fits and starts, or dance a conga. If you’re like me, it might mean constantly bouncing among multiple projects until one finally comes to fruition.
Recently, I was thinking about one of my favorite mythic stories as a way to work with these creative dynamics, hoping to become more productive—and it worked! So here it is.
I’ve always been fascinated by the marriage of Aphrodite and Hephaestus, but one aspect of the story has always bothered me.
Now, we only have two surviving stories about their relationship. One is about Aphrodite’s infidelity–how she cheated on her husband with the war god Ares. The second story, which was recorded much later than the other, is of their engagement.
So, who are these gods?
Hephaestus is the Olympian blacksmith, the god of fire and the forge. A working man’s god. His mother is Hera, queen of the gods.
Zeus may or may not have been his father. In some versions of the myth, Hera was royally ticked off at Zeus for birthing Athena from his noggin, so she tried to make her own baby divinity by herself, resulting in Hephaestus, who was born lame and deformed.
Regardless of his paternity (or lack thereof), Hephaestus’s parents disowned him and threw him — literally — off of Mount Olympus. Whether lame at birth or as a result of the fall, either way, he was deemed too imperfect to be a god.
Living among mortals and unfit to hunt or fight, Hephaestus turned to blacksmithing to forge his path. That’s where his divine gifts shone through. He transmuted his pain into creativity, the way that artists do. With his bare hands, he used his hammer and anvil to forge beautiful and powerful objects. Through discipline and steady work, he transformed his defects into products of perfection. It’s an alchemical principle that everything contains its opposite, and Hephaestus is an alchemical god.
Among Heph’s genius inventions was a beautifully crafted chair, a throne fit for a goddess, which he gifted to his mother, Hera. When she proudly took her seat, she immediately found herself bound fast by her wrists, legs, and waist, floating in mid-air, unable to escape. Of course, her son was willing to release her--in exchange for a place on Olympus among the gods. He may have inherited a vengeful streak from his mother.
But that wasn’t all he wanted. He also asked for (or demanded) Aphrodite, the most beautiful of the Olympian goddesses.
According to the most common version of the story, Zeus gladly acquiesced to Hephaestus’s demand for Aphrodite. It was a two-for-one deal. Not only would the bargain get his wife out of her bondage chair, but marrying off Aphrodite could also restrain the goddess’s promiscuous behavior and the drama it caused.
This is the part of the story that seems off to me, a patriarchal artifact that doesn’t make psychological sense.
Storytellers have suggested for millennia that Hephaestus’s lameness and physical appearance made him unacceptable to one of such transcendent beauty as Aphrodite. But that is to misunderstand the nature of Love.
If this is THE story of the marriage of Aphrodite, then we’re missing a ginormous chunk of the myth—the part where she makes Zeus, Hera, and Hephaestus suffer every day of their immortal existence for presuming she is theirs to command.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate just who and what Aphrodite is. Hesiod tells us that she was born from the first act of violence in Greek mythology—the castration of the sky god Ouranos by his Titan son, Kronos.
Where Ouranos’s severed testicles mixed with the turbulent tides of the Aegean, the gruesome brew of blood and salt and semen birthed Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, graceful as the sea foam, dancing elegantly even in stormy waters. No mother. No father. A primal force of nature, a creature unto herself.
She emerged before the rise of the Titans and long before the Olympians were born, swallowed, and regurgitated. She is of an older, deeper order than they. Her first friend was Eros, the primordial god whose magnetic power holds the cosmos together.
If Aphrodite deigned to join Zeus and his siblings on Olympus, it was because she chose to be there.
She might recognize Zeus as king, but I assert that nobody commands Aphrodite in matters of the heart, whether the matter is tender, passionate, or jealous.
What if we've been reading this myth of Aphrodite’s betrothal all wrong?
After all, what makes a great craftsman?
Exquisite attention to detail. Exceptional taste. Extraordinary appreciation or even worship of beauty. And masterful skill with his hands.
Consider for a moment what such fine tactile skill might incite in the goddess of not just love and beauty, but pleasure and carnal delights. I believe she found much to love and appreciate about Hephaestus. Their marriage magnifies them both.
Perhaps it is even Hephaestus’s intimate knowledge of Aphrodite’s body that informed his creation of Pandora, the first woman, whom he sculpted with his own hands.
Still, the marriage of these two flames is not an easy one. How could it be?
Aphrodite is the goddess of passion, and passion flares and shifts unpredictably. While love can be deep and gentle, it is also volatile and not something that can be contained.
Hephaestus is a blacksmith, whose job is to control the intensity of his heat, though it may indeed smolder and even boil lava-like. As wild, passionate, and promiscuous as Aphrodite may be, Hephaestus is in equal measure steady, predictable, reliable, and constant. The only god who works, he goes to his forge every day, day in and day out, like clockwork.
Such constancy is not the nature of love. She might find it unbearably boring. So she seeks a different kind of heat, one that burns with excitement, drama, and conflict. And who better to turn to than the god of conflict, war, and frenzied battle—Ares, the god of war.
Aphrodite and Ares found one another irresistible. Both carnal creatures. She, a passionate procreative force. He, a battle-lusty warrior who burns as hot and violently as she or her husband, and who also has little concern for keeping the peace.
The athletic swordsmanship of the war god was a delicious novelty after so much time spent enjoying the finely tuned fingers of the blacksmith. Love does not play by the rules of society. As I said, she is older and of a deeper order than such ideas as morals and laws.
When he learned of Aphrodite’s infidelity from the sun god, Helios, Hephaestus seared with rage. To add insult to injury, the adulterers were carrying out their affair in Hephaestus’s marital bed. But rather than erupt with rage, he did what blacksmiths do. He tempered his fire. And he did what craftsmen do, he channeled his emotion into his work, forging a bronze net of strands so impossibly fine that the net was invisible, even to gods.
One morning, before he left for his forge as he did every day, Hephaestus set his trap, draping the invisible net over his bed. Later, when the adulterers met for their daily dalliance, the net hoisted them into the air, securing them, still entangled, over the bed. Quite literally caught in the act.
In his desire to see them burn with shame, Hephaestus gathered the other gods to witness the lovers in their humiliation. But that is also a misunderstanding of love. For her, there was no cause for shame. She was being true to her nature.
Whether this is the end of their marriage is up to the storyteller, but I see love and work coming together again in the name of craftsmanship, endlessly repeating this cycle during the creative process.
It begins with passion and inspiration. But with any large undertaking, passion eventually fades. In the absence of his muse, the craftsman must fill inspiration’s void with dedication and perspiration.
Love grows bored with the daily grind and may seek out something new and exciting, a dangerous moment in the creative process. If an artist follows impulses to start an exciting new project instead of remaining committed to his work, the work dies. If this cycle repeats, a pile of abandoned work accumulates, as well as the emotional weight it carries. (Don’t ask me how I know.)
I’ve had this conversation with enough writers and artists to know this is a nearly universal experience. That’s the power of myth.
When I recognized these dynamics, it unlocked something for me. I recognized how I cheat on my big projects with smaller, easier ones. Or I abandon my work to pursue something more exciting, whether it’s a weekend escape, a creative workshop, or a video game marathon. Anything to escape the drudgery.
Such diversions may be creatively nourishing at first. A walk on the beach can inspire me to write or even help me solve a problem I’ve been struggling with. But when it becomes avoidance instead of a restorative practice, inner conflict develops. We know when we’re neglecting something important. The gods will not let us hide from ourselves for very long.