archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Hephaestus (Bolen)

The best work in the house, made in the room nobody visits.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Hephaestus, one of the eight god patterns of Gods in Everyman (1989) and the second of her two rejected sons: the intense, introverted maker whose feeling goes into his work, named after the lame smith of the Greek gods.

Bolen’s Hephaestus is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of fire, metalwork and craft. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the second of the rejected sons, with Ares, and her chapter title gives it three roles: craftsman, inventor and loner. The man in whom Hephaestus predominates, as she describes him, is intense and introverted, more expressive with his hands than with words, and absorbed in making things that are useful and beautiful; for him work is not a job or a source of status but the place where he is most alive. The god personifies, in her words, “a deep human urge to make things”. The difficulties she attaches come from the wound in the myth: the rejected child may become “an emotional cripple, a smoldering volcano, or a highly creative productive man”, and much depends on whether his feeling finds its way into the work. Women matter greatly to him and, in her account, can make or break him.

Go deeper

At the threshold

There the lame architect the goddess found,Obscure in smoke, his forges flaming round,While bathed in sweat from fire to fire he flew;And puffing loud, the roaring billows blew.That day no common task his labour claim’d:Full twenty tripods for his hall he framed,That placed on living wheels of massy gold,(Wondrous to tell,) instinct with spirit roll’dFrom place to place, around the bless’d abodesSelf-moved, obedient to the beck of gods:

Public domain · Homer, Iliad, Book XVIII (Thetis at the forge of Vulcan), trans. Alexander Pope (1720)

Thetis finds the lame smith among his forges and his self-moving tripods, a god absorbed in the work and the work absorbed in him.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    The forge of Hephaestus

    Homer, Iliad XVIII, -750

    Thetis finds him among his bellows and self-moving tripods and asks for the arms of Achilles.

  2. Jung’s example

    The god cast down

    Homer, Iliad I and XVIII, -750

    Cast from heaven for taking his mother’s side, and in another telling by her for his lameness, he falls to Lemnos.

  3. Jung’s example

    The net

    Homer, Odyssey VIII, -700

    The craftsman’s revenge on a faithless wife is an invisible net, perfect in its making.

  4. Jung’s example

    Hymn to Hephaestus

    Homeric Hymn 20 (Evelyn-White, 1914), -600

    A short hymn that credits him and Athene with teaching people the crafts that took them out of the caves.

  5. a later reading

    Mulciber

    Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, 1667

    A late reading: the smith of heaven recast as the builder of Pandaemonium, cast down for good.

The wider sky

Where the Hephaestus (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 10 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Nor was his name unheard or unador'dIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen call'd him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heav'n, they fabl'd, thrown by angry JoveSheer o're the Chrystal Battlements: from MornTo Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,A Summers day; and with the setting SunDropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,On Lemnos th' Aegaean Ile: thus they relate,Erring; for he with this rebellious routFell long before; nor aught avail'd him nowTo have built in Heav'n high Towrs; nor did he scapeBy all his Engins, but was headlong sentWith his industrious crew to build in hell.

Public domain · Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I (Mulciber) (1667)

Milton retells the fall of Mulciber from heaven to Lemnos only to say that the true fall was longer and his engines could not save him, a craftsman cast out.

The forge is where he is whole, the hall is where he limps.

He makes what the gods use, and is seldom asked to dinner.

The net he builds is flawless, and no one thanks him for it.

The deep layer · what was written

Hephaestus (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Hephaestus is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of fire, metalwork and craft. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the second of the rejected sons, with Ares, and her chapter title gives it three roles: craftsman, inventor and loner. The man in whom Hephaestus predominates, as she describes him, is intense and introverted, more expressive with his hands than with words, and absorbed in making things that are useful and beautiful; for him work is not a job or a source of status but the place where he is most alive. The god personifies, in her words, “a deep human urge to make things”. The difficulties she attaches come from the wound in the myth: the rejected child may become “an emotional cripple, a smoldering volcano, or a highly creative productive man”, and much depends on whether his feeling finds its way into the work. Women matter greatly to him and, in her account, can make or break him.

The grouping matters. Bolen sorts Zeus’s sons by his attitude to them, and Ares and Hephaestus are the two he rejected, sons who live by physical action rather than mind or words. Two exclusions apply. This is not Hephaestus the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Hera, his mother, and Aphrodite, his wife.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 9 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), in part III, “The Generation of the Sons”. The chapter’s epigraph comes from Murray Stein’s essay “Hephaistos: A Pattern of Introversion”, collected in James Hillman’s anthology Facing the Gods (1980), and Stein’s title states the reading Bolen develops. The chapter follows the book’s standing order, the god, the archetype, the man, his relationships, his difficulties and ways to grow; Bolen notes that the god had no children and that many Hephaestus men would rather not have them (p. 238). Her sources for the chapter include her own earlier writing on Aphrodite and Hephaestus. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths are public domain, and they disagree about who rejected him. Hesiod says Hera bore him alone, without Zeus, in anger at her husband (Theogony 927–929). In the first book of the Iliad Hephaestus himself tells how Zeus threw him out:

Once before when I was trying to help you, he caught me by the foot and flung me from the heavenly threshold. All day long from morn till eve, was I falling, till at sunset I came to ground in the island of Lemnos. — Homer, Iliad (c. 750 BCE), 1.590–593, trans. S. Butler (1898)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

In book 18 he gives the other version, that his mother cast him out because he was lame, and that the sea goddesses Thetis and Eurynome took him in and he worked for them for nine years in their cave (18.394–405). The Odyssey has his revenge on Aphrodite and Ares, an invisible net that catches the lovers (8.266–366), and the short Homeric hymn to Hephaestus praises him, with Athena, for teaching people the crafts that took them out of caves (Hymn 20). Bolen names Hera as his sole parent, while Shepherd Bliss’s 1989 summary of her chapter has him rejected by both parents for his deformity; the poems tell two separate stories, one about each.

The debate

The roster places Bolen’s Hephaestus nearest the shadow, on the strength of the rejected craftsman. The resemblance is to a family drama, not to Jung’s concept. Jung’s shadow is the part of a person’s own character that the ego refuses to see and meets projected in others; Hephaestus is rejected by his parents, not by himself, and Bolen’s pattern is a whole temperament with its own gifts, not a disowned remainder. The better genealogy is Jung’s introversion, which Stein’s title names, and the archetypal psychology of Hillman’s circle, in which each god is a style of consciousness. The lame god has also invited comparison with the wounded healer, the figure whose injury is the source of his skill; Robert Bly (1990) made a version of the point inside the men’s movement, recalling that Hephaestus limped and that some peoples were said to lame their smiths to keep them from leaving (p. 208).

The general criticism applies. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) held that Bolen identifies gods with personality types, whereas “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17). David Tacey (1997) objected that she treats archetypes as standing outside time, when the figures are heavily conditioned by culture (p. 20); a craftsman type defined against an executive culture is a case in point. Bliss summarised the chapter without objection in his review for Yoga Journal, while Publishers Weekly (1989) dismissed the system as a whole as “at least as simplistic as sun-sign astrology”.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Hephaestus as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Research on introversion, creativity and vocational interest in practical and artistic work describes neighbouring traits but makes no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the smith at his forge making armour for heroes, the god thrown from Olympus, and the deceived husband of Aphrodite. Popular discussion of her types has named fictional geniuses with damaged bodies, solitary artists and overlooked elder sons as Hephaestus men, as in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the rejected sons. Apart from Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

  • Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 2 and 9, p. 238; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
  • Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
  • Hesiod, Theogony 927–929; Homeric Hymn 20, to Hephaestus. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Homer, Iliad 1.586–594, 18.394–405 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
  • Homer, Odyssey 8.266–366 (S. Butler, Trans., 1900). Project Gutenberg #1727.
  • Stein, M. Hephaistos: a pattern of introversion. In J. Hillman (Ed.), Facing the Gods (1980). Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-312-5.
  • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. CW 6. Definitions, “Introversion”.
  • Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. P. 208.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
  • Tacey, D. (1997). Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14241-0. Chapter 1, “Archetypes, gods, men and women”, p. 20.
  • Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
  • [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
  • Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0238, “Gods in Everyman: The Rejected Son God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0238-gods-in-everyman-the-rejected-son-god-archetypes/

Leaving

What the hammer? what the chain?In what furnace was thy brain?What the anvil? what dread graspDare its deadly terrors clasp?When the stars threw down their spears,And watered heaven with their tears,Did He smile His work to see?Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Public domain · Blake, The Tyger (from Songs of Experience) (1794)

Blake’s questions about hammer, chain, furnace and anvil put a smith behind the terrible creation, with awe at the making and unease at what is made.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey◐ ShadowThe face we never show to the world.Return to the void