Vulcan (mythology)

• 1. The God Outside The Walls

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  Vulcan was the only major Roman god whose worshippers wanted his cult kept at a distance. The Etruscan haruspices, the diviners who read divine will, held that any temple of Vulcan should sit outside the city. His oldest shrine in Rome, the Vulcanal, may originally have stood on or beyond the city limits before Rome expanded to swallow the Capitoline Hill. This is a strange demand to make of a god, and it points to what made Vulcan unlike the others. He was the god of fire, but not only the friendly fire of the hearth and the forge. He was also the fire that destroys. Romans feared him as much as they courted him. Why would a city build a god a home and then ask him to live beyond the gate? Why throw live fish into bonfires in his honour? And how did a Roman deity tied to volcanoes and burning granaries become, in another telling, an ugly child hurled off a mountain by his own father? The answers run through festivals, foundation legends, and a sanctuary that may once have been a place to burn the dead.

• 2. Fire That Feeds And Fire That Burns

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  The Roman concept of Vulcan held two opposed powers in one god: fire that destroys and fire that makes things grow. In his destructive aspect he was worshipped to avert danger from harvested wheat, which is why his cult sat outside the city's bounds. That same destructive power was considered useful if aimed at enemies, and the arms of defeated foes were dedicated to him. Dumezil connected this defensive fire to the third of the three Vedic sacrificial fires, the protective fire set on the southern boundary of a sacred space to guard against evil. Since Rome itself was seen as a magnified temple, that defensive fire belonged to the temple of Vulcan, while the hearth fire belonged to Vesta. The fertilizing power of Vulcan ran through Roman legend as fatherhood. He was named as father of Caeculus, founder of Praeneste, of Cacus, and of the Roman king Servius Tullius. In each case the god's power was tied to the fire of the house hearth. Caeculus' mother was made pregnant by a spark that fell on her womb from the hearth. The mother of Servius Tullius, Ocresia, was impregnated by a male organ that appeared in the ashes of a sacrificial altar at the order of Tanaquil, the wife of Tarquinius Priscus. The child's divinity was known when flames wrapped his head and left him unharmed.

• 3. The Festivals Of August

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  On the 23rd of August each year, when summer heat put crops and granaries most at risk of catching fire, Rome held the Vulcanalia. Bonfires were lit in the god's honour, and live fish or small animals were thrown into them as a sacrifice, consumed in place of humans. The day belonged to a tight cycle of four late August festivities: the Consualia on the 21st, the Vulcanalia on the 23rd, the Opiconsivia on the 25th, and the Vulturnalia on the 27th. These August rites mirrored four festivals in the second half of July. Where July dealt with untamed nature and waters in a time of deficiency, August was devoted to the fruits of human effort, the stored grain and its link to society, now threatened by the excessive strength of fire and wind made worse by dryness. People observed the day in small ways. They hung clothes and fabrics out under the sun, a habit that may reflect a link between Vulcan and the divinized Sun. They also began work by the light of a candle, perhaps to coax a beneficial use of fire from the god. The Vulcanalia was not Vulcan's only sacred date. The 23rd of May, the second of the two annual Tubilustria for purifying trumpets, was sacred to him as well. After the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, Vulcan was among the gods placated, and the emperor Domitian built him a new altar on the Quirinal Hill.

• 4. A Sanctuary On The Forum

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  The Volcanal stood at the foot of the Capitolium, in the northwestern corner of the Roman Forum, an open-air space holding an area dedicated to the god and a perennial fire. Roman tradition credited its dedication to Romulus, who placed there a bronze quadriga, a war trophy taken from the Fidenates. Plutarch told it differently, saying the war was against Cameria, sixteen years after Rome's founding, and that Romulus also dedicated a statue of himself crowned by Victory, with an inscription in Greek listing his successes. Romulus was said to have planted a sacred lotus tree in the sanctuary, still living in the time of Pliny the Elder and reputed to be as old as the city. The ground itself carried a darker history. The Volcanal was perhaps used as a cremation site, fitting the early use of the Forum as a place of burial. A statue of Horatius Cocles was moved here after lightning struck it in the Comitium. When summoned haruspices, out of hatred for the Romans, fraudulently had it placed where sunlight never reached, the deception was uncovered and they were executed. At the start of the 20th century, behind the Arch of Septimius Severus, excavators found old tufaceous foundations and a rocky platform 3.95 meters long and 2.80 meters wide, covered with concrete and painted red, marked with narrow channels and pocked with hollows once read as graves.

• 5. The Greek Inheritance

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  A fragment of a Greek pot showing Hephaestus, found at the Volcanal, has been dated to the 6th century BC. That single shard suggests the Romans had already matched their fire god to the Greek smith long before the date the pot was made. Through this identification with Hephaestus, Vulcan became the maker of art, arms, iron, jewelry, and armor for gods and heroes, including the lightning bolts of Jupiter. The Greek myths gave him a family and a wound. He was the son of Jupiter and Juno, and the husband of Maia and of Aphrodite, called Venus. His smithy was said to lie beneath Mount Etna in Sicily. The most human of his stories is a story of rejection. Baby Vulcan was small and ugly with a red, bawling face, and when he sided with his mother in a quarrel, his father Jupiter hurled him from the top of Mount Olympus. He fell for a day and a night, landed in the volcano Etna, broke a leg that never healed, and sank to the depths of the ocean. There the sea-nymph Thetis found him and raised him in her underwater grotto, where he played with dolphins and kept pearls for toys.

• 6. The Boy Who Found Fire

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  Late in his childhood Vulcan found the remains of a fisherman's fire on the beach and became fascinated by a single coal, still red-hot and glowing. He shut it in a clamshell, carried it back to the grotto, and made his own fire. On the first day he stared at it for hours. On the second day he learned that bellows made it hotter, and that certain stones then sweated iron, silver, or gold. On the third day he beat the cooled metal into bracelets, chains, swords, and shields. He made knives and spoons for Thetis, a silver chariot drawn by seahorses for himself, and slave-girls of gold to do his bidding. His talent betrayed his hiding place. Thetis wore a necklace of silver and sapphires that Vulcan had made to a dinner on Mount Olympus, and when Juno admired it and asked where to find one, Thetis grew flustered, and the queen of the gods guessed the truth. Vulcan refused Juno's demand to come home, but sent her a chair of silver and gold inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The moment she sat, hidden springs locked metal bands around her. Jupiter ended the standoff by promising Vulcan a wife, Venus the goddess of love and beauty, if he would free his mother. He agreed. It was said that when Venus was unfaithful, Vulcan beat the red-hot metal so hard that sparks and smoke rose from the mountain, and Etna erupted.

• 7. Names Across The Ancient World

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  The origin of the name Vulcan is unclear, and scholars have chased it across half the ancient world. Roman tradition linked it to Latin words for lightning, fulgur and fulmen, and Walter William Skeat's etymological dictionary supported a meaning of lustre. Others looked east and north. Meid and Vasily Abaev pointed to the Ossetic smith of the Nart saga, Kurd-Ala-Wargon, and proposed an original Indo-European smith god named wlkanos, a reading Dumezil rejected as unacceptable. Christian-Joseph Guyonvarc'h proposed the Irish name Olcan. Martin L. West suggested a fire god named Volca, cognate with the Sanskrit ulka, meaning flame or meteor or firebrand. The most developed theory belongs to Gerard Capdeville, who traced Vulcan back to the Cretan god Velchanos, a young master of fire and companion of the Great Goddess. A gloss by Hesychius states that Velchanos is Zeus among the Cretans. He was honoured in a festival called the Velchania and a month named for him, kept his first god in a cavern of Mount Ida, and was worshipped also in Cyprus. Capdeville saw his traits surviving in Latium only in Vulcan's sons Cacus, Caeculus, and Servius Tullius. At Praeneste the uncles of Caeculus were called the Digiti, a name linking them to the Cretan Dactyli.

• 8. Beyond Rome And After

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  At Ostia the cult of Vulcan was the most important in the town, and his priest carried the title pontifex Vulcani et aedium sacrarum. This priest held jurisdiction over every sacred building in town, could grant or refuse permission to raise new statues to Eastern gods, and was chosen for life. His position was the equivalent of the pontifex maximus in Rome and the highest administrative office in Ostia, served by subordinate praetores and aediles. A fragmentary inscription found at ancient Hippo Regius makes it possible that the writer Suetonius once held this office. Elsewhere the god clung to places where the earth itself burned. At Pozzuoli, Strabo recorded a plain of sulphurous vapour outlets that the Greeks called the agora of Hephaistos, the Forum Vulcani, known today as Solfatara. Near Modena, Pliny the Elder reported fire coming from the ground on fixed days devoted to Vulcan. The god outlasted antiquity in unexpected forms. He became the patron of Sheffield, the English steel-making city, with his statue on the Town Hall, and the largest cast iron statue in the world stands in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2013 the name Vulcan won a popular vote to name a newly found moon of Pluto, but the International Astronomical Union chose otherwise, settling on Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.