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Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan)
1. Also
Hephaistos.
The Greek
god of fire and craftsmanship, named Vulcan by the Romans.
Son of Zeus
and Hera — although some versions of his
story state that he had no father, with Hera bearing him alone in
retaliation for Zeus having brought forth Athena — Hephaestus was born
lame and ugly, and his mother Hera hated him on first sight.
In one
version of the myth, Hera herself, after seeing that he was born deformed,
casts him from Olympus. In
another version Zeus hurls him from heaven because he tried to defend Hera
when they were having a quarrel. Upon landing on Lemnos — after falling
for a full day — Hephaestus brakes his legs and becomes lame. In
any case, the sea-goddess Thetis then finds the crippled infant on the
beach, and takes him to her underwater grotto where she raises him with
the help of Eurynome, mother of the Graces.
To regain his rightful
place among the gods, Hephaestus used a clever ruse. He built a golden
throne and sent it to Hera as a gift. Upon sitting on it, Hera got imprisoned
by its golden arms, which promptly clamped her. To reclaim her freedom
Hera had to extract a promise from all the gods that Hephaestus would be
accepted into the Pantheon.
Hephaestus became the smith and
manufacturer of art, arms and armor for gods and heroes, using a volcano
as his forge. According to the
Iliad
he is married to Aglaia, one of the Graces, but in the
Odyssey
he is said to be married to Aphrodite.
2. Also known as the
"Ghost Planet" (Vulcan), celestial body that was thought to be
the closest planet to the Sun, circling it inside the orbit of Mercury,
but that it was later proven to do not exist.
The belief in the
existence of Vulcan sprung in the 17th century due to irregularities in
Mercury's motion that seemed to signal the existence a planet inside
Mercury's orbit. French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le
Verrier —
made world famous by the discovery of Neptune on the basis of his
calculations — was the one that believed so, and his faith in the planet
was never shaken, even though the only chance of glimpsing it would be
either to catch it in transit across the Sun's face, or identify it at the
time of a total solar eclipse.
In 1859 Lescarbault, a
French country doctor and amateur astronomer, announced that he had seen
the planet in transit; Le Verrier made haste to see him —
and accepted the story. Confirmation was lacking, but there was a revival
of interest in 1878, when two well-known observers —
Swift and Watson —
surveyed the neighborhood of the totally eclipsed Sun and reported finding
not one Vulcan, but several. Again, no proof or confirmation was
forwarded.
Vulcan does not exist,
and never did; the hunt for it was finally abandoned after the total solar
eclipse of 1929.
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Further info:
Hephaestus / Vulcan.
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