A Wounded God

In the Iliad, Homer calls Hephaistos the only god who “felt mortal pain” — from deformity and injury. Homer also shows us Hephaistos’ anger toward his rejecting mother, Hera, “that bitch.” This perhaps too is an instance of mortal pain.

Hera’s rage shows up in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (5th cent. BCE).

But my own boy, Hephaistos,
the one I myself gave birth to,
was weak among the gods,
and his foot was shriveled,
why it was a disgrace to me,
a shame in heaven,
so I took him in my own hands
and threw him and he fell
into the deep sea….

What can it possibly mean for a god to be deformed? There are many in myth. A peculiarity of the power of gods and goddesses: they cannot undo what has been done. They can only transform to a new condition. So a wounded god tends to stay that way, and the wound is archetypally meaningful. What, then, is the numinous power of wounds?