Hephaestus was a builder and architect, goldsmith and gunsmith, blacksmith and inventor of mechanical objects. He forged the weapons of Heracles and Achilles, two great heroes. His cult has origins in Lemnos, where the ancient inhabitants believed that the volcanic fires coming out of the mountain Moschilo came from the god’s underground forge.
Hephaestus is the god who presides over the endogenic forces of nature that appear in the Aeolian Islands and to whom the nearby island of Hiera was sacred, present-day Vulcano, dominated by the crater that was then active and that made it uninhabitable, and Stromboli. It is clear that a volcanic deity similar to Hephaestus had always been venerated in the Aeolian Islands since the first Greek settlement and that there was a temple dedicated to him on the Acropolis. On the islands the god could reveal himself in all his destructive power during the paroxysms of the two active volcanoes, but he also presented himself as a wholesome deity, due to the therapeutic virtues of the hot springs and fumarolic hot areas closely connected with these endogenic forces.
<img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-17919" src="https://www.smarteducationunescosicilia.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/13-raffigurazione-di-un-vulcano-1-1024×683.jpg" alt="Raffigurazione di un vulcano" width="1024" height="683" /
