Vulcan Tattoo Meaning

Craft, the forge, the maker, and the god whose greatness was in what he made.

Vulcan is the divine smith and master of fire — the Roman god of the forge whose furnace burns beneath the volcano, who forged the thunderbolts of Jupiter and the armor of heroes, the lame, soot-stained maker cast out from the beautiful Olympian court yet indispensable to it, the god whose greatness lay entirely in what he made. To carry Vulcan is to carry craft, the forge, the maker, and the god whose greatness was in what he made — the divine craftsman who masters both destroying and creating fire, the necessary outsider whose worth is in his work.

Vulcan (Volcanus) is the Roman god of fire and the forge, and he governs fire in both its faces. He rules the destructive fire — the volcanoes that bear his very name (from 'Vulcan' comes 'volcano') — and the productive fire, the controlled blaze of the smith's furnace that makes metal soft and workable. His great forge is said to lie beneath Mount Etna, the volcano in Sicily, where his assistants, the one-eyed Cyclopes, help him work the metal, the mountain's fire and smoke the sign of his labor below.

From that forge came the greatest works of the divine world. Vulcan made Jupiter's thunderbolts — the weapons of the king of the gods himself; he made Neptune's trident; and he forged the armor of every significant hero, including the famous armor of Achilles. Nearly every great weapon and divine artifact in mythology came from his hands. Yet there is a hard irony at the heart of Vulcan: the god of making, the maker of all these glories, was himself physically imperfect — lame — and his imperfection excluded him from the beauty-obsessed Olympian court, where the gods prized perfect form. The maker of the gods' treasures was not at home among the gods. The Roman Vulcan is the smith-god of the forge beneath the mountain, maker of the thunderbolts and the heroes' armor. The Roman Vulcan is the forge beneath the mountain — the Roman god of fire and the forge, governing both destructive fire (volcanoes bear his name) and productive fire (the smith's furnace), his forge beneath Mount Etna in Sicily where his assistants the Cyclopes help him work; he made Jupiter's thunderbolts, Neptune's trident, and the armor of every significant hero — the god of making whose physical imperfection (his lameness) excluded him from the beauty-obsessed Olympian court, the maker of the gods' treasures who was not at home among the gods.

Volcanoes are named for Vulcan — the Roman identification of the god with volcanic fire made his name the common term for the geological phenomenon. Mount Etna in Sicily was his primary forge in Roman mythology — the island of Vulcano in the Aeolian Islands (whose name also derives directly from the god) was his other attributed forge. The Hephaestus-Aphrodite marriage is one of the great comic mismatches in Greek mythology — the ugliest god married to the most beautiful goddess; when Ares and Aphrodite's affair was discovered by Helios and reported to Hephaestus, he made a net of invisible bronze chains and trapped them in flagrante, then invited all the gods to witness the humiliation. The gods laughed. Poseidon eventually negotiated the release. The armor of Achilles — made by Hephaestus at Thetis's request after Patroclus's death — is described in the most extended descriptive passage in the Iliad (the Shield of Achilles, Book XVIII), in which the god essentially makes a model of the entire world on the shield's surface.

Vulcan across cultures

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