Vulcan, Roman god of the forge
Vulcan is the Roman god of fire, metalworking, and the natural power of volcanoes. His cult is among the oldest in Italic religion and reaches back linguistically into the Etruscan layer.
Unlike the later naturalized figure of Hephaestus, Vulcan was at first a god of consuming fire, worshipped above all outside the cities in order to keep his destructive aspect away from residential districts. Only the Hellenistic syncretization made him the cheerful god of the forge of the gods.
Table of Contents
Myth and Origin
The name Vulcan is disputed in terms of language history, but is usually linked to the Etruscan Velchans and to an Indo-European root meaning “to burn”. As early as the regal period a Volcanal, that is an altar site dedicated to Vulcan, was attested at the foot of the Capitol.
It was regarded as one of the oldest places of worship in Rome and served as a gathering point for political acts under the open sky. Plutarch mentions it in the “Romulus” Life as the place where Romulus and Tatius are said to have concluded one of their treaties.
In the older Italic layer Vulcan was responsible for dangerous fire, that is for conflagration, lightning, and volcanic eruption. For this reason many of his sanctuaries were built on the edge of the city or outside the city walls, in Rome for example on the Campus Martius.
Only the identification with the Greek Hephaestus brought the positive aspect of the forge strongly to the fore. The Etruscan model deity Velchans is attested on the bronze mirror of Piacenza and appears there with hammer and tongs.
Virgil in the “Aeneid” depicts Vulcan as the smith of the gods, who at the request of Venus fashions the weapons of Aeneas, among them the famous shield with the prophetic images of Roman history.
Ovid adopts this view in the “Metamorphoses” but expands it with numerous episodes that derive from the Hephaestus mythic cycle. Vulcan thus became literarily a double figure whose Italic depth and Hellenistic art narrative overlap. Augustan literature uses the episode on the shield of Aeneas as a programmatic text for the whole history of Rome.
In Italic popular religion Vulcan was also connected with Maia, an old vegetation goddess. The inscription finds from Praeneste and Tibur attest joint dedications that interweave the destructive power of fire with the thriving of the fields.
From this connection arose local festival calendars that in Republican Rome were partly taken over into the state calendar.
Symbols and Attributes
Hammer, anvil, and tongs are the unmistakable tools of Vulcan. In visual art he usually appears as a bearded smith in a loincloth, often with a deformed foot, a consequence of the Hephaestian tradition.
He stands or sits at a red-glowing anvil, beside him lie sword blades, helmets, or finished weapons. The idea of the limping smith is not original to the Italic tradition and was adopted only through the identification with Hephaestus.
The flame of fire is his element, yet it seldom appears as a stand-alone image. More often it is depicted in connection with the forge chimneys and the workshops beneath Etna.
Virgil already locates Vulcan’s workshop in the interior of the Sicilian volcano and describes the raging of the Cyclopes at the anvil in the “Aeneid”, Book VIII. This localization remained present in later literature and pictorial tradition and gave the word volcano its name.
Animals are assigned to him only to a limited extent. The red bull calf was regarded as the preferred sacrificial animal, since its color recalled fire.
In case of fire danger Roman authorities offered him animals that appeared unshorn or inconspicuous, in the hope of symbolically binding the consuming power of fire through another sacrificial animal.
At the Volcanalia fish were thrown into the fire as substitution offerings, which Pliny explains with the idea that the water creatures were meant to appease the fire through their alien nature.
Cult and Veneration
Vulcan’s main festival was the Volcanalia on 23 August, in a dry season prone to fire. On this day fish and small animals were thrown into the fire, which is probably to be understood as a substitution offering, in which the animals were consumed as representatives for house, harvest, and city.
Varro reports this practice, Pliny the Elder comments on it in the “Naturalis historia”. Comparable substitution rites are found in many Italic city cults and belong to the oldest surviving practices of Roman religion.
The old Volcanal lay at the Comitium and was regarded as sacred in a political as well as a religious sense. Here statues and inscriptions were set up, here Romulus himself is said to have sacrificed.
In Republican times the urban focus shifted to the Vulcan temple on the Campus Martius, at which the Volcanalia were publicly celebrated. Both places, however, remained connected by a procession in which the old Volcanal was honored as the origin of the cult.
Ostia, the harbor city of Rome, possessed a particularly significant Vulcan cult with a Pontifex Vulcani at its head, who was at the same time the chief priest of the whole city.
This position shows how important fire protection was for the timber construction near the harbor. The inscriptions there name Vulcan as protector against urban conflagration. In the fire of 64 AD under Nero his temple was invoked in the customary manner, without the catastrophe being averted.
Provincial sanctuaries range from Pompeii through the Po Plain to Gaul. In Vulci and Velia, cities with an Etruscan prehistory, the cult was continuous. In Lugdunum and at other Gallic places he was syncretized with local smith deities.
In Aquincum, Carnuntum, and other Danube sites inscriptions attest veneration by soldiers of the legionary forges. In Britain too, altars dedicated to him have been found near iron-smelting sites.
Important Myths
The most important Roman narrative about Vulcan is the forging of the weapons of Aeneas. Virgil in the “Aeneid”, Book VIII, describes how Venus asks the god of the forge to provide her son with the armor needed for the war in Italy.
Vulcan agrees, and the Cyclopes in his workshop beneath Etna fashion helmet, sword, lance, and above all the great shield, whose imagery anticipates the coming Roman history down to the Battle of Actium. This scene is programmatic for the Augustan self-interpretation, because it makes Rome’s future appear as already cast in divine forge work.
A second narrative is the episode of the marriage with Venus, which is taken up in the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid and in Virgil. Vulcan, the limping smith, is the husband of the most beautiful goddess, which is already an old motif of mythic contrast.
When Venus is caught in infidelity with Mars, Vulcan weaves an artful net of bronze and catches the pair in flagrante. The episode derives from the Hephaestian material but was understood in the Roman reading as a lesson on the difficulty of uniting art, force, and beauty.
A third narrative tells of Caeculus, the mythical founder of Praeneste. Servius reports the tradition that Caeculus was born from the womb of a maidservant after a spark of Vulcan’s fire had struck her.
He is said to have later become the founder of the city, and in Praeneste Vulcan was regarded as the ancestor. This narrative connects cosmic fire power with political foundation and shows the close interweaving of the god of the forge and the origin of the city.
A fourth narrative tells of the birth of Servius Tullius, the sixth Roman king. According to Pliny and Varro, Servius arose from a spark that rose from the household altar of a slave woman named Ocresia.
This narrative overlays the Caeculus tradition and legitimizes the special position of Servius as a reformer king who established the comitia centuriata.
Relationships in the Pantheon
Vulcan is in the Hellenistic image the son of Jupiter and Juno and the brother of Mars and Minerva. The connection with Mars goes deeper than merely familial, for both deities share a relation to war, albeit in different ways.
Mars embodies the events of battle, Vulcan the metallurgical preparation. With Minerva he shares the patronage over craft, yet while Minerva is responsible for textile and intellectual skill, Vulcan rules over fiery work with materials.
With Venus Vulcan was traditionally married, yet this connection was elaborated less in Roman literature than in Greek. In the older Italic layer Maia, an old early-summer goddess, is closely connected with Vulcan. The first of May was dedicated to her and to him, and joint sacrifices at the Volcanal can be reconstructed.
In the wider pantheon Vulcan stands close to the god Stata Mater, a goddess who was meant to make conflagration burn down, as well as to Tiberinus, whose water played a real role in firefighting.
These combinations make clear that Vulcan was less a single god than a junction in the relational network of Roman fire and protective deities.
Mulciber, an epithet of Vulcan with the meaning “the melting one”, appears in epic poetry above all in Lucan and Statius and designates the creative, skilled side of the god.
This duality as a destructive and creative god of fire is a continuity from archaic times, in which Vulcan was regarded equally as the maker of artful metal objects and as the cause of devastating fires.
A rarely mentioned connection exists with Stata Mater, an old protective goddess against fire, whose sanctuary likewise lay at the Comitium. The two formed an old pair of public fire protection. The task of Stata Mater passed in the imperial period partly to the Vigiles, who created their own cult topography.
Reception and Influence
In the Renaissance and Baroque, Vulcan remained a popular allegorical figure for craftsmanship and inventiveness. Velázquez painted the volcanic workshop beneath Etna with the Cyclopes, Rubens and Tintoretto took up the Vulcan-Mars-Venus episode. In Genoese and Florentine print graphics Vulcan was stylized as the patron figure of the smiths’ guilds.
With the industrialization of the 19th century the image of Vulcan gained a new currency. Steelworks, machine factories, and shipyards named themselves after the god.
The Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, the Vulcan-Maschinenbau AG, and numerous other companies tied in with the ancient imagery of the forge. In geology too the word volcano, derived from Vulcan, became the standard term for fire-spewing mountains.
In the popular culture of the 20th century Vulcan appears in comics, films, and games as a symbol of the forge, of fire, and of metalwork.
Of interest in the history of science is the short-lived Vulcan hypothesis in astronomy, in which a hypothetical planet within the orbit of Mercury was named after him, before the general theory of relativity rendered the assumption superfluous. The asteroid 4464 Vulcano also bears his name.
In the astronomy of the early modern period “Vulcan” was for a time the hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun, whose orbit Urbain Le Verrier postulated in 1859 to explain the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
Only Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915 explained the anomaly without the assumption of a further planet, and “Vulcan” disappeared from the model of the solar system. The episode lives on in the word vulcanoid, which in present-day planetary science designates a class of hypothetical small bodies in orbit near the Sun.
In geology “volcano” has, since the 17th century, designated all fire-spewing mountains. Athanasius Kircher described in his “Mundus Subterraneus” of 1665 the volcanoes as chimneys of an underground fire system, which he understood as the work of the Roman god.
This metaphor shaped early volcanology far into the 19th century and connected ancient mythology with the emerging natural science.
Religious-Studies Classification
Robert Schilling and Kurt Latte emphasize the Italic-Etruscan depth of the Vulcan cult. In the older layer Vulcan is less a smith than a god of conflagration and lightning, worshipped outside the city walls in order to keep the consuming power at a distance.
Only in the Hellenistic syncretism does he become the positively charged figure of art, in which inventiveness and craft merge.
Georges Dumézil assigns him to the third of the Indo-European functions, the productive, material world. From this perspective Vulcan is the god of economy and the forge alongside Quirinus, the god of the people.
Mary Beard and John North show that this typological assignment does not fully represent the urban cult of Rome, because the state-sustaining function at the Volcanal attests a multidimensionality that reaches beyond Dumézil’s scheme.
John Scheid highlights the significance of the Vulcan cult for the urban organization of safety. Fire protection was a central public task in a densely built timber city, and the Volcanal stood in this respect in an immediate function.
Jörg Rüpke works out how Vulcan serves as an example of a deity whose religious function was closely interwoven with the urban transformation of Rome. Frank Sear and Andreas Schmidt-Colinet have mapped the archaeological traces of the cult in Ostia and in the North African provinces.
Volcanal and Aedes Volcani
The oldest sanctuary of Vulcan was the Volcanal at the Comitium, an altar site lying under the open sky on the slope of the Capitol. Ancient topographers such as Festus report that the place was founded by Romulus himself at the wish of the Sabine rulers, which indicates the institutional depth of the cult.
The place lay elevated and in open air, because the fire with which Vulcan was connected was not permitted to be worshipped in enclosed spaces. A bronze sword-smith group and a statue of Romulus stood for a long time on the Volcanal, until they were relocated in the late Republic by construction works.
The state temple of the later period, the Aedes Volcani, lay on the Campus Martius, outside the city wall, because fire as a dangerous element was not supposed to come into the urban area.
This topographical exclusion is a characteristically Roman solution in dealing with ambivalent gods, comparable to the temples of Bellona and of Mars outside the pomerium. Vitruvius comments in “De architectura” (I, 7) that temples of fire-causing gods always had to lie outside the city, a norm that concerned Vulcan, Mulciber, and Stata Mater.
In Ostia a separate Vulcan sanctuary arose in the 1st century with an associated priestly office, whose holder, the Pontifex Volcani, had his own position in the city hierarchy.
The associated inscriptions, above all CIL XIV 4 and 32, document that the Vulcan sanctuary of Ostia was also responsible for fire protection and the city calendar.
The Iulii family of the Ostian notables provided the Vulcan priests over generations. In Pompeii wall paintings and lararia images attest the domestic Vulcan cult, which was practiced above all in workshops and forges.
Volcanalia and Fire Sacrifice
The main festival, the Volcanalia, was celebrated on 23 August, a day in late summer on which the Roman fields were at their driest and the danger of fire for stores and timber buildings was at its highest. Roman religion did not pass over this real danger but incorporated it into the ritual.
At the Vulcan sacrifice small fish from the Tiber were thrown into the fire, an archaic substitution rite which according to Plutarch’s “Quaestiones Romanae” 71 was to be understood as a representation of the human soul. The fish gave up the water for the fire and thus symbolically secured peace between the hostile elements.
The non-human sacrificial animals, above all the bull calf and the boar calf, were burned completely, in the form of a hecatomb, that is without the usual portion of the meal for the priests. This form of holocaust was rare in Roman ritual and reserved for Vulcan.
Macrobius describes in the “Saturnalia” (I, 12, 18) that the Praefectus urbi at the Vulcan festival had blazing bowls dipped into the water over the bed of the Tiber by night, a light-magic act intended to banish the dangerous element under water.
In private the festival was celebrated in merchant houses with the extinguishing of all workshop fires and their solemn rekindling. This practice is documented epigraphically in Pompeii and Herculaneum.
One piece of evidence is the Tabula Pompeiana 19, which dates an apprenticeship contract for a smith’s apprentice to 22 August, that is one day before the Volcanalia, so that the taking up of the work could begin on the festival day.
The Vulcan festivals were adopted in the late imperial period beyond Italy in Gaul and Africa, where local smith gods were identified with Vulcan.
Apotropaic Rites and Fire Protection
The majority of Roman fire-protection rites were assigned to Vulcan. Servius Tullius is said, according to Cicero, to have established the first urban fire-protection college, the familia publica vigilum, whose protective god was Vulcan.
This troop was reorganized in the Augustan reform of the vigiles under Caesar Augustus in 6 AD; the Cohortes vigilum received their own Vulcan sanctuaries in their barrack buildings. The inscription CIL VI 1057 attests an altar in the statio of the first cohort with the formula Volcano genio cohortis.
Apotropaic practices in the private household included the extinguishing of the hearth fire on the night before the Volcanalia, the scattering of salt on the hearth, and the attaching of small bronze plates with a depiction of Vulcan to the doors of workshops.
Pliny the Elder reports in the “Naturalis historia” (VII, 50) that certain stone plates were considered effective for fire protection if they were buried under the threshold at the Vulcan festival. This magical component stands in a long tradition of Italic household religion.
In late antiquity St. Laurentius became the Christian patron of fire protection, whose day of martyrdom, 10 August, lay in immediate proximity to the Volcanalia.
This shift of religious fire protection from Vulcan to Laurentius has been analyzed by Robert Markus and Robin Lane Fox as an example of Christian substitution theology. The cultic function remained the same, only the divine addressee changed.
Sources and Further Reading
Ancient sources: Virgil “Aeneid”, Ovid “Metamorphoses” and “Fasti”, Livy “Ab urbe condita”, Varro “De lingua latina”, Pliny “Naturalis historia”, Servius commentary, Macrobius “Saturnalia”, Plutarch “Romulus”, Dionysius of Halicarnassus “Roman Antiquities”.
Research literature: Robert Schilling, “Rites, cultes, dieux de Rome”, Paris 1979. Kurt Latte, “Römische Religionsgeschichte”, Munich 1960. Georges Dumézil, “La religion romaine archaïque”, Paris 1966. Mary Beard, John North, Simon Price, “Religions of Rome”, Cambridge 1998. John Scheid, “An Introduction to Roman Religion”, Edinburgh 2003. Jörg Rüpke, “Die Religion der Römer”, Munich 2001.
