Grasping Materialities: Hephaestus and Ogun

UVA Rotunda Planetarium

For some reason, the theme of the past two weeks in my life has been space and time, particularly the latter, so much so that it is perhaps better to name the theme “time and bodies”. I have a book review to write to that end, but for now, there are other thoughts I want to put here. This is in conversation with Edward Butler’s essay on Hephaestus and Antonio Vargas’ comments on the essay, with a connection to Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s essay on Ogun

The first thing on my mind concerns the following statement Edward makes:

“Smoothness, Proclus explains, signifies the receptivity of the highest points, the virtual continuity of the extremes within the cosmos, the cosmic sublime, with its ideality, its intellective exterior. It is inseparable, therefore, from the relativity of extreme distance, the ‘smoothness’ that results from the blurring of infinitesimal components into a continuum, as when the craggy mountain, from an extreme distance, appears smooth.”[1]

It is this smoothness that is inherent to distance that defines the substance of “Aither”, as Edward explains not too long after this:

“Matter is no given substance, but instead what recedes constantly before our attempt to determine the whatness of some substance, and of any substance in general. In being thus constitutively out of our reach, distanced from us by a gap we cannot bridge, because the bridge will be some form, and hence not matter after all, matter resembles the distance of the ideal, as expressed cosmologically in the distance from us of the ‘sphere’ of the primum mobile, the sphere of the ‘fixed’ stars which are fixed purely by our distance from them, a relativity it was not beyond the ancients to grasp, however incomprehensible it was to medieval Christians. Aithēr, the substance of this furthest extremity, is nothing that we could possess, nothing that could be perceived except from afar. And yet it has its phenomenological properties, which bring us to the second aspect of the shape we are trying to discern, the shape of a certain Hephaestean theophany, which is smoothness. With distance comes smoothness, at once an absence of detail, of phenomenal or apparent properties and also a property in itself, a primary property of distance, and hence of eminence from a given perspective.”[2]

What caught my eye is that this particular structure of the world given in appearance is one where the eye is relatively unaided. In general, as Antonio says, Platonic cosmology “is not the investigation of this thing here, but of the necessary shape of appearance itself”[3], and that this shape says something about the nature of Presence itself (or Being itself):

“The perfectly circular shape of the horizon is not caused by any body bending the sky (as an atomist might caricature it), but is instead a reflection of the fact that presence itself is “like a sphere,” as Parmenides puts it.”[4]

However, this necessary “shape of appearance” being defined in terms of sight means that having radically different sight gives a radically different content of appearance even if the “spherical shape” of appearance remains the same. This is perhaps one way to consciously bridge the phenomenology behind the Timaeus cosmology and our modern empirical discovery of a spatially vast universe. Indeed, as Edward as pointed out in his book “The Way of Being”, it was not impossible for the ancient Mediterranean thinkers to imagine the possibility of other worlds and other Suns[5], but what is new for us is that we can now see these distant suns, and presumably we might eventually also see their planets directly. This is possible because of the telescope, that extension of our eye towards the very far, just as the microscope is an extension of our eye toward the very small. What has happened is that, quite as the traditionalists dreaded, we have extended our bodies; we have taken on new and more impressive embodiments. We are already “transhuman”, having augmented our very bodily relation to the world. There is a sort of hand-in-hand relation between our continued expansion of embodiment and our understanding of the world in terms of space. Antonio quoted something from John Crowley’s Little, Big that I cannot help but reproduce here:

“the difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space.

To look at the Ancient concept through the spectacles of the New concept is to see absurdity: seas that never were, worlds claimed to have fallen to pieces and been created newly, a congeries of unlocatable Trees, Islands, Mountains and Maelstroms. But the Ancients were not fools with a poor sense of direction; it was only not Orbis Terrae that they were looking at.

When they spoke of the four corners of the earth, they meant of course no four physical places; they meant four repeated situations of the world, equidistant in time from one another: they meant the solstices and the equinoxes. When they spoke of seven spheres, they did not mean (until Ptolemy foolishly tried to take their portrait) seven spheres in space; they meant those circles described in Time by the motions of the stars: Time, that roomy seven-storey mountain where Dante's sinners wait for Eternity. When Plato tells of a river girdling the earth, which is somewhere (so the New concept would have it) up in the air and somewhere also in the middle of the earth, he means by that river the same river Heraclitus could never step in twice. Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body, and how operate on it? Not by the means we perceive extension, relation, color, form, the qualities of Space. Not by measurement and exploration. No: but by the means we perceive duration and repetition and change: by Memory.”[6]

But how should we understand this transition between the world according to memory and the world according to extension? Perhaps we should be more specific. How do we understand the transition from the world according to which space what defined by time and the world according to which time is defined by space? Perhaps our answer is embodiment, and particularly embodiment considered as a kind of tool or machine. Here is Edward:

“In Homer, however, there is a vision of purely technological possibility which is more optimistic and empowering, centering on Hephaestus’ creation of automata, self-moving machines, which in the interpretation of Platonists like Proclus are simply self-moving beings as such, considered purely in their materiality. The mechanical automata of Hephaestus in the Iliad, or the self-guided ships of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, may thus be taken as the symbols of self-moving biological organisms considered as machines, in very much the manner than modern science does. These automata therefore provide theophanic ground in principle for this reduction, for considering living beings as if they were machines.”[7]

And here is Antonio:

“Edward discusses the status and place of technê in Greek thought. It reminds me of something I noted in my commentary on Proposition 58 of Proclus’ Elements of Theology. There I wrote that one speculative expansion of Proclus’ schema would be to understand individual animals as primarily organic (i.e. tool-bearing) beings, and thus as primary producers of instruments — i.e. artifacts. After all, an individual soul without a body has no use for tools. Thus, technology — not the human — might lie at the center of the system, as what receives influx from all higher causes, from the individual animal all the way to the divine unities (Proclo: Os Elementos da Teologia, Odysseus, 2024, p. 479–480).”[8]

The first instrument of the individual animal is its own body. But this is but one piece in a much wider logic, a logic where the lower hypostases can be “instruments” for the expression of the will of higher ones. Basically, in Proclus’ system, a given “subsistence” can be the instrument of a higher agent. A Divine Soul is an instrument of a Nous/Intellect, which is an instrument of a God/Henad. A Daimon is a Soul that is an instrument of a Nous; that is, the ultimate agent for a Daimon is its Nous. We transmigrating souls have our bodies as instruments, but we do not have direct access to Nous for Proclus[9]. This logic brings up an interesting possibility: If we are gaining further instruments for the expression of our wills in the world, are we not also enabling (and discovering) a kind of procession of a new subsistence? Perhaps this is how we should understand Edward’s claim that “Machine life is the supreme technological accomplishment.”[10] In producing machine life, we produce a new world, or rather, a new stratum of the world, a stratum we cannot separate from our historical enmeshment. Somehow, the procession of being attains a historical reflection, while also being inseparable from the recognition of historical as such and the rise of a “historical consciousness”. This is an interesting procession insofar as our procession is marked by an entanglement with its products. We are the demiurge of our body by being entangled with it, and so we are the demiurge of machine life by being entangled with it. The world formed by being recognized (in the sense of being “known” as well as being “reknown” as in re-cognized) is not one where the highest formal principle is soul, but one where the highest formal principle is a kind of body.

To understand this, let us go back to the world of time and memory, using Proclus as an example. For Proclus the highest body is Place, and the body of the world is “Place itself”[11]. The astrological context of this kind of philosophy comes out in the way this concept is meant to explain the movement of other bodies by the agency of their souls, particularly in transmigration. That is, “Place” should be seen as temporally intelligible, not in the sense of an abstract temporality of counting seconds, but in the sense that joins John Crowley’s exposition to Plato’s Timaeus: temporality in terms of lived lives, the memory of lived lives, the cycles of living being, including the seasons and the astral signs. One’s “place” is the principle of one’s life. You still see it when people are said to be “put in their place”, the echoes of which recalls the notion of duty, or living in a divinely ordained world where everyone (ideally) has their role, a role that does not have to be a rigid determinism of actions, but something like a song with many harmonious voices, or a cohesive narrative with many characters weaving it.

This is not the world of machine life, where place loses that value for the most part. Here, even space and time themselves become a pliable material, as we see in the theory of relativity, instead of the “luminous” ensouled body it is under the higher psychic and noetic principle. Here, bodies “bend the sky”, not to produce the horizon, but to produce further bodies. Much like our incarnation in a world of memory and narrative already made, one which we change ever so slightly by our mere appearance, we have also incarnated machines, and ourselves as machines, in a world already made, that we change by our very appearance. If there anything Wolfgang Smith got right, despite his regrettable reactionary stance on Young Earth Creationism, it is that we have “discovered” the modern physical. Given that this is the subsistence directly below the World described by the Timaeus, should we then say that we have found the formal structure that the Timean Demiurge could not assimilate, his “visible chaotic motion”? As Edward says, “Matter” is a relative determination, what escapes our formalization. The modern “physical” escapes, at least in part, the Astrological World; therefore, I can conclude, it is the probable referent of the Demiurge’s “material”. It is “chaos” because it gives no “meaning” in the sense that the Prime Demiurge gives, it is not ordered according to the logic of narrative, which is the mode by which the World Soul thinks[12], and as Edward says, is the demiurgic mode Zeus operates in. What’s more, given that the lowest processions have their substrate provided by the highest subsistences (Prop. 64), we can say there is a higher subsistence that explains the “materiality” of this “physical”. In Proclus, this is quite simply the Intelligible Intellective, as both Matthew Vanderkwaak[13] and Edward[14] have said. It is also not an accident that the Gods of the Intelligible-Intellective are those associated with the same objects modern physics studies: Gaia/Earth, Ouranos/Sky, etc. Left to themselves in their brute physicality, they offer no narrative meaning, no horizon for human flourishing. But they have an intelligibility of their own, and in its materiality, it is perhaps assured something at least psyche-like for its own independent intelligibility. This is provided, for instance, by the notion in relativity physics of the “World-Line”.

Although Hephaestus is the God most associated with the issues of technology we have been looking at throughout this post, there is another side of this technological theophany that we can explore, one that might be hard to explore because the Gods of War and Technological progress are two Gods in Greek religion. In the Yoruba Pantheon on the other hand, these are one and the same God, and there is a way Babalawo describe the Western technological juggernaut that is interesting to compare:

“I initially began to think of applying Yoruba indigenous hemeneutics to conceptualize contemporary American society as an Age of Ogun when translating a verse from the vast oral corpus called Ifa that is chanted by babalawo (Yoruba diviners and priests of the oriṣa Ọrunmila) in the process of divination. In one verse of Eji Ogbe, the most senior and prominent section of this oral corpus, Oyinbo (or white people/foreigners) are described as “ọmọ aṣogun dere” or children of those who made Ogun into an idol. This is significant for many reasons. Dating using Ifa narratives is very tricky, and although we cannot know exactly when this verse came into being, it is clear that at some point after Ifa practitioners came into contact with Western Europeans, they looked for a suitable way to describe this foreign culture and identity using Yoruba idioms. The cult of Ogun, characterized by high mobility, advanced technology, industriousness, metal, and displays of force seemed like the best framework through which to understand and depict these strange people. After all, they traveled a long distance in impressive ships with advanced military technology that they were not afraid to use both in the service of and against their Yoruba interlocutors. From a traditional Yoruba perspective, as Ogun simply is all of these things (weapons, mobility, technology, displays of force, etc.), the Oyinbo were serving and revering him/his spirit whether they knew it or not.

Still, Ifa does not describe Oyinbo as children of Ogun (ọmọ Ogun), as his devotees would usually be called, or even as the ones who made Ogun into an oriṣa or deity, which might also be reasonably expected. Rather, Ifa says Oyinbo are the descendants of those who “made Ogun into an idol/statue,” indicating that something was out of place. Not only was Ogun not quite treated as the oriṣa that he is, making him into an idol runs against tradition as in Yorubaland Ogun is never depicted as a statue or idol, as are some oriṣa. Instead his sacrifices are offered to objects like metal weapons, tools, a blacksmith’s anvil, and so on. Hence, from Ifa’s perspective, Oyinbo had been closely linked and involved with Ogun and had been for a long time since they are the descendants of those who made Ogun into an idol, but they clearly did not understand how to function as his “children” and interact with him properly, which, as we shall see presently, can have disastrous effects.”[15]

That is, for the Yoruba “Philosophers” of Ifa (I’d call them that), technological progress is so tightly bound up with war that they are implicated in the same God. In the Greek religion, this is grasped through three Gods – Hephaestus, Athena, and Ares – bound through marital drama (a symbol of intense intimacy of activity), but still, as Edward says, with a separation such that although “miraculous weaponry brings immediate and demonstrable results”, the fact is that “the Greeks were not so warlike as to overvalue this dimension over personal combat prowess.”[16] For the Yoruba, on the other hand, in Ogun you find the activities associated with the three Gods mentioned earlier converging. In his identification with Iron, you find the enablement of technological prowess, for Ogun is the one who discovered Iron and its first black smith. In Iron, you find Ogun’s association with war, for it is with Iron weapons he fights, and he is the God of warriors and hunters. In Iron, you also find Ogun’s association with the arts[17], particularly through the Iron Gong. Soyinka associates him with those endeavours Edward calls “civilizing” and associates with Athena. Ogun is the one who goes forth into the unknown, who brings civilization and technology. He is also a fearsome God, who can destroy his allies in a blind rage. He embodies the two sidedness of “civilization”, indeed, of materialization in general, for iron is the “material” par excellence, the “residue”, the one that can’t be completely assimilated, and it being associated with civilization shows civilization as a kind of embodiment, a materialization, just as his association with swift justice shows this embodiment as also an ethical project. You can then perhaps see another side to why Edward himself had to mention Athena and Ares in his piece on Hephaestus. There is no technical theophany without them.

What then is the point of all this detail, why bring Ogun to this conversation? Well, because of the schema of a solution Ayodeji Ogunnaike offers later in that essay:

“In the only myth analyzed here that has a happy ending, this was accomplished through Ọṣun’s role in cooling and pacifying Ogun. Just as a blacksmith working with iron must must quickly cool it in water so that it does not become deformed or burn those who come into contact with it, the hot and aggressive energies of Ogun must always be tempered by the coolness and soothing nature of Ọṣun. This again underlines the importance—and absence in American society—of rituals of cleansing and cooling for those who participate in Ogun’s ambiguously destructive and creative violence that can be used either to protect and mold or to kill and destroy. If we can learn to embrace Ogun and Ọṣun simultaneously by empowering and respecting women, learning to understand and value the arts, and placing a higher premium on social justice, integration, and interaction than we do on individuality and force, then perhaps we can transcend the identity of those who made Ogun into a sacreligious idol beset by his wrath and become true children of Ogun whom he blesses and protects from all of the horrors that have made the past few years so difficult for us all.”[18]

Ọṣun is also associated with the arts, but also with Love, beauty, and the Ọṣun river in Ọṣun State, Nigeria. It is not that Ọṣun does not have her wrath. She does and it would be best to not court it. However She is the one who does calm Ogun’s own wrath. Perhaps the way to put this Platonically would be to say that while Ogun’s activity is that procession into further materiality, Ọṣun is the one who orders the reversion. One might compare Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s words above with Edward’s conclusion:

“For it is clear that, motivated by piety, the Phaeacians have removed everything from their society which would be an obstacle to the fullest exercise of human talent and creativity, and this is also associated with technological achievements beyond the capacity of other societies. We see from this that justice and technophany, the domains of Athena and of Hephaestus respectively, have an inherent bond, and furthermore that the perfection of automata, living machines, is a kind of criterion for its enactment. Machine life is the supreme technological accomplishment, and demands a just social order for its successful implementation.”[19]

It is interesting to note that although the divine couple in both conclusions enact a different kind of union, the goal is the same: technological advancement meets social eudamonia. Athena is not associated with exactly the same things as Ọṣun. If anything, the pairing of Ogun and Ọṣun resembles that of Ares and Aphrodite or Hephaestus and Aphrodite more than it does Hephaestus and Athena, but we see similar results. The first lesson is that Gods are not mere archetypes. The structure of being revealed in the Yoruba Pantheon is bound to be radically different from that revealed by the Hellenic one. How this can be reconciled is the subject of Edward and Antonio’s ongoing debate on Gods and shared domains (you can find their debate in order here, here, here, here, here, and here). The second lesson is that whatever stance we take on their reconciliation, it is clear that because these are different Gods and different pairings, meaning this reconciliation cannot simply be a universal imposition on particulars. If anything, the Platonic position is that Universal principles do not impose, but are radically transparent. What will happen is something more of a pragmatic adaptation based on local theophanies, and a very important role for exegesis given in this adaptation. This is how we will be able to carry this project of exploration into the stars. Edward put it in better words, in a vision of a possible future that I might actually want to reincarnate in:

“This is the other part of the revolution I am envisioning, namely the cosmopolitical revolution of thought which will have been integral to Earth’s finding its way through the troubled waters that made it seem to many, in the early 21st century, as though the odds were stacked against humans and the other beings sharing our fragile ecosystem. So many species were lost, and so much damage done, that a shadow of mourning passed across our world like the passing of some massive object through our emotional and cultural space, and led over time to a revaluation of values. On the one hand, the voices of the non-human, whether animal, inanimate, or incorporeal, could no longer be devalued, or for many, ignored as elements of their personal world. Humans were drawn back despite themselves into the fabric of dialogue with other beings whose worlds differed incommensurably from their own. Contrary to the concerns of some in the early stages of this process, this cosmopolitical awakening did not result in the rejection of science or of political structures based on inalienable rights, but it did reconceptualize them. Science, for example, was no longer seen as providing the exclusive access to the truth which integral worldviews veiled, that is, as a hegemonic scientism, but rather as a set of practices thin enough in themselves to pass between what came to be recognized as discrete, but permeable, cosmotechnical regimes. This paradigm shift, or rather, the shift into a radical plurality of paradigms, resulted in the human race, a young one by galactic standards, finally integrating its timeless wisdom, part of its basic organic toolkit for survival, into its technological development. External observers have indeed noted that some such realignment is often required for worlds passing through the ecological bottleneck created by the uneven development of psychical capacities in ages of rapid technological acquisition. As a result, humanity and the Earth’s other surviving sentient beings passed their most dire test.”[20]

I certainly hope we pass this test.

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[1] Edward P. Butler, “New Essay: Hephaestus and the Theophany of the Technical,” Substack newsletter, Henadologia, July 6, 2025, https://epbutler.substack.com/p/new-essay-hephaestus-and-the-theophany.

[2] Butler, “New Essay.”

[3] Antonio Vargas, “Weekly Update - Under Venus Conjoining Uranus,” Substack newsletter, @philoantonio, July 7, 2025, https://philoantonio.substack.com/p/weekly-update-under-venus-conjoining.

[4] Vargas, “Weekly Update - Under Venus Conjoining Uranus.”

[5] “Aristarchus even posited that the stars were other, distant suns” Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023). p. 128

[6] John Crowley, Little, Big, 1st Perennial ed (Perennial, 2002).

[7] Butler, “New Essay.”

[8] Vargas, “Weekly Update - Under Venus Conjoining Uranus.”

[9] For an overview, see: Antonio Vargas, “An Introduction to Proclus’ Theoretical Philosophy,” n.d., accessed June 13, 2021, https://www.academia.edu/44084940/An_Introduction_to_Proclus_Theoretical_Philosophy.

[10] Butler, “New Essay.”

[11] Michael J. Griffin, “Proclus on Place as the Luminous Vehicle of the Soul,” Dionysius 30 (2012): 161–86.

[12] Dirk Baltzly, Gaia Gets to Know Herself: Proclus on the World’s Self-Perception, Brill, January 1, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1163/156852809X441331.

[13] Matthew Vanderkwaak, “‘A Shrine for the Everlasting Gods’: Matter and the Gods in Proclus,” Dionysius 37, no. December (2019): 87–113.

[14] Edward Butler, “The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus” (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/edward-butler-the-metaphysics-of-polytheism-phd-thesis.pdf. p. 320-322

[15] Ayodeji Ogunnaike, “Oyinbo Ọmọ Aṣogun Dere,” Journal of Interreligious Studies, August 4, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/37180031/Oyinbo_%E1%BB%8Cm%E1%BB%8D_A%E1%B9%A3ogun_Dere. p. 108-109

[16] Butler, “New Essay.”

[17] Wole Soyinka, Myth, literature and the African world (Cambridge university press, 1976).

[18] Ogunnaike, “Oyinbo Ọmọ Aṣogun Dere.” p. 122

[19] Butler, “New Essay.”

[20] Edward P. Butler, Considerations Regarding Worship in Extraterrestrial Habitats, n.d., accessed March 9, 2025, https://www.academia.edu/128096548/Considerations_Regarding_Worship_in_Extraterrestrial_Habitats. p. 2-3