In the fourth and final part of the series of posts about mythology and the tech industry, based on an email exchange with Petri Mähönen, I try to work some loose ends into the tapestry. Like the previous one, this post focuses on myths but with an eye to the tech implications.
Hephaestus
Hephaestus is the Rodney Dangerfield of Olympus: he doesn’t get the respect he deserves. He never did, and even less so today when metalwork is old hat. However, metallurgy was the highest of high tech in ancient times. Turning copper into an alloy hard enough to make edged weapons transformed society, as the name of the Bronze Age indicates. Blacksmiths have traditionally been associated with the occult. The association between iron and magic predates the Iron Age (think lodestones), and fire has always been a source of power.
Data science is a contemporary analogy, and of course programming. Data is a cornerstone of digital transformation, in the corporate world as much as in government. Hal Varian famously said in 2009 that “the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians,” i.e. people who can magic data. It’s still true; “big data” took off as a search term between 2010-2015, and is still a hot topic (Google Trends).
There are several striking archetypal resonances between Hephaestus and geeks, such as his fraught relationship with his mother (being rejected, and his revenge), the triangle with Aphrodite and Ares (Internet = DARPA + pornography), the importance of nets in his stories, and his role as the gods’ armorer (Amazon, Microsoft and Google angling for Pentagon money; Huawei’s links to the Chinese military).
I argued in Parts 1 and 2 that tech entrepreneurs also need an appreciation of the value of sound engineering. I labeled that as Apollo – but it could just as well be Hephaestus, the god of useful tools.
Apollo-Dionysus vs. Trickster
It is striking that we had to invoke Loki to add a “real” trickster to the Greek pantheon (see Part 1, especially). Leaving aside the arguably recent academic construction of the trickster archetype (Shipley, "Trickster Ethnography," 2015), I’ve been struck that Hermes/Mercury don’t really fit the Trickster bill. Hermes (and the Roman Mercurius) was mischievous, but there’s no sense that he was malicious or a subverter of the status quo in the way most tricksters are. (However, Mercurius is a much more potent figure in alchemy; according to CG Jung, “When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter.”
Trickster and its complement, the Golden Boy (cf. Loki and Baldr), represent a not-quite-orthogonal axis to Dionysus-Apollo. Petri had a lovely image: the trickster could be a wormhole from one end of the A-D axis to the other.
It may be that some cultures emphasize Trickster, and others A-D; Norse and Greek mythology might be an example. (The complication is that they share Indo-European roots, so why the difference?) Another possible answer is that Trickster applies to how the technology functions in society, while A-D applies more to individuals and companies (and perhaps specific technology functionality, e.g. search vs. social media: search feels Apollonian, and social media Dionysian).
Petri pointed out that both Dionysus and Loki stand outside the established social order, though Dionysus isn’t usually put in the Trickster box. To put a fine point on it: While Dionysus started as an outsider (a bastard son of Zeus, like so many others) many of the stories tell of his ultimately successful campaign to establish his cult. Hermes also started as an outsider, son of another of Zeus’s many mistresses, but then wrangled himself into the Twelve. Tricksters often work themselves into the center of power, e.g. Reynard the Fox and Merlin. (Like Loki, Merlin was a half-breed who came to a sticky end.)
A few more
Petri flagged Janus, who handles both beginnings and endings, looks after transitions, and is a fundamental keeper of duality (cf. the double face). He may not play a large role in entrepreneurs’ archetypes, but could be handy at the aggregate level when thinking about technologies.
Petri also recommending looking at gods of wisdom and knowledge in Hindu mythology. He noted that Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, wisdom, and learning. She should be considered together with Hayagriva, an avatar of Vishnu who’s worshipped as the god of knowledge and wisdom.
I know far too little about Asian mythology, but the Monkey King is a powerful figure with trickster elements. He’s ambitious and high-spirited – like some tech entrepreneurs (godchecker-com; Lou, Master’s thesis 2016).
From binaries to triples
Petri proposed multiple dualities of Athena-Apollo (wisdom-knowledge), and Athena-Hephaestus (science-engineering); see especially Part 3. He suggested there might be a wisdom-knowledge-skills axis corresponding to Athena-Apollo-Hephaestus. It could even be the root of disciplines/professions. Apollo is related to medicine and arts; Athena is wisdom, strategy (business strategy, too?), justice but also innovations in crafts; and Hephaestus is the techie, not worrying about wisdom and justice, but concerned with metalworking, sculpture, and anything nice with fire (including volcanoes).
Since we’re such suckers for binaries, I’m always on the lookout for triples like this. In addition to Petri’s Athena-Apollo-Hephaestus, we see Athena mediating between Apollo and Dionysus (qua the Furies) in achieving justice in Aeschylus’s Eumenides. For invention, one could propose Hermes-Hephaestus-Athena; all three are associated with innovations of one kind or another.
Here’s an attempt at interlocking triplets. (I didn’t realize the central place of Athena until I’d finished constructing it.)
(These really shouldn’t be blobs connected by lines; a better representation would be overlapping blobs, so that it isn’t clear where one god ends and another begins.)
I noted earlier that several leader-company pairs map to Dionysus-Apollo, and perhaps Bezos-Amazon maps to Athena-Hermes. That prompts a topic for later: can one populate some of the other pairs, or even triples, in this figure to entrepreneurs and companies?
Since adding a third dimension to the chart gets confusing, so here’s another set that connects with the above over the Hephaestus-Athena connection
Geeks in space
I can’t resist flagging the obvious at the end: the American space program started with Mercury and moved on to Apollo… There’s some fun side history to excavate here; for now, a few quotes from the web:
- “Originally called Project Astronaut, President Dwight Eisenhower felt that gave too much attention to the pilot. Instead, the name Mercury was chosen from classical mythology, which had already lent names to rockets like the Greek Atlas and Roman Jupiter for the SM-65 and PGM-19 missiles.” (Wikipedia) [And the Centaur, come to think of it.]
- “Silverstein chose the name ‘Apollo’ after perusing a book of mythology at home one evening in 1960. He said the image of ‘Apollo riding his chariot across the sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.’” (NASA)
All the posts in the Techies & Myth series
- Part 1: Apollo, Dionysus, and the Entrepreneurs
- Part 2: Mythical entrepreneurs
- Part 3: Goddesses and Tech
- Part 4: More Gods as Tech
Update, Oct 2020
- Added links to other posts in the series
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