Almost three years ago, the night became mythic for Xyante and me when a man rushed at us out of the darkness on a deserted midnight street corner shouting he had a knife. We were lucky. We both escaped with slash wounds, X on his face and both of us in our hands, all on the right side. We are both right-handed artists and have had much time to ponder the message, over and above ’stay away from those places at night’ — although when fate looks for someone, it finds them wherever they are.

I have written about this night in another blog ["Night Turns Mythic"], but we have reasons to continue to work this story. In fact, we both believe the story is still working us. It’s our habit to look for meaning in everything, so of course it is easy to find, but this story keeps presenting itself to us in arresting ways. We are very healthy people, yet Xyante was caught up in a perfect storm of conditions that led to a dangerous staph infection inside the mantle of his spinal cord–a structure called the ‘arachnoid’ because it is like a spider web of nerve fibers. He is still in the midst of a slow and painful recovery. Again, we were lucky, because he survived. The doctors still tell us how close he came to dying. We soon noticed that the date on the emergency room bill is two years to the day from the date on our ambulance and emergency room bill the memorable night we were attacked. When we told people, it got the attention even of the doctors in the hospital. “That’s really weird!”

We use the word weird a lot, but although I remembered it came from the Old English wyrd, and had to do with what were called cunning men and women, people of wisdom, I had forgotten until I looked it up just this moment that it is still defined as having to do with fate or destiny. There is some expression of fate or destiny for us in this story of one-sided woundings. The damage to Xyante’s spinal nerves is symptomized on the right side of his body. That’s weird.

When I went to myth-school, a particular mythic story found me. I didn’t go looking for it. Or, I should say, him, Hephaistos, the Greek blacksmith god, artist god, and also the god of fire and sacrifice. I was inspired to work with this mythic figure when my professor dramatically imitated his crooked gait. The only wounded Olympian god! I knew then and there he would be the subject of my dissertation. When I told Xyante, he said “Be careful who you bring home!” X understands archetypal psychology very deeply and he was joking with me, but there was a germ of seriousness in what he said. Be careful when you choose to bring home the god of fire, and a wounded god at that.

I thought I was ready for the fire, which is also the fire of creativity, and is the inner fire of the artist whose art is a lifeway that amounts to a spiritual path. It is a fire that burns like the heat of Etna, the volcano that the ancients believed housed Hephaistos’ forge, where he created beautiful and fateful objects–even the first woman, Pandora.

I learned many things by deeply studying Hephaistos’ myth. One thing I learned was that although I love the idea of the mythic shadow, an idea we associate with Jung, that every daylight quality has its underworld counterweight–and it is the shadow territory that holds the greatest spiritual riches, like the ores and crystals that the ancients compared to foetuses growing in the womb of Earth and whose fire we all covet for its incomprable weird beauty.

I loved Hephaistos’ ambivalent relation to the imperious power of the king-god Zeus, for it is Hephaistos, the only maker-god, who supplies the significant regalia of power to Zeus and other gods and mortals: Zeus’s thunderbolts, his sceptre, the weapons and armor of Achilles, the half-divine hero of Troy. Yet Hephaistos does not participate directly in the control of worldly affairs the other gods take sides and quarrel over. Instead, he is sometimes the peacemaker between them when the quarrels erupt into threats of violence. Mortals prayed to Hephaistos to make good things for human life, like warm houses and hearths and proper tools. When Zeus commanded him to chain Prometheus to the rock for giving mortals the forbidden gift of fire–fire from Hephaistos’ own forge–he complied under protest, criticizing Zeus’s lust for power. Not reliably in one camp or the other, Hephaistos was called amphigueeis, “ambidextrous”, meaning he is two-sided, complex. It also means he is able to access both brain hemispheres. Chew on that!

I reveled in his amiguity, but I realized over time that I had soft-pedaled on Hephaistos’ wounding. Yes, yes, the wounding is significant, and he shares this condition with other maker gods like Egyptian Ptah and Nordic one-eyed Odin, the god of wisdom, magic and poetry (poetry is the province of blacksmith gods; in many mythologies poetic meter originates in the the rhythm of the hammer on the anvil). Homer says that Hephaistos suffered ‘mortal pain’ when he was thrown from Mount Olympus, either by Hera or Zeus or both, either because he was physically imperfect, or wounded by the fall, or both. Interestingly, gods and goddesses do not have the power to undo a condition like wounding. They only have the power to transform it. Hephaistos’ wounding is central to his myth. But I had no comparable experience of ‘mortal pain’ with which to imagine his condition. Not so much as a broken bone.

Xyante and I, together with our myth-buddy, Bluenomada, have been musing over the idea that wounds are jewels. We have all received recent, traumatic physical woundings. In Jungian psychology, the experience of wounding, and this includes the trauma of birth, is an opportunity for a meeting between the ego and the unconscious that results in the transformation, to use Sam Keen’s words, of an unconsicous myth into conscious autobiography, as we work and worry the wound, both unconsciously and consciously, in the same way as the tongue returns to worry a painful tooth. This visiting and revisiting feeds a story that may come to have great power in our lives, especially if we don’t forget it. The intensity of bodily pain is not revisited on us in memory. But story stays, if we can succeed in co-creating a it out of what the unconscious casts up, like a shovelful of earth dug from the mother-lode of gold.

The process begins there, just as the blacksmith’s art begins in refining the raw ore. A nugget came up for me when I recognized a poetic connection between my and Xyante’s being knifed and the job of one of Hephaistos’s brother gods, Ogun, the West African and Caribbean diaspora god of metal. Ogun is asked for protection from wounding with metal. Sacred wounding, ritual scarification, is also the realm of Ogun, and in many ancient and surviving cultures the scar is a clan marking that allows an indvidual to be recognized as one’s own. Ogun and other maker gods including Hephaistos are responsible for completing the creator gods’ task of making humans by giving them features — markings that denote our membership in the human clan, and whereby we gain identity. A wounding, then, is a marking. It makes me recognizable to myself and others. And it carries a story. Unmarked by either physical or psychic wounds, one has little to say! Experience, and particularly the more dramatic and traumatic kind, if we survive, makes us more uniquely ourselves.

When I was cut by the man in the mythic darkness, in a city with a mythic name, Atlanta (after Alalanta of the golden apples) I had to undergo more cutting. The knife had severed a tendon in my middle finger. The surgeon reattached it with another knife and a needle (needles are also sacred to Ogun and symbolizes the ability to heal ourselves by closing up wounds, as well as the need to be awake and alert to one’s environment, symbolized by the pricking). My beautiful hand was now marred by a crook in the middle finger — a crooked bird! It took me a while to love it again. But I do (and the crooked bird is reserved for flashing on special occasions at deserving miscreants). I love that another name for my tutelary god, Hephaistos, is “the crooked one.”

Just today, I happened to look at my crooked finger and realized how different my story is. I had realized that Xyante and I owned our stories in the wake of being attacked by an unknown man in the dark. We never blamed this man. Instead, we always felt the event to be the unconscious, the cosmos, the dark powers, whatever you like, bringing us into contact with an implement of awakening. It must have been Xyante’s intuition, when I came home with a wounded god, that a painful wounding was in the offing, and that perhaps, once one has courted someone in the family of wounded gods, an inevitable hierogamy, a mystical marriage, is consummated with a blood oath. To be binding, by the way, oaths used to be administered at the blacksmith’s anvil.

My realization today, looking at my dear little crooked bird, is that she is taking flight in a new trajectory. She is a symbol of the wisdom I gained, the wisdom I need, to dare to help other people to find their jewel in the wound. Without this experience, I would be just another unpolished pebble. Not that the pebble is not beautiful; it is that having somehow been set in the path of my work, wounding has been neceessary to craft a uniquely faceted jewel. I am different. Now, I need to make a mark with my new story.