Vulcan / Hephaestus. Vulcan is the god of fire including the fire of volcanoes, deserts, metalworking, and the forge in ancient Roman religion and myth. He is often depicted with a blacksmith's hammer. The Vulcanalia was the annual festival held August 23 in his honor. His Greek counterpart is Hephaestus, the god of fire and smithery. In Etruscan religion, he is identified with Sethlans. Vulcan belongs to the most ancient stage of Roman religion: Varro, the ancient Roman scholar and writer, citing the Annales Maximi, records that king Titus Tatius dedicated altars to a series of deities including Vulcan. The origin of the name is unclear. Roman tradition maintained that it was related to Latin words connected to lightning, which in turn was thought of as related to flames. This interpretation is supported by Walter William Skeat in his etymological dictionary as meaning lustre. It has been supposed that his name was not Latin but related to that of the Cretan god Velchanos, a god of nature and the nether world. Wolfgang Meid has dispued this identification as phantastic. More recently this etymology has been taken up by Gerard Capdeville who finds a continuity between Cretan Minoan god Velchanos and Etruscan Velchans. The Minoan god's identity would be that of a young deity, master of fire and companion of the Great Goddess. Christian Guyonvarc'h has proposed the identification with the Irish name Olcan. Vasily Abaev compares it with the Ossetic Wergon, a variant of the name of Kurdalegon, the smith of the Nart saga. Since the name in its normal form Kurdalegon is stable and has a clear meaning, this hypothesis has been considered unacceptable by Dumezil. Vulcan's oldest shrine in Rome, called the Vulcanal, was situated at the foot of the Capitoline in the Forum Romanum, and was reputed to date to the archaic period of the kings of Rome, and to have been established on the site by Titus Tatius, the Sabine co-king, with a traditional date in the 8th century BC. It was the view of the Etruscan haruspices that a temple of Vulcan should be located outside the city, and the Vulcanal may originally have been on or outside the city limits before they expanded to include the Capitoline Hill. The Volcanalia sacrifice was offered here to Vulcan, on August 23. Vulcan also had a temple on the Campus Martius, which was in existence by 214 BC. The Romans identified Vulcan with the Greek smith-god Hephaestus. Vulcan became associated like his Greek counterpart with the constructive use of fire in metalworking. A fragment of a Greek pot showing Hephaestus found at the Volcanal has been dated to the 6th century BC, suggesting that the two gods were already associated at this date. However, Vulcan had a stronger association than Hephaestus with fire's destructive capacity, and a major concern of his worshippers was to encourage the god to avert harmful fires. The festival of Vulcan, the Vulcanalia, was celebrated on August 23 each year, when the summer heat placed crops and granaries most at risk of burning. During the festival bonfires were created in honour of the god, into which live fish or small animals were thrown as a sacrifice, to be consumed in the place of humans. The Vulcanalia was part of the cycle of the four festivities of the second half of August related to the agrarian activities of that month and in symmetric correlation with those of the second half of July. While the festivals of July dealt with untamed nature and waters at a time of danger caused by their relative deficiency, those of August were devoted to the results of human endeavour on nature with the storing of harvested grain and their relationship to human society and regality which at that time were at risk and required protection from the dangers of the excessive strength of the two elements of fire and wind reinforced by dryness. It is recorded that during the Vulcanalia people used to hang their clothes and fabrics under the sun. This habit might reflect a theological connection between Vulcan and the divinized Sun. Another custom observed on this day required that one should start working by the light of a candle, probably to propitiate a beneficial use of fire by the god. In addition to the Vulcanalia of August 23, the date of May 23, which was the second of the two annual Tubilustria or ceremonies for the purification of trumpets, was sacred to Vulcan.