I was asked (as part of general request, to a lot of people, not just me) to preach the Word of Hephaestus, the smith god.  This was my answer:

This is the Word of Hephaestus as I know him:

he is the teacher of craft and cunning art, the master of MakerSpaces, the lord of intelligence applied to physical matter. By his Word are mountains ground to dust, and then the dust is taught to think; through his Art does the abacus come into being. He applies the golden ratio to handmade things, and he renders geometry in three dimensions as the beautiful and the useful. He brings forth the metals from the rocks, and by his artifice is cloth coaxed from the flax and from the sheep. Weight and measure, grain and yard and dram, and the things made to these measures, are in his purview.

No drug, not potion nor smoke nor pill, empowers his thought — yet all the mechanisms by which these are strengthened and refined are in his wheelhouse. The engine of his mind turns the gears of technic and of aesthetic, churning natural matter into artifice and thing. The lenses of his eyes see the history of each thing, follow it from the seam of bright metal in the rock to the pot bubbling stew on the stove — and his ears hear the rust that eats the rebar in the skyscraper’s foundations.

All processes from raw material to finished thing to the gaping maw of the trash-heap, he knows intimately and clearly, and he delegates them to his minions, the Hundred-Handed and the Nymphs, who labor with brute strength and elegant agility, to bring forth every sort of object whether graceful or vile. By his labors and his deputation are all the wonders of mortals made, all engines of creation and destruction, all artifice of object and thing. And these are his fourfold secrets:

1. Knowing ABOUT something and Knowing HOW to do something are not the same.
2. A picture is worth a thousand words.
3. A finished part is worth a thousand pictures.
4. A working machine is ten thousand parts.

And by these fourfold secrets are all the works of Hephaestus accomplished.

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