Hymn to Hephaestus
HephaestusOne of the eighty-seven Orphic Hymns — a collection of short invocations, each with a line naming the incense (here: frankincense-manna). Most likely this is the service book of a Bacchic community in Asia Minor under the empire: the hymns run in sequence, like an order of service rather than a book of poems.
Hephaestus here is not a smith at all. He is fire as a cosmic element: "aether, sun, stars, moon, unpolluted light — for these are the limbs of Hephaestus made manifest to mortals". The god is dissolved into a physical principle.
And the request follows precisely from that. Since fire is also the heat in our bodies, the last two lines ask: "Stop the raging madness of untiring fire, keeping the warmth of nature in our bodies." A prayer against fever addressed to physics. This is how the Orphics worked: first identify the god with an element, then petition the element on its own terms.