What God Has a Baby Out of His Forehead
The science and morality of creating a life with DNA from three different individuals is hot news. The UK parliament has voted in favour of allowing trials of mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), otherwise also known as three-person IVF, which would allow women with mitochondrial mutations to accept healthy children.
Of class, commentators have been groovy to stress that such a child would take merely two "parents" – the people raising the resulting offspring. The third person is the adult female who gives the healthy mitochondrial DNA to compensate for a fault in the mother's Dna.
For anyone who has studied ancient Hellenic republic, the situation of ii women and one human contributing to a kid will be familiar, as indeed are weird nativity stories more generally. The father involved in the three-parent birth I'll be describing here – the god Hephaistos – was himself the result of a most unusual conception.
His mother Hera became pregnant past eating lettuce (a plant associated with semen because of the milky white fluid in its leaves). In some versions of the myth she did this to take revenge on her husband Zeus, who himself had given nativity with a minimal female contribution. He had eaten another of his many loves, Metis, while she was significant – and and so he gave birth to their daughter Athena from his own caput.
In an culling version, Hephaistos was born earlier this Athena incident. When Zeus gave birth, the midwife – wielding the axe to cure Zeus of his monster headache – was sometimes shown as being Hephaistos. Many other myths of Hephaistos depicted him as a weakling, implying that someone built-in without a male contribution must exist inadequate. Despite his many skills, in particular in metallic-working, Hephaistos was represented as being lame.
Erichthonios: nascence from Globe
It's when we come to the conception and birth of Hephaistos'due south son Erichthonios that we notice a iii-person conception. In that location are two women involved. The myth tells of how Erichthonios was born from Gaia, the goddess Earth. Then she was in some means a "parent".
Hephaistos contributed the seed. Merely the reason that Erichthonios existed was Hephaistos's lust for a third divine person, the goddess Athena – who had a special and obvious significance for the people of Athens.
Hephaistos had a stiff want for Athena, but as a virgin goddess she ran away from him. He was not able to catch her – but he ejaculated and the seed fell on her leg. She wiped it away with a piece of wool and the seed vicious on Gaia, the Earth, making her pregnant.
So while Athena contributed no cloth to the child, if Hephaistos hadn't lusted after her there would never have been an Erichthonios – and Athena is not just the object of desire, only the ane who makes arrangements for bringing upward the baby.
Erichthonios grew in the womb of Gaia and, when he was born, Gaia passed him over to Athena to care for him. In vase paintings of this scene, but the upper part of the trunk of the goddess Earth is shown. She keeps her connection to the soil.
Sometimes Zeus, the baby's granddaddy in ii ways, is there too. But in other versions the scene involves Earth, Athena – and Hephaistos, standing by and watching the "birth" of his son.
Nature and nurture
Like u.s.a., the aboriginal Athenians were concerned nearly what "true parenthood" is. Was the biological aspect or the nurturing aspect most important? The myth of Erichthonios focuses on the contributions to the kid made by World and by Hephaistos'south seed. Athena does not give any raw material to this child however she is the one who looks after him when he is born, making arrangements for his care.
In this story of iii people and ane baby, it seems to me easy to answer the question: "Who are the parents?" All 3 divine persons. By having iii people involved in his origin, Erichthonios helped Athenians think most their links to their native soil and to their chief deity Athena.
The myth shows sensation of how parenthood can exist about nurture equally well as nature. And the third person, Hephaistos, was as well necessary to provide the crucial biological material. For the Greeks, information technology was seed: for u.s.a., it'southward Deoxyribonucleic acid.
There accept been hypothetical 3-parent babies for millennia. Now, we may be nearly to see them outside the world of mythology.
Source: https://theconversation.com/ancient-greece-has-something-to-say-about-the-three-person-baby-debate-37121
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