After rethinking about the great interest that pregnancies and births of singers or actresses arouse and that, almost always, there is some aspect that stands out, be it because of frivolity, be it because of strangeness, they have come to mind the incredible mythological pregnancies, which look like some taken from science more to the limit that today has become reality.
Pregnant dads
Believe it or not we could say that Thomas Beatie is not the first man, or rather, pregnant dads , saving the distances and taking Zeus Olympic for granted, in fact, for a few millennia many people believed in him as the most powerful god. Well, Zeus was pregnant, or rather, he gestured two of his children.
His first marriage was happy, and he had married a cousin of his, very intelligent and balanced (nothing like his second wife, who had quite a bad temper and justified jealousy that made him violent). Well, this first wife, Metis, was perfect except in a rather serious detail: there was a prophecy, if she gave birth to a son this would dethrone his father.
And considering that the family tradition was quite black in that regard Zeus settled the issue expeditiously: when Metis got pregnant she ate it. He pregnancy in the male He continued inside Zeus and the daughter, Athena, was born from her father's head, emerging as an adult.
Zeus, as I told you, was not especially faithful to his wives and had many adventures with goddesses and mortals. One of them was a Theban princess, Sémele. When she was pregnant, she wanted to try her lover and, badly advised, made her swear that she would grant him what he asked. And he asked him to be shown in all his power, surrounded by lightning and thunder. The girl was mortally wounded and Zeus, applying her previous experience, decided to save her offspring.
He made a caesarean section to the girl and took the boy and cut his thigh, putting the fetus inside. Months later he cut again and the little Dionysus was born, who would be the god of wine, already formed and healthy.
Women who give birth to beings of other species
Just yesterday we talked about the ethical dilemma of a woman gestating a Neanderthal child. The list of pregnant mythological women of other species It would be long but I will tell you two very curious stories of mythological pregnancies in which women give birth to strange children.
The first is Leda, queen of Sparta, lover of Zeus without knowing it (or so she said) she. Playing in a meadow with other girls he was approached by a beautiful white swan he hugged with tenderness.
The swan was really not such, it was Zeus with his tricks of seduction, and the tenderness ended in coitus. After a few months Leda laid one or two eggs, of which, yes, human or semi-divine children would be born. Curiously, in addition, the children, who were four, were two of her legitimate husband and two of the god, a subject that we will see repeated in another myth.
The second is Pasifae, queen of Crete and wife of the Minos. In this case the gods were, only indirectly, the cause of their strange loves. She was cursed by Poseidon, who was furious with her husband, and made her fall madly in love with a bull.
The great engineer Daedalus built a wooden cow where she hid to attract her bull and also became pregnant. The son was clearly of another species, even stranger than giving birth to a Neanderthal, since it was a hybrid between human and bovine, the terrible Minotaur. Of course, in this legend nobody tells us how he managed to give birth to that being, but in the case of legends we cannot always ask for complete rigor.
Pregnancy of twins of different parents
That fact does exist and has been confirmed, although it is a very rare case: a woman who is pregnant with twins who are from different parents. I have already told you about Leda but the most representative legend is that of the birth of Hercules (called Heracles in Greek).
Alcmena was the wife of a prince of Tirinto and possible future king of Mycenae. Zeus, again, used a ruse to get to bed with her and took the appearance of her husband. That same night, when the husband arrived, he also lay with Almena, becoming pregnant with twins of different parents.
After a very long and complicated birth, made difficult by Hera, Zeus's jealous wife, she gave birth to two children: Iflicles mortal and Heracles, son of God, children of different parents but pregnant in the same uterus at the same time.
Assisted fertilization
Did the gods also use the assisted fertilization? Well, in a way, and of course in the case of Zeus, we can say that one of his ploys resembles assisted fertilization.
Danae, princess of Argos, was locked in a tower and was a mother thanks to assisted fertilization. He had been predicted by his father a fortune teller that his grandson would kill him and the best way to avoid it that occurred to him was to deprive his only daughter of freedom. But that infatuated Zeus would not get him and it materialized like a shower of gold in Danae's room, leaving her pregnant with a child who would be, at birth, Perseus and who, logically but without wishing to, would end up fulfilling the prophecy.
If you like these stories I recommend you read the Metamorphosis of Ovid and the Theogony of Hesiod. In them, as we have seen, the human imagination is revealed prior to all scientific advances and already in mythology we could know stories of pregnancy to the limit. What do we have left to see come true?
