In honor of my own special day, this post will focus on the well-known myth of the birth of the Greek goddess Pallas Athena. Athena is known as the Olympian goddess of wisdom, war, heroic journeys, and crafts. She was truly a renaissance goddess with such a broad range of powers. But, before she became such an important figure in Greek mythology, she had to be created first.
The story begins with Zeus’s paranoia of losing his throne to children. I guess this is a pretty sound fear since he killed his own father, and his father killed his grandfather and both took the throne from each other, so it was kind of a family tradition. His first wife, the Titaness of craftiness, Metis, was not too fond of the thought of sleeping with him, so she ran. Of course, Zeus chased after her, even going as far as to change into whatever shape she was at the time, this continued until Metis got tired of running and basically gave up and let Zeus find her.
After fooling around for awhile, Zeus got a prophecy saying that Metis’s second child would overthrow him. Of course, he knew he couldn’t just stop at one child, so he planned to get rid of her way before even one kid. So, the only logical way to stop Metis from having a child was to eat her. Who hasn’t been there?
This seems like a pretty sound way to keep a child from happening, so Zeus continued his life. Even though Metis was not in the picture, a child would still happen because crazy things happen with the gods and logic just doesn’t exist. So he continues his king of the gods duties, but nine months later he’s starting to get a headache. When his headache gets to a point that nothing will help, the god Hermes decides the best option is to just air his brain out. Hermes runs out and gets Hephaestus, the god's blacksmith, brings his ax down upon Zeus’s head. His migraine unsurprisingly goes away when a fully grown woman jumps out of his forehead. Athena must have been pretty busy in there since she didn’t just have a simple toga on, no, she was in full battle gear ready to fight anyone at not even a second old.
I guess that giving her father a massive migraine didn’t strain their relationship too much because she went on to become Zeus’s favorite child. No wonder she’s the favorite; what, with a city named after her, creating spiders and hobbies for everyone, and being ready to throw-down at any time, so happy creation-day Athena!
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