Hello everyone and welcome to my second blog about mythology!!! Today, I will explain how the Milky Way came to be (its origins in Greek mythology, not the actual scientific reason; I’m not a STEM student…). First of all, I need to address the fact that I’ll only be telling one version of the creation of the Milky Way, for I know for a fact that even in Greco-Roman mythology, there are many ways of telling that story. My version says that it is Heracles (or Hercules by his Roman name) who is at the origin of the Milky Way when he was just a baby. We all know that Zeus had MANY children, not a lot of whom where his wife’s… One of which was Heracles—literally ‘Hera’s glory’ in Greek (he tried to make it up as much as he could)—who was born of Alcmene, a mortal woman. One time, when Hera was asleep, Zeus let Heracles suckle on her milk, a milk that would bestow godlike abilities upon him. However, Hera woke up, and when she realized that she was breastfeeding one of Zeus’ illegitimate children, she threw him away, and the gush of milk created the Milky Way.
