(Un)creation Myths

Introduction

In 2016, Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka, his team of researchers, and post-doctoral student Kazutoshi Takahashi, discovered in their tissue-culture room at Kyoto University a small, microscopic cluster of cells. These skin cells from adult mice had transformed, under a series of genetic, pronuclear injections, into embryonic stem cells. For this work, they received the Nobel Prize in Physiology. These cells – also known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS – utilize the genetic control of cell determination to reverse their development. Once created, these cells can do little to control their fate. 

Fate, in the biological determination of cells and in the religious or philosophical stories we tell ourselves, lends a hard skeleton and psychological comfort to our lives. It wields a nebulous power in our self-conception, generating a constructed, game-like world we play, and relieving us of responsibilities. Manipulating the biological possibilities of cell fate offers insight into how we can work towards seizing better control of our own fate. 

Fate is something much more precisely defined in science. But when we think about it, our minds are drawn to how we project the endpoint of our lives, the final dot that the string rests upon before it is cut. It seems like we believe in fate less and less as time goes on. When we are young, fate is a central character in fairy tales, where characters are buoyed to the ends of their stories by figures like animals and fairy godmothers, where an invisible hand plucks them up at the last minute and saves them from dreariness, as if spotting the goodness of their hearts. But comparing the biological notions of fate and the literary notions of fate can lead us to new discoveries about each. 

By identifying which genes act as control mechanisms for the differentiation of cells – what makes each of our cells, from our muscles to our bones, distinct from one another — we can modify these genetic switches and turn adult cells back into stem cells that have the capacity to become, truly, anything. Like little clocks, cells can traverse the winding path of time backwards, discarding their cellular machinery, reverting back to the metaphorical formless orbs of their embryonic stages. Cells can walk backwards from their own fate, which is determined just slightly after inception. As embryos form, the establishment of the animal pole and vegetal pole triggers the creation of the human embryo with proper placements of limbs. From then on, secreted factors, or morphogens, in varying degrees are given location-specific responsibilities. Think of it like marbles rolling out from a bag onto a line: spots in the line closer to the origin, the bag, have the most marbles; as the marbles peter out and lose momentum, spots farther on the line receive less marbles. The quantity of marbles then corresponds to triggering a specific set of genes in varying degrees, leading to differential expression of proteins. 

In literature and religion, each culture has its own form of creation myths, from genesis to the Chinese gods splitting open the earth and the sky. Similarly, in science, we look at creation myths to tell us about the end of the story, which seems to be already determined from its beginning. As I read through different myths, I want to understand: if cell fate is hardwired from the moment a cell is born, can humans also be thought of as similar to small particles, simply being swayed by the flow? I think so. And if a cell fate can be reversed, is there such a thing as an uncreation myth for a human – a way a human mind can go backwards in time? I think so––in the right conditions, at the right time. It’s a tricky thing. We follow the fairytales we write for ourselves, and when our present and future can no longer exist, we weave our memories into tales that stick forever.

Fate of the Future – & of the Past

A memory: is it an image, a string of sounds, a piece of text in our mind that floats past the ashes and drifts through the snow of our dreams? The subject of poets and songs, memory is the nebulous substance that determines our past. Many neuroscientists believe that strong moments in the present trigger a linked number of sensory cortices – for example, linking the triggering of specific colors, sounds, and senses in our heads. 

The hippocampus is responsible for training the cortex in an interleaved manner –– meaning that it is a training center that coordinates different aspects of the brain to fire simultaneously, like a coach who instructs you to run correctly, so that when future stimuli fire, you slip into muscle memory easily. 

Yet, what exactly determines what is encoded into memory? Another part of our brains, the prefrontal cortex, is the central control mechanism that functions to control our attention. Whatever we pay attention to is what we encode into memory. However, what controls our attention is, in turn, the moments and values that stand out the most to us in our other past memories. 

memory → attention → memory

The memories of our past determine the spotlight of our attention, which then determines the new memories then created. If we lose the capacity to create new memories, we then return to the past as if we are artists making a sculpture. The synaptic weights are flexible and fluid. Memories are labyrinths that change shape as we navigate them. We often think we’ve left them, only to discover that they are highly malleable. This loop suggests that, perhaps, we live in echo chambers of our youth: the values of our environment around our younger selves may continue to shape us for years to come. It may even be programmed into us to perceive, and thus follow, the same trajectories. 

Looped Stories

Mythologies and fairytales familiar to us from childhood illustrate the idea of fate as ultimately inescapable. Oedipus kills his father without intending to; Herodotus’s legendary myth tells of the king who consulted the oracle about the battle the following day, triumphantly declaring his victory before learning that it was his own kingdom doomed to fall. The three fates spin their string to determine people’s lives. In classical fairytales, the protagonist’s positive values, unappreciated at the start, are fated to ultimately defeat a cruel authority figure. Fate takes the form of a fairy godmother, who facilitates the inevitable upwards trajectory.

As younger children, we often wish for such a guardian. By being able to pretend that we have our fates written out for us, we live in a bubble of self-importance. For example, in the 1840s, nobles believed their bodies were made of glass; a Bavarian princess noted that as a child, she’d swallowed a full-sized piano made of glass, and now refused to touch any walls for fear of breaking her ribs. 

I particularly like the tale of Ariadne because it spatially depicts what other stories mirror in the structure of their plot. It is a labyrinth. Ariadne’s tale itself is a labyrinth; its multitudinous endings unravel outwards like tributaries of string. There are many interpretations of the finale, some of which include Theseus’s abandonment or Dionysus’s wooing, some which end in her madness or suicide on the island of Naxos. In Aigimos, by Cercops of Miletus, quoted later by Plutarch, Theseus presents his reasoning for leaving as having fallen in love with another woman; Pisistratus later redacted these lines from the Hesiodic corpus due to the ire of the Athenians. 

The romance between Ariadne and the god after becomes central to her story. In the Corning Museum of Glass, engraved scenes from the romance between Dionysus, who discovers a brokenhearted Ariadne abandoned on the shores of Naxos – reinvented as “Summer” in this short story, a site of medical experimentation for the architect Daedalus – decorate thick, beautiful blown-glass vases, the limbs protruding with smoothness, the postures aggressively situated in the center, shrouded by scenes of intense tropicality. “Fink’s stylized and sculpted figures, surrounded by billowing folds of fabric and ornate vegetation, represent the then-nascent Art Deco style,” writes Alexandra M. Ruggiero in “The Surprising History of Ariadne and Bacchus Vase.” Her romance with Dionysus – and later ascension, as some scholars write, to being named the Goddess of Labyrinths after he deifies her – represents a redemption from the failed, limited love of a mortal as easily swayed by lust as Theseus. Ariadne’s sacrifice was rewarded by godly love, painted as a successful denouement. Perhaps the central valley of disappointment was merely her lowest point before the hand of fate tugged her upwards. Ariadne’s deification and mortality is the death of her human self, shedding behind the limits of an old life. 

Manhood and husbandry was considered to be a distinct blemish on one’s honor. To excuse their Athenian hero of a reputational blemish, Athenian poets wrote that Theseus had been told by Dionysus to leave Ariadne on an island before leaving, Stephen Jackson writes in “The Theseus / Ariadne Desertion.”  

From the moment a cell is created, its location in the embryo determines what sorts of genes it will express. In relation to Ariadne, characters, like cells, are determined by their class and archetype. Their fates are determined from the moment we are introduced to them as the servant, the princess, the explorer, the wife, or the grandmother. Even though the phylogenies of these characters can branch off into a variety of ATU index categories, they still fit into these buckets.

In the case of Ariadne, her fate was determined from the start. As a consequence of her being the daughter of a royal, ruler of a beast-ridden island, she was forced to play the role of the benevolent keeper, entranced by Theseus. Like Calypso, she is the bereft woman, the deus ex machina whose infatuation leads to a poetic distribution of security. Her position in society and her absorption of ‘morphogens,’ and even the receptors she’s been programmed with – disposition towards language, towards monarchy, towards an understanding of the role she must play in regards to royal politics – are due to her birth. In biology, morphogens act as a messaging system to unconsciously program the differentiation of fate in cells. In life, these morphogens take on a variety of different forms. Funnily enough, distance and proximity to centers of power – such as one’s distance from a school district – do determine our futures.

Her free will is limited; her memories determine her future focus, which generate new memories for her to base her life upon. Fairytales rely on these class-based archetypes and repeated anaphoras throughout the story to generate an inevitability. But this inevitability is based on a moral code.

The Code of Fate

Death is reversible, but honor is not. Fairytales play upon this seemingly paradoxical code to create a reward-and-punishment system to make fable-like lessons for young readers. 

The Underworld plays a significant role in Greek mythologies: there is always the capacity to return from death. The precipice looms large, and yet it is crossable, as long as someone can vouch for you and pluck you up from the lap of Hades. For example, in past texts, we read that the body and the soul are distinctly separate. The death of the body does in no way mean that the soul has died. The soul is the true self. In lines 5–7 of the epigram for the Athenians killed in the action at Potideia in 432 B.C.E.:

victory, the monument of war, they secured in dying.

The aether received the souls, the earth the bodies

of these men. The two were sundered at the gates of Potideia.

Victory is equated with death, with handing over the self, with surrendering responsibility of the self. The last line is simultaneously violent and clean: the sundering of the body and the soul. It is this cleavage that makes death feel so incomplete and water-like in fairy tales, where one’s soul, which is the true self, merely ventures into another territory, and can be tugged out of the fields of asphodel later on by a future hero.

There is always the possibility of redemption, always the possibility of renewal, when it comes to the physical body. But a staining of honor is irrevocable – hence the Athenian desire to redact Theseus’s original negative role in the myth of Ariadne. Thus in fairytales, the fear is not death, but rather alienation and shedding of one’s values – and what that implies about your place in the world, if fate intended that for you from the moment you were born. 

This is what fate seems to be in fairy tales – despite the possibility of physical death, you are fated from birth to be good or bad, to be virtuous or sinful. It is the color and substance of your soul, which is your true self. Destruction of the soul is far worse than death, a destruction of the body. In fairytales, your fate is determined by your values. From Aristophanes’ comedy Peace, produced in 421 B.C.E.:

Was it then true what they say, that in the aether

we become stars, when someone dies?

Trygaeus answers: “Yes indeed!” 

(Cambridge University Press)

The aether is associated with the sky and the stars for the souls, while the earth is for the bodies. Human souls hang in the sky, able to shine immortally, regardless of if the body is alive. Bodies stained with sin let their souls wander off into the darkness. There is no such thing as true death for those who were destined to be good. 

Fairytales present characters with insurmountable tasks and accelerated romances. Characters seem to be fated to be good or bad, and following your path is what the divine forces want you to do, regardless of what you think of it; Oedipus attempted to avert himself from his own path to avoid sin, but failed –– but that doesn’t seem like a good fable to tell young children, who should be conditioned to take control of their own paths. 

As we grow up and read stories that exist in reality, more adult-geared fiction pushes characters to remain virtuous in spite of an easy descent into morally wrong behavior. The fate of these individuals rests in whether or not they follow their moral path, and those who do against all odds are those who prevail in the end. A ‘victory’ is not a life, wealth, or splendor, but rather a death with nobility. Not every character in later books we read in life can do this, but it is attributed to their own behavior rather than the easy scapegoat of fate, which it is in the classical fairy tales. Villains have interior worlds. In fairy tales, each character exists as a pivot point for the next – but they are still valuable, for they utilize the simple, results-based logic of an immature child to show that selflessness and kindness will result in internal and external beauty.

Fairy tales set the foundation for understanding how our environment and innate qualities instruct us to act, like a small particle in a larger biological structure. Inbuilt virtue leads the chosen hero to grow into their fate, and we come to appreciate the simple longevity of morality that is externalized in these worlds built for children – the birds perching on one’s shoulder, the kind smiles of passerby, the golden sunlight passing through the trees, as if the world can hear the song of one’s self. 

But if cell fate can be reversed and unwound like a ball of thread, switching genetic factors on and off, so, too, can a human’s fate be reversed, which we read as we transition from fairy tales to stories in middle and high school. Choosing one’s own fate – self-determination – is not static or given. It is a continuous decision that carries weight with it each day. There is no limbo between the earth and the sky. We are in control of the factors that shape us, however difficult it is to push against the instinct of ease. We have our own wreckages to contend with.

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