ABSTRACT
Athena may have been the first clearly cyborg Goddess in Greek myth. Coinciding with an early wave of invasions along the Mediterranean, she and her followers were forced to renounce her earlier birth from her mother Metis the Titaness and accept the story of being born from Zeus’s head (Graves 1955). Hers may be seen as the first high-tech birth, thanks to the skillful hammer of Hephaestos, yet she never fully relinquished her earlier identity either, and managed to exist powerfully within the patriarchal Olympian pantheon while remaining true to the gifts of her mother, symbolized by the serpent on her shield and the owl on her shoulder. To a Pagan, it is quite possible to imagine being both a cyborg and a Goddess.
