Leto's Birthing Seat - Delos Myth in Chronicles of the Zamfir | World Anvil
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Leto's Birthing Seat - Delos

Per Greek mythology known to humans, Leto is the goddess who roamed the world as a wolf and eventually found a safe haven on the island of Delos to give birth to Artemis and Apollo. In some versions of the story, Artemis immediately turns to help Leto through the birth of Apollo.   This is important in werewolf lore and culture, as Leto and Artemis are both beloved among them, especially among women. This has been more true historically, as many of the norms of werewolf culture have now been supplanted after the Great Purge and been replaced with Christian traditions, especially Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Even so, the myth of Leto's birthing stool is still circulated among werewolves - that Leto was forced to give birth on an island, Artemis' birth was painless, but she struggled with no midwife for the birth of Apollo. Artemis assisted and Apollo was born beneath a palm tree. Werewolves believe that the rock formation where Leto gave birth, called Leto's Birthing Seat in lore, is a place blessed by Mother Luna by Artemis' assistance and, if one was lucky enough to give birth there, Mother Luna and her two aspects as Leto and Artemis would preserve the life of the mother and child during the birth. It is unclear if there was ever a specific formation that was attributed to the birth and, if there was, the location is now hopelessly lost or very well hidden. Researchers and historians have searched the entire island attempting to find any type of indication of magical properties and have come up with nothing.    There are myths that, during the time of Julius Caesar and Roman occupation of Greece, the head of the alpha family in Rome at the time had his men go and carve the actual rock face where Leto was supposed to have given birth directly out of the island and brought back to Rome in the attempt to garner further favor for the daughter of a more noble born pack alpha further North. The story goes that the alpha married her to the Roman out of love for his daughter and the hope she would live to have many healthy children. There are depictions of this rough hewn stone stool in paintings and drawings of their wedding festivities and it was referenced several times afterward, but all trace of the object completely vanished after that alpha family was killed in a coup several generations later. No one knows what ever became of it.    The myths about the island and the seat have persisted specifically because werewolves continue to struggle with terrible infant and maternal mortality rates and researchers from around the world agree that the rates are going up, not down. Part of this is attributed to lack of interest in modern medicine, but there is the whispered theory that the systematic hunting of she-wolves is weakening and killing the species. In modern days, many pack alphas spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to bribe the Greek werewolves to send their mates to the island during their pregnancy in the hopes that the myth may be true. The wolf-blooded women on the island are said to be gifted midwives and have two of the only complete sets of Birthing Stones known. The success rate of births there is significantly higher than anywhere that will still speak to the European wolves after the purge and is noteworthy, but it's impossible to say if that is due to the magical association with the myth of Leto or because the traditions and knowledge about werewolf midwifery have remained more intact with more skilled midwives who, admittedly, get much more practice than most others in the world.   There have always been rumors that the women of the island are associated with the Daughters of Leto, who are believed to have disappeared and been killed off in the 19th century, but the general distrust of their politics still affects the island and many also refuse to send pregnant women there for treatment by what they believe are she-wolf witches.

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