Issue #45

Abstract: In ancient mythology, some heroes are endowed with two fathers at once — human and divine, earthly and heavenly/elemental. This emphasizes their numinous status, unlike ordinary people. In reality, however, even the heroes always have only one father: one is real, the other is adopted. Despite all its marvelousness, in this matter myth adhered to a rigid logical structure, making the world it describes fairly consistent. Thus, since ancient times, the theme of conception and birth has been one of the most rigid in universal human culture, and the accompanying concepts of sexuality and gender have become, in their traditional resolution, the most reliable pillars of materialist ontology. Modern fiction, which to a certain extent has taken the place of mythology, based on the achievements of science and the trendy hypotheses of intellectuals, has on several occasions approached this difficult area in pursuit of its own goal of bringing a sense of the extraordinary to life. This paper examines the fantastic assumption made by Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five that any human child has more than two parents. This allowed the author not only to return in an enriched form the old mythological and religious ideas, but also to build a new, expanded ontology, which makes it absolutely necessary to have a multidimensional (multilevel) reality. The introduction of the latter is already implied by many later scientific concepts like the Multiverse theory. But no less important here are the psychological and aesthetic motifs that connect the combinatory of abstractions with the human life world and turn everything non-standard into a natural request of the spirit, striving to overcome the close boundaries of its material cradle.