Mythic Automaton

myth:mythic_automaton

The made being in myth and craft long before machinery: Hephaestus's golden handmaidens who attend him, and the bronze giant Talos who circled Crete and hurled stones at ships, undone at last by the one vein of ichor in his heel; Pygmalion's ivory woman waked to life by love; the Chinese artificer Yan Shi, whose mechanical man sang and danced and winked at the king's concubines. And then the real clockwork — Vaucanson's duck, Japan's tea-serving karakuri. The ancient dream of the artificial person. — comparative myth / history