I don’t have time now to fully develop this idea, but I was thinking about how prophecies sometimes have tricky wording. Perhaps Oedipus becomes a priest, kills his father for some reason, and then marries his mother…in the sense that he officiates when she takes a second husband (some other guy).
An ancient Greek wedding was not solemnized by a priest. (It involved a lot of prayers, rituals and sacrifices, but they were performed by family members.)
Why waste their energy when he’s about to do worse to himself than they possibly could?
Personally, I’d spin the original tale the opposite way - their fate wasn’t set until they consulted the Oracle, and thus started the chain of events that lead to the murder.
But, looking at it that way, you don’t get a very interesting story when they don’t.
Unless…
Oedipus, as a young adult, encounters a stranger.
This stranger, gifted by the gods with prophecy, or a god himself come to Earth just to mess with Oedipus (which, let’s be honest, this lot would totally do), tells Oedipus of the prophecy.
There are several ways this situation could go, of course, but not all of them lead us to the fulfillment of the prophecy without ‘you can’t fight fate’… Let’s ponder, then, one of the ones that does.
Oedipus, being an impetuous young man, slays the stranger (or ‘slays’, as the case may be), for speaking such nonsense.
But the stranger’s words…they stay with him.
He obsesses. Becomes sullen. Hostile even.
Eventually, he quarrels - publicly, to simplify what follows - with his father…striking him in anger, killing him, accidentally.
Part one of the prophecy fulfilled.
He manages to avoid punishment, as it was an accident, leaving him free, and on the throne.
It just makes his obsession with the prophecy worse, specifically the ‘marrying his mother’ part.
He knows it won’t happen legitimately, leaving him relieved - consciously, at least. But the idea won’t leave his head - it has to happen, doesn’t it? The prophecy is clearly coming true.
Eventually, he decides the prophecy must be completed, and presents the idea to his mother.
Jocasta is, obviously, against the idea, and rather disturbed that Oedipus would ever even bring it up. But he will not be swayed, and takes her by force, then and there…afterwards, she acquiesces.
Whatever the people of Thebes thought of the matter, he was king, she was queen…who was going to argue? So, they wed.
After they retire to their wedding bed, Jocasta reveals why she had apparently come around so easily - by slitting his throat as he comes to her, then killing herself.
On Olympus, the gods begin paying off the bets they’d made about whether the whole Xanatos gambit would actually bear fruit.
Well, he wouldn’t even need to be a priest then! Looking at your link, maybe Oedipus could play the role normally filled by the bride’s father (who’d probably be dead by then) and formally give his mother to her new husband.
Whether it’s possible to come up with a phrase in Ancient Greek that might be taken to mean both “gets married to his mother” and “solemnizes the marriage of his mother to someone else” is beyond me, but there’s probably some way to twist the prophecy to get some meaning other than the obvious out of it.
Frankly, it seems to me that the Oracle is just a damn troublemaker…
For the alterniverse version, Oedipus is the privileged son of Laius and Jocasta, but an old crone who works in the palace tells him that his real parents are shepherds who gave their son to the king and queen when they were childless, which is why he has no brothers and sisters. She also tells him that he is destined to one day find and kill the shepherd who is his real father and marry the shepherd’s wife.
In part in fury over the fact his parents betrayed him and in part to keep from killing his birth father/marrying his birth mother, Oeddie kills Laius. Realizing that the penalty for regicide is death by torture, he knows that the only way he can avoid it is to be king, which not being the biological issue of Laius he cannot be, but said old crone reminds him that the King of Thebes is chosen by Jocasta’s brother Creon, and that if Jocasta marries Oedipus he will be king and she can intervene with her brother; Jocasta, horrified at the notion of marrying her son but more horrified at the notion of burying him, consents to the union and pretends the old crone is telling the truth. Ultimately Jocasta cannot live with the lie anymore and blurts it out and next thing you know she’s dead and Oedipus is a blind mo-fo, at which point the crone reveals herself to be a slave of the Fates, but then aren’t we all…
See? This is how we play the game!
“I say, I say, I say, my wife auditioned for a part in my production of Oedipus Rex.”
“Jocasta?”
No, she’s an appalling actress."
Being still very young, one day Little Oedipus, who’s angry after having spent some Time Out, finds a hole in the garden wall and uses it to leave the royal palace. He befriends a merchant who takes him under his wing; they leave the city (“your parents? Nah, they won’t miss you, didn’t you say how badly they treat you?”) before the search for the missing prince is extended to the city outside the palace and eventually the merchant leaves him with a foster family.
From then on, events unfold more or less as originally intended; Oedipus was too young to remember clearly such things as his parents’ names or that they were kings (I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t remember what my mother looked like when I was little; I do remember what she looks like in pictures taken when I was little, but that’s different).
The merchant? Hermes, of course.
Tengu I like it!
Personally, I’ve always found the other Jocasta more interesting. You see the Avengers (of whom Hercules is a member) often fight an android named Ultron. Ultron is a genius who always has multiple back up plans and makes multiple copies of himself in case he is destroyed. For reasons I’m still not clear on, Ultron once made a female android and named her Jocasta. IIRC She fell in love with the unrelated android Machine Man/Aaron Stack/X51. Eventually, she was killed saving the Avengers from a large bomb.
So why was she named Jocasta? I’d like to see a rewriting of the myth of Oedipus that involves the Avengers and explains this.
For Now What About This-
Hearing the prophecy, Laius calls the city together for a public decree. He recites the prophecy. Then, he announces that the prophecy will never come to pass. He falls on his own sword. Jocasta drinks a goblet of poison. The royal vizier then reads a proclamation ’ You see my people? We have given our very lives to show you this lesson- the will of Olympus can be thwarted! Though we die, you live as never before! From this moment onward you, and not the gods, make your destinies! Your lives belong now only to you’
The city weeps for its lost rulers. Oedipus is crowned king without ever fulfilling the prophecy and the power of the gods is broken.
They’re not that tricky though. When Croesus asks an oracle what would happen if he attacked Persia the answer he got was “a great empire would fall.” As it happens it was Coresus’ empire that fell. He should have asked the oracle which empire would have fallen. The Greeks really weren’t all that big on cheating fate so much as they were keen on how people chose to embrace their fate. Once Oedipus realizes his crime he goes through with the punishment he decreed before he knew he was the guilty party. In his own way Oedipus embraces his fate on his own terms.
Different version of Oedipus:
Oedipus is interested in the daughter of a family friend who is staying at the royal palace. Oedipus steals into her chambers in the dead of night only to be confronted by strange man in the night. Jealous that his inamorata appears to have another man in her heart Oedipus kills him in a rage. Then he says nothing and sleeps with the girl. SURPRISE! Turns out that Oedipus mistakenly entered his parents bedchamber and fulfilled the prophesy.
Because Ultron considered Hank Pym his father. Hank was married to Janet van Dyne, making her his (step) mother. He kidnapped Janet (the Wasp) and intended to transfer her essence :rolleyes: into the robot he intended for a mate.
I’m not sure if Janet dying was going to be a necessary side-effect of the process, or was just Ultron’s way of making it worse for his father. The whole scheme was less about making Ultron a mate than ruining Hank’s life, as he was tricking Hank into doing the actual kill-Jan work.
Which was a huge waste of time and effort, since Pym was quite good at ruining his own life without any outside help.
Well, yeah. But since it’s canon that Ultron’s brain waves were copied from Hank’s–and since, by comic book logic, that means his personality is supposed to mirror Hank’s in many ways–it’s clear that Ultron is the physical expression of Hank’s self-hatred.
But that’s another thread.
They can be. The prophecy in Macbeth, for instance, hinges on a technicality that isn’t even really a technicality.
Come on, being delivered via Caesarian is still being born!
*Who said anything about cheating fate? I’m suggesting that there was more than one way the prophecy could have been fulfilled, and that if Laius and Jocasta hadn’t cast out their son the prophecy might have come true in a somewhat less horrible manner. (I don’t see any way around Oedipus killing Daddy Dearest.) Since we’re asked to imagine a scenario in which the Oracle is never consulted then Oedipus can’t be deliberately looking for a less-horrible way to make the prophecy come true, it just works out that way because he grows up knowing who his real mother is.
*No, because the prophecy said “marry his mother”, not “have sex with his mother”.
You’re spoiler-spacing Macbeth? Seriously?
Anyway, that’s a matter of definitions, I suppose. If you take born to mean pass from a woman’s womb to the outside of her body, via the vagina, then the prophecy was accurate.
Damn, I got too hung up on Oedipus being a mother fucker. You’re right.
You’re right, I probably should have just spoilered the title in case there were any superstitious theater types reading. 
Here’s another quickly sketched scenario. First, let’s take it as a given that the king’s word is law. Whatever he says, goes.
Laius and Jocasta have an unhappy marriage, and he eventually comes to consider her such an unpleasant shrew that he makes some remark like “If I were ever to be murdered, I wouldn’t want my killer to be executed. Instead I’d want him sentenced to marry YOU, since that would be a far worse punishment!”
Oedipus, who actually does have kind of an Oedipus complex, flies into a rage. “How dare you talk to my mother that way!” He strikes his father and kills him.
After a pause, the chancellor or grand vizier or whatever says “Well, I guess I’d better start sending out invitations. At least we won’t have to worry about bride’s side or groom’s side…”