Self Fulfilling Prophecy / Mythology & Religion

• The Bible:
  • The Tower of Babel was built because its builders feared being scattered across the Earth. As part of His punishment, God did just that.
  • Joseph has prophetic dreams saying he will one day rule his older brothers - so they fake his death and sell him into slavery. But this then starts a chain of events which lead to him becoming grand vizier of Egypt and controlling the only source of stored food when a famine hits, leading to his brothers having to beg him for help.
  • King Ahab was warned by Micaiah the prophet that he would die in the battle of Ramoth Gilead. Ahab tries to avert the disaster by dressing up in different clothes before going into battle while King Jehoshaphat wore his royal clothes, hoping that the Syrian army would go after Jehoshaphat instead of him. However, an arrow shot at random pierces King Ahab, and he ends up fulfilling the very prophecy that was spoken about him.
• The origin story of Buddhism involves founder Siddhartha Gautama, a Hindu aristocrat, being prophesied as a child to become either a great religious leader, or a great ruler. Hoping for the latter, his parents spoiled him rotten and made sure he wanted for nothing. However, on his first trip out of the palace he saw suffering for the first time, and began studying with ascetics to come to terms with the shocking-for-him reality of life outside the aristocracy, ultimately becoming the religious leader his parents tried to keep him from being.
• Christianity: In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, it is generally accepted that the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ was bound to happen from the beginning of creation, even if humanity did not fall to sin (this is something known as Recapitulation Theory). Thus, the entire Bible can be seen as a back-and-forth tug-of-war between Satan trying to delay the inevitable and God outsmarting him at every move.
• Classical Mythology: Greek Mythology frequently displays this trope.
  • Priam and Hecuba hear a prophecy that their son Paris will cause Troy to burn down. They abandon him in the woods to die, but he is raised as the son of a shepherd. When Paris is herding sheep, Zeus chooses Paris to judge the beauty of Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Paris chooses Aphrodite, who promises him the hand of Helen. By marrying Helen and stealing her from her husband Menelaus, Paris triggers the Trojan War which results in the destruction of Troy. If his parents had raised him as a prince of Troy, Zeus would not have chosen him to judge the contest.
  • Cronus hears a prophecy that one of his children will defeat him. He swallows his children as soon as they are born. Eventually, his wife Rhea hides her sixthborn child, Zeus, and tricks Cronus into swallowing a rock. Zeus grows up, defeats Cronus, and frees his siblings.
  • Averted. Zeus is warned that his lover Metis would bear a son great enough to oust him. He swallows the pregnant Metis, whose child is Athena.
  • Averted. Zeus and Poseidon lusted after the sea-goddess Thetis. After they learned that her future son would be greater than his father, they decided not to have sex with her and arranged her to marry a mortal. No matter how great her son became, he would only be a demigod with a mortal's fate.
  • Greek tragedy often revolves around the idea that You Can't Fight Fate. Those who attempt to do so suffer grisly punishments for their hubris. If you consider Oedipus et al., Paris got off lightly.
  • Then there's King Croesus, who was told that if he attacked his neighbor, a great empire would fall. Think about that for a moment — obviously, it's going to come true, since whichever empire lost the war would fall. Croesus just didn't consider that it might be his empire. This is lampshaded in The Cartoon History of the Universe's version, where Croesus' response is "What kind of answer is that?! I might as well flip a coin!" Also, when Croesus complained to Apollo and his oracle after his campaign turned out a disaster, he got the response: "You should have asked which empire instead of assuming that it would be Cyrus' empire that would fall." As a matter of fact, if people got an unsatisfactory answer from the oracle in Delphi they could ask for another one, and Croesus as a favoured benefactor of Delphi easily could have done just that.
  • According to The Histories, the same Croesus fell victim to another such prophecy as well, this time in the form of a dream. Having dreamed that his favorite son Atys would die by an iron weapon, Croesus took him out of the army and forbade him from engaging enemies or keeping weapons in the palace. This made Atys restless, so Croesus allowed him to hunt a boar (because they don't wield weapons, obviously). Atys was killed by a thrown spear in a Friendly Fire incident during the hunt.
  • See also the myth of Perseus' birth. See, the oracle at Delphi told King Acrisius that his grandson would kill him, so he decided to prevent his daughter Danae from ever bearing a son by locking her up in a brass tower, where her weeping drew the attention of Zeus and he sired a child with her. Once Acrisius found out, he locked them up in a coffin and floated it out to sea in the hopes that they would drown^note In ancient Greek times, it was considered a much greater and more unforgivable sin to directly kill a family member than it was to abandon them and leave their survival to fate, whereas under modern mores, the latter is not considered much better than the former. In addition, since the child was an offspring of Zeus, Acrisius probably didn't want to piss off the King of the Gods by killing the kid directly - sending him off and letting fate/the will of the Olympians, specifically Poseidon (God of the Sea) in this case, decide whether he lived or died, may have been another matter., but a fisherman found both of them and took them in. Though Perseus never sought out revenge against Acrisius, he did end up accidentally killing him. As Perseus returned home from his famous quest, Acrisius learned he was still alive and fled to the remote city of Larissa. Turns out Perseus got shipwrecked there too, where he entered a local athletics contest, and accidentally caved a crowd member's head in with a discus. Guess who that crowd member was.
  • Oedipus. Before his birth, someone cursed his parents, declaring that their child would kill the father and marry the mother. When little Oedipus was born, they spiked his heels and left him on a hill to die of exposure - only for the rulers of another nearby region to find the child and take him in. The rest, as they say, is history. Or maybe mythology. Even worse, Oedipus learned about the prophecy and ran away from his foster parents to prevent it from happening. Little did he know he was not their biological son. Poor, poor Oedipus...
• Norse Mythology:
  • This is the cause of Baldur's death. Baldur has visions of his death approaching, so he turns to his mother Frigg for help. Frigg makes all things in the world swear not to harm Baldur, making him invulnerable to any form of attack, so the other gods start a game out of throwing things at Baldur. Loki gets frustrated by this and discovers that Baldur is not invulnerable to mistletoe (Frigg having forgotten to ask the mistletoe or discounting it as harmless depending on the version), makes an arrow made of mistletoe and tricks Baldur's blind brother Höðr into using it to kill him.
  • Many of Odin's attempts at preventing Ragnarök (tricking Fenrir, tossing Jormungandr in the ocean so he drowns, casting Hel into the realm of Hel) actually end up giving them motivation and power to cause it, leading to his death and the fall of the Aesir.
• The Talmud (Berachos 56-57) speaks at length about dreams and whether or not they can predict the future. Many of the opinions contradict each other, unsurprisingly, but a popular opinion is that interpreting the dream actually causes your prediction to happen. To that end, it proceeds to give a Long List of different ways to interpret dreams, almost all of which are positive.