Lara Chang

Season: 5, Episodes: 3, Faction: DHARMA Initiative

Overview

Lara Chang is Pierre Chang’s wife and the mother of Miles Straume. She was a member of the DHARMA Initiative and lived on the Island in the 1970s. In 1977 Lara and her son were evacuated from the Island on the submarine Galaga. Off-Island, Lara came to reside in Encino, California.

Fire

Home

Fertility (Vegetation)

On the Island (1974)

5×13 – Some Like It Hoth

Lara lived with her husband Pierre on the Island. One day Lara stood behind a time-traveling adult Miles, in the cafeteria lunch queue. This was when adult Miles realized he was now living amongst his parents.

1977

Lara and Pierre had a son who they named Miles. It was implied by Pierre that Miles was named after the jazz musician Miles Davis, of whom Lara was a fan. Inside their house at the Barracks Lara was seen in 1977 in the company of both her husband and baby son, not knowing that an adult version of Miles was watching from outside. (“Some Like It Hoth”)

5×01 – Because You Left

The next morning, she greeted Pierre as he woke up and told him that it was his turn to help their son. (“Because You Left”)

5×15 – Follow the Leader

The next day Pierre organised the evacuation of all the DHARMA women and children from the Island. Lara and her baby son left the Island on the submarine, on her husband’s orders. Lara appeared upset by her husband’s insistence that they should leave. After leaving the Island, Lara and Miles moved to the United States. (“Follow the Leader”)

On the mainland

5×13 – Some Like It Hoth

Lara and Miles, now in the United States eventually settled in Encino, California. As Pierre didn’t tell them the reasons of the evacuation from the Island, Lara eventually felt that Pierre had abandoned them. Approximately ten years later, while Lara was finishing up the paperwork for her new apartment landlord, Miles unwittingly discovered a dead body in apartment 4. Lara inquired as to how he knew the body was there, and Miles said that he heard the dead man screaming.

Many years later, Lara became gravely ill. She was being cared for in the same Encino apartment by a nurse named Evelyn when a rebellious teenage Miles came to visit her after not having seen her for quite some time. He tried to get her to tell him what she knew about his abilities and about his father. Lara simply told Miles that his father was long dead, that he had never cared about them, and that he was buried somewhere Miles could never go. (“Some Like It Hoth”)

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Related Character Images

Associated DHARMA Stations

Decoded Family Members

Dr. Pierre Chang (Husband)

Miles Straume (Son)

Decoded Season 5 Characters

Evelyn

Trevor

Mr. Vonner

Kimberly Vonner

Jeanette Lewis

Charlotte Lewis

Key Episode(s) to Decoding the Character

5x13 "Some Like It Hoth"

5x15 "Follow the Leader"

Wiki Info

In Greek mythology, Hestia (Roman Vesta), daughter of Cronus and Rhea (“hearth” or “fireside”), is the virgin goddess of the hearth and of the right ordering of domesticity and the family. She received the first offering at every sacrifice in the household. In the public domain, the hearth of the prytaneum functioned as her official sanctuary. With the establishment of a new colony, flame from Hestia’s public hearth in the mother city would be carried to the new settlement. She sat on a plain wooden throne with a white woolen cushion and did not trouble to choose an emblem for herself.

Mythology

In Roman mythology, her more specifically civic approximate equivalent was Vesta, who personified the public hearth, and whose cult of the ever-burning hearth bound Romans together in the form of an extended family. The similarity of names between Hestia and Vesta, is misleading: “The relationship hestia-histie-Vesta cannot be explained in terms of Indo-European linguistics; borrowings from a third language must also be involved,” scholar Walter Burkert has written. At some primitive level her name means “home and hearth”, the oikos, the household and its inhabitants. “An early form of the temple is the hearth house; the early temples at Dreros and Prinias on Crete are of this type as indeed is the temple of Apollo at Delphi which always had its inner hestia” Among classical Greeks the altar was always in the open air with no roof but the sky, and that of the oracle at Delphi was the shrine of the Goddess before it was assumed by Apollo. The Mycenaean great hall, such as the hall of Odysseus at Ithaca was a megaron, with a central hearth fire.

The hearth fire of a Greek or a Roman household was not allowed to go out, unless it was ritually extinguished and ritually renewed, accompanied by impressive rituals of completion, purification and renewal. Compare the rituals and connotations of an eternal flame and of sanctuary lamps. At the more developed level of the polis, Hestia symbolizes the alliance between the colonies and their mother cities.

Hestia as an Olympian

Hestia is one of the three great goddesses of the first Olympian generation, along with Demeter and Hera. She was described as both the oldest and youngest of the three daughters of Rhea and Cronus, sister to three brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, in that she was the first to be swallowed by Cronus and the last to be disgorged. Originally listed as one of the Twelve Olympians, Hestia gave up her seat in favor of newcomer Dionysus to tend to the sacred fire on Mount Olympus. However, there is no ancient source for this claim. As Karl Kerenyi observes, “there is no story of Hestia’s ever having taken a husband or ever having been removed from her fixed abode.” Every family hearth was her altar. Of the Olympian gods, Hestia has the fewest exploits “since the hearth is immovable, Hestia is unable to take part even in the procession of the gods, let alone the other antics of the Olympians,” Burkert remarks. Sometimes this is assumed to be due to her passive, non-confrontational nature. This nature is illustrated by her giving up her seat in the Olympian twelve to prevent conflict. She is considered to be the first-born of Rhea and Cronus; this is evidenced by the fact that in Greek (and later Roman) culture ritual offerings to all gods began with a small offering to Hestia; the phrase “Hestia comes first” from ancient Greek culture denotes this.

Immediately after their birth, Cronus swallowed Hestia and her siblings except for the last and youngest, Zeus, who later rescued them and led them in a war against Cronus and the other Titans. Hestia, the eldest daughter “became their youngest child, since she was the first to be devoured by their father and the last to be yielded up again”—the clearest possible example of mythic inversion, a paradox that is noted in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (ca 700 BC): “She was the first-born child of wily Cronus—and youngest too.”

Poseidon, and Apollo of the younger generation, each aspired to court Hestia, but the goddess was unmoved by Aphrodite’s works and swore on the head of Zeus to retain her virginity. The Homeric hymns, like all early Greek literature, reinforce the supremacy of Zeus, and Hestia’s oath taken upon the head of Zeus is an example of surety. A measure of the goddess’s ancient primacy—”queenly maid…among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses”, in the words of the Homeric hymn—is that she was owed the first as well as the last sacrifice at every ceremonial assembly of Hellenes, a pious duty related by the mythographers as the gift of Zeus, as if it had been his to bestow: another mythic inversion if, as is likely, the ritual was too deep-seated and essential for the Olympian reordering to overturn. There are theories (by modern neopagans among others) that Hestia, as goddess of “home and hearth”, was one of the most ancient of all gods later worshiped as Olympians; as a maternal goddess of humans finding safety and homes in caves around a fire, worship of Hestia, by other names, may literally be hundreds of thousands of years old and has continued through classical Greek times to the present day.

“The power worshipped in the hearth never fully developed into a person,” Walter Burkert has observed. Hestia evolved into a lesser goddess in the same ranks of Pan and Dionysus, who was incorporated into the Olympian order in Hestia’s place. At Athens “in Plato’s time,” notes Kenneth Dorter “there was a discrepancy in the list of the twelve chief gods, as to whether Hestia or Dionysus was included with the other eleven. The altar to them at the agora, for example, included Hestia, but the east frieze of the Parthenon had Dionysus instead.

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