Io - Greek myths - Feb 11

Let us talk about Io.

Io is more than just two letters, she is one of Zeus’s/Jupiter’s many paramours. Therefore, what is special about her? Let us ponder.

How does the myth go, in general? Io was a nymph or a human princess, daughter of Inachus, himself a river god or a human king. She caught the eye and attention of Jupiter. The greatest of the Greco-Roman gods began to court her. This caught Hera’s/Juno’s attention. Trying to do something about it, Jupiter turned Io into a cow. It did not work. Juno demanded the cow for herself. For some reason – to save his own ass, maybe – Jupiter complied, and Io was put to pasture under the watchful gaze of Juno’s primary minion of that time – the hundred-eyed Argus. After a while, the king of the gods, the legend among mortals, Jupiter, realized that you know, this is not right, he got Io into this mess, so who but… Hermes/Mercury to get her out of it? The latter agreed, went to the pasture, put Argus down, and released Io. However, he did not turn her back into a human/nymph, and in addition, Juno sent a gadfly, (a biting fly), to harass Io further. After many other trials and tribulations, Io reached Egypt, where she stopped being a cow, and became a goddess instead – usually Isis or Hathor, as far as Greeks and Romans were concerned. Juno’d put Argus’ eyes onto a peacock’s tail, the end. Where to start?

It is an old myth. It is a myth about the gods. There are no mortals there. Unlike modern times, such as Mr. Riordan’s novels and other fiction, back then the gods and goddesses weren’t just characters as Odysseus or Perseus were, for example; rather, they were personifications of concepts, allegories, ideas, and so on, and so forth. Hera/Juno, for example, was a goddess of marriages and families; she stood for family unity and loyalty, which is why, despite all of her husband’s infidelities, when a mortal named Ixion tried to seduce her, she… either refused him, or gave him a minor goddess, (a cloud goddess), named Nephele, as a wife instead. Post mortem, Ixion is in the underworld, rolling around in a flaming wheel… that sounds suspiciously like a sun metaphor. Ditto for Sisyphus’ punishment – a stone that goes first uphill and then downhill sounds suspiciously like a sun metaphor.

For the Greeks and especially the Romans, the only Olympian sun god was Apollo, who himself almost ended up in Tartarus. He had a son named Asclepius, who – first – healed the sick, and then resurrected the dead. Pause. Unlike the New Testament, where the Savior got into trouble for completely different reasons, Asclepius was smitten down with a thunderbolt precisely for resurrection and defying the natural order.

Apollo did not care – Asclepius was still his son, so he grabbed his trusty solar bow and shot the Elder Cyclopes who used to forge the thunderbolts dead.

The Thunderer was not impressed either. He grabbed Apollo and would have sent him into Tartarus after Asclepius, when in rushed Leto – Apollo’s mother and Jupiter’s paramour, who did the unmentionable and saved Apollo from that final fate, reducing his punishment to some sort of an exile instead.

Why Leto’s actions were unmentionable? Because it is never said, what they actually were – all we know is that she was able to suck-up to Jupiter for the last time, to save her son’s life. (In a manner of speaking, but still). After this incident, she remained on Olympus, (probably), but purely as a part of entourage, never doing anything, while Artemis gradually moved away from Olympus, becoming a goddess of the wild places, (among other domains, but not so much the moon), and Apollo remained a very important god, but a solar god? Not so much. These days, people associate the sun with Helios as much as they would with Apollo; for Homer in his ‘Odyssey’, the sun was flat-out Helios rather than Apollo. …What Io has to do with this?

Let us try again. Zeus/Jupiter was the king of the gods, but he was also a thunder god, and his immediate siblings too were gods of nature, rather than of human aspects, (i.e. Athene and Hermes, as examples). Poseidon embodied the sea. Hades – the Underworld. Demeter (and her daughter Kore) was the earth, (the fertile ‘civilized’ part of it). Hestia, (who was the least developed of all the deities associated with Olympus), was the fire – the hearth-fire, but that is not important. So why is Hera not a ‘natural’ goddess, but of human marriages and families?

She was not. Not at first. Just as the peafowl was not her sacred animal at first either. The peafowl live in India and South-East Asia, and were introduced to the Mediterranean Europe at least from the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests, if not later. (The closest relative of the Asian peafowl is the Congo peafowl of Africa, but the ancient Greeks and Romans did not know it). Before then, the sacred animal of Hera/Juno might have been the cow instead, for one of her epithets is ‘cow-eyed’, and it was considered flattering in ancient world. Moreover, the cow is a good mother (and wife, to a point), on one hand, and can be associated with a rain cloud as well. Put otherwise, Zeus and Hera, Jupiter and Juno, could have been a couple from the start – Zeus/Jupiter being the destructive aspect, thunder and lightning, whereas Hera/Juno being the more benign, the life giving rain aspect instead. In some of the older myths, Zeus and Hera become a couple during a storm: Zeus confronts Hera disguised as a cuckoo, Hera shelters it from the storm, Zeus becomes himself and wins Hera over – or that is how the story goes.

The European cuckoo is 110% brood parasite, rather like the cowbirds of North America and the honeyguide bird of Africa. (This is one of the reasons as to why this story does not come up too often these days). That said, Zeus/Jupiter was a bad husband not because of all the children that he had sired, but also because he was a bad husband. He married Metis, the mother of Athene, and swallowed her, and so Athene emerged from him alone, (and had many issues). He had a relationship with Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, and see above, as to how that seemed to have ended. And Hera/Juno?

Let us get onto Io. She was turned into a cow, of all things. However, if Hera/Juno was also a cow, at least some of times, (and remember, Zeus/Jupiter himself used to be a bull from time to time, and Demeter/Ceres, their sister, was associated with horses), she would hate it even more, and assume that her husband was trying to replace her. Hence, her claim to Io the cow. So, why does her husband comply?

…In the ‘Iliad’, Zeus claims to be the strongest on Olympus, able to defeat all the others in a tug-of-war over Tartarus. Hera… is not impressed; at one point, she uses her beauty and brains to distract Zeus while her allies are giving the Greek forces a hands-up over the Trojan host. While Zeus does eventually catch-up onto her, this does not stop him from proclaiming his love for her, claiming that she got his entire lovers’ list beat. Kind of both humiliating and sweet at the same time. Put otherwise, Zeus might’ve authentically fallen in love with his sister-wife by then, (and vice versa?), plus he’s aware that physically, she’s no slouch herself – in another part of the ‘Iliad’, she beats the crap out of Artemis, when the latter challenged her; by contrast, Hermes surrenders to the twins’ mother Leto without actually doing anything – back to Io?

In Io’s story, Jupiter may be trying to replace Juno with a different wife, but he is not ready to challenge her openly yet, this could be messy. Therefore, he complies, and Juno puts Io into charge of Argus, the embodiment of the starry sky.

Wait a second, isn’t her husband’s domain also the sky? Yes, and so’s hers, and while she is not trying to replace him precisely, she is trying to build-up a challenger for the sky-god’s title. Enter Hermes, slash Mercury.

…Does anyone ever notice that the latter is acting atypically for him? Hermes/Mercury is a messenger of the gods, he is the patron of thieves, politicians, bards, merchants, and many more, but he does not murder people, let alone other immortals, for fun. Here he does, using a sickle-shaped sword of all weapons. (Later on, he loans it to Perseus to slay Medusa).

…A sickle-shaped sword? A lunar crescent! Being stuck in Argus’ stellar nighttime sky-pasture, Io the full-moon-cow threatens to ruin the entire lunar calendar. Enter Mercury with a crescent moon sword, (either new or old crescent, details are tricky), to end Argus and let Io the moon free. She is still a cow, however, and stays as such until she gets to Egypt, where she becomes a goddess instead – either Isis or Hathor. Both goddesses were associated with Juno by the Romans. Clearly, Jupiter had invested a lot of power into Io being the new Juno back then, and it worked-out… in a way that no one involved expected it to.

What else is left? In Ovid’s version, Mercury puts Argus to sleep by telling him the tale of Pan and Syrinx, the nymph who refused the former by turning into a reed, i.e. dying in an atypical way. Pan used the reeds to make his first panpipes, i.e. giving Syrinx an entire new life, (or at least existence). This is what happens to Argus as well – he dies and stops being Argus, but his eyes go onto a peacock’s tail, and so, he gets reborn – isn’t mythology fun?

That said, this was also the de-facto end of the tale of Io, with only ties left to wrap-up is her son, Epaphus, who became friends with a boy named Phaeton. The latter was the son of Helios, and tried to ride his father’s solar chariot through the sky, only to be struck down by Jupiter (in order to save the world, of course). Helios was devastated, (and there were some rumors that it was he who was struck down by Jupiter instead). Being a solar god with Zeus/Jupiter around is flat-out bad, it looks like – but that is another story.