The Greek Myths, Volume 1 by Robert Graves

Author:Robert Graves
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141959658
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-11-13T21:00:00+00:00

2. Strabo: x. 1. 3; Stephanus of Byzantium sub Argura; Suidas sub Isis.

3. John Malalas: Chronicles ii. p. 28, ed. Dindorff.

1. This myth consists of several strands. The Argives worshipped the moon as a cow, because the horned new moon was regarded as the source of all water, and therefore of cattle fodder. Her three colours: white for the new moon, red for the harvest moon, black for the moon when it waned, represented the three ages of the Moon-goddess – Maiden, Nymph, and Crone (see 90. 3). Io changed her colour, as the moon changes, but for ‘red’ the mythographer substitutes ‘violet’ because ion is Greek for the violet flower. Woodpeckers were thought to be knocking for rain when they tapped on oak-trunks; and Io was the Moon as rain-bringer. The herdsmen needed rain most pressingly in late summer, when gadflies attacked their cattle and sent them frantic; in Africa, cattle-owning Negro tribes still hurry from pasture to pasture when attacked by them. Io’s Argive priestesses seem to have performed an annual heifer-dance in which they pretended to be driven mad by gadflies, while woodpecker-men, tapping on oak-doors and calling ‘Io! Io!’, invited the rain to fall and relieve their torments. This seems to be the origin of the myth of the Coan women who were turned into cows (see 137. s). Argive colonies founded in Euboea, the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, Syria, and Egypt, took their rain-making dance with them. The wryneck, the Moon-goddess’s prime orgiastic bird, nests in willows, and was therefore concerned with water-magic (see 152. 2).

2. The legend invented to account for the eastward spread of this ritual, as well as the similarity between the worship of Io in Greece, Isis in Egypt, Astarte in Syria, and Kali in India, has been grafted on two unrelated stories: that of the holy moon-cow wandering around the heavens, guarded by the stars – there is a cognate Irish legend of the ‘Green Stripper’ – and that of the Moon-priestesses whom the leaders of the invading Hellenes, each calling himself Zeus, violated to the dismay of the local population. Hera, as Zeus’s wife, is then made to express jealousy of Io, though Io was another name for ‘cow-eyed’ Hera. Demeter’s mourning for Persephone is recalled in the Argive festival of mourning for Io, since Io has been equated in the myth with Demeter. Moreover, every three years Demeter’s Mysteries were celebrated at Celeae (‘calling’), near Corinth, and said to have been founded by a brother of Celeus (‘woodpecker’), King of Eleusis. Hermes is called the son of Zeus Picus (‘woodpecker’) – Aristophanes in his Birds (480) accuses Zeus of stealing the woodpecker’s sceptre – as Pan is said to have been Hermes’s son by the Nymph Dryope (‘woodpecker’); and Faunus, the Latin Pan, was the son of Picus (‘woodpecker’) whom Circe turned into a woodpecker for spurning her love (Ovid: Metamorphoses xiv. 6). Faunus’s Cretan tomb bore the epitaph: ‘Here lies the woodpecker who was also Zeus’ (Suidas sub Picos).

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