Notes

IO the Priestess

Io is known as the first priestess of Hera(Wife of Zeus), who lived in Argos (A place near Southern Greece today). Her father Inachus, is the legendary king of Argos. She is often described and portrayed as a lovely and a beautiful young woman in history books and paintings.

The Myth:

Zeus falls in love with beutiful Io, but gets rejected. Since we are talking about the supreme god Zeus here, of course he doesn’t just let it go, in fact, he starts to disturb Io in her sleep again and again. An oracle gives an advice to Io’s desperate father, which is “to choose between his daugter or his kingdom”,eventually Inachus, banishes his daughter from his land.

After she is banished, Zeus changes his shape and approches his lonely, terrified and vulnerable prey, Io. Because Io is her priestess, Hera senses Zeus’s evil plan. When she gets there, Zeus truns Io into a white cow to protect her from the wrath of Hera. But Hera insists on receiveing the cow as a gift from Zeus. Even though Zeus doesn’t want to, he does accept this offer in the end.

After taking the cow from Zeus, Hera sends Argus Panoptes (Greek: All Seeing) who has 100 eyes and sleeps 50 of them open, to watch over the cow.

When Zeus wants to save Io from Hera, he sends his son Hermes to put Argus in sleep and rescue Io. Hermes does that by telling stories until Argus is bored to sleep and kills him, rescues Io and comes back to Zeus.

With the loss of Argus, Hera gets enraged and sad. To honor his loyalty, it is told that she placed his myriad eyes on the tail of her bird, the peacock. Because Hera is full of anger, she sends a gadfly to sting Io and the gadfly chases her all the way to Egypt where Zeus finally changes her back into a woman.

Io later will be known as, Isis in Egyptian mythology.