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The theme of a celestial god’s love for a heifer occurs in Akkadian, Hurro-Hittite, Ugaritic and Greek mythology. In Akkadian, from the Old Babylonian period to the Neo-Assyrian, we find various versions of the story that the Moon-god Sin fell in love with a cow and mounted her in the form of a young bull. She was called Geme-Sin ‘Sin’s Maid’. When the time came for her to give birth, he heard her cries of pain and sent down two daughters of Anu to ease her delivery. They rubbed oil on her forehead and sprinkled her all over with ‘the water of labour’. The calf then dropped lightly on the ground. In the Hurro-Hittite myth it is the Sun-god who looks down from the sky and espies a desirable cow. He comes down in the shape of a young man and speaks with her. After a fragmentary passage, the cow is pregnant. She gives birth to a two-legged creature, it disgusts her, and she prepared to eat it when the Sun-god intervenes to save his child. Before departing, he scratches its limbs and head. He then arranges for it to be guarded by fierce birds and snakes, until a childless fisherman comes, finds it, scratches its limbs, head, and eyes, takes it home, and persudes his wife to pretend that she has borne it herself. The sequel of the story (CH 363) is lost. In the Ugaritic corpus the storm-god Baal makes love to a cow, after which the cow conceives (KTU 1 5.v.18ff.). In another obscure episode the goddess Anat is also involved.
The same theme is present in Greek story of Io. She was a priestess of Hera, whose Homeric epithet boôpis, ‘cow-face’, bears witness to the bovine assiciations of the cult. Io is said to have been turned into a cow, either by Hera or Zeus, and then forced to wander over the whole world. Hera’s temple stood on a hill called Euboea, ‘Good for cattle’, and in the earlier form of the myth it was here that Io’s frenzied roaming ended. It reflects some traditional ritual in which the priestess, wearing cow’s horns, was pursued to the temple by someone carrying and ox-goad. This had its mythical counterpart in the gadfly that drove the cow Io from land to land. It is less clear what corresponded to her coupling with Zeus, who assumed the form of a bull according to Aeschylus, and to the birth of Epaphos in the ritual. Probably a bull and cow were mated in a ceremony intended to promote the fertility of the cattle. The name of Io’s offspring, Epaphos, was associated with the word epaphē ‘a touching, laying on of hands’, and explained that Zeus had laid his hand on Io to turn her into a cow, or back from a cow into a woman, or to make her conceive. This detail in the story may have been invented to account for Epaphos’ name. But the emphasis in the Hurro-Hittite myth on the scratching of the cow’s offspring, both by the Sun-god and by the fisherman, raises the possibility that this is an original element, perhaps reflecting a ritual action.
Sources (list of abbreviations)
CH 363
KTU 1 5.v.18ff.
Bibliography
| Bachvarova 2001 | Bachvarova, Mary R. “Succesful Birth, Unsuccessful Marriage. Aeschylus' Suppliants and Mesopotamian Birth Incantations.” NIN 2 (2001) 49-90. |
| West 1997, 443-435 | West, Martin L. The East Face of Helicon. West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. |
Amar Annus
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