BURGEONING LADS OF SCIENCE

Mythursday: The Pick-Up Divinity

So I didn’t update last week. Sorry. It’s not like you’re paying me for this, so shut up.

Anyway, I don’t want to go two weeks without making a post, but I’ve got some things to do today, so I’m just going to take one question, even though I got a lot of (maybe too many) good questions last week.

Chris Sims—and, look, I’m not trying to show favoritism toward his questions or anything—asks:

“I would like to know more about why Zeus was always turning into swans to have sex with ladies. Were they all into animals?”

My initial answer was that it was for the same reason that Mystery (of “The Pick-Up Artist”) wore ridiculous hats. Which is to say, to get ladies’ attention and catch them off-guard. Which is true, but isn’t the entire answer.

Zeus wore disguises for a number of reasons.

1) Yes, to catch a girl’s attention. Zeus rightly (within the narrative at least) assumed that girls really wanted to pet adorable animals. Whereas today he might turn into a kitten or unicorn, ancient ladies were apparently into flawlessly milk-white bulls.

2) To disguise himself and his intentions from the girl. Nobody is going to walk up to the acknowledged Rape God of the Galaxy unless they want to pop out a Hercules nine months later. Conversely, no one who goes to feed a swan expects they will soon be squatting out two enormous god eggs (this happened). I’ll show in a second that Zeus didn’t always take animal form, but his disguises were intended to be something the girls would trust and not be afraid of.

3) To disguise himself from his wife. Hera was a (justifiably) jealous wife and was always on the lookout to catch Zeus in his dalliances. Girls who got caught or who helped Zeus not get caught could feel the brunt of Hera’s wrath (see Io and Echo for examples). For some reason, theoretically Hera would be less suspicious of the lady getting boned by an eagle.

And maybe most importantly…

4) Zeus couldn’t appear in his true form to mortals. He was literally lightning and thunder incarnate. Just the sight of his face was deadly to humans. One of his lovers, Semele, made him promise he would reveal himself to her and he did and she died in a fire but there was a baby in her and Zeus put the baby in his leg and anyway that’s where Dionysus came from. So he had to have some kind of disguise lest he get his grind on with some ashes.

As I said, Zeus’s disguises weren’t always animals, just something that helped him gain access to or the trust of the girl. Here are some examples:

Aegina—eagle
Alcmene, mother of Herakles—her husband, Amphitryon (this trick worked so well that Uther Pendragon would copy it centuries later)
Antiope—satyr
Callisto—the goddess Artemis
Danaë, mother of Perseus—golden shower (remember?)
Europa—bull
Leda, mother of Castor and Pollux and Helen of Troy—swan

That’s just a few examples which don’t include girls or women he didn’t use disguises on or girls he just regular raped.

I’m sure somewhere in the annals of myth is a story in which he disguised himself as a gallery owner, but perhaps we’ll never know.