Worried that cow-horns might also be a symptom, Isis let her COVID precautions put a damper on the official reception for Io.

[SETTING: San Casciano Hot Springs, in Tuscany]

JUNO, GODDESS OF MARRIAGE AND JUPITER’S SISTER-WIFE-QUEEN (you read that right): What in the world are the mortals doing with my healing shrine down there?

CERES, GODDESS OF CROPS AND ALSO SISTER OF JUPITER: They call it archaeological excavation. It’s very, very slow digging, and then they take the things they dig up and study them.

JUNO: You mean farming?

CERES: No, that’s where they put things into the ground, then after a wait they dig things out of the ground and eat them. How do you not know this already?

Archaeology, sometimes known as “artifact farming.”

JUNO: I don’t make deals with peasants. Except for when they give birth, which is why I have this shrine here. Also I love a good hot-springs day spa. Are those mortals stealing my votive offerings?

CERES: Our offerings. Human fertility cults aren’t all about you. You may be the goddess of marriage and childbirth, but I’m the goddess of mothering.

JUNO: Please, you rescue your daughter from the Underworld one time, suddenly you’re Martyr Mother Superior. Don’t forget, I also had a child come back to Mt. Olympus.

CERES: After you threw him off Mt. Olympus for being an ugly infant.

JUNO: Whatever, like anyone cares what happens to Vulcan. Who is that goddess coming over here with her arms full of votive penises?

Still more logical than modern health insurance infrastructure.

CERES: Isis, another fertility goddess. You met her at a party one time. Remember, she’s from Egypt?

JUNO: That explains whatever it is that she’s wearing. Isis, you do know your penis bouquet there makes you look crazy.

ISIS, GODDESS OF FERTILITY AND OSIRIS’ SISTER-WIFE-QUEEN (you read that right): I’m not crazy, I’m just a little overextended. I mean, I’m already the Queen of the entire Underworld in Egypt, and then suddenly people are dropping votives for me in a lake in northern Italy. Plus I’ve got that famous temple in Pompeii, it’s just a lot, you know? And that’s before I have to come up and rescue my votives from some slow-digging mortals.

JUNO: On Mt. Olympus we call them artifact farmers.

CERES: No, we do not.

JUNO: Why did mortals think we wanted those votive penises anyway? I can understand a bronze womb dropped in sulfur water, that’s still better reproductive medicine than a lot of places have these days (glares at 2022 Supreme Court). But just a penis? Totally useless. Why are you collecting them?

ISIS: Well, I can’t read the Etruscan or Latin inscriptions, so I just assumed they were gifts to me to commemorate that time I sewed my brother Osiris’s dismembered corpse together and made him a magic penis to replace his missing one so I could conceive our son Horus.

CERES: (after a beat of stunned silence) Hera and I both had children with our brother. The same brother. How are you still the weirdest one here?

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