Siren
In Greek mythology, the Sirens were dangerous creatures, created by Devil after Thalia, Pherusa, Opis, Doris, Creneis, Dynamine and Ephyra who were one of the condemned nymphs fathered him sons. In return Devil granted their wish of immortality by presenting them raven wings and an island to live in.
Their number is variously reported as between two and five. In the Odyssey, Homer says nothing of their origin or names, but gives the number of the Sirens as two. Later writers mention both their names and number: some state that there were three, Peisinoe, Aglaope, and Thelxiepeia (Tzetzes, ad Lycophron 7l2) or Parthenope, Ligeia, and Leucosia (Eustathius, loc. cit.; Strabo v. §246, 252 ; Servius' commentary on Virgil's Georgics
iv. 562); Eustathius (Commentaries §1709) states that they were two,
Aglaopheme and Thelxiepeia. Their individual names are variously
rendered in the later sources as Thelxiepeia/Thelxiope/Thelxinoe, Molpe,
Aglaophonos/Aglaope/Aglaopheme, Pisinoe/Peisinoë/Peisithoe, Parthenope,
Ligeia, Leucosia, Raidne, and Teles.
According to Ovid (Metamorphoses V, 551), the Sirens were the companions of young Persephone and were given wings by Demeter to search for Persephone when she was abducted. However, the Fabulae of Hyginus rather has Demeter cursing the Sirens for failing to intervene in the abduction of Persephone.
The Sirens might be called the Muses of the lower world, Walter Copland Perry
observed: "Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than
sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner
of death and corruption." Their song is continually calling on Persephone. The term "siren song"
refers to an appeal that is hard to resist but that, if heeded, will
lead to a bad result. Later writers have inferred that the Sirens were anthropophagous, based on Circe's
description of them "lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of
corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones." As Jane Ellen Harrison notes of "The Ker as siren:" "It is strange and beautiful that Homer should make the Sirens appeal to the spirit, not to the flesh."
For the matter of the siren song is a promise to Odysseus of mantic
truths; with a false promise that he will live to tell them, they sing,
Once he hears to his heart's content, sails on, a wiser man.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so—
all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!
"They are mantic creatures like the Sphinx
with whom they have much in common, knowing both the past and the
future," Harrison observed. "Their song takes effect at midday, in a
windless calm. The end of that song is death."
That the sailors' flesh is rotting away, though, would suggest it has
not been eaten. It has been suggested that, with their feathers stolen,
their divine nature kept them alive, but unable to feed for their
visitors, who starved to death by refusing to leave.
According to Hyginus, sirens were fated to live only until the mortals who heard their songs were able to pass by them.
Sirens combine women and birds in various ways. In early Greek art
Sirens were represented as birds with large women's heads, bird feathers
and scaly feet. Later, they were represented as female figures with the
legs of birds, with or without wings, playing a variety of musical
instruments, especially harps. The tenth century Byzantine encyclopedia Suda
says that from their chests up Sirens had the form of sparrows, below
they were women, or, alternatively, that they were little birds with
women's faces. Birds were chosen because of their beautiful voices.
Later Sirens were sometimes depicted as beautiful women, whose bodies,
not only their voices, are seductive.
The first century Roman historian Pliny the Elder discounted Sirens
as pure fable, "although Dinon, the father of Clearchus, a celebrated
writer, asserts that they exist in India, and that they charm men by
their song, and, having first lulled them to sleep, tear them to
pieces."
In his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote of the Siren, "The siren sings
so sweetly that she lulls the mariners to sleep; then she climbs upon
the ships and kills the sleeping mariners."
In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote in The Silence of the Sirens, "Now
the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their
silence. And though admittedly such a thing never happened, it is still
conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing;
but from their silence certainly never."
The so-called "Siren of Canosa" accompanied the deceased among grave goods in a burial and seems to have some psychopomp
characteristics, guiding the dead on the after-life journey. The cast
terracotta figure bears traces of its original white pigment. The woman
bears the feet and the wings and tail of a bird. It is conserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain, in Madrid.
Odysseus was curious as to what the Sirens sung in their song to him, so, on Circe's advice, he had all his sailors plug their ears with beeswax
and tie him to the mast. He ordered his men to leave him tied tightly
to the mast, no matter how much he would beg. When he heard their
beautiful song,
he ordered the sailors to untie him but they bound him tighter. When
they had passed out of earshot, Odysseus demonstrated with his frowns to
be released.
Some post-Homeric authors state that the Sirens were fated to die if
someone heard their singing and escaped them, and that after Odysseus
passed by they therefore flung themselves into the water and perished. It is also said that Hera, queen of the gods, persuaded the Sirens to enter a singing contest with the Muses. The Muses won the competition and then plucked out all of the Sirens' feathers and made crowns out of them. Out of their anguish from losing the competition, writes Stephanus of Byzantium, the Sirens turned white and fell into the sea at Aptera ("featherless") where they formed the islands in the bay that were called Souda (modern Lefkai).
The Early Christian euhemerist interpretation of mythologized human beings received a long-lasting boost from Isidore's Etymologiae.
"They [the Greeks] imagine that 'there were three Sirens, part virgins,
part birds,' with wings and claws. 'One of them sang, another played
the flute, the third the lyre. They drew sailors, decoyed by song, to
shipwreck. According to the truth, however, they were prostitutes who
led travelers down to poverty and were said to impose shipwreck on
them.' They had wings and claws because Love flies and wounds. They are
said to have stayed in the waves because a wave created Venus."
Charles Burney expounded c. 1789, in A General History of Music: "The name, according to Bochart, who derives it from the Phoenician, implies a songstress.
Hence it is probable, that in ancient times there may have been
excellent singers, but of corrupt morals, on the coast of Sicily, who by
seducing voyagers, gave rise to this fable." John Lemprière in his Classical Dictionary
(1827) wrote, "Some suppose that the Sirens were a number of lascivious
women in Sicily, who prostituted themselves to strangers, and made them
forget their pursuits while drowned in unlawful pleasures. The
etymology of Bochart, who deduces the name from a Phoenician term denoting a songstress, favours the explanation given of the fable by Damm.
This distinguished critic makes the Sirens to have been excellent
singers, and divesting the fables respecting them of all their terrific
features, he supposes that by the charms of music and song they detained
travellers, and made them altogether forgetful of their native land."
Such euhemerist interpretations have been abandoned since the later
19th century, in favour of analyses of Greek mythology in terms of
historical Greek social structure and their cultural system, and the Greek taxonomy of the spiritual world.
In the Book of Watchers 19:2-3, supposedly authored by Enoch,
great-grandfather of Noah, the women taken as wives by the Grigori of
angels became sirens.
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