Lamia (mythology)
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On the fringes of Greek mythology Lamia was one of the monstrous bogeys that terrified children and the naive, like her daughter Scylla, or Empousa. The Lamia had the head and torso of a woman, but the lower half of her body was serpentine.[1] Laimos is the gullet, and she had a cannibal appetite for children that could be interpreted as a dangerous erotic appetite for men: harlots might be named "Lamia", Karl Kerényi noted,[2] and the connection between Demetrius Poliorcetes and the musically talented courtesan named Lamia was notorious.[3]
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[edit] Lamia's parentage
Diodorus Siculus[4] made of Lamia the daughter of Poseidon and Lybie—no more than a personification of Libya—and a queen of Libya herself, whom Zeus loved, Aristophanes tells (in Peace). Hera either turned her into a monster—if she was not already one of Hecate's brood—or when Hera killed all of Lamia's children save Scylla, the grief turned her into a monster. Lamia had the gift to be able to take her eyes out and then put them back in, the mark of a Sibyl possessed with the second sight: compare the Graeae and the Norns. A paternalistic embroidery on this archaic mytheme is that this gift was the gift of Zeus, and by a further explanatory improvisation, that Lamia was "cursed" with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children.
Horace, in Ars Poetica (l.340) imagined the impossibility of retrieving the living children she had engulfed. Roman mothers used to threaten their children with this story; some such nurse's tale of Lamia in her tower was referred to by Tertullian, Against Valentinius (ch.iii).
Further passing references to Lamia were made by Plutarch, (On Curiosity 2); Strabo (i.II.8); and Aristotle, Ethicsvii.5.
[edit] Late visions of Lamia
Many lurid details were conjured up by later writers, assembled in the Suda, expanded upon in Renaissance poetry and collected in Bulfinch and in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Lamia was envious of other mothers and ate their children. In Renaissance emblems she had the body of a serpent and breasts and head of a woman, like the image of hypocrisy. She was usually female, but Aristophanes suggests her hermaphroditic phallus, perhaps simply for monstrosity's sake (Peace l..758). Blood-drinking female vampire-spirits were called Lamiai: compare the medieval succubus.
The 19th century editors of Lempriere's Dictionary were of the opinion that Lamia is the model for Lamiae -- small African monsters whose hisses were pleasing but who destroyed children -- and that these are what are today called lemures. Modern mythographers find no connection.
John Keats described the Lamia in Lamia and Other Poems, presenting a description of the various colors of Lamia that was based on Burton's, in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
More recently, the Lamia surfaced in popular culture with an appearance in The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the rock opera by Genesis. A song called "The Lamia" describes three snakes with female faces devouring the protagonist in a ritualistic fashion. The lyrics, composed by Peter Gabriel, explore the disturbing sexual connotations of the Lamia's cannibalism in a surprisingly tender fashion.
[edit] Modern folk traditions
In the modern Greek folk tradition, the Lamia has survived and retained many of her traditional attributes. John Cuthbert Lawson comments, "....the chief characteristics of the Lamiae, apart from their thirst for blood, are their uncleanliness, their gluttony, and their stupidity" (Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals). The contemporary Greek proverb, "της Λάμιας τα σαρώματα" ("the Lamia's sweeping"), epitomises slovenliness; and the common expression, "τό παιδί τό 'πνιξε η Λάμια" ("the child has been strangled by the Lamia"), explains the sudden death of young children (ibid). As in Bulgarian folklore and Basque legends, the Lamia in Greece is often associated with caves and damp places.
In modern Greek folk tales, Lamia is an ogress similar to Baba-Yaga. She lives in a remote house or tower. She eats human flesh and has magical abilities, keeps magical objects or knows information crucial to the hero of the tale's quest. The hero must avoid her, trick her or gain her favour in order to obtain one of those. In some tales, the lamia has a daughter who is also a magician and helps the hero, eventually falling in love with him.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Robert Graves, 1960. The Greek Myths 61.
- Karl Kerényi, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks pp 38–40. Edition currently in print is Thames & Hudson reissue, February 1980, ISBN 0-500-27048-1.
