Strix (mythology)
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The strix or striga (pl. striges; occasionally corrupted to stirge) was an Ancient Roman legendary creature, usually described as a nocturnal bird of ill omen that fed on human flesh and blood, like a vampire. Unlike later vampires, it was not a revenant—a risen corpse—but the product of metamorphosis. The name is Greek in origin and means "owl", with which bird it is usually identified (the name of the genus Strix follows this meaning).
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[edit] Classical stories
The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boios, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios (their father being a wild bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, like Lycaon, by being transformed into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix "that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men".[1] The first Latin allusion is in Plautus's Pseudolus,[2] dated to 191 BCE, in which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the striges—i.e., disemboweling a hapless victim. Horace, in his Epodes, makes the strix's magical properties clear: its feathers are an ingredient in a love potion. Seneca the Younger, in his Hercules Furens, shows the striges dwelling on the outskirts of Tartarus. Ovid tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king Procas in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus and placated with the meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the Kalends of June.[3]
Though descriptions abound, the concept of the strix was nonetheless vague. The scientific Pliny, in his Natural History,[4] confesses little knowledge of them; he knows that their name was once used as a curse, but beyond that he can only aver that the tales of them nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat[5] suckled its children.
[edit] Medieval and modern
The legend of the strix survived into the Middle Ages, as recorded in Isidore's Etymologiae,[6] and gave both name and attributes to the strigoaică, the Romanian witch, and to the strega, the Italian witch. Also the Albanian shtriga is described as a witch and derives from the Strix; she can transform into a flying insect.
In more recent times the Stirge was presented as a popular monster in Dungeons and Dragons. In the game it took the form of a many-legged flying creature which sucked the blood from its victims through a sharp, tubular beak.
A version of the striga makes an appearance in The Witcher (video game) based on the works of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski. As a demonic undead creature, which tranforms from the corpse of a dead child, striga in the Witcher's universe doesn't look like insects or vampires but looks similar to a ghoul with a muscular four-legs body, big claws, and a horrific fang.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Translation by Oliphant, pp. 133-134
- ^ Pseudolus 819
- ^ Fasti, vi.101 ff.
- ^ Natural History xi.232
- ^ In the ancient world the bat was commonly classified as a bird; only Aristotle differed, considering it halfway between bird and land animal. See Oliphant, p. 134 n. 4
- ^ Etymologiae book 12, ch. 7.42
- Oliphant, Samuel Grant (1913). "The Story of the Strix: Ancient". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 44: 133-49. doi:.
- "Carna, Proca and the Strix on the Kalends of June", by Christopher Michael McDonough, in Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), Vol. 127. (1997), pp. 315-344.
