As promised, here is today's #ClassicsHalloween thread on the 'vampiric' creatures of Greek mythology. The first of these will be Lamia, whose name means 'Devourer'.
It's amusing to me to remember that I first encountered Lamia as a kid, in my D&D 'Monstrous Manual'
It's amusing to me to remember that I first encountered Lamia as a kid, in my D&D 'Monstrous Manual'
Lamia was a beautiful Libyan woman who was loved by Zeus. But every time she gave birth to a child he had fathered, the infant was murdered by Zeus' jealous wife, Hera, until Lamia was made mad with grief.
In her despair and frenzy, she envied the happiness of every mother more fortunate than herself; she began snatching and eating their children. The savage cruelty in which she now indulged rendered her ugly, and her face became fearfully distorted.
Zeus gave her the power of taking her eyes out of her head and putting them in again (Diodorus Siculus 20.41.5), but the reason is unclear: perhaps so that she could escape seeing the misery in the world (?).
Lamia became a bugbear with which to frighten children. Strabo (1.2.8) claims that such stories were used to 'deter' children from misbehaviour, as they can 'scare the simple-minded'.
The Lamia also became, in later times, a ghostly woman who - by voluptuous artifices - attracted young men, in order to feast on their fresh, youthful, and pure blood, a form of proto-vampire.
It is this element of the story that Keats adapts for his poem 'Lamia' in 1820, where Hermes returns Lamia from serpent form to human, only for tragedy to strike when her true nature is revealed to her lover. This poem was the inspiration for Waterhouse's portrait of Lamia.
As a 'proto-vampire' Lamia became synonymous with another creature, Empusa - a monstrous spectre said to devour humans. It could shapeshift and was believed to have been sent out by Hekate to frighten travellers.
Empusa does not feature greatly in art, but it is likely that she was depicted as were other female monsters, such as this image of Scylla, with a serpentine lower half.
Empusa, even though she was a danger to travellers, was actually not that much of a threat, given that in order to send her away shrieking all one had to do was to shout insults at her. I'll come back to this idea later.
She was typically imagined to have one leg of bronze and the other as a leg of an ass. Aristophanes (Frogs 289ff) deploys Empusa for comedic purposes in terrifying Dionysus. One of the shaped she adopts in this encounter is that of 'an extremely attractive woman'.
This is the earliest literary reference to Empusa, and she would reappear on his work at 1056-7 of 'The Assembly Women', where an unattractive and heavily made-up old woman is mistaken for her.
Likewise, Demosthenes (18.130) employs Empusa as a term of insult. He claims that the mother of his opponent Aeschines was a prostitute nicknamed Empusa, 'as she would do, undergo, and become anything'.
We now start to move towards a far more insidious element to these myths, which become ways of monstrifying women, especially in terms of appearance and sexuality. Could this then account for the way to exorcise these creatures by insulting them?
That another classification of such creatures exists, the Mormo ('Frightful') - as seen in Xenophon (Hellenica 4.4.17, where it is treated as 'hobgoblin') - is suggestive that the TYPE is more important than any individual mythological backstory.
It is also telling that in trying to find images for this thread, it became quickly apparent that Lamia and Empusa have been (re)imagined as hyper-sexualised erotic figures for the minds of fantasy artists.
Thus it seems that while they were originally figures to inspire fear, these women have become figures to titillate, figures of sexual objectification. Seemingly we have returned to a level of sexual humour and risqué behaviour that is not too dissimilar to that of Aristophanes.
That draws a close to today's #ClassicsHalloween thread, even though I do wish it could have ended on a more positive note. Sadly it seems that the modern conceptions of female sexuality are not that different to those that caused sexualised women to become society's bugbears.
Anyway, we'll come back tomorrow with - what I hope will be - a more lighthearted thread on prophecy and divination in the ancient world: a spot of #ClassicsOuija for #ClassicsHalloween
