i will be free
my heart is a savage garden: you will not get out of
here alive, and i know that you think me soft and weak—is this not why you
called me a chickadee and insisted that i have no temper? but i am the daughter
of the moon, you ought have known my ancient waters were more than capable of
eroding you as well as my immortal flames; i will not falter in my steps—your
nightmares are a trangression this world will not forget and so i dub thee
forgiven, but there is a price to pay; so i am burning you along with your
nightmares until not even void will sing remembrance to your name—you can call
out to any god or goddess of death to save you, but where i am sending you, you
will not be heard; you should be careful for what you wish for—sometimes you get
exactly what you want, and you wanted me to be a part of your nightmare; isn't
that why you splintered me with your darkness? you can take it back, but feel
the fangs of my darkest wolves; they've been starved of your blood so long that
they refuse to remain caged because like any wild thing i will be free—my wings
were made to fly.
Lamia 1 & 2 -- John William Waterhouse
In the 6th century BCE Stesichorus (so named because he was the 1st to establish [stesai] choral poetry, who may have been the son or grandson of Hesiodos, was made blind for composing poems that were insulting to Helen of Troy and then cured for writing poems that flattered her. According to him, Lamia, the daughter of the sea god Poseidon, was the mother of Scylla, the dragon associated with Charybdis. A century later in “The Wasps” Aristophanes claimed that her name was derived from “laimos,” the Greek word for gullet, but more recent scholarship reconstructs a Proto-Indo European stem *lem-, "nocturnal spirit." She was the queen of Libúē (Libya), which both Odysseus and Menelaus visited on their way home from the Trojan War; in Homeros’ account, for Odysseus it was the land of the lotus-eaters (lōtophagoi) who “left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them,” and for Menelaus it was such a rich land that ewes lambed 3 times a year, lambs had horns as soon as they were born, and shepherds always had enough milk, meat, or cheese. After Lamia’s affair with Zeus, his wife Hera stole or killed all of her children. Either Hera transformed her into an immortal monster who devoured children, or Lamia lost her mind from grief, gouged out her own eyes, and began devouring the children out of envy. Some writers credited Zeus with changing her into a monster after she killed her children in order that she could get revenge. In the 1st century BCE Quintus Horatius Flaccus claimed instead that Hera forced Lamia to devour her own children. She was also cursed with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children, but Zeus gave her the ability to remove her eyes to let her rest and to appease her grief; this ability was accompanied by the gift of prophecy. In later traditions she gave her name to the vampire-like lamiae who seduced young men and then fed on their blood. Some harlots adopted the name "Lamia," like Demetrius I of Macedon’s courtesan in the 3rd century BCE. By the time of Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis in the 2nd century the lamiae were regarded as sorceresses. In his 9th-century treatise on divorce archbishop Hincmar of Rheims listed the lamiae, which he identified as female reproductive spirits, among the supernatural dangers that threatened marriage. Perhaps her most influential portrayal was in John Keats’ 1819 poem, ‘Lamia”:
ReplyDeleteShe was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,
She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete: 0
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?...
Her throat was serpent, but the words she spake
Came, as through bubbling honey, for Love’s sake,
Keats based his poem on the 3rd-century account by Lucius Flavius Philostratus in which the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana had saved a young bridegroom from being devoured by his new bride.