Lamia (mythology)

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Lamia

The Lamia (In this 1909 painting by Herbert James Draper, Lamia has human legs but a snakeskin around her waist)
Creature
Grouping	Legendary Creature
Sub grouping	Daemon
Similar creatures	Empusa, Mormo
Data
Mythology	Greek
Country	Libya

In ancient Greek mythology, Lamia (Greek: Λάμια) was a beautiful queen of Libya who became a child-eating daemon. While the word lamia literally means large shark in Greek, ^[1] Aristophanes claimed her name derived from the Greek word for gullet (laimos), referring to her habit of devouring children.^[2]

Some accounts say she has a serpent's tail below the waist. This popular description of her is largely due to Lamia, a poem by John Keats published in 1819.^[3] However, Diodorus Siculus describes her as having nothing more than a distorted face.^[4]

Later traditions referred to many lamiae, folkloric monsters similar to vampires and succubi that seduced young men and then fed on their blood.^[5]

Contents 1 Mythological history 2 Interpretations 3 Modern folk traditions 4 Lamia in popular culture 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Mythological history

According to Diodorus Siculus, Lamia was born the beautiful daughter of King Belus of Egypt, making her the granddaughter of Poseidon and Lybie.^[6] Upon her father's death she became queen of one of his territories, Libya.^[7] However, while visiting Delphi, Pausanias remarks that Lamia was the daughter of Poseidon. He also states that Lamia and Zeus were the parents of Herophile, a noted sibyl.

Diodorus goes on to relate that Lamia had an affair with Zeus and bore him children. When Hera, Zeus's wife, discovered the affair, she killed the children in a rage. Driven insane with grief, Lamia began devouring other children, and, according to Diodorus, her face became hideously distorted from her grisly deeds.^[8]

Zeus then gave her the ability to remove her eyes. In Diodorus the purpose of this is unclear, but other versions state this came with the gift of prophecy. Zeus did this to appease Lamia in her grief over the loss of her children.^[9]

Later stories state that Lamia was cursed with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children. Some accounts (such as that of Horace, below) say that Hera forced Lamia to devour her own children. Myths variously describe Lamia's monstrous (occasionally serpentine) appearance as a result of either Hera's wrath, the pain of grief, the madness that drove her to murder, or - in some rare versions - a natural result of being Hecate's daughter.^[10]

Horace, in Ars Poetica (l.340) imagines the impossibility of retrieving the living children she has eaten:

Neu pranse Lamiae vivum puerum extrabat alvo.

Alexander Pope translates the line:

Shall Lamia in our sight her sons devour,

and give them back alive the self-same hour?

Stesichorus identifies Lamia as the mother of Scylla, by Phorcys.^[11] This may be a conflation of Lamia with the sea goddess Ceto, traditionally Phorcys's wife and mother of Scylla. Further passing references to Lamia were made by Strabo (i.II.8) and Aristotle (Ethics vii.5).

[edit] Interpretations

Mothers used to threaten their children with the story of Lamia.^[12] Leinweber states, "She became a kind of fairy-tale figure, used by mothers and nannies to induce good behavior among children."^[13]

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. She was usually female, but Aristophanes suggests a hermaphroditic phallus, perhaps simply for monstrosity's sake.^[14] Leinweber notes, "By the time of Apuleius, not only were Lamia characteristics liberally mixed into popular notions of sorcery, but at some level the very names were interchangeable." ^[15] Nicolas K. Kiessling compared the lamia with the medieval succubus and Grendel in Beowulf.^[16]

Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, describes the witch Meroe and her sister as lamiae:^[17] "The three major enchantresses of the novel — Meroe, Panthia and Pamphylia — also reveal many vampiric qualities generally associated with Lamiae," David Walter Leinweber has noticed.^[18].

One interpretation posits that the Lamia may have been a seductress, as in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, where the philosopher Apollonius reveals to the young bridegroom, Menippus, that his hastily-married wife is really a lamia, planning to devour him.^[19] Some harlots were named "Lamia".^[20] The connection between Demetrius Poliorcetes and the courtesan Lamia was notorious.^[21][22][23] In the painting by Herbert James Draper (1909, illustration above), the Lamia who moodily watches the serpent on her forearm appears to represent a hetaira. Though the lower body of Draper's Lamia is human, he alludes to her serpentine history by draping a shed snake skin about her waist.

In Renaissance emblems, Lamia has the body of a serpent and the breasts and head of a woman, like the image of hypocrisy^{[citation needed]}.

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.^[24] The Keats story follows the general plotline of Philostratus, with Apollonius revealing Lamia's true nature before her wedding.

[edit] Modern folk traditions

In the modern Greek folk tradition, the Lamia has survived and retained many of her traditional attributes.^[25] John Cuthbert Lawson remarks that "....the chief characteristics of the Lamiae, apart from their thirst for blood, are their uncleanliness, their gluttony, and their stupidity".^[26] The contemporary Greek proverb, "της Λάμιας τα σαρώματα" ("the Lamia's sweeping"), epitomises slovenliness^{[citation needed]}; and the common expression, "τό παιδί τό 'πνιξε η Λάμια" ("the child has been strangled by the Lamia")^{[citation needed]}, 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, in that she lives in a remote house or tower, eats human flesh, 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] Lamia in popular culture

This "In popular culture" section may contain too many minor or trivial references. Please reorganize this content to explain the subject's impact on popular culture rather than simply listing appearances, and remove trivia references. (June 2009)

• A creature with particularities slightly "Lamian" appears in the movie Pan's Labyrinth, complete with a hunger for children and eyes that are not in its sockets. The figure of Aughra, a character in The Dark Crystal, while not carnivorous, shares with her the latter characteristic.

• The Lamia also makes an appearance in the rock opera "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway", composed and recorded by the progressive rock group Genesis in 1974, with libretto by Peter Gabriel. Gabriel's interpretation has three Lamia appearing to the protagonist, Rael, in a very sexualized scenario. When their love-bites draw blood from their human lover, they wither and die, whereupon Rael feels compelled to taste their flesh. This act transforms him into a grotesque creature, a Slipperman. How much of this imagery, beyond the Lamia's half-woman, half serpent form, is drawn from mythological and literary sources, as opposed to Gabriel's own vivid imagination, is a matter of some debate in progressive-rock circles.

• 'Lamia' is also the name given to one of the Witches in the movie adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel Stardust. In the novel she is not named, though called the "Witch Queen". In the movie, she is portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer. It is also the name of a woman who takes people's heat in Gaiman's novel Neverwhere.

• Lamias are also mentioned in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series and the novels of Rob Thurman.

• Lamia feature in the Tim Powers novel The Stress of Her Regard as chthonic vampires that both inspire and prey upon poets such as Keats, Byron, and Shelley.

• Lamia is a traditional monster in the Final Fantasy game series produced by Squaresoft.

• Lamia is also mentioned in an Iron Maiden's song entitled "Prodigal Son", which is the 8th track of Iron Maiden's 2nd album, Killers.

• In the manga Rosario + Vampire Kagome Ririko is a mathematics teacher at Yōkai Academy. In the dark recesses of her chambers, she becomes a Lamia, with the head and torso of a beautiful woman, but the body of a serpent, and uses her abilities to drain students' emotions in exchange for knowledge; she does this through a flower-like appendage on her tail.

• In the manga Fairy Tail there is a guild named Lamia Scale with a crest of a Lamia. The guild is allied with Fairy Tail and another two guilds to defeat Oracion Seis.

• The Lamia is mentioned in the Sam Raimi film Drag Me to Hell voiced by Art Kimbro. This version is depicted as an evil spirit summoned by a curse put on a personal item or memento. It takes three days for the Lamia (described as a fierce, two-legged creature with the head and hooves of a goat) to fully manifest: at first it appears as a malevolent spirit but on the fourth day it comes for the owner of the accursed object and drags him/her into Hell. The only ways to (possibly) stop the Lamia from taking the targeted person to hell in the movie continuity is: a) appease it with a blood offering by sacrificing a small animal, but this isn't always effective; b) summon the Lamia and place into a corporeal body (human, animal, etc), then kill what it inhabits; and c) give the cursed object to someone else (be they living or dead), and the Lamia will take him or her to Hell instead of the original owner.

• The Lamia in the book series Night World are born vampires that can choose when they want to stop physically aging. They follow strict rules and live hidden, in the Night World, with the "made" vampires, witches, shape shifters, and werewolves.

• The Lamia is also referred to in Joseph Delaney's "Wardstone Chronicles", featuring the Spooks Apprentice, Spooks Curse, Spooks Secret, Spooks Mistake, Spooks Battle & Spooks Sacrafice although the series as of yet is not complete. In the books the Lamia is a breed of witch from the Mediterranean, mostly Greece. The main character, Tom Ward's mother is a lamia witch, however, in the sixth book in the series it is revealed that she is in fact Lamia, the mother of all Lamia witches. They come in two forms, feral and domestic. Feral lamias are vicious and drink human blood, they can have wings and covered in scales with long sharp talons. The lamias become domestic by being around humans, which causes them to take the form of a beautiful human woman, only recognizable by a line of green and yellow scales down her spine.

• Lamia was a demonic adversary in the television series Poltergeist The Legacy, cast as a beautiful succubus-type spirit that preyed on men through their dreams. She was captured by the protagonist team in a specially engraved box after an incantation was cast and her name spoken.

[edit] See also

• Abyzou
• Empusa
• Gorgon
• Medusa
• La Llorona
• Lilith
• Mermaid
• Mormo
• Nāga
• Succubus
• Vampire

[edit] References

• Graves, R (1955). "Lamia". Greek Myths. London: Penguin. pp. 205–06. ISBN 0-14-001026-2. 
• 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.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lamia

• Theoi Project - Lamia
• Theoi Project - Keto