Record #93
Lamias
Serpent-women who seduce and devour travellers through illusion and enchantment.
Original Text
According to the Greeks and Romans, Lamias lived in Africa. From the waist up their form was that of a beautiful woman; from the waist down they were serpents. Many authorities thought of them as witches; others as evil mon- sters. They lacked the ability to speak, but they made a whistling sound which was musical, and in the spaces of the desert beguiled travellers in order to devour them. Their remote origin was divine, having sprung from one of the many loves of Zeus. In that section of his Anatomy ofMelancholy (I62I) that deals with the power of love, Robert Burton writes:
Philostratus, in his Fourth Book devitaApollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 2; years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenicianby birth, and if he would tarry with her, heshouldhearher sing and play,and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him;but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact,for it was doneinthemidstofGreece.
Shortly before his death, John Keats was moved by this reading of Burton to compose his extensive poem ’Lamia’ .
Philostratus, in his Fourth Book devitaApollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius a young man 2; years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenicianby birth, and if he would tarry with her, heshouldhearher sing and play,and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him;but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a Philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, among other guests, came Apollonius, who by some probable conjectures found her out to be a serpent, a Lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’ gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions. When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact,for it was doneinthemidstofGreece.
Shortly before his death, John Keats was moved by this reading of Burton to compose his extensive poem ’Lamia’ .