Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan

Author:Matt Kaplan [Kaplan, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Retail, Fringe Science, Science, 21st Century, v.5, Amazon.com, Mythology, Cultural Anthropology
ISBN: 9781451668001
Publisher: Scribner

Siren song

In the Odyssey, Odysseus runs into numerous temptations and threats of seduction. The Lotus-Eaters try to lure him into a life of eternal flower eating, and the beautiful witch Circe does her best to convince Odysseus his place is to be forever by her side, but these threats are nothing compared to that presented by the Sirens. As Odysseus prepares to leave Circe, she sternly warns him, “First you will come to the Sirens, who enchant every single man who comes to them. If anyone draws near to them in ignorance and hears their voices, there is no homecoming… instead he is enchanted by the clear, sweet song of the Sirens who sit in a meadow, surrounded by a great heap of rotting men, skeletons with shreds of shrivelling skin on them.”

Remarkably, when Odysseus reaches the Sirens, the text gives absolutely no physical description of these monsters while describing their song in considerable detail: “Come here, illustrious Odysseus, great glory of Greece, beach your ship, so you can listen to our voices. For nobody has ever sailed by on his black ship without listening to the honeyed words on our lips.”

Depictions of Sirens in art and literature made many years after Homer show these monsters as bird-women, presumably because birds sing and because many birds are, in fact, carnivorous and sit in nests surrounded by skeletons and rotting flesh. Yet Homer’s decision to not describe the Sirens’ bodies is worth noting, since so many other monsters in his stories are described in great detail.

Intriguingly, even the gender of the Sirens is concealed. They have honeyed words on their lips and they are specifically mentioned by Circe as attracting men, so they are often assumed to have been female, but Homer does not actually state that they are. One reason for the gender and physical ambiguity in the Odyssey could be that the Sirens were so well known that everyone hearing the story was expected to know what they looked like. Given the extensive descriptions of so many other monsters, however, it seems more likely that Homer simply wanted to have a monster in his story that represented the fears associated with the temptations of the flesh. By presenting the Sirens without physical form, he effectively left which temptations they represented up to the listener.

There are obvious similarities between these Greek monsters and the demons that appear so much later in history. All of them seduce, but there is a key difference between the Sirens and the demons found later in Kings of Britain and The Nightmare—sleep.

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