THE SIRENS
E. M. Berens A Hand-book of Mythology (1894 edition) The Sirens would appear to have been personifications of those numerous rocks and unseen dangers, which abound on the S.W. coast of Italy. They were sea-nymphs, with the upper part of the body that of a maiden and the lower that of a sea-bird, having wings attached to their shoulders, and were endowed with such wonderful voices, that their sweet songs are said to have lured mariners to destruction. Source: E. M. Berens, A Hand-book of Mythology: The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome (New York: Maynard, Merrill, & Co., 1894). |
THE ODYSSEY
Homer (XII.39ff.)
(Circe speaking)
To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who beguile all men whosoever comes to them. Whoso in ignorance draws near to them and hears the Sirens' voice, he nevermore returns, that his wife and little children may stand at his side rejoicing, but the Sirens beguile him with their clear-toned song, as they sit in a meadow, and about them is a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling. But do thou row past them, and anoint the ears of thy comrades with sweet wax, which thou hast kneaded, lest any of the rest may hear. But if thou thyself hast a will to listen, let them bind thee in the swift ship hand and foot upright in the step of the mast, and let the ropes be made fast at the ends to the mast itself, that with delight thou mayest listen to the voice of the two Sirens. And if thou shalt implore and bid thy comrades to loose thee, then let them bind thee with yet more bonds.
Source: Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation, trans. A.T. Murray, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1919).
To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who beguile all men whosoever comes to them. Whoso in ignorance draws near to them and hears the Sirens' voice, he nevermore returns, that his wife and little children may stand at his side rejoicing, but the Sirens beguile him with their clear-toned song, as they sit in a meadow, and about them is a great heap of bones of mouldering men, and round the bones the skin is shrivelling. But do thou row past them, and anoint the ears of thy comrades with sweet wax, which thou hast kneaded, lest any of the rest may hear. But if thou thyself hast a will to listen, let them bind thee in the swift ship hand and foot upright in the step of the mast, and let the ropes be made fast at the ends to the mast itself, that with delight thou mayest listen to the voice of the two Sirens. And if thou shalt implore and bid thy comrades to loose thee, then let them bind thee with yet more bonds.
Source: Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation, trans. A.T. Murray, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1919).
S. A. Scull
Greek Mythology Systematized (1880)
Homer located the island of the Sirens near the rock of Scylla. They were sea-nymphs, who had the power of luring to ruin by their charming voices. At one time only two were recognized—Aglaopheme and Thelxiepia; then there were three—Aglaope, Pisinoe, and Thelxiepia. Later writers describe them as having wings. [...] The Sirens endeavored to attract Ulysses and his companions to their ruin, but he stuffed the ears of his men with wax and lashed himself to the mast of the vessel, and thus escaped. The Sirens attempted to draw the Argonauts from their course, but their singing was drowned by the sweeter music of Orpheus.
Source: S. A. Scull, Greek Mythology Systematized (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1880).
THE SIRENS AS DEATH-ANGELS
Jane Ellen Harrison
1903
JANE ELLEN HARRISON (1850-1928) was a British classical scholar and a founder of the modern study of Greek mythology. Her key insight was to apply archaeological discoveries to help elucidate and explain Greek religion, and in turn Greek myth. In her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) argued that religious rituals were the inspiration for myth. In this excerpt, Harrison notes that the early Greeks envisioned the soul as a bird or winged creature and argues that the Sirens were originally conceived as chthonic souls or death angels.
The clearest light on the lower nature of the Sirens is thrown by the design in fig. 39 from a Hellenistic relief. The monument is of course a late one, later by at least two centuries than the vase-paintings, but it reflects a primitive stage of thought and one moreover wholly free from the influence of Homer. The scene is a rural one. In the right-hand corner is a herm, in front of it an altar, near at hand a tree on which hangs a votive syrinx. Some peasant or possibly a wayfarer has fallen asleep. Down upon him has pounced a winged and bird-footed woman. It is the very image of obsession, of nightmare, of a haunting midday dream. The woman can be none other than an evil Siren. Had the scene been represented by an earlier artist, he would have made her ugly because evil; but by Hellenistic times the Sirens were beautiful women, all human but for wings and sometimes bird-feet.
The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the obsession of a demon. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a hetaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite.
There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted. The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum (fig. 40) is purely monumental.
She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, aπροβασκάνιον, a soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic ritual, that the charm itself is used as countercharm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations would gather round The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna wrote for her girlfriend Baukis begins
'Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.'
On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a sphinx.
Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either soul or Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as sweet singer. Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, there is at least a haunting remembrance that she is a soul who sings to souls. In the cosmography with which he ends the Republic, Plato thus writes: 'The spindle turns on the knees of Ananke, and on the upper surface of each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone. The eight together form one Harmony.' Commentators explain that the Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but then, if music be all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good Muses who chant the music of the spheres? Plutarch felt the difficulty. In his Symposiacs he makes one of the guests say: 'Plato is absurd in committing the eternal and divine revolutions not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who are by no means either benevolent or in themselves good.' Another guest, Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving to them in Homer a mystical significance. 'Even Homer,' he says, 'means by their music not a power dangerous and destructive to man, but rather a power that inspires in the souls that go from Hence Thither, and wander about after death, a love for things heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness of things mortal, and thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even here,' he goes on to say, 'a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing reminiscence.'
It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer's Sirens had really any such mystical content. But, given that they have the bird-form of souls, that they ' know all things,' are sweet singers and dwellers in Hades, and they lie ready to the hand of the mystic. Proclus in his commentary on the Republic says, with perhaps more truth than he is conscious of, 'the Sirens are a kind of souls living the life of the spirit.' His interpretation is not merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive tradition with mystical philosophy.
The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the spheres by the Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, nay even became stars. In the Peace of Aristophanes the servant asks Trygaeus,
‘It is true then, what they say, that in the air
‘A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?’
To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free:
'Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod,
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding,
As a bird among the bird-droves of God1.'
And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of a Siren:
'With golden wings begirt my body flies,
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet,
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies.'
But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the Siren, 'half-angel and half-bird,' to cosmic functions, yet, to the popular mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet fearful and to be shunned. This is seen in the myth of their contest with the Muses'. Here they are the spirits of forbidden intoxication; as such on vases they join the motley crew of Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos. They stand, it would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the impulses in life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his 'Land of Heart's Desire' and to which if he hearken it may be he will return home no more—voices too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.
Source: Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 202-206.
The terrors of the midday sleep were well known to the Greeks in their sun-smitten land; nightmare to them was also daymare. Such a visitation, coupled possibly with occasional cases of sunstroke, was of course the obsession of a demon. Even a troubled tormenting illicit dream was the work of a Siren. In sleep the will and the reason are becalmed and the passions unchained. That the midday nightmare went to the making of the Siren is clear from the windless calm and the heat of the sun in Homer. The horrid end, the wasting death, the sterile enchantment, the loss of wife and babes, all look the same way. Homer, with perhaps some blend of the Northern mermaid in his mind, sets his Sirens by the sea, thereby cleansing their uncleanness; but later tradition kept certain horrid primitive elements when it made of the Siren a hetaira disallowing the lawful gifts of Aphrodite.
There remains another aspect of the Sirens. They appear frequently as monuments, sometimes as actual mourners, on tombs. Here all the erotic element has disappeared; they are substantially Death-Keres, Harpies, though to begin with they imaged the soul itself. The bird-woman of the Harpy tomb, the gentle angel of death, has been already noted. The Siren on a black-figured lekythos in the British Museum (fig. 40) is purely monumental.
She stands on the grave stele playing her great lyre, while two bearded men with their dogs seem to listen intent. She is grave and beautiful with no touch of seduction. Probably at first the Siren was placed on tombs as a sort of charm, aπροβασκάνιον, a soul to keep off souls. It has already been shown, in dealing with apotropaic ritual, that the charm itself is used as countercharm. So the dreaded Death-Ker is set itself to guard the tomb. Other associations would gather round The Siren was a singer, she would chant the funeral dirge; this dirge might be the praises of the dead. The epitaph that Erinna wrote for her girlfriend Baukis begins
'Pillars and Sirens mine and mournful urn.'
On later funeral monuments Sirens appear for the most part as mourners, tearing their hair and lamenting. Their apotropaic function was wholly forgotten. Where an apotropaic monster is wanted we find an owl or a sphinx.
Even on funeral monuments the notion of the Siren as either soul or Death-Angel is more and more obscured by her potency as sweet singer. Once, however, when she appears in philosophy, there is at least a haunting remembrance that she is a soul who sings to souls. In the cosmography with which he ends the Republic, Plato thus writes: 'The spindle turns on the knees of Ananke, and on the upper surface of each sphere is perched a Siren, who goes round with them hymning a single tone. The eight together form one Harmony.' Commentators explain that the Sirens are chosen because they are sweet singers, but then, if music be all, why is it the evil Sirens and not the good Muses who chant the music of the spheres? Plutarch felt the difficulty. In his Symposiacs he makes one of the guests say: 'Plato is absurd in committing the eternal and divine revolutions not to the Muses but to the Sirens; demons who are by no means either benevolent or in themselves good.' Another guest, Ammonius, attempts to justify the choice of the Sirens by giving to them in Homer a mystical significance. 'Even Homer,' he says, 'means by their music not a power dangerous and destructive to man, but rather a power that inspires in the souls that go from Hence Thither, and wander about after death, a love for things heavenly and divine and a forgetfulness of things mortal, and thereby holds them enchanted by singing. Even here,' he goes on to say, 'a dim murmur of that music reaches us, rousing reminiscence.'
It is not to be for a moment supposed that Homer's Sirens had really any such mystical content. But, given that they have the bird-form of souls, that they ' know all things,' are sweet singers and dwellers in Hades, and they lie ready to the hand of the mystic. Proclus in his commentary on the Republic says, with perhaps more truth than he is conscious of, 'the Sirens are a kind of souls living the life of the spirit.' His interpretation is not merely fanciful; it is a blend of primitive tradition with mystical philosophy.
The Sirens are further helped to their high station on the spheres by the Orphic belief that purified souls went to the stars, nay even became stars. In the Peace of Aristophanes the servant asks Trygaeus,
‘It is true then, what they say, that in the air
‘A man becomes a star, when he comes to die?’
To the poet the soul is a bird in its longing to be free:
'Could I take me to some cavern for mine hiding,
On the hill-tops, where the sun scarce hath trod,
Or a cloud make the place of mine abiding,
As a bird among the bird-droves of God1.'
And that upward flight to heavenly places is as the flying of a Siren:
'With golden wings begirt my body flies,
Sirens have lent me their swift winged feet,
Upborne to uttermost ether I shall meet
And mix with heavenly Zeus beyond the skies.'
But, though Plato and the poets and the mystics exalt the Siren, 'half-angel and half-bird,' to cosmic functions, yet, to the popular mind, they are mainly things, if not wholly evil, yet fearful and to be shunned. This is seen in the myth of their contest with the Muses'. Here they are the spirits of forbidden intoxication; as such on vases they join the motley crew of Centaurs and Satyrs who revel with Dionysos. They stand, it would seem, to the ancient as to the modern, for the impulses in life as yet unmoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies, whether of love or art or philosophy, magical voices calling to a man from his 'Land of Heart's Desire' and to which if he hearken it may be he will return home no more—voices too, which, whether a man sail by or stay to hearken, still sing on.
Source: Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 202-206.