by Veronika | Filed Under Articles, Muse Lore
Part 5 of our essay on fantastical, mythological, and supernatural Muses
Half-Woman/Half-Beast Enchantresses
Finally, I want to look at those creatures whose transformation into something more than the normal mortal/normal human is not shown or stressed in a tale: it does not matter what the hour of the day or night is, these half-female/half-beast mistresses of magic just are. What’s more, some are evil, some are helpful and kind-hearted, but they are usually beautiful and tempting no matter which, spelling disaster if you happen to cross paths with one of the human-beastess hybrids possessed of cunning wiles and wickedness of the soul.
One of the oldest of such hybrid creatures, and one with countless variants in world cultures and religion, is Lilith. Originally Lilith was a Mesopotamian storm goddess who dates back as far as 3000 B.C. Her epithet then – or one of them — was “the beautiful maiden,” but that was a warning to men, not a compliment to her. She was also said to be a succubus, a disseminator of disease (the wind of her storms spreading her ills), and a head of temple prostitution. We know she was also associated with the night because another of her epithets was “she who seizes the light,” and because storm and wind demons in general share a common etymology with night demons. Early portrayals of the she-demon imagine her with the wings and talons of a “Zu bird,” a massive mythological bird with the body of an eagle and the head of a lion. Lilith in general is associated with owls and lions. Incapable of giving milk or bearing children, she is also accused in some myths of stealing and/or devouring them.
There is one mention of Lilith in the Hebrew Bible: “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.” The “screech owl” is the reference to Lilith here; in other editions “screech owl” is rendered, less effectively I think, as “night-owl,” “night monster,” “vampire,” “night hag,” “lilith,” “night creature.” After this early appearance in the Hebrew Bible (8th century B.C.), Lilith appears all over Jewish tradition, from the Talmud to the Kabbalah.
Somewhat more contentious but definitely intriguing are mentions of her in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The first allusion, at least, seems a sure gesture toward our sharp-taloned storm-and-night-demoness:
“And I, the Instructor, proclaim His glorious splendour so as to frighten and to te[rrify] all the spirits of the destroying angels, spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers, and [desert dwellers...] and those which fall upon men without warning to lead them astray from a spirit of understanding and to make their heart and their [...] desolate during the present dominion of wickedness and predetermined time of humiliations for the sons of lig[ht], by the guilt of the ages of [those] smitten by iniquity – not for eternal destruction, [bu]t for an era of humiliation for transgression.”
However, another poem discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls speaks more obliquely yet tantalyzingly of a dangerous woman, a strange woman, a Seductress: “Her house sinks down to death, and her course leads to the shades. All who go to her cannot return and find again the paths of life.” Furthermore, she is set apart in this text by horns and wings — wings in which “a multitude of sins are hidden.”
As a fundamental fiend of cultures around the world – her haunt first storms, then night – Lilith makes too many appearances to make a full accounting of here. To summarize, she first chills the hearts of those in Mesopotamian and Sumerian cultures, as mentioned above; then she swoops down to make appearances in Jewish and Christian canonical texts; then she screeches her way into folk traditions and/or unrecognized or mystical writings; and finally is immortalized in the works of writers like Goethe and Keats, as well as the paintings of Pre-Raphaelites such as Rossetti (who, in the painting below, took care with the symbols he included along with the demon-goddess: the poppies symbolize death and cold,
the white roses sterile passion.) In her pallor and her sweet virgin’s white nightgown she seems more the victim of night – a lovely insomniac or somnambulist, not the embodiment of night’s worst terrors, a half-woman/half-screeching-owl “with a multitude of sins hidden in her wings.” But that was Rossetti’s fault – he and his brotherhood always wanted to make things pretty. For them, even she who seizes the light is a muse.
Yet in the end, perhaps that’s what Lilith was for all the cultures that demonized yet kept resurrecting her again and again, in their myths: she was not a muse of lightness or goodness, beauty or grace, as we would instinctually expect muses to be, but a necessary muse of darkness. She was a necessary evil. For to not know the night at all would be too terrible. To label her Lilith, and describe her as a harlot with talons and wings – at least then one knows what is out there in the kingdom of shades, even if a fable.
Another culture concerned with what is hidden deep within the night mists is Japan, where gods, or kami, can be beneath under any rock, and unsuspecting lone travelers may be bedeviled by the face of a beautiful woman who is in fact the incarnation of a devious fox spirit. One of the most stunning depictions of a variant of the latter oft-told story is Mizoguchi Kenji’s film, “Ugetsu,” in which a 16th century potter, living during a period of civil wars and constant strife, is enticed away from his humble home and loyal wife by an unbelievably enticing and wealthy princess.
Having already escaped from a bandit-filled lake shrouded in impenetrable mist, the determined potter Genjuro, finally arrived at the market place, simply wants to sell his wares, but he is flattered beyond his wildest dreams when they catch the eye of the lustrous and aristocratic Lady Wakasa. Not only does she buy all of his work – no small compliment to a serious craftsman like Genjuro – she invites him to her villa, where she soon makes her intentions – and appetites — clear. Having left his wife and child behind at the lake, Genjuro is unaware that his wife is already dead, killed by a bandit, so out of fidelity, he hesitates at Lady Wakasa’s advances initially, but soon the dreamlike atmosphere – her taste for beautiful things that make the villa such elegant surroundings, and the feeling there that time has stopped; the angelic way she walks, as if she were not of this world – win him over, and he ends up betraying his wife and entering into a kind of ideal but mock marriage with her.
Of course, it is too good to last, especially for a humble man like Genjuro. Soon the locals find out that he has been bewitched by the town ghost and set about correcting matters. We learn that Lady Wakasa, along with her whole clan, was killed in the wars, and their luxurious villa razed to the ground, and she returned to the earth as a voluptuous ghost, eager to enjoy the carnal pleasures of a husband and a marriage she was cruelly denied when her life was cut so brutally short. To break the curse, the village priest writes Sanskrit runes on Genjuro’s body, which repel Lady Wakasa, and in the blink of an eye, all the beauty of the lady herself and her immaculately appointed home vanish into nothingness; Genjuro finds himself weeping in an overgrown field of weeds, his fantasy gone.
But the bitterness is by no means over; the worst is saved for last, when Genjuro, perhaps in karmic repayment for abandoning his wife, is treated to another dose of the supernatural upon his arrival at home. For his wife appears to him as a ghost, although he does not know this at first, and he rejoices at seeing her “alive.” At last, he realizes how much he loves her. But at the end of the night, he learns the truth: she, too, must return to the land of the dead after this brief visitation, and Genjuro, realizing that he left her for the sake of such vanities as money and the hopes of achieving fame for his pottery, is heartbroken, ashamed, and utterly bereft.
Mizoguchi based his tale on the folk belief/fear in Japanese culture of being trapped by beautiful women who are actually inhabited by fox or other demonic spirits; as well as on a specific story making use of such superstitions, written by 18th century writer Akinari Ueda and called “The Lustful Serpent.” In the story, Toyoo, the naïve and romantic youngest son of a wealthy fisherman, meets Manago, a young woman in his rural village whose beauty seems to be, as he says to himself, “beyond this world.” Shocked he hasn’t seen this vision before, he is astounded at his luck when she asks him to come see her at her villa, which he dreams of at night; when he goes to visit her the next day, unable to resist, it is exactly as he pictured it in his dream: exquisitely appointed inside and tastefully landscaped outside. Acting just coy and demure enough to enchant Toyoo, but taking decidedly forward steps, the woman explains that her husband has died, and asks Toyoo to enter into a thousand-year bond with her through the ceremonial drinking of sake.
Demurring only because of his poverty, Toyoo is touched when she gives him the token of a resplendent sword as a love pledge, but when his family sees it, they believe he’s stolen it and report him to the authorities. To prove his innocence, he brings them all to Manago’s villa, but there is nothing there but a house fallen to ruins and a wilderness where once there was a garden, obviously many years ago. One of the policeman spots a beautiful woman in the garden – Manago – but when he calls to her she vanishes.
When she later approaches Toyoo to try to account for these events, he at first refuses to listen, convinced now that she is a demon. But when she offers up the feeblest excuses, he falls for them, for he is desperately in love with her. The two are married despite what has happened and live blissfully for a time, until one day, when out visiting a picturesque temple set in the mountain alongside a waterfall and river, an old priest spies Manago and her maid and dares them to show their true, disgusting forms to all. They jump into the waterfall and disappear. Horrified, Toyoo pleads with the old man to help him. He explains, “That demon is a giant snake and very old. Having a lascivious nature, it is said to bear unicorns when it couples with a bull and dragon steeds when it couples with a stallion. It appears out of lust, attracted to your beauty, it has a attached itself to you.” He tells Toyoo he must steady his emotions if he is to overcome this demon’s great power.
Without saying good-bye to his changeling-wife, Toyoo returns to his family, who decide to marry him to a more proper bride. They choose one who had served at court, named Tomiko, who impresses Toyoo with her beauty, until, on their second night together, he hears Manago’s voice distinctly issuing from Toyoo’s mouth. In the end, he is able to entice her to come close by pretending to accept the inevitability of Manago’s demonic possession of Tomiko, and that he is hers for life, but at the last moment, he throws a robe scented heavily with poppy seeds over her, which her demon form cannot stand – a white snake appears from beneath the robe and slithers past. The snake dies while a priest chants incantations and buries it alive, although eventually Tomiko, the poor mortal bride, dies too. Toyoo, however, is at last released from Manago’s clutches.
Somewhat related to such a fearsome demon-serpent tale are the many western tales of female hybrid sea creatures, such as Melusine, or Melusina, who is half woman, half-serpent. Even her name echoes music – mellifluous – like a siren call from deep within a dreamy lake shrouded by the spells of high priestesses (it also bears a slight similarity to Madeleine, the name which Edgar Allen Poe thought second only to Helen in its beauty).
The earliest (circa 14th century) version of the Melusine tales were originally French, then German, and finally English versions appeared around 1500. In the most famous of these English tales, the King of Scotland came upon a gorgeous lady while hunting in the forest one day. She was Pressyne, future mother of Melusine. He begged her to marry him, but first she extracted from him the promise that he would not look upon her while bathing, since he did not want him to see her true form, as it was taboo for mortals to marry fairy creatures. However, as men and women always do in fairy tales, he broke the one condition on which his happiness was based, and Pressyne left, with her three young daughters, for the Isle of Avalon.
And so the three girls – Melusine, Melior, and Palatyne – grew up in the legendary land of Avalon. On her fifteenth birthday, Melusine, the eldest, asked Pressyne why she had taken her and her sisters away from their father. Upon hearing of their father’s broken promise, Melusine took it upon herself to seek revenge. She and her sisters captured the King and buried him alive in a mountain with all his wealth. Furious at what the unruly girls had done – after all, he was their father, and they owed him the respect to not go around locking him up in mountains – Pressyne doled out punishments. What the other girls’ were seems to have been forgotten, for Melusine was the star of the show, and we know hers down to the last deliciously bizarre detail: for her role in this act of semi-patricide, she was condemned to take the form of a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. (Apparently her crime only warranted transformation on the Sabbath, but then she wasn’t even Jewish, so the choice of days is even more random).
Still, it does not end there: like mother, like daughter. A handsome bachelor named Raymond of Poitou came across Melusine in a forest, and like the King of Scotland to her mother, proposed marriage. And again, just as her mother had done, Melusine agreed on one condition: that he must never enter her chamber on a Saturday (the day she turned into a serpent). He broke the promise and saw her in the form of a part-woman part-serpent. However, unlike her mother, their love was so great that she initially forgave him, but it was not so great that when, during a fight, he called her a “serpent” in front of his court, she was going to put up with that treatment. So at that moment she turned into a dragon, and flew away, never to be seen again.
Melusine, however, despite representing the taboo of the female – and the obvious connections with ancient practices of staying away from the female when she was menstruating or giving birth – also is provided with a powerful gift for magic in some tales, sometimes constructing magnificent castles out of nothing, giving gifts of magic rings, and basically using her powers for good. While Martin Luther, who believed the tales about Melusine to be fact rather than fiction, accused her of being a succubus, it is interesting that instead of being simply a keisei, or castle-toppler (as the most skilled Japanese courtesans were termed, since they could ruin a man with desire, and thus could reasonably compared to succubi), Melusine was actually a castle-builder, which must have been an extremely honored, and handy, magic art to possess in the medieval period. No matter what the reason, however, Saturday’s serpentine lady obviously exerted the fascination of, well, a muse, if we look at the impressive list of artists who have created works based on her legend: Sir Walter Scott, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, composer Felix Mendelssohn, and award-winning contemporary writer A.S. Byatt.
Another lady of the lake sometimes blamed for switching babies – the original meaning of “changelings” – was also a water-nymph like Melusine, and she is familiar to us from Arthurian legend: the Lady of the Lake. Like her counterpart in the chimerical environs of Avalon, the treacherous Morgan le Fey, the Lady of the Lake’s origins are probably ancient. The first mention of Avalon is found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. As time goes on and the stories surrounding Arthur and the holy grail proliferate, we learn more about all the characters, including the Lady of the Lake – even conflicting tales of her. In the Lancelot-grail cycles we read her back story: her training by Merlin, her virtual seducing him into teaching her the sorcerer’s arts, and her brutal betrayal of him in the end.
The most retellings of Arthurian legend most familiar to us, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its offspring, take to heart both aspects of the Lady of the Lake. Just as Melusine is a complicated woman – and even more than that come Saturdays – so too does the Lady of the Lake display a very dynamic, dualistic nature that is necessary to achieve her purposes in the Arthurian realm. She gives Arthur the sword Excalibur in almost all the legends, she raises Lancelot in a few of the tales; but often there is an equal blood debt to settle as well. Perhaps that is why she too has captured the imagination of writers, poets, and composers. Walter Scott wrote a series of poems about her, and through a complicated textual-artistic history, they ended up influencing one of the most beautiful, heavenly, and pure-sounding music ever composed: Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Thus, a hymn to the Virgin Mary is tied to the Lady of the Lake: sorceress, trickster, sexual tease, merciless avenger – a woman full of fury at certain times and tenderness at others. Maybe that’s always been one reason why that piece of music is so close to the divine; because it has brushed, if just lightly, like the flowing wooden locks of the maiden carved into the prow of a boat, the waters near Avalon for one of its inspirations, and from doing so, we mortals recognize a more kindred, familiar spirit alongside the celestial angel within the music, which we will never be.
Of course, that divine music is associated with these water nymphs, and that we humans feel a strong magnetism toward them despite their labile moods, should come as no surprise, for we all remember, if only from The Odyssey, the creatures known as the sirens. Even their name has sneaked into our culture as part of a phrase – a “siren call” being a thing or person you are powerless (or believe you are) to resist. Not just found in the familiar Greek myths, in Russian mythology, for example, the “siren” becomes the “sirin,” and bears the head and chest of a beautiful woman and the body of a bird (usually an owl – echoes of Lilith here, perhaps). According to the Russian myth, the sirins lived “in Indian lands” near Eden or around the Euphrates River. They sang beautiful songs to the saints, foretelling future joys and encouraging them in their ascetic lives and difficult trials. However, for normal, weaker mortals the sirins’ song was fatal. Not for the uninitiated, apparently, the sirins’ singing would compel the average men to forget and forsake everything else, until they died from lack of eating, not even knowing their own names or who or where or if their families were. Thus, sirins were often interpreted metaphorically, as the mystical word of God and the dangers it poses to those who are not yet prepared for it spiritually.
But no discussion of famous temptresses within and beside the water would be complete without mentioning the mermaid. The range and rich absurdity and Felliniesque beauty of the tales: the hilarious idea that early sex-starved seamen confused the bulbous, gray whiskered manatees with silken-haired, lithe mermaids-girls; the fact that mermaid stories first crop up in Assyria in 1000 B.C., when a goddess who was shamed about loving — and then killing — a mortal supposedly jumped into the river to become a fish, but the waters refused this inglorious transformation, and instead turned her into what they thought a more divine creature: fish below the waist and human above; the legend that Alexander the Great’s sister, Thessalonike, turned into a mermaid after her death, and would always question passing sailors about her brother, capsizing the boats and killing all aboard if any dared tell her the truth of his death; and the fact that even today countless children are enchanted by mermaids, particularly of the animated, celluloid variety — even though Disney’s “The Little Mermaid,” loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s brilliant story of a mermaid with complex motives and profound spiritual desires, inexplicably stripped Ariel of any and all depth and made of her the Bimbo of the Sea, Jessica Simpson’s amphibious cousin.
The fairy tale of “The Little Mermaid,” as written by Hans Christian Andersen, is one of his masterpiece, in which the mermaid endures all that she does not only for the love of a prince – he is, in one sense, a means to an end – but because she wants to gain a human soul so she can go to heaven for eternity. For this is something denied mermaids, who die after 300 years, with no hereafter awaiting them. And for this goal she is willing to put up with the agony of having legs; although everyone finds her walk, a sylph-like step on the tip of her toes, exquisitely graceful, to her “every step felt as though she were walking on sharp knives.”
The story follows the general outlines of the Disney version, with the mermaid giving up her beautiful voice, failing to get the prince, and him marrying another, which causes her death. By the end she has already gone through two transformations, from mermaid to lovely mute human, and then into a transparent air spirit whose job it is to do good deeds, like carrying the scent of flowers on the winds, so that in 300 years’ time, she just might earn her soul. She does love the prince, and is sad to lose him to his bride; but the prospect of heaven is an even more irresistible dream of transmigration for this former mermaid.
Her innocence should come as no surprise, for innocence is at the heart of the mermaid’s allure: it is, after all, only the upper half of her body that is human, and thus sexually attractive and available; the lower part is safely encased in fish tales. One might wonder if this is the appeal for young sailors: the promise, the whiff, of sensual enchantment, trapped safely in myth or in anatomical impossibility. The mermaid is the patron saint of the young cabin boy, wet behind the ears, away from home, dreaming of women and greatness, but still afraid of both.
Another tale of innocents transformed – and I would like to end this section on water sprites, undines, mermaids, etc., on the note of innocence, in honor of Andersen’s courageous and committed little mermaid, for like hers, many of these tales of metamorphosis so often serve as allegories of rites of passage to adulthood (and beyond, in her case) — is the Chinese tale, “The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.” This tale is eerie, almost, in its multiculturalism: not only does it share elements with the story of “Swan Lake” and the selkie tales of Irish, Icelandic, and Scottish mythology. Not only do the Japanese have an almost identical tale, they even have an extremely popular nationwide festival, called the tanabata matsuri, on the seventh day of the seventh month, to celebrate the one night of the year the two star-crossed lovers of this tale supposedly meet. In fact, we don’t even have to look beyond this essay to find deep resonances: the tale of the King of Scotland and the discovery he makes when he sees his wife bathing bear profound resemblances, both in the actual circumstances as well as in the taboo against mortals and fairies, or fey, marrying.
In any case, the story is probably so popular because it is sweet and full of longing. It goes like this: A young cowherd named Niulang has the luck to stumble upon seven fairy sisters who are half-human, half-swan, bathing in a lake. Egged on by his friend, a mischief-making ox, he steals the sisters’ clothes and waits to see what will happen (this is another common fairy tale convention; in European versions they steal the swans’ feathers). The fairy sisters elect the youngest and most beautiful sister, Zhinü (“the weaver girl”) to retrieve their clothing. She does so, but in the process, of course, Niulang sees her naked, and therefore, she must accept his proposal of marriage.
Surprisingly, perhaps, she proves to be a wonderful wife, and Niulang a good husband, and despite their different provenances and species, they are very happy together. But the Goddess of Heaven (in some versions Zhinü’s mother) finds out that a mere mortal has married one of the fairy girls and is furious. Taking out her hairpin, the Goddess scratches a wide river in the sky to separate the two lovers forever, for they are each represented by a star in the tale (knowing nothing of astronomy, I left it out to avoid self-confusion), and in this way she forms the Milky Way (this is the part of the tale absent in the western versions). Thus, Zhinu must sit forever on one side of the river, lonely and sad, wiling away the hours by weaving on her loom, while Niulang watches her from afar and, in an unusual gender reversal, takes care of their two children.
However, their tale is not completely tragic, for their enduring love is rewarded one night a year: on that night, all the magpies in the world take pity on them and fly up to heaven to form a bridge for the lovers to cross to reach each other and be together for a single night, the seventh night of the seventh moon.
By contrast, some hybrid creatures had no interest in the soul: the body was enough in all its pleasures, even if it caused heartbreak too. One of the most famous hybrid creatures in mythology is a man, and a horny one at that, both literally and figuratively,: Pan, a Greed god of shepherds and flocks, mountain wilds and hunting, and rustic music – he would definitely steal the swan’s clothes, but he would play them a song on his pipes while doing it, just to keep the tone of things light. He was human but for possessing the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat. Pan was often conflated, especially in Roman mythology, with some real rapscallions: his close kin the satyrs, young humans with horse ears who were said to roam the woods with Pan and Dionysus, and who were frequently portrayed in both Greek and Roman art with erections. Needless to say, they were strongly associated with male sexuality, poster boys for getting down and dirty in the Arcadian woods.
But Pan was different than all the other goatish rogues on the make: he actually had his heart broken. For this reason, if not for others, his story is remembered still today. As the opening lines of a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley explain, when Pan fell for the nymph Echo, he began or at least became embroiled in a situation that went beyond a love trial and sounds like one of the world’s earlier’s soap operas, and what could be more understandable to modern readers? Shelley writes:
Pan loved his neighbour Echo-but that child
Of Earth and Air pined for the Satyr leaping
The Satyr loved with wasting madness wild;
The bright nymph Lyda,-and so three went weeping.
As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the Satyr,
The Satyr, Lyda; and so love consumed them.
To provide more of the juicy (or in this case, disappointing) details, Echo (of Narcissus and Echo fame) was a winged Oreiad nymph, her face shrouded in a veil, reduced to a secret voice that Pan, musician that he is, can’t help but love. One story says that Aphrodite cursed him with the hopeless love for the disembodied voice of Echo when he judged her (the wrong way, apparently) in a beauty contest. So Pan had to settle for playing on this reeds and waiting for her to echo him with her haunting voice.
Like Echo, “child of Earth and Air,” some of these mythological creatures were neither part human nor animal, not even in the Greek theological system, which usually anthropomorphized its gods and goddesses. Nor were they recognizable as monsters or beasts from traditional fairy tales (trolls, witches, etc.). One of the loveliest examples of this special class of creatures is Iris, goddess of the rainbow. While some contended that she was a rainbow itself, others said that a rainbow was merely the road on which she traveled, but either way, the beauty she either embodied or carried in her wake elevated this messenger to the status of a minor goddess. For she was in essence a messenger uniting Earth and heaven (humanity and gods), as well as connecting the underworld to the world above – she just did so gorgeously.
Virtually every classical poet celebrates her dazzling, brightly colored beauty. Virgil expounds in the Aeneid, “Soaring to heaven on balanced wings, [Iris] blazed a rainbow trail beneath the clouds as she flew … Iris, glory of the sky, cloud-borne.” From Greek poet Nonnus’ Dionysiaca: “And the rain’s comrade, the bow of Iris, wove her many colours into a rounded track, and shone bent under the light-shafts of Phaethon opposite, mingling pale with dark, and light with rosy.” And Ovid writes, “Iris glided down to earth along her many-coloured bow.” Yet another encomium, this one from Roman poet Statius: “Hither from the blue sky came in balanced flight the varicoloured maid; the forests shine out, and the shady glens smile upon the goddess, and smitten with her zones of radiance the palace starts … [Iris] the golden fashioner of clouds … Iris goes forth, and tricks out her beams, made dim by showers of rain.”
For what must have been the most sublime wake-up calls in history, Iris was often despatched by Hera to first waken and then command Hypnos, the god of sleep: “[Hera] said: ‘Iris, my voice’s trustiest messenger, hie quickly to the drowsy hall of Somnus [Hypnos], and bid him send a dream of Ceyx drowned to break the tidings to [his wife] Alcyone.’ Then Iris, in her thousand hues enrobed traced through the sky her arching bow and reached the cloud-hid palace of the drowsy king. Near the Cimmerii a cavern lies deep in the hollow of a mountainside, the home and sanctuary of lazy Somnus … There Iris entered, brushing the Somnia (Dreams) aside, and the bright sudden radiance of her robe lit up the hallowed place; slowly the god his heavy eyelids raised, and sinking back time after time, his languid drooping head nodding upon his chest, at last he shook himself out of himself.”
To conclude with some fantastical creatures, I give you the firebird and the unicorn. First, the firebird, which in Egyptian and Persian mythology is equivalent to what we know as the phoenix, that splendid red and gold bird that consumes itself at the end of every life-cycle and then rises from its own ashes, one of the most memorable symbols of renewal and rebirth – and grandeur — in any mythology. In China the firebird (the Fenghuang) is slightly different: it is not a firebird/phoenix in the real sense of consuming itself in flames, but is called “the Chinese phoenix” because it rules over all the other birds in China. It is said to be made up of the beak of a cock, the face of a swallow, the forehead of a fowl, the neck of a snake, the breast of a goose, the back of a tortoise, the hindquarters of a stag, and the tail of a fish. It symbolizes the union of yin and yang, and of the celestial bodies, and is an extremely good omen.
In Russian folklore the Firebird is different, more like a frisky, fantastic beast, such as a unicorn. A bird of miraculous powers, its feathers shine like silver and gold, its eyes like diamonds. At midnight the Firebird – another nocturnal creature, although the tales about him suggest he is flexible on this point — visits gardens, which, like the goddess Iris, his feathers alone light up with the luminescence of a million stars. There the Firebird eats golden apples, and if any human is lucky enough to get him to share them, he will be granted eternal youth and beauty, and immortality. When the firebird sings, pearls fall from its beak and those near enough to hear his song can be cured of sickness; the blind may even regain sight.
In the original ballet version of “The Firebird,” choreographed in 1910 to music by Stravinsky, the bird is a girl, upping the sexual tension between her and the prince who captures her, even though what he wants is to use her to help him marry another girl, a princess. However, in the written tales the firebird is usually male, as in one of the more well-known, if not more easy-to-follow, versions of the story: “The Tale of Ivan Tsarevich, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf.” I say the latter because in this story there are so many animals and mythological beings doing miraculous things, aside from the firebird (who sets the story in motion, as a symbol of desire, but does not help Ivan much). I literally lost track of the metamorphoses of the animals, including a golden-maned horse and a wolf, though I do know that at one point, the gray wolf magically changed himself into Elena the Fair, the princess that both Ivan and the Tsar Afron want to marry, and spent days deceiving the Tsar in that guise in order to save her for Ivan. In some tales, however, the firebird is more active in granting wishes and aid with magic.
Finally, before we end this list of miraculous creatures that has just skimmed the surface of what seemingly ever culture has taken time to dream up, I want to point out those young women who are not half-beast, but are given a special gift, as recorded in myth, to tame creatures that no one else can. In other words, they can commune with these animals on some spiritual plane. An early instance of this is the story of Pegasus and the muses. Athena caught Pegasus, tamed the wild, winged horse, and presented him to the Muses. Scholars connect the name Pegasos with the word for “spring, well,” and this is highly appropriate, for like a precocious (and very strong, big) puppy, everywhere the horse struck his hoof to the earth, a spring burst forth: the one on Mount Helikon, the Hippocrene (“horse spring”), became especially important to the Muses as the spring from which they drew their inspiration.
In medieval times, according to legend, unicorns, and especially if the lady in question is a virgin. In this case the maiden is granted a bond with a god-like creature, and he chooses to become her servant — to be, in effect, enchanted by her – as if transferring his divinity to her. An example of this can be found in “The Lady and the Unicorn” series of French tapestries, completed at the end of the 15th century in France. The six tapestries concern a lady, a unicorn, and the five senses; a sixth stands out because it does not refer to one of the five senses and goes by the title “A mon seul desir” — “To My Only Desire” (see picture of it below). Despite the name, the fact that the lady is putting away a necklace worn in the other tapestries has led some to interpret the sixth “as a renunciation of the passions aroused by the other senses,” and thus as a re-commitment to the virginity unicorns are supposed to be so fond of in human females. Another view sees the tapestry as potentially depicting a sixth sense, of love or compassion or understanding.
Yet at the end of the day, there is always the wild card element to paintings such as these, and their relationship to ancient myths and fairy tales of unbelievable couplings of swans gods and mortal girls, princesses and frogs, young women trapped in towers and showers of gold. What we have is not the disgust of bestiality, but in the end, the child’s wonder of a day at the zoo mixed with our adult wonder at where we come from and what our ancient ancestors believed, and these magical beasts obviously played a great role in that.
Still, just as many contemporary young girls go through a phase, just around puberty, during which they are fascinated by horses as a substitute for conscious sexual curiosity, the fact that many of these tales feature young girls and their rites of passage is still modern to us today. A modern updating of the unicorn and maiden myth is the reindeer in Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale of the quest involved in leaving childhood behind, “The Snow Queen.” In the process of looking for her best friend Kai, who has been kidnapped by the wicked, heartless Snow Queen, little Gerta is assisted by Bae, a reindeer from Lappland.
When Bae asks a local wisewoman if there’s any charm she can give young Gerta against the powerful Snow Queen, she replies, “I can’t give her any more power than she already has! Don’t you see how great it is? Don’t you see how both men and animals must serve her? But she must never learn of this power; it is in her heart, for she is a sweet and innocent child.” Instead of the unicorn and the maiden, we have the kind reindeer from Lappland and the innocent, loyal young Gerta.
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