Introduction: The Serpent Seed
The conflict of Man vs. Snake is ancient. If you are part of the bible-believing public it is the most ancient conflict known to us, and the source of all suffering on earth.
Genesis 3 describes the fall of mankind into the condition of perpetual Sin and Death from its former Edenic state. The biblical Serpent is the proverbial ‘snake in the grass’ tempting Eve into fatal disobedience by inducing her to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge.
Eve persuades Adam to partake of her error by repeating the lies of the serpent. The pair recognizes their nakedness as the effects of the Forbidden Fruit start to kick in.
Moving to cover themselves, God walks in. Immediately he knows something is wrong. The lord says,
Bitch who told ya’ll to put clothes on?
Adam doesn’t waste any time in throwing Eve under the bus, and God condemns the Serpent:
12. “the woman you put here with me- she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13. then the lord said to the woman, ‘what have you done?’
The woman said, the serpent deceived me, and ate.
14. so the Lord God said to the Serpent, “because you have done this,
Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals
You will crawl on your belly
And you will eat dust
Al the days of your life.
And I will put enmity
Between you and the Woman,
And between your offspring and hers;
He will crush your head,
And you will strike his heel
This passage has given rise to what is called ‘the dual-seed’’, or ‘Serpent Seed’ doctrine, a fringe belief alive and well in certain circles wherein the Serpent’s Seduction is considered literal.
According to the ‘dual-seed doctrine’ the Serpent mated with Eve to produce the line of Cain. As sons and daughters of the Deceiver, the descendants of Cain are held responsible for every evil that dwells in the hearts of men.
The light of truth and justice was brought forth by the pure human offspring of Eve and Adam, first through Abel, who Cain famously murdered, and then through the line of Seth.
The Serpent Seed Doctrine is racial Marxism, framing human history as a violent conflict between the descendants of Cain and Seth.
(* Note that biblical scholars have identified no less than seven offspring in the line of Adam and Eve in scripture, while geneticists have singled out no less than 10 sons and 18 daughters descended from a single primordial pair.)
The Serpent Seed Doctrine is considered a part of the lunatic fringe, deeply entrenched in turn-of-the-century American Antisemitism. Even so, the vilification of the Serpent is a staple of both Jewish and Christian symbology, ancient and modern.
Representing the menace of the Jews as a Serpent is ironic; A Jewish Messianic Prophecy recorded in the Talmud considers the serpent Leviathan mankind’s spiritual enemy and holds that the Blessed will feast on its flesh at the End of Time; real JRPG Final Boss shit.
Even in traditions that venerate the snake, it is a creature shrouded in a mantle of fear and respect.
Studies have concluded that fear of snakes is a learned behavior. A human toddlers’ only innate response to snakes is one of curiosity; meaning, human babies aren’t competent to look after themselves. They have bad instincts.
There are around 600 known species of venomous snakes on earth. About 200 of those can kill or maim with their venom, and while there are no documented instances of the Amazonian river anaconda killing or eating a man, snake expert Paul Roseti insists that it does happen.
Our primitive ancestors learned the hard way not to fuck around with snakes, but there is a dark side to the human psyche that beckons some souls inexorably, even sexually, to death and the void. Freud dubbed this the Thanatos Instinct, Thanatos being the Greek personification of Death.
The choking kink is an example of the Thanatos Instinct. I recognize the mechanics of erotic asphyxiation are a little more complex than just having a wank about death, but I suspect the danger is at least half the thrill of it— and I’m willing to bet the modern Lamia kink is another expression of Freud’s Thanatos Instinct.
The lamia is a vampiric entity, half-human and half-snake— like the descendents of Cain.
Portrayals of human/lamia intercourse usually involve light to extreme bondage; and death by lamia constriction might be the higher octave of the choking fantasy.
What? You didn’t know there was a thriving Lamia fandom in the depraved world of erotic anime?
Hentai is a Japanese word that translates to ‘pervert’ in English, and the stuff lives up to its namesake: h-anime is feverishly, gleefully perverted, in ways the relatively tame Western imagination can scarcely comprehend.
Lamia erotica is a very specific corner of the broader category of the Succubus fetish, another popular trope in the h-anime world. Succubi are female demons in European folklore that prey on the sexual essence of men. H-anime treatments of the Succubus motif usually involve people being brainwashed into sex with monsters that are trying to kill them.
Fringe interpretations of the biblical Genesis hold that Eve mated with the Serpent; and thousands of years after the bible landed, legions of Otaku perverts would embrace human/serpent intercourse as a head-canon in their private spank bank. Between the Book of Genesis and the explosion of h-anime culture in the late 1980’s, there is a massive folk history of the Lamia to explore. This history embraces themes of cultural genocide and the development of Western social attitudes toward sex and the sexes; and it can be traced throughout the whole of recorded history, enjoying global distribution.
To start unraveling this tangled mass of serpents, I’ll begin where this all began for me; with 1995’s Chrono Trigger.
Akira Toriyama's Sexy Lamia
Chrono Trigger is a Japanese role-playing game by Squaresoft Studios from they year 1995 that was originally ported for the Super Nintendo.
The scene where we meet the lamia in Chrono Trigger is brilliant in ways that will become more apparent the deeper we go into this;
The party walks into a medieval abbey. A peaceful ambiance filters through stained glass, and several nuns are going about their services. When we interact with these demure-looking church women, each one says something vaguely threatening:
Then comes the big reveal.
In a swirl of blue flame the nuns cast off their human disguises and reveal their true forms; they are deadly, man-eating monsters, one and all! Half-snake, half-woman, all LAMIA!
(Actually they are Naga-ettes, but acknowleding that would destroy the premise of this article.
The naga were a mysterious civilization of serpent-people known from the Hindu Vedas; thematically and stylistically, the naga-ettes of Chrono Trigger are Lamia— vampiric creatures that are half-woman and half-snake.)
It turns out this entire church is a front. The sub-floors are all haunted by droves of shape-shifting monsters; this is their headquarters.
There is a secret room in the basement where you find the monsters venerating a statue of the wizard called Magus, who wields an enormous scythe. The Greek titan Saturn also wields a scythe in many of his classical depictions. Saturn is a god of Time and Death, mirrored in the Roman Kronos. A heap of external evidence suggests Saturn/Kronos heavily informed later Christian ideas of Satan:
It isn’t difficult to read between the lines:
The Church is not what it pretends to be. All these people are wearing masks, and they prostrate themselves before dark idols in the basement.
This is powerful symbolism to layer into a game for children, not that I noticed it as a kid. What I did notice was Lamia’s scandalous midrith.
‘These monsters are hot,’ I told myself.
As an adult, I still think the Lamia of Chrono Trigger is weirdly hot. As tempting as it is to cave to embarrassment, I have to consider the very real possibility that I was meant to feel that way.
This is, after all, Akira Toriyama’s design- work. The same Akira Toriyama that lit up every early 90’s childhood with a steady stream of Bulma’s panties by way of the hit children’s show Dragonball.
Akira Toriyama is also the mastermind behind the character designs for the popular Dragonquest franchise. As of October 2024, the upcoming release of the Dragonquest III remake has become a hot-button issue on social media.
The late artist’s work is being censored in an effort to keep a franchise aimed at children child-friendly. The censorship in question is pretty light, and the outrage over it thinly masks the real source of the controversy, which is DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) standards being enforced at an international level by American consulting firms.
I can see both sides of the censorship argument. Do I think Toriyama’s work is beautiful and perfect just the way it is? Yes.
Do I feel like a childhood saturated in Akria Toriyama’s work helped me grow up to be a coomer that would write a 30-page dissertation dissecting the Lamia kink? Also, yes.
Do I think that putting a sports bra on one of Akira Toriyama’s anime baddies will do anything to reverse a trend that already too far gone? Definitely not.
Returning to our subject: Chrono Trigger isn’t the first time we meet Lamia in a Squaresoft RPG. The Final Fantasy franchise was on its 6th release in 1995, and we encounter Lamia in five out of the six installments current at that time.
Lamia in Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy I might not count. The half-woman, half-snake Fiend of Fire called Kary is distinguished from other representations of Lamia by having six arms:
Kary looks more like the illusory serpent-woman summoned by the court magician in Ray Harryhausen’s first Sinbad film:
In Final Fantasy II (1989), though, the venerable tradition of the Lamia-as-shapeshifting-seductress steps forward in a raunchy scene where Queen Hilda of the Resistance tries to lure the hero Firion into bed.
It soon turns out that Queen Hilda has been replaced by a Lamia Queen:
The pixel rendering of Final Fantasy‘s first Lamia was Queen faithful to Yoshitaka Amano’s original design concept:
In Final Fantasy III Lamia doesn’t get her own scenario, but she does show up in the corrupt floating fortress of the arch-wizard Hein:
In Final Fantasy IV, the advent of 16-bit graphics allowed for the first Lamia in Squaresoft history that was a low-key baddie:
Final Fantasy was conceived as an emulation of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop gaming system. It is in the Dungeons and Dragons player handbooks we will find the next rung on our long ladder down to the bottom of world Lamia lore.
Buckle in; our narrow treatment of this popular fantasy monster is going to massively dilate from here.
Lamia in Dungeons and Dragons
Lamia is featured in Dungeons & Dragons’ first Monster Manual, published in 1977. Here she is half-woman and half-beast, a solitary being that stalks ruined temples and feasts on wayward travelers. She is very rare, chaotic evil in alignment, and highly intelligent. She is also a wizard.
The lamia can cast ‘charm person’, ‘mirror image’, ‘suggestion’, and ‘illusion’. She uses these spells to lure her victims, and she loves to play with her food.
First, she drains the target’s wisdom. When they’ve become a slave to her every whim, she drinks their blood to the last drop and then devours the flesh of the drained husk. You can see how all this might easily be spun into the euphemism that it would become in the hands of hentai studios. But wait, there’s more.
In 1981 the Fiend Folio was released as a supplement to the Monster Manual. Here we find the Lamia Noble. She is once again a vampire wizard, but with an added twist; she is half-snake instead of half-beast, and she can shape-shift. I should stop calling it she– the lamia could be male or female. This is also true of Lamia nobles.
Ray Harryhausens iconic Medusa from 1981’s Clash of The Titans was shaking up things at the box office the same year TSR’s Fiend Folio dropped:
In Dragon Magazine #36 (1980) Gary Gygax, one of the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, produced a character sheet for Robert E. Howard’s Conan character so that Dungeons and Dragons fans could moonlight as the world’s most beloved Barbarian. This was before the barbarian existed as an official class; Dungeons and Dragons was still being invented.
It seems appropriate, then, to draw a line of inference from the Fiend Folio‘s Lamia Noble to Robert E. Howards 1929 novelette, ‘The Shadow Kingdom’.
In ‘The Shadow Kingdom’, Kull the Atlantean has usurped the throne of Valusia, a mysterious island nation. He soon finds that the royal palace is a literal den of snakes; an ancient race of serpent-men has ruled Valusia from the shadows for untold ages. They murder human kings to replace them with shapeshifting dopplegangers, and the illusion they cast about themselves is so perfect no one knows the serpent men of old remain at large in the world.
In Rob Howard’s hands, the paranoid headspace the reader is forced to occupy for the duration of the story becomes a critique of society and the human experience:
Was it the real Kull who sat upon the throne or was it the real Kull who had scaled the hills of Atlantis, harried the far isles of the sunset, and laughed upon the green roaring tides of the Atlantean sea? How could a man be so many different men in a lifetime?
For Kull knew that there were many Kulls and he wondered which was the real Kull. After all, the priests of the Serpent went a step further in their magic, for all men wore masks, and many a different mask with each different man or woman; and Kull wondered if a serpent did not lurk under every mask.
Many commentators recognize in The Shadow Kingdom the first real sword and sorcery story. That the Lamia Noble is an homage to this rough-hewn gem of fantasy literature is near-certain.
In Dragon Magazine #192, published on April Fools Day in 1993, an article on the ecology (and love life) of Lamias by Spike y Jonez establishes the breeding habits of lamia and lamia nobles- they both prefer to mate with humans, as only a human breeding partner can produce a lamia noble. At last, the turning of the wheel is complete: the stage is set for the in-bound lamia kink.
Yet a careful study of the paper trail reveals that the lamia kink had been there from time immemorial. We’ll take a visual cue from the people at TSR and 1977’s Monster Manual to break through to the next layer of Lamia Lore. Remember how in 1977’s Monster Manual she was given the body of a lion in lieu of the snake body that is now considered synonymous with the lamia? Where did that come from?
The answer seems to be Edward Topsell’s 1607 zoological compendium The History of Four-Footed Beasts, where the English autodidact treats dragons, unicorns, gorgons, manticore, and lamia as real things, ‘based on the testimony of sundry and learned gentlemen’.
The History of Four-Footed Beasts
‘The History of Four-Footed Beasts’ is a massive tome.
A cleric by vocation, Edward Topsell’s ambition was to compile ancient and modern sources on animal lore into a comprehensive bestiary. The final product includes so many fabulous legends and erroneous details passed off as hard truths that the work is still studied for the many curiosities it enshrines. Examples include:
‘True toads have a toadstone in their heads that protects people from poison.’
‘Weasels give birth through their ears.’
‘Elephants worship the sun and the moon and become pregnant by chewing on mandrake.’
That The History of Four-Footed Beasts served as a primary source for the authors of 1977’s Monster Manual is confirmed as we delve into Topsell’s description of the Lamia:
Chrysostomus writeth that there are such Beasts in some part of Lybia, having a woman's face, and very beautiful, also very large and comely [] breasts such as cannot be counterfeited by the art of any Painter, having a very excellent colour…
they are the swiftest of foot of all earthly Beasts, so as none can escape them by running: for by their celerity… [] they overthrow men. For when as they see a man, they lay open their breasts, and by the beauty thereof, entice them to come near to conference, and so having them within their compass, they devour and kill them…
The Chysostomus referred to here is Dio Chrysostom, a Greek orator, writer, philosopher, and historian who lived between 40 and 115 AD.
In Dio Chrysostom’s 5th Oration, the most eminent rhetorician and sophist of his day lays out his famous Libyan Myth, wherein he describes a civilization of man-eating monsters with upper bodies like women who are all-snake from the waist down:
The general character and appearance of their body were as follow:
The face was that of a woman. The breast and bosom, and the neck, too were extremely beautiful, the like of which no mortal maid or bride in the bloom of youth could claim, nor sculptor or painter will ever reproduce.
The complexion was of dazzling brightness, the glance of the eyes aroused affection and yearning in the souls of all that beheld. The rest of the body was hard and protected by scales, and all the lower part was snake, ending in the snakes baleful head…
And while they overcame other creatures by force, they used guile with man, giving them a glimpse of their bosom and breasts [] filling them with a passionate desire for intercourse.
But as soon as the man came within reach they seized him in their grasp; for they had claw-like hands too, which they had kept concealed at first. Then the serpent would promptly sting and kill him with poison, and the dead body was devoured by the serpent and the rest of the beast together.
The awesome tits of Lamia are a feature that has been preserved in the heavily sexualized h-anime depictions of the lamia, but the deeper we go into this the more apparent it becomes that she was always a sex symbol.
By synthesizing his extensive source material into a whole greater than the sum of its parts, Topsell took a hand in shaping the lamia myth for future generations. The creature described in Dio Chysostom’s Libyan Myth is clearly portrayed as having a body like a serpent. This notion Topsell discards outright:
...but I cannot approve their opinions, either in this or in that, wherein they describe [the lamia] with horses feet, and the hinder-parts of serpents...
The detail that throws Topsell off of the serpent imagery appears to have come from by the 5th century BC playwrite Aristophanes, who named the Lamia’s testicles in identically worded lists of exceptionally foul objects in two separate plays (Peace and Wasps ). Lacking any real experience with the animals he cataloged, I surmise Topsell did not believe that snakes had testicles.
Topsell acknowledges the ‘filthy stones’ of the lamia as emblems of the creatures exceptional lewdness and, like Dio Chrysostum over a millennia before, employs the creature as a rhetorical device; a living commentary on the nature and wages of sin.
Another notion that Topsell discards outright is something virtually every other commentator on the subject of the Lamia took for granted, including Dio Chrysostom himself.
In his own words, the Libyan Myth was never intended to be zoological or historical account. Instead, it was a rhetorical device showing how men are doomed by their lusts:
Now this myth, which has not been invented for a child’s benefit to make it less rash and ungovernable, but for those whose folly is greater and more complete, may perhaps, now that we have brought it into this context, be able to show adequately the character of the passions, that they are irrational and brutish and that, by holding out the enticement of some pleasure, they win over the foolish by guile and witchery and bring them to a most sad and pitiable end.
The description Topsell finally settles on is the one affirmed by observation of specimens brought forth by Roman Emperor Probus [276-282]. I haven’t been able to hunt down the primary source re: the Lamia of Emperor Probus, but what we end up with, in Topsell’s estimation, looks something like this:
The hinder part of this Beast are like unto a Goat, his fore-legs like a Bears, his upper parts to a Woman, the body [scaled] all over like a dragon, as some have affirmed… when Emperor Probus brought [the lamia] forth for public spectacle…
QED: the lamia in 1977’s Monster Manual used Topsell’s bestiary as its primary point of reference.
The Lamia of Philostratus
Topsell’s account of the Lamia includes the synopsis of a legend from The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a biopic on the fantastic life and teachings of a wandering neopythagorean mystic.
Philostratus Lucius Flavius compiled his biography of the great Anatolian philosopher Apollonius from about 217 to 238 AD, a little over a century after the semi-mythic figure is believed to have died. The work was commissioned by Julia Domna, first empress of the Severan Dynasty. Some scholars assert the Christ-like Apollonius was largely unknown in Western Europe until after the publication of Philostratus’ biography, which made Apollonius a key figure in the Neopythagoran movement. In this paradigm Julia Domna’s son, the emperor Caracalla, would have been one of the first high-profile converts to the teachings of Apollonius.
The Life of Apollonius of Tyana is the earliest and most complete source attesting to the enigmatic sage’s life. It also contains one of the earliest depictions on file of Lamia -as – seductress; Philostratus was writing a century after the Libyan Myth, but Dio Chrysostom never referred to his snake women as Lamiae.
Dio Chrysostom never called his beguiling apex predators Lamia, but it’s unlikely the parallels between the 5th Oration and the story of Apollonius in Corinth are a coincidence; for the work of Dio Chrysostom was highly esteemed by Philostratus.
In Philostratus’ account, Menipuss the Lycian is a young man who becomes a disciple of Apollonius while the great philosopher and magician is sojourning in the Greek city of Corinth.
Menipuss is loved by a beautiful and wealthy Phoenician woman, but Apollonius reveals to Menipuss that his lover is neither a woman, nor wealthy, nor Phoencian; instead, she is one of the lamiae. In the time of Philostratus, lamiae were classed in with the empousai— another female sex-daimon with a ravenous hunger for the flesh and blood of young men.
‘You are a fine youth and hunted by fine women, but in this case you are cherishing a serpent, and a serpent cherishes you.’
Balking at this dire warning, Menipuss reveals his intention to marry the woman. Undeterred by the stubbornness of Menipuss, clever Apollonius crashes the happy couple’s wedding breakfast.
“where is the dainty lady at whose insistence we have come?” [said Apollonius].
“here she is”, replied Menipuss. “and to which of you belong the silver and gold and all the rest of the decorations of the banquet hall?”
“to the lady”, replied the youth. “for this is all I have of my own,” pointing to the philosphers cloak which her wore.
And Apollonius said, “have you heard of the gardens of Tantalus, how they exist and yet do not exist? As such [] you must regard this adornment, for it is not reality but the semblance of reality.
And that you may realize the truth of what I say, this fine bride is one of the vampires, that is to say of those beings whom the many regard as lamias and hobgoblins. These beings fall in love, and they are devoted to the delights of Aphrodite, but especially to the flesh of human beings, and they decoy with such delights those they intend to devour in their feasts’.
Her secret betrayed, the Lamia disappears. The keen-eyed Apollonius has saved the day, demonstrating the miracles of High Philosophy.
The illusions of Lamia formed the basis of her lore in [much] later pop culture; for example, in the first edition Dungeons and Dragons adventure module The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, a lamia noble maintains the illusion of a shop stocked with provisions for the purpose of luring her victims.
The Lamia of Keets
Edward Topsell’s bestiary probably re-introduced the general public to the Lamia myth; it was essentially a best-selling coffee table volume that enjoyed wide circulation for centuries after its publication.
Some 1500 years after the time of Philostratus, the second-generation English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) would turn the Neopythagorean object lesson of the Lamia myth on its head.
In 1820, only a few short months before the poet’s untimely death by tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five, Keets’ long narrative poem titled Lamia provided the maligned seductress with an on-ramp to a redemption arc.
Instead of being a vampire woman, the Lamia of Keats is freed from her cursed form by the god Hermes. She enters Corinth in the shape of a lovely woman and falls in love with a beautiful youth named Lycias, but Apollonius the philosopher destroys the young couple’s happiness on the day of their wedding feast by revealing the woman’s true identity.
Thus exposed, Lamia vanishes like a dream upon waking—and Lycius dies of grief. Here, philosophy is cast as the villain; a destroyer of fantasy, dispelling all the most intoxicating dreams of Man.
As a member of the learned class, It’s possible Keats had read Philostratus— but it’s more fun to think of him getting inspiration by flipping through a wayward copy of Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts.
I am rocking with the head-canon that the bestiary was a monolith of weird influence that percolated through the laudanum-spiked awareness of the Romantic generation, inspiring stony thoughts of lion-women with great tits.
The Lamia of Keats set a strong precedent for Lamia-as-love-object, but the shapeshifting, hypersexual snake-woman is a motif that runs back to the very foundations of history and myth as we know it.
The shape-shifting sex daimon of Philostratus and the desert-dwelling Libyan spirits of lust incarnate related by Dio Chrysostom were employed by both writers as means of demonstrating the mortal dangers presented to the aspiring philosopher by the passions, but all signs point to this version of the Lamia being drawn from much older story-telling traditions that were exported to Rome and Greece from across Mediterranean, and over a wide margin of aeons.
Lamia, Lilu, Lamashtu, Lilith
The 4th century Latin Vulgate translation of the bible translated the original Hebrew ‘Lilith’ in Isaiah 34:14 to lamia. By the 11th century, archbishop Hincmal of Reims would define the lamia as
…a supernatural danger threatening marriage… a female reproductive spirit…
By this definition, lamia is indistinguishable from a succubus.
Modern translations of Isaiah 34:14 make no mention of Lilith or lamia. For example, in the new international version:
...Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will bleat to each other; there the night creatures will also lie down and find for themselves places of rest.
Or, the King James Version:
...The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island; and the satyr shal cry to his fellow; and the screech owl also shall.
‘Screech owl’ and ‘night creatures’ were rendered as the proper noun Lilith in the original Hebrew text.
It is in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a satirical work of the 8th century AD, that Lilith is named as Adam’s first wife.
A lot gets lost in translation, as we see in the separate treatments of the line from the book of Isaiah presently under our consideration. This is as true when converting a text from ancient Hebrew to modern English as it is when converting a text from whole form to synopsis.
As such, I’m going to provide the relevant passage in full (not only for accuracy of transmission, but because we at Dungeonposting love primary sources. We hope that you do, too):
When God created the first man Adam alone, God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
[So] God created a woman for him, from the earth like him, and called her Lilith. They [Adam and Lilith] promptly began to argue with each other: She said, “I will not lie below,” and he said, “I will not lie below, but above, since you are fit for being below and I for being above.”
She said to him, “The two of us are equal, since we are both from the earth.” And they would not listen to each other. Since Lilith saw [how it was], she uttered God's ineffable name and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Maker and said, “Master of the Universe, the woman you gave me fled from me!”
The Holy Blessed one immediately dispatched the three angels Sanoy, Sansenoy, and Samangelof after her, to bring her back. God said, “If she wants to return, well and good. And if not, she must accept that a hundred of her children will die every day.”
The angels pursued her and overtook her in the sea, in raging waters, (the same waters in which the Egyptians would one day drown), and told her God's orders. And yet she did not want to return. They told her they would drown her in the sea, and she replied. “Leave me alone! I was only created in order to sicken babies: if they are boys, from birth to day eight I will have power over them; if they are girls, from birth to day twenty.”
When they heard her reply, they pleaded with her to come back. She swore to them in the name of the living God that whenever she would see them or their names or their images on an amulet, she would not overpower that baby, and she accepted that a hundred of her children would die every day.
Therefore, a hundred of the demons die every day, and therefore, we write the names [of the three angels] on amulets of young children. When Lilith sees them, she remembers her oath and the child is [protected and] healed.
One tradition holds that Lilith flew to the ends of the earth to copulate with monsters like the arch-demon Samael to become the mother of all demons. Holding to this tradition, Lilith becomes the biblical Echidna. More on Echidna later.
Jewish halakhic law forbids the spilling of a man’s seed, for Lilith the night-haunter takes advantage of men while they are masturbating or having erotic dreams; she steals their seed to replenish her demonic offspring.
The characterization of Lilith offered in the Alphabet of Ben Sira seems to have caught on. Renaissance painter Michelangelo would depict the serpent of Genesis as half-snake, half-woman in his famous Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed in 1512 AD:
Described as shapeshifters that appear in the likenesses of both men and women, the lilu and lilitu almost certainly provided the folkloric base layer for the Jewish Lilith, as well as the Akkadian Lamashtu; a distinctly female spirit that drinks the blood of men, slays children, and brings nightmares, disease, and death.
Incantation bowls meant to bind or appease the lilu or lilitu appear throughout the Mesopotamian region as late as 800 AD:
Not only does the Akkadian proper noun Lamashtu sound eerily similar to the Hellenic Lamia, the earliest known references to Lamia reveal that she and Lamashtu held identical provenance.
‘Cruel, raging, angry, predatory- she pulls out the pregnant woman’s baby… with no children of her own’
Lamia, Queen of Libya
Durius of Samos (350-281 BC) was tyrant of the Greek island of Samos who moonlighted as a historian. His Libyca survives in thirteen fragments; one of these fragments provides the earliest reference to the Lamia myth.
In the Libyca of Durius of Samos, Lamia appears as a daughter of Belus and Libya. Lamia grows up to become Queen of Libya, and for her exceptional beauty she isloved by Zeus.
Zeus’ jealous wife Hera robbed Lamia of the children she had by him as they were born and so Lamia hid herself in a cave and became deranged, hunting and killing the children of others. Disfigured by her torment, the once-beautiful woman became terrifying to behold.
As further punishment, Hera made it so Lamia could not sleep. As a final kindness to, Zeus gave her the ability to remove her eyes.
Comparing the Greek myth of the child-slaying and envious Queen Lamia to the Akkadian Incantation against Lamashtu exposes us to the high probability that Queen Lamia was not a historical figure, but a Greek handling of a much older foreign legend.
A few centuries after Duris of Samos, Diodorus Sicculus (1st century BC) takes up the Lamia myth in book twenty of his monumental Bibliotheca Historica:
At the base of this rock was a large cave thickly covered with ivy and bryony, in which according to myth had been born Lamia, a queen of surpassing beauty.
But on account of the savagery of her heart they say that the time that has elapsed since has transformed her face to a bestial aspect. For when all the children born to her had died, weighed down in her misfortune and envying the happiness of all other women in their children, sshe ordered that the new-born babes be snatched from their mothers arms and straightway slain.
Wherefore among us even down to the present generation, the story of this woman remains among the children and her name is most terrifying to them. But whenever she drank freely, she gave all the opportunity to do what they pleased unobserved.
Therefore, since she did not trouble herself about what was taking place at such times, the people of the land assumed she could not see. And for that reason ssome tell in the myth that she threw her eyes into a flask, metaphoricaly turning the carelessness that is most complete amid wine into the aforesaid measure, since it was a measure of wine that took away her sight.
One might also present Euripides as a witness that she was born in Libya, for he says: who does not know the name of Lamia, Libyan in race, a name of greatest reproach among mortals?”
Diodorus Sicculus gives us a euhemerized account of the story that Queen Lamia could remove her eyes at will.
Rather than being literal, her removable eyes reflected a political reality: under her rule the sins of men flourished, as she turned a blind eye to them. The Lamia of Diodorus Sicculus is the embodiment of tyranny and misrule whose legacy is shaped by her violent outbursts, much like the Lamia Noble of 1981’s Fiend Folio.
Almost two centuries after Diodorus Sicculus, the Greek geographer and professional tourist Pausinias (110-180 AD) gives us a radically different take on the popular horror of Queen Lamia. In book X of his excellent travelogue Descriptions of Greece he tells us:
There is a rock rising up above the ground. On it, say the Delphians, there stood and chanted the oracles a woman, by name Herophile and surnamed Sibyl.
The former Sibyl I find was as ancient as any; the Greeks say that she was a daughter of Zeus by Lamia, daughter of Poseidon, that she was the first woman to chant oracles, and that the name Sibyl was given her by the Libyans.
[2] Herophile was younger than she was, but nevertheless she too was clearly born before the Trojan war, as she foretold in her oracles that Helen would be brought up in Sparta to be the ruin of Asia and of Europe, and that for her sake the Greekss would capture Troy. The Delians remember also a hymn this woman composed to Apollo. In her poem she calls herself not only Herophile but also Artemis, and the wedded wife of Apollo, saying too sometimes that se is his sister, and sometimes that she is his daughter.’
The Oracle at Delphi was the primary seat of the priesthood of Apollo. From here the god was known to dispense prophecy to mortals through the mouths of the pythia, professional seeresses whose lives were devoted to the god. This passage seems to indicate that the oracular line at Delphi was established by the descendants of Lamia.
It’s a curious take, but it’s one Pausinias claims the locals of Delphi were beholden to.
Apollo famously killed the dragon Python, effectively wresting his seat of prophecy from the claws of a previous inhabitant.
There’s an account in Antonius Liberalis’s Metamorphoses (2nd-3rd century AD) that relates Lamia to the Delphic countryside except here Lamia appears as a cave-dwelling monster that is slain by a brave hero hurdles the monster into a wide chasm; similar to the way Apollo destroyed Python.
Here is the relevant passage from the Metamorphoses of Atonius; in this version of the Lamia myth, we see shades of Apollo and Pynthon blended with a homoerotic binding of Isaac:
By the foothills of Parnassus, toward the south, there is a mountain called Cirphis, lying near Crisa.
Inside it there is to this day a huge cave in which lived a great and prodigious beast. Some called it Lamia, though others called it Sybaris.
…The inhabitants of Delphi had for some time been considering emigration and they asked the oracle to what land they should emigrate. The god told them that they would be delivered from this menace if they remained and were willing to abandon by the save a youth chosen from the citizens…
By lot Alcyoneus, son of Diomus and Meganire, was chosen. …The priests crowned Alcyoneus and led him toward the cave of Sybaris.
By divine inspiration, Eurybarus son of Euphemus, a descendant of the River Axius, …. Happened to be coming from Curetis and encountered the youth as he was being led forward. Stricken by love for him, and asking why they were so proceeding, he thought it dreadful not to defend him to the utmost…
tearing off the chaplets from Alcyoneus, he placed them on his own head and gave orders that he himself should be led forward instead of the youth.
As soon as the priests had led him up to the cavern, he ran in and hauled out Sybaris from her laid, carrying her into the open and hurtling her from the crags.
Tumbling down she struck her head against the footings of Crisa. Because of this wound she faded from sight. From that rock sprang a fountain and the locals call it Sybaris. And the Locrians founded a city in Italy, called Sybaris, after her.
A little over a century after the time of Pausinias, Lamia makes her own metamorphoses; she transforms from a cursed and bestial tyrant into the shapeshifting and serpentine femme fatale we still know her as.
A foundational Greek myth that connects snakes, shapeshifting women, and the art of prophecy can be traced in the figure of Tiresias, the blind prophet.
We are going to make a detour into the life of the far-famed seer, as Tiresias leads us to the Double Snake motif, and it is through the lens of the Double Snake motif that we might catch a glimpse of the truth within the truth of the Lamia myth.
Tiresias and the Double Snake
The earliest written work to feature Tiresias is one of the earliest written works at all, period; it is, of course, Homer’s Odyssey.
In Book XI, Odysseus treks to the mouth of the underworld on the north shore of the Black Sea to consult the shade of a dead Tiresias.
From here, Tiresias becomes a stock character. He would reprise his role as divine prophet in The Bacchea of Euripides (480-406 BC), and in the Oedipus Rex and Antigone of Sophocles (497-405 BC).
The Biblioteca of pseudo-Apollodorus (1st century AD) relates conflicting traditions to account for Tiresias’ blindness:
“some say that he was blinded by the gods because he divulged to the human race what they wanted to keep concealed. Or according to Pherecydes, he was blinded by Athene… [for] it came about that he saw the goddess completely naked. []… When Chariclo begged her to restore the use of his eyes, she lacked the power to do so, but purified his ears instead, giving him a complete understanding of the language of birds.”
For this reason, Tiresias is named as the originator of the art of ornthomancy (scrying by the movement of birds).
The story of Tiresias shares parallels with the story of another great seer named by Homer. In the Odyssey, Theoclymenus is honored among Odysseus’ crew for he is
...a prophet, sprung from Melampous’ line of seers...
For details on ‘Melampous’ line of seers’, we’ll refer back to the Library of pseudo-Apollodorous:
‘Melampous lived in the country, and in front of his house there was an oak tree which housed a nest of snakes. After these snakes had been killed by his servents, Melampous gathered some wood and burned the reptiles, and then reared their young. When they were fully grown, they came up to him while he was asleep, and placing themselves at either shoulder, purified his ears with their tongues.’
Melampous had a son who he named Mantius, while Tiresias gave birth to the famous seeress Manto. It’s unclear which of these famous sooth-sayers gave us the English word ‘mantic’, defined as ‘of or relating to the art of prophecy’.
You heard me right when I said Tiresias gave birth.
The sex change of Tiresias was extensively treated in the Roman period, and many versions of the tale exist. Pseudo-Apollodorus offers the episode as yet another means of accounting for Tiresias’ blindness:
Hesiod says that [Tiresias] caught sight of some snakes coupling near Mount Cyllene, and when he injured the snakes, he was changed from a man to a woman; but when he saw the same snakes coupling on a futher occasion, he became a man again.
And for this reason, when Zeus and Hera were having an argument as to whether men or women gain more pleasure from love-making, they consulted Tiresias.
He said that judging the act of love on a scale of ten, men get one part… and women nine parts. On that account, Hera turned him blind, but Zeus granted him the gift of prophecy…
In both these tales, it is through the mediumship of serpents that both men become endowed with the ability to understand the speech of birds. This story is echoed in the 13th century norse Saga of the Volsungs when Siegfried tastes the blood of the dragon Fafnir and similarly gains… the power to understand the speech of birds.
Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-17 AD) says in his Metamorphosis that Tiresias lived as a woman for seven years, and was changed back in the eighth. More fleshed-out accounts of the life of Tiresias say that he acted as a priestess of Hera while serving his sentence as a member of the opposite sex, even marrying and having children (like Manto).
Mount Cyllene, where Tiresias is supposed to have been twice transfigured by mating snakes, was holy to Mercury, for it is on Cyllene that Mercury was born:
‘225. THOSE WHO FIRST BUILT TEMPLES TO THE GODS:
[]… Lycaon [first mythical king of Arkadia], son of Pelasgus, built the temple to Hermes of Cylenne.’
Pausinias weighs in on this:
‘The image of Hermes most devoutly worshipped by the inhabitants [of Cyllene] is merely the male member upright on the Pedestal’.
Tiresias’ plunge into womanhood on a mountain where they worship dicks… Kids, I don’t know what to make of it.
For our purposes, we are chiefly interested in the association of Cyllene with Mercury; Mercury’s emblem was the Caduceus, a winged staff with two snakes coiling around it. Were these the same snakes that Tiresias had witnessed mating on Cyllene?
Mercury’s possession of the caduceus is thought to go back at least as far as the seventh century BC and the Homeric Hymn to Mercury, where Mercury gives the lyre to his older brother Apollo, and Apollo grants Mercury the Cadeseus in gratitude:
[] ...I will give you a beautiful wand of wealth and fortune, made of gold, trefoil; it will keep you safe from harm, fulfilling all the dispositions of good words and events that I claim to know from the utterance of Zeus.
But as to the prophetic art, my dear [Mercury], it is not destined that you should know it...
The ‘wand of gold’ mentioned here is (almost) always represented in votive figures of Mercury as the Caduceus, the symbol of Mercury’s authority as the divine envoy to Hades, god of the Underworld.
Despite Apollo’s words, a relationship between coiled snakes and the prophetic arts is established in this exchange. Apollo alone among the gods of Olympus knows the will of Zeus, but it is Mercury the Messenger who bears the pronouncements of Apollo to earth.
The motif relating the double snake and the prophetic arts occurs in the story of Tiresius on Cyllene, and in the story of the great diviner Malampous. If the locals at Delphi believed that the daughter of Queen Lamia was the first to issue prophecies from Apollo’s seat, the slaying of Python hints at a pervasive theme wider and deeper than myth and sex monsters: one of social control by way of the priestcraft, and of a violent clash between religious perspectives.
The astrological symbol for Mercury looks like a horned figure, but its design was actually inspired by ancient depictions of the Caduceus:
Older representations of the twining snakes of the Caduceus look like an incomplete figure-eight. Ovid has Tiresias turn back into a man on the eighth year. Mercury gifts the first musical instrument to Apollo, and there are seven notes in a musical scale (eight if you treat the tonic note of the next octave as its own unit). Pseudo-Apollodorus tells us that the seven Pleiades sisters were born on Mount Cyllene. Like a figure-eight, we could run around and around this chain of correspondence.
Luckily, there is a tradition regarding the double snake motif running parallel to the alchemical symbol of the Caduceus that offers us a way out of the loop and further down the braided legacy of the Lamia myth.
Medusa, Lamia's Dragon-Twin?
In the earliest sources regarding the myth of Queen Lamia there is no mention of her draconic or serpentine aspect. There are, however, striking parallels between the Lamia myth and that of the gorgon Medusa; analyzing the overlap may help us contextualize the shift.
Lamia was a queen of Libya, while Perseus sought the lair of the gorgon sisters in Libya. A euhemerized interpretation of the myth of Perseus and Medusa by Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BC) suggests that the legend accounts for the abundance of deadly snakes in Libya; as Perseus flew on the fleet-winged sandals of Mercury back home to the island of Seriphos with Medusa’s head in a magic bag, her blood fell to the earth where it crystalized as a mass of writhing, venomous serpents.
Another feature shared by both legends is the removable eye. Some versions of the Lamia myth make her able to remove her eyes, while the oft-referenced library of pseudo-Apollodorus has Perseus guided to the hidden island of the gorgons by the wisdom of the Graeie. The Graeie were three sisters who were old from birth, sharing a single eye and a single tooth.
Like Lamia, Medusa had been a beautiful woman before being cursed by a goddess. Lamia and Medusa also share a vital connection to the god Poseidon: Medusa was raped by him, while in some versions of the Lamia myth, the Libyan Queen was sired by him. Through Poseidon, both Medusa and Lamia would become associated with the horrors that lurk in the dark depths of the ocean.
The Medusa in Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of The Titans (1981) is a serpent from the waist down, a visual element that we have seen had been historically associated with the Lamia:
This is not how Medusa was envisioned by those who first lit the torch of her myth.
Her crown of serpents has been a constant feature, but the Medusa of old was more akin to the earliest descriptions of Queen Lamia transformed: a hideous and clawed monster, terrifying to behold.
The western pediment of the Temple of Artemis at Corfu (ancient Korkyra) dated to about 580 BCE gives us an idea of how the Greeks saw Medusa:
Here she is shown as a ‘mistress of the Animals’, exemplifying rulership traditionally ascribed to Artemis, the huntress. She is also flanked on either side by leopards, a detail that will become important when we arrive at ancient Heirapolis and visit the cult of Phyrgian Cybelle. For now, we will hone in on the ‘double snakes’ that gird her waist.
In E.D.A. Morshead’s translation of Agamemnon by the heavy-hitting 5th century BCE dramatist Aeschylus, the captive Trojan princess Cassandra derides the treacherous Queen Clytemnestra by comparing her to the most robust caricatures of feminine depravity known to the plays Athenian audience:
‘O aweless soul! The woman slays her lord-
Woman? What monster of the earth Were fit comparison?
The double snake- Or Scylla, where she dwells, the seaman’s bane,
Girt round with rocks? Some hag of hell, Raving a truceless curse upon her kin?’
‘The Double Snake’ is not a well-known moniker for the gorgon Medusa, but Aeschylus’ play was written near-contemporaneously to the dedication of the Temple of Artemis at Corfu. We can be sure Cassandra was referring to the gorgon Medusa by comparing the Morshead translation to another. Ted Hughes renders the passage thus:
The woman with the heart of a demon;
Is there a name for her-
Basilisk, with her fatal, piercing glare,
Dog-headed, man-eating monster,
Shark ripping from beneath.
The basilisk is a reptilian creature whose gaze turns men to stone, just like gaze of the cursed woman in the Greek story of the snake-haired Medusa.
Votive relics unearthed at the palace of Knossos on the island of Crete and attributed to the Minoan civilizational complex (1900-1150 BC) might hold the key to all this:
It’s been established with fair certainty that the Minoan trade empire was toppled and absorbed by the patriarchal Mycenaean civilization of mainland Greece. The Mycenaeans were the Achaeans of Homer’s Iliad, a war-like people who championed the cult of Zeus and conducted the war against Troy.
Genetic assays have determined that the ancient Greeks who gave us what is termed ‘classical civilization’ were the lineal descendants of the Mycenaeans.
In a 1911 paper by A.L. Frothingham and originally published in the American Journal of Archeology titled Medusa, Apollo, and the Great Mother, Frothingham asserts that these serpentine idols are reflective of a cult of the Great Mother that thrived in pre-historic times but was
...given in later times a subordinate part in the Olympian System, entering the service of Zeus and Athene.
I feel like Frothingham is a bit generous in his wording. Converting the central deity of a conquered people into a grim monstrosity fit only for beheading and total subjugation comes across as an open acknowledgment on the part of Achaean mythographers that there was nothing gentle about the denaturation of the archaic Minoan Snake-Mother.
A.L. Frothingham suggests that this figure, dated to about 1500 BCE, represents an early Minoan Venus; a primeval mother goddess or Grand Creatrix. The serpent represents death and regeneration; it periodically renews itself by shedding its skin, and its venom is endowed with the power to heal, on top of being fatal. The dual serpent motif could represent the poles of creation and destruction, and the opposing forces of expansion and contraction. These ideas would persist in the double-snakes entwined around Mercuries Caduceus, but the twisting of the holy ‘double snake’ into the Medusa/Lamia complex might represent the coupe de grace of an ancient cultural genocide or campaign of religious suppression and conversion.
Apollo kills the snake at Delphi; Herakles kills the snake in the garden of the Hesperides; Jason robs the snake that defends the golden fleece; and Perseus decapitates Medusa, the ‘double snake’; meanwhile, the sub-Mycenaean cultural layer appears to have held the serpent in reverence.
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, from whence we derived the negative image of the Double Snake, is the first installment of a trifecta of dramatic works by the same author collected under the title The Oresteia, named for Orestes, the tragic Mycenaean prince who was fated to kill his own mother.
The final chapter of The Oresteia of Aeschylus is called The Eumenides, and it deals with the punishment of Orestes; how he was tormented by the eponymous Eumenides, or Furies; vengeful spirits that had the faces of gorgons wreathed with vipers; and how he was absolved of his crime.
During the purification of Orestes, Aeschylus seems to acknowledge the Old Gods trampled underfoot by the Olympians and their priests; for it is only by honoring the ancient spirits of the land that Orestes is cleansed of his guilt. This detail is uncanny, blind-siding the reader by punching a hole in the Olympian narrative and opening a window into lingering memories of Greek prehistory.
It isn’t just Orestes who is sanctified by the action of honoring the snake-haired Furies — it is the entire city of Athens:
ATHENE:
These appalling creatures
Are wise.
Dreadful as they are
They bring a huge wealth
To Athens. Worship them and thank them.
They will return
Kindness for kindness.
Only let Athens
Be founded in justice
And everything in Attica shall flourish...
Come to your home in the rock,
Torch-lit. You noble women
Enter the cavern.
Live with us, powerful to repel
From Attica
All misfortune.
Citizens of Athens,
Welcome the Kindly Ones.
This repeats the motif of Athene, patron goddess of Athens, affixing the decapitated (but still potent) head of the gorgon to her shield; a tradition we do not find recorded until centuries after the Oresteia was produced (i.e. in the oft-mentioned first century Library of Apollodorus).
The olive branch extended to these Old World nature spirits would turn out to be a token gesture, at best.
By the Roman period, the snake-woman persisted in popular consciousness as a vampiric entity that was only good for showing young men what not to do.
The demonization of the serpent/woman in the West would only escalate from there, becoming a byword for the embodiment of evil in the Christian era.
Sex and the Scylla Motif
As Cassandra runs through the permutations of awful things she could compare Clytemnestra to, the dog-headed shark monster Scylla is mentioned alongside Medusa.
It appears that Scylla was developed into a sex symbol at a time when Lamia was still represented as an insane child murderer with removable eyes. As Scylla was re-integrated with her Homeric role during the Roman period, her sexual attributes may have been grafted onto the Lamia myth.
I found this passage in the annotations of a scholarly PDF that compiled sources pertaining to the myth of Lamia, and it stopped me in my tracks:
1. Lamia was the Libyan Neith, the Love-and-Battle goddess, also named Anatha and Athene, whose worship the Achaeans suppressed; like Alphito of Arcadia, she ended as a nursery bogey. Her name, Lamia, seems akin to lamyros (“gluttonous”), from laimos (“gullet”)- Thus, of a woman: “lecherous”- and her ugly face is the prophylactic Gorgon mask worn by her priestesses during their Mysteries, of which infanticide was an integral part. Lamia’s removable eyes are perhaps deduced from a picture of the goddess about to bestow mystic sight on a hero by proffering him an eye.
Holy shit, that’s a lot to unpack. Prophylactic gorgon masks? Infanticide? Lamia an African Battle Goddess identical to Athene? Forget everything you’ve just read, because I have no fucking clue where this is going anymore.
Just kidding—
We are still treating the Western tradition of Lamia, the cursed queen-turned-child-slayer-turned-sex-vampire. Competent scholarship seems to reveal that the whole mess is a sand castle of lies built on a long-range program of cultural appropriation, assimilation, or genocide, but I must persist— we haven’t even arrived at Scythian Echidna yet. Don’t you want to hear about the time Hercules clapped Lamia cheeks?
The ‘gluttonous gullet of a lecherous woman’ goes a long way toward implying the shape of the contemporary Lamia kink. In hentai, the lamia are the same lewd, sex-addicted creatures we saw in the pontificating stories of Philostratus and Dio Chrystomos. It’s a feature of the Lamia myth that has remained stable in pop culture for well over two thousand years; the hypersexual snake-mother is an ancient motif.
Theoi.com provides an alternate etymology for Lamia’s name:
Lamia was no doubt first envisaged, however, as a sea-monster for she was a daughter of Poseidon and her name is simply the ancient Greek word for a large, dangerous lone-shark. She was probably identified with the sea-goddess Keto (Ceto) for both are described as the mother of the monstrous Skylla.
Atargatis, Ataratheh, Astarte
Striking out to trace Keto’s the origins of Keto leads us to a proto-Lamia. Atargatis, a northern Syrian goddess called ‘Derketo’ by the Greeks, was represented as half-woman and half-fish at the ancient Canaanite/Philistine settlement of Ascalon. As Ataratheh, her sacred emblems were the dove and the fish— emblems that Greek syncretism would transfer to Astarte, who became the sea-born goddess Aphrodite by the 8th century BC.
In the Roman era, Atargatis was still worshipped as a unique goddess in her ancient precincts— one often represented either riding on, or flanked by, lions. Derketo the fish-goddess paralleled the Phrygian Grand Creatrix, Cybelle.
It would appear the Levantine Atargatis, Derketo, was split into separate entities as she was integrated into the Olympian system; her divine attributes were melded with Venus, the eldest Olympian; and her mermaid body became Hesiod’s Keto, the mother of sea-beasts like Scylla.
The connection between Lamia and Scylla is forged in what few fragments remain of work of 6th century BC Greek poet Stesichorus, who stated in his epic poem on the life of Scylla that she was the child of Lamia. Stesichorus is the only archaic writer known to make this connection; poets from Hesiod to Hyginus attribute Scylla’s parentage to the dreadful Keto and her abysmal mate Phorcys.
Though Stesichorus’ work persists only in fragments (literal fragments of decayed papyrus) he exercised profound influence over the literary development of ancient Greece. It is perhaps due to his influence that a broad study of representations of Scylla and Lamia through time reveals a tradition of braided symbolism.
Located between the Island of Siciliy and the Southern tip of Italy, the Messina Strait was known by ancient sailors for its treachery. The danger it represented was so famous that Homer gave it a dramatic embodiment in the dual monstrosity of Scylla and Charybdis.
Odysseus and his crew must pass between the many-headed Scylla the living whirlpool Charybdis in a trial so perilous the witch Circe spends the better part of two pages walking them through it, and it is from Circe we hear the earliest description in literature of Scylla, the monstrous offspring of Lamia according to Stesichorus:
No rugged young archer could hit that yawning cave
With a winged arrow shot from off the decks.
Scylla lurks inside it- the yelping horror, Yelping, no louder than any suckling pup
But she’s a grisly monster, I assure you.
No one could look on her with any joy, Not even a god who meets her face-to-face…
She has twelve legs, all writhing, dangling down
And six long swaying necks, a hideous head on each,
Each head barbed with a triple row of fangs, thickset,
Packed tight- and armed to the hilt with black death!
Holed up in the caverns bowels from her waist down
She shoots out her heads, out of that terrifying pit,
Angling right from her nest, wildly sweeping the reefs…
By the 5th century BC, Scylla is represented as a woman with the body of a sea serpent in Greek art. She is set apart from the other nereids (daughters of Ocean, also depicted as merfolk) by the many dogs attached to her waist. The dogs-heads implied by Circe’s description of Scylla’s pup-like yelping were all that remained of Homer’s original description; it would appear that Scylla, previously cast as an embodiment of the ocean’s lethal chaos, was transformed into an embodiment of the feminine mystique.
This is the Scylla described in the Epitome of Apollodorus’ Library (1st Century AD) and the Fabulae of Higinius (64 BC-17 AD); the one who, like Queen Lamia and Medusa, was born a beautiful woman and cursed by jealousy.
The low pun here seems obvious. A ‘bitch (as in, female dog) in heat’ is still a euphemism for a promiscuous woman. It’s been that way for a long time; In the 13th century Dante Aligheri’s journey through hell in The Inferno is inaugurated by his encounter with the she-wolf, the poet’s symbol for sexual incontinence and bodily lust. Scylla the sailor’s bane with a set of shaggy, ravening hounds where we would expect to find her genitals suggests the association between hounds and negative attitudes toward the feminine libido is much older than Dante and Catholicism.
In the Odyssey Circe mentions a lone, shaggy fig tree in her description of the whirlpool Charybdis:
‘The other crag is lower- you will see, Odysseus-
Though [the cliff atop which Scylla resides and the cliff beneath which Charybdis churns] both lie side-by-side, an arrow-shot apart.
Atop it a great fig-tree rises, shaggy with leaves, Beneath it awesome Charybdis gulps the dark water down… ‘
The fruit of the fig tree has long been considered a symbol of the female genitalia in the Mediterranean world (see here and here); The presence of the tree on the crag above the yawning mouth of Charybdis could indicate that Homer had always intended Scylla and Charybdis as sex symbols, albeit sex-negative ones. Like the lamia of Apollonius and Dio Chrysostom almost a thousand years later, the twin horrors of the Messina Strait may be taken to represent the threat posed by the classically feminine attributes of unbridled and all-consuming lust to sailors embarking on the journey of a virtuous life.
Just before Odysseus and his crew encounter Scylla and Charybdis, they must pass the haunt of the Sirens who lure men to destruction. The sirens are not described in overtly feminine terms; but they are in line with the serpent of Genesis, tempting Odysseus with their knowledge:
‘Never has any sailor passed our shores in his black craft
Until he has heard the honeyed voices pouring from our lips,
And once he hears to his heart’s content sails on, a wiser man.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so-
Al that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!’
In the 4th century BC, South Italian cities like Akragas and Syracuse would feature the Scylla that is half woman and half sea-serpent on their coinage; the reason usually given is that it’s because these cities lay within bounds of the Messina Strait, from whence her legend originated. Marking their currency with a personification of mortal peril at sea might also have been a gesture similar to Athena affixing Medusa’s head to her Aegis; invoking the primordial might of nature spirits for the defense of the polis. It certainly indicates that regional attitudes toward Scylla had evolved beyond the Homeric framework.
In the 3rd century BC, the Scylla motif underwent another transformation; the serpent woman with dogs around her waist had sprouted an extra tail. Sometimes the tails in these iterations of Scylla would terminate with the heads of sea-monsters instead of fins, evoking the serpent-bodies of the Libyan snake women that ended with the heads of serpents which we find in the moralizing 5th oration of Dio Chystomos in the first century AD.
By the time the double-tailed Scylla shows up in Mediterranean Greece, a double-tailed serpent goddess had been roaming the Eurasian steppe for at least a century.
Like Scylla’s tail, our tale (hehe) forks here— and now we take the road heading east, to the home of the Scythians.
Scythian Echidna
Hesiod is an early Greek poet believed to have written in the 8th century BC, making his output roughly contemporaneous to that of Homer. There is even a later manuscript of unknown authorship that pits these two pillars of ancient Greek literature against each other in what amounts to an Iron Age rap battle.
Hesiod’s Theogony is a Boetian Book of Genesis, mapping the genealogy of the gods and expounding on the creation of the universe.
In Theogony the poet describes Echidna, the mother of all monsters:
“A monster, terrible…
Nothing like any mortal man,
Unlike any immortal god,
For half of her is a fair-cheeked girl with glancing eyes,
But half is a huge and frightening speckled snake.
She eats raw flesh in a recess of the holy earth…
A nymph, immortal and ageless all her days”
By her consort Typhon she births such famous creatures as: Cerberus, the Lernean Hydra, the Nemean Lion, Sphinx, and Chimera.
Here at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition we have the half-human half-snake mother of all monsters getting repeatedly dicked down in the deepest pit of hell with her immensely fertile womb churning out the stuff of nightmares.
These themes are to become familiar; a serpentine earth-and-fertility goddess is cast in a mold of primal terror.
But wait— there’s more.
Herodotus (484-425 BC) is commonly referred to as ‘the father of history’ because he is credited with embarking on the first organized attempt to catalog long chains of events he could not have witnessed on a factual basis. He is also called ‘the father of lies’ by Plutarch; Herodotus’ lurid tale of Scythian Echidna found in book IV of The Histories makes it easy to understand this appellation:
“The story told by the Greeks who live in Pontus is as follows.
Heracles, driving the cattle of Geryones, came to this land, which was then desolate, but is now inhabited by the Scythians…
[3] Heracles came from there to the country now called Scythia where, encountering wintry and frosty weather, he drew his lion’s skin over him and fell asleep; and while he slept his mares, which we grazing yoked to the chariot, were spirited away by divine fortune. When Heracles awoke, he searched for them, visiting every part of the country until at last he came to the land called the Woodland, and there he found in a cave a creature of double form that was half maiden and half serpent; above the buttocks she was a woman, beow them a snake.
[2] When he aw her he was astonished, and asked her if she had seen his mares strying; she said that she had them, and would not return them to him before he had intercourse with her; Heracles did, in hope of this reward.
[3] But though he was anxious to take the horses and go, she delayed in returning them, so that she might have Heracles with her for as long as possible; at last she gave them back, telling him, “these mares came, and I kept them safe here for you, and you have paid me for keeping them, for I have three sons by you.
[4] Now tell me what I am to do when they are grown up: shall I keep them here 9since I am queen of this country), or shall I send them away to you?” Thus she inquired, and then (it is said) Heracles answered:
[5] “when you see the boys are grown up, do a follows and you will do rightly: whichever of them you see bending this bow and wearing this belt so, make him an inhabitant of this land; but whoever falls short of these accomplishments that I require, send him away out of the country.”
10. … [2] Two of her sons, Agathyrus and Gelonus, were cast out by their mother and left the country, unable to fulfill the requirements set; but Scythes, the youngest, fulfilled them and so stayed in the land.
[3] From Scythes son of Heracles comes the whole line of the kings of Scythia…”
Attributing the genesis of the Scythian nation or race to a creature similar to Hesiod’s Echidna might have been a tongue-in-cheek way for the Greek settlers of the Pontic Steppe to refer to their barbarian rivals as the bastard sons of a hellish monster, but I’m going to jog off on another angle.
The Scythians are known today for the exquisite gold-work their nobles were interred with. Every time you see a piece of Scythian gold hauled up from an ancient kurgan burial site, it’s attributed to a Greek workshop; here is one such piece, a depiction of the Scythian ‘anguipede’ (snake-legged) goddess:
Was the serpent-goddess with the forked tail motif exported to the Hellenic world from greater Scythia by Greek Artisans? Did the Scythian Nobility infiltrate and rise to prominence in certain Greek city-states like the lamia nobles in Dungeons and Dragons, bringing their heraldic or religious symbols with them?
Archeologists have decided that this figure represents the ancestral goddess and divine ancestor of the Scythians. I suspect their best grounds for making this determination has a lot to do with Herodotus’ legend of the Scythian Echidna.
We find something like the Anguipede Goddess of the Scythians adorning the walls of the tomb of Thracian king Dromichetes, who unified the Getic tribes on either side of the lower Danube around 300 BC:
We also find the ‘anguipede’ motif all over the Grand Altar of Zeus at Pergamon, except instead of being cast with an air of reverence, the snake-bodied figures are being trampled underfoot by the gods of Olympus:
The Pergamene Kingdom was an independent power in Asia Minor that had subjugated the Galatian Celts and the Macedonians. They had also effectively repulsed the Iranian Seleucid’s attempts to overthrow them. Estimated to have been completed between 170 and 159 BC under the rule of King Eumenes II, the Grand Altar at Pergamon reflects a period of stability and growth after the upstart kingdom had consolidated regional power. It also reflects the ambitions of the rulers of Pergamese nobility.
The inner frieze of the altar depicts Telephus, the ancestor of the Attalids, being suckled by she-lion. Romulus and Remus, ancestors of Rome, were famously nursed by a she-wolf. In their first grand work, the Attalids had declared their superiority to Rome.
Upon the death of King Attalus III in 133 BC, ownership of the entire Pergamene kingdom was transferred to the Romans less than thirty years after the completion of the Grand Altar.
It remains unclear what the enigmatic snake-men of the Grand Altar truly represent, but because they are cast in opposition to the Olympian Gods it is assumed they represent the elder generation of the Titans; the Gods who came before the Gods.
Taking the broad view of things, it would appear that the masculine urge to clap serpent cheeks has long been mingled with ideas of violent, cross-cultural conflict. In the Echidna of Hesiod we recognize a sort of proto-Lamia; but in the Anguipede Goddess of the Scythians we recognize a heraldic motif that will cause the record needle of our narrative to skip ahead a few centuries.
Melusine, The Medieval Dragon-Half
The Bosco Sacra is widely considered the oldest sculpture garden in the modern world. Located near the Italian hamlet of Bomarzo, the project was launched in the 16th century by prince Francesco Orsini (1523-1585), perhaps as a tribute to his late wife, Guilia Farnese. Orsini and Farnese were big names in the world of the Italian Renaissance; the Park of the Monsters was one of their minor artistic contributions.
Here is a statue said to represent the Echidna of Hesiod, designed by Pirro Ligaro, which can be found at Bosco Sacra:
Compare Pirro Ligario’s Echidna to the emblem of one of the biggest names of the 3rd Renaissance:
The 16th century Echidna and the 21st century Starbucks Siren, the 5th century BC Scythian Anguipede Goddess, and the 4th Century BC double-tailed Scylla all look like the Medieval European heraldic motif called the Melusine:
Tradition holds that the Limburg-Luxemborg Dynasty (which ruled the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, and Hungary from 1308 to 1437); the House of Anjou (and their English cadet branch, the House of Plantagenet); and the French House of Lusignan were all descended from the legendary Melusine, a shape-shifting and hyper-fertile serpent-woman.
The literary Melusine is known from the work of Jean d’Arras, compiled from about 1382 to 1394. In The Romans of Partenay or of Lusignen: Otherwise known as the Tale of Melusine, the reader is transported back to the time of the crusades. Elinas, the King of Albany (that is, Scotland) meets the faerie Pressine (in French, Pressyne means ‘like a siren’) near an abandoned well while he is out hunting.
The king proposes to Pressine. She accepts, but only on the condition that Elinas swears never to see her when she gives birth to or bathes their children (because she transforms into a serpent-like being). Pressine gives birth to triplet girls named Melusine, Melior, and Palatine. Elinas is so excited at the news of triplets that he breaks his promise, barging into her chamber as she gives birth to his daughters. He violated his oath, and so Pressine abandons him to raise their daughters on the mist-shrouded island of Avalon.
Every day Pressine takes the girls to the top of a mountain from which they can see the Kingdom of Alba, which would have been their home. Enlisting the help of her sisters, Melusine avenges herself on the faithless Elinas by locking the King of Albany and all his riches in the mountain of Brandelois. Elinas dies as a result of his punishment, and Pressine becomes enraged with her daughters.
She locks Palatine in the same mountain that Elinas died in; Melior is sealed inside a castle; and Melusine is banished from Avalon, cursed to take on the form of a two-tailed serpent from the waist down every Saturday.
She is also burdened with a curse not unlike the one that doomed her father; if a man ever takes Melusine to wife, he must never see her on Saturdays. If he breaks his oath, Melusine will be forced to remain in her monstrous form.
Melusine settles by a stream near Poitiers in France, where she eventually meets Count Raymondin of Poitiers. She consents to marry him on the condition that he never view her on Saturdays. In time Melusine bears him ten sons; like I said, hyper-fertile.
In some versions of the story, their children are all deformed. Even so, Melusines relationship with the otherworld allows her to perform miracles on her husband’s behalf: marvelous castles are erected, and Raymondin’s wealth and power grow substantially over the course of a decade.
In time, though, the perpetual goading of Raymondin’s family arouses his suspicions. Why does Melusine spend every Saturday by herself, and why does she never attend mass? He trespasses on his oath and sneaks into his wife’s chambers, where he finds her bathing in a green basin wearing her serpent-form.
Raymondin keeps this knowledge secret until one of their sons murders his uncle, Raymondin’s brother. Raymondin blames Melusine, calling her a serpent. All at once, Melusine transforms into a dragon and flies off, imparting two magic rings upon Raymondin before he never sees her again.
The whole story pushes the boundaries of credibility, but that didn’t stop several prominent aristocratic houses in the Middle Ages from claiming Melusine as an immediate ancestor or incorporating the Melusine motif (a woman with a dual serpent’s tail) into their heraldry.
Echoes of the Melusine legend are found ringing through the literary history of Europe, from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837) to the legend of the Swan Knight Lohengrin related in Wolfran Von Eisenbach’s Parzifal (early 1200’s).
Hundreds of years after the ascent of House Luxembourg, the Augustinian Friar Martin Luther (1483-1546) described their Melusina as a succubus, or the devil appearing in female form to seduce men away from the truth of Jesus Christ. Some have inferred from Melusines customary isolation on Saturdays, which prevented her from attending Christian mass, that she was a crypto-jew, as Saturday is the traditional Jewish Sabbath.
Recall that in Jean d’Arras’ Melusine story, Melusine’s mother is married to an ancient King of Scotland.
In the opening lines of the Declaration of Arberoath, dated April 6th, 1320, addressed to the pope in Rome and approved by all the kings of Scotland, the Scots recount their history and origins:
‘Most Holy Father and Lord, we know and from the chronicles and books of the ancients we find that among other famous nations our own, the Scots, has been graced with widespread renown.
They journeyed from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Pillars of Hercules, and dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes, but nowhere could they be subdued by any race, however barbarous…’
According to Orthodox Judaism, the law of matrilineal descent has been in place since the convenant at Sinai in 1310 BCE.
Are we talking about a secret MtDNA lineage passed on by the mothers? Scythian Echidna and Melusine are both women, as is the Serpentine Lilith of the Sistine Chapel. Her hair is thick and strawberry-blonde, with ruddy hair often considered a hallmark of Scottish ancestry. Is Scottish Ancestry just Scythic Ancestry?
The dissolution of the Scythian Empire, the identity of the Scythic people, and their disappearance into the folds of history has long been a source of historical intrigue. Is the riddle solved by following the trail of the anguipede Goddess?
In the 1993 anime Dragon Half, the protagonist Mink is the offspring of a dragon slayer and a dragon, and her hair is red. Soft disclosure, perhaps?
The Scottish king met Pressine as a water nymph living by a well in the forest. Tradition links Melusine with rivers. Do Pressine and Melusine’s relationship with water indicate their foreign character? In the legend they belong to another order of being; but what if they were just foreign?
Remember the Minoans were in possession of the double-snake//mother motif at least 700 years before the Scythians emerged in history. The Minoans are thought to have been at the center of a trans-continental trade empire. They were even the middlemen between the ancient Israelites and Cornish tin. Cornwall is in Southern England. Migration routes between the British Isles and Greater Eurasia fueled the Bronze Age; Pressine could have come by boat to Scotland from pretty much anywhere.
If Pressine can indeed be thought of as the avatar of the Scythian Snake-Mother it would stand to reason that she hailed from Scythia, just like the Scottish kings in the Declaration of Arbaroath claimed to.
Pressine might have reflected the introduction of a Scythian royal element to the native Celto-Britonic ruling class, but this is all very speculative.
At its apex the Scythian Empire was massive. It ran from the Eastern shore of the Black Sea to the Western frontier of the Gobi Desert, and it is from the edge of the Gobi that we will follow the motif of Lamia-as-Anguipede creatrix down into the buried foundations of ancient Chinese civilization.
The Chinese Double-Snake
That Scythic people interacted with the ancient Chinese is an archeological certainty.
The degree, extent, and nature of the exchanges between the Scythians and Chinese are still under (fierce) debate, but one thing we know for sure is that Ancient China furnishes us with a creation myth similar to that of Scythian Echidna.
That Scythic people interacted with the ancient Chinese is an archeological certainty.
The degree, extent, and nature of the exchanges between the Scythians and Chinese are still an object of (fierce) debate, but the literature of Ancient China furnishes us with a creation myth similar to that of Scythian Echidna.
The Classic of Mountains and Seas is a compilation of early Chinese geographical, mythic and legendary material thought to date back to at least the 4th century BC, though its present form was not achieved until the Han dynasty in the 2nd century BC.
In this ancient Chinese text we read the myth of Fuxi and Nuwa, the original humans who lived on the mythical Kunlun Mountain, believed to represent the central axis of the world. Fuxi and Nuwa were brother and sister who became man and wife; together they created offspring from clay, which they animated with the joint powers of their divinity. Their offspring would become the human race.
In a silk tapestry dated to the 8th century AD and the Tang Dynasty, Fu Xi and Nuwa are depicted as half-human and half-serpent in a manner reminiscent of the DNA double-helix.
Zekariah Sitchin, who pioneered the Annunaki theory of ancient alien genetic manipulation in creating the human race, believed the helicase symbols in Mesopotamian steles and later Sumerian art were blatant references to the DNA double helix.
Fu Xi and Nuwa in their serpent-form are represented against a background of stellar constellations, holding the compass and the square; symbols employed by Freemasonry because they are essential to complex design and architecture.
It is an intriguing fact that the Chinese double-snake creator-god motif emerges well after Scythian depictions of their anguipede creatrix, particularly since writers like Christopher Beckwith maintain that the origins of Chinese civilization are Scythic.
A column at the Fuxi Temple in Gansu Province bears an inscription that further illuminates the legendary origins of Chinese civilization:
“Among the three primogenitors of Huaxia civilization, Fu Xi in Huaiyang Country ranks first.
In the beginning there was as yet no moral or social order. Men knew their mothers only, not their fathers.
They could only know their offspring but not their progenitors. They slept whenever they wanted. When awoke, they started [repeating a single sound to communicate without language].
When hungry, they searched for food; when satisfied, they threw away the remnants. They devoured their food hide and hair, drank the blood, and clad themselves in skins and rushes.
Then came Fu Xi and looked upward and contemplated the images in the heavens, and looked downward and contemplated the occurrences on earth. He united man and wife, regulated the five stages of change, and laid down the laws of humanity. He devised the eight trigrams, in order to gain mastery of the world.”
Instead of being represented as the creator of humanity as in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Fu Xi temple attributes all of the accoutrements of civilization to his divine interference: astronomy, divination, law, marriage rituals, agriculture, the measurement of time, and the written word are all attributed to Fu Xi, the First Divine Emperor.
Echoing a central theme we’ve been grazing, commentators have suggested that the social order prevailing in China before the time of Fu Xi was matriarchal, and the chief contribution of Fuxi and Nuwa to Chinese Civilization was patriarchal organization, with chaos and the feminine once again being treated as synonyms.
The Libyan Myth Revisited- The Golden Ass
The road of our narrative forked where Scylla’s tail did, but we’re going to double back to a place we’ve already been; the Libyan Myth of Dio Chrysostom.
While Herakles is clapping lamia cheeks and fathering other races in the lore of the Pontic Greeks, Dio Chrysostrom writing over half a millennium after Herodotus submitted his report has Herakles shafting snake-women in a different capacity. In North Africa, according to Dio, Herakles put the finishing touches on the destruction of the entire population of Libyan snake women:
‘At that time, then, the task of destroying this brood was not completed by the king.
Later, however (so the story continues), Heracles, while clearing the whole earth of wild beasts and tyrants, came to this place too, set it on fire, and when the creatures were escaping from the flames, slew with his club all that attacked him, and with his arrows those that tried to run away.
[22] Now perhaps the myth is an allegory to how that, when the majority of men try to clear the trackless region of their souls, teeming with savage beasts, by rooting out and destroying the brrod of lusts in the hope of then having got rid of them and escaped, and yet have not done this thoroughly, they are soon afterwards overwhelmed and destroyed by the remaining lusts; but that Heracles, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, carried the task through to completion and made his own heart pure and gentle or tame; and that this is what is meant by his taming, that is, civilizing the earth.
Herakles was the most prolix of the primordial monster-slayers of Greek Myth; famously taming Cerberus as well as destroying the Lernaean Hydra the Nemean Lion, all offspring of the snake-mother Echidna.
As a slayer of monster-pussy, Herakles fathered three children on Scythian Echidna.
If I were a greek writer of the last centuries BC, I would euhemerize this myth by asking: which of Echidna’s Hesiodic offspring do you suppose represent the children of Echidna and Herakles? And which one represents the great ancestor and first king of the Scythian people?
Dio Chrysostom’s closes his fifth oration with a chilling paragraph that suggests Herakles’ mop-up of the Snake-women of North Africa may not have been a success:
[24] Would you care, then, to have me gratify the younger people among you by giving a brief additional portion of the myth? For they believe so thoroughly in it and are so convinced of its truth as to assert that one of this brood appeared to the oracle of Ammon under the escort of a strong force of calvary and archers.
They saw what seemed to be a woman, reclining on a pile of sand; she wore a sheepskin thrown oer her head after the manner of the Libyan women, but displayed her bosom and breasts and lay with her head thrown back. They supposed that she was one of the professional harlots from some village who was on her way thither to join her company. Accordingly, a certain two young men, greatly taken with her appearance, approached her, one outstripping the other. When the creature seized this one, she dragged him into a hole in the sand and devoured him. The other young man, rushing past her, saw this and cried aloud so that the rest of the part came to his assistance. But the creature hurled itself at the young man wih the snake part foremost, and after killing him disappeared with a hissing sound. They add that the body was found rotten and putrefying, and that the Libyans who were acting as guides permitted no one to touch the body lest all should perish.
It seems like Dio’s intent here was to impress upon the listener the reality of the violent, dangerous, and unconquerable lamia.
To me, it seems obvious this was a rhetorical device meant to leave listeners with a sense of the imperishable dangers lurking in human nature.
Though it might have had nothing to do with the existence of an actual lamia, his horror story is so wildly effective that the rational and scientifically-minded Edward Topsell writing his bestiary some 1500 years later seems to accept it at face value.
Contemporary to the career of Dio Chrysostomos is The Golden Ass of Apuleius, the only latin-language novel to have survived in its entirety. The whole novel revolves around the protaganist’s quest for occult secrets.
Apuleius died in 170 AD, the same year Philostratus was born. The context in which the lamia is named in both The Golden Ass and The Life of Apollonius of Tyana seems to indicate that the strongly patriarchal character of Roman civilization and learning was well-developed by the time the Christian ethos was introduced; orthodox Christianity grew on a substrate of much older biases.
The Golden Ass is an extremely interesting work, especially when viewed through the lens of everything we’ve been discussing.
In Chapter Eleven, the protagonist is inducted into the Cult of Venus and learns the Goddesses true identity; she is Isis, Goddess of Magic.But that is the capstone and conclusion to a surreal romp through vulgar scenery; the themes of sex and spirituality are contrasted to a dysphoric effect in the ten chapters that precede it.
By the first century AD, lamia was a synonym for what we would call a vampire, which the Greeks called Empousai. The vampires of ancient Mesopotamia, with their powers of seduction and enchantment, could be either sex; these appear to have been subsumed by the specter of female derangement embodied in the lamiae through an oral tradition of cumulative misogyny that would thrive marvelously through the ages.
Apuleius’ journey through the magical traditions of the neopythagorean era includes a visit to theThessalian witches Meroe and Panthia, who seduce a man named Socrates (Socrates as in, the grandfather of Western philosophy?) and hold him captive.
When the witches learn that he plans to escape the witches raid his bed, thrust a knife in his neck, drain his blood into a skin bag, cut out his heart, and stuff the holes with sponge. The writer calls Meroe and Panthia Lamiae.
Overall, The Golden Ass gives us a picture the feminine so nuanced that Apuleius has been accepted as a witch by some Neo-pagans; he seems to embrace the full spectrum of the Goddesses latent potentials, from the object of supreme horror to the object of supreme devotion.
The patriarchal religious view-point that has dominated Western Thought for much of recorded history can be traced through the Indo-European language family to the RigVeda, a sanskrit text of Northern India dated to at least 1500 BC.
RigVeda contains a wealth of information that indicates it’s contents must be much older than the composition date, but these grounds are still contested, as is the manner by which Indo-European language and myth structures were transmitted.
Earlier we traced the myth of Lamia back to the Akkadian Lamashtu. Akkad was in the Mesopotamian River Valley, a region whose languages are categorized as semitic (with the exception of Sumerian); and it is in the Semitic cuneiform of ancient Akkadian that we find the earliest known creation epic.
It is the Enuma Elish, recorded on a series of tablets excavated in 1876 at the ruins of Nineveh, where we find what appears to be the original template on which all of Western mythological history was patterned.
Marduk and Tiamat
When on high the heaven had not been named, Firm ground below had not been called by name, Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, (And) Mummu*–Tiamat, she who bore them all, Their waters commingling as a single body;
No reed hut had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods whatever had been brought into being,
Uncalled by name, their destinies undetermined—
Then it was that the gods were formed within them.
Dating to the late second millenium BC, the Enuma Elish is the only complete surviving record of ancient Babylonian/Akkadian cosmology. It tells the story of how Marduk (or Enlil, or Bel) was given supreme authority over the younger generation of the gods by conquering the mother-goddess Tiamat.
In gearing up for war against the New Gods, gods who she had previously given birth to, Tiamat fostered eleven great, poisonous Chimeras with Kingu,her divine consort. Thus Tiamat gained the epithet ‘Mother of Dragons’ or ‘Mother of Monsters’, perhaps finding its reflection in the later Semitic daemon Lilith’s role as ‘Mother of Demons’.
Marduk bound Tiamat’s eleven Chimeras and killed their mother with an arrow through the heart. He cleaved her body in half and used it as the raw material of creation, establishing the heavens and the earth from the Supreme Mothers’ corpse.
Tablet Five of Enuma Elish describes Marduk’s role in ordering the cosmos, while Tablet Six details the creation of Man from the blood of Kingu, who was sacrificed to produce the human race, who were designed to toil in the service of the gods.
Enuma Elish describes Tiamat as having a tail. Her name appears to derive from tamtu, the Akkadian word for the sea (or the Northwest Semitic Tehom, meaning the Abyss or the Deeps) and she has long been represented as a serpentine or draconic entity.
Echoes of the biblical Genesis are all over the Babylonian/Akkadian creation myth, as are other themes we’ve gone over in triplicate: the subjugation of the Monstrous Feminine, and the Mounstrous Feminine’s relationship to the Serpent.
The Serpents of Cybele: The She-Dragon in the Gospel of Saint Philip
Tertullian (155-220 AD) was an early Christian writer in Carthage, recognized as the father of Latin Christianity. In his treatise titled Against Valentinus where he lambasts the flourishing heresy of the Valentinian Gnostics he mentions the lamia as an ignorant fable employed by parents and nurses to frighten children into obedience:
‘To remove from a familiar authority to an unknown one, to wrench oneself from what is manifest to what is hidden, is to offend faith on the very threshold. Now, even suppose that you are initated into the entire fable, will it not occur to you that you have heard something very like this when you were a baby, amongst the lullabies she sang to you, about the towers of Lamia, and the horns of the sun?’
Perhaps it would amuse Tertullian to know that the nearest I could find to any reference to the Towers of Lamia comes from a source he would have regarded as another ignorant fable. It’s in the apocryphal Acts of Philip, believed to have been written sometime in the 4th Century AD, where we find a city in Asia Minor occupied by serpent-people and ruled by a she-dragon.
Several outstanding features of the Acts of Philip set it apart as a text of decidedly gnostic origin.
For instance, the invocation of Sabaoth:
‘John said to Philip: Let us not render evil for evil.
Philip said: I shall endure it no longer.
132. The three others dissuaded him; but he said:
‘Abalo, arimouni, douthael, tharseleen, nachaoth, aeidounaph, teleteloein, which is (after many invocations descriptive of God):
‘let the deep open and swallow these men: yea, Sabaoth.
133. It was opened and the whole place was swallowed, about 7000 men, save where the apostles were.’
Sabaoth is mentioned by the church father Irenaeus (130-202 AD) in his Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies):
‘Moreover, [the Sethian Gnostics] distribute the prophets in the following manner:
Moses, Joshua [the son of Nun], Amos, and Habakkuk belonged to Ialdabaoth; Samuel, Nathan, Jonah, and Micah, to Iao; Elijah, Joel, and Zekariah to Sabaoth; Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, to Adonai; Tobias and Haggai to Eloil Michaiah and Nahum to Oreus; Esdras and Zephaniah to Astanphaeus.’
Irenaeus affirms that the seven Powers named here are related to the seven visible planets in gnostic thought:
‘They maintain, moreover, that the holy Hebdomad is the seven stars which they call the planets, and they affirm that the serpent cast down has two names: Michael and Samael.’
Irenaeus would go down in history as the last known living connection to the apostles of Jesus Christ; he claimed to have heard the ministry of Polycarp, who claimed to have heard the ministry of John the Evangelist. Against Heresies was, like Tertullian’s Against Valentinius, concerned with defining proto-orthodoxy and preserving the True Faith against gnostic interpretations of scripture.
In Revelations 12:7-12 it is the archangel Michael who casts the Dragon and his Angels down to earth. Meanwhile in the gnostic tractate On the Origin of the World, Samael (which means ‘blind god’) is considered the same entity as Ialdabaoth, the enemy of mankind.
Gnostic cosmology is a series of broken mirrors; the earthly realm is considered a corrupt reflection of the heavenly one, with the Demiurge Ialdabaoth acting in imitation of the Divine Image:
‘…The [Fallen] Serpent also, who was acting against the Father, reduced under his power the angels here, and begot six sons, he himself [Ialdebaoth] forming the seventh person, after the example of that Hebdomad which surrounds the father. They further declare that these seven mundane demons always oppose and resist the human race, because it was on their account that their father was cast down to this lower world.’
In other words:
To the gnostics the seven spheres of the heavens as defined by the visible planets were merely the fallen image of divine order, and not divine in themselves.
Here is the wikipedia abstract on Ialdabaoth:
‘In some Gnostic writings, Sabaoth is one of the sons of Ialdabaoth. According to Hypostasis of the Archons and On the Origin of the World, Sabaoth dethrones his father Ialdabaoth. In both accounts, Sabaoth repents, when he hears the voice of Sophia, condemns his father and his mother (matter) and after that is enthroned by Sophia in the seventh heaven. Some Church Fathers report on the other hand, that Gnostics identified Sabaoth with Ialdabaoth himself.’
All of this is just to help us confirm the Acts of Philip as a gnostic work.
In the first version of Philips Ministry related to us in the Acts of Philip (the manuscript transmits three different versions of the same legend), the disincarnate voice of Jesus Christ, through Martha, sends Philip, Bartholomew, John, and Marianme (Mary Magdeline?) to the
‘land of the Greeks to... suffer hardships [] because of the wickedness of them that dwell there; for they worship the Viper, the Mother of Snakes…’
It’s fascinating that Christ conscripts Philip and the other apostles to campaign against a hive of snake-worshippers because everything I’ve related to you by Irenaeus is from a chapter in Book I of his Against Heresies titled ‘Doctrines of the Ophites and Sethians’. ‘Ophites’ means ‘people of the snake’ in Greek, and they were named as such because Ireneus held them guilty of the supreme heresy of venerating the Serpent:
‘… some of [the Valentian Gnostics] assert that Sophia (Wisdom, The Great Mother) herself became the serpent; on which account she was hostile to the creator of Adam, and implanted knowledge in men, for which reason the serpent was called wiser than all others. Moreover,… our internal configuration in the form of a serpent [the intestines] reveals our hidden generatrix.’
Later writers like Hippolytus of Rome would take the blasphemy of the Ophites even further. Here is a Wikipedia abstract on the Ophidian gnostics:
In giving the name Ophite, however, [Hippolytus] appears to have brought into greater prominence than Irenaeus the characteristics of the sect indicated by the word; their honor for the serpent, whom they even preferred to Christ; their venerating him because he taught our firt parents the knowledge of good and evil; their use of references to the brazen serpent in the Old and New Testament; and their introduction of the serpent into their Eucharisitc celebration.’
On their way to the land of the Ophani (‘the snake people’), Philip and his disciples meet a leopard on the road that prostrates itself before them. Philip commands the creature to speak in the name of Jesus Christ, and it does:
‘Last night I passed through the flocks of goats over against the mount of the she-dragon, the mother of snakes, and seized a kid, and when I wont in to eat it, it took a human voice and wept like a little child, saying to me: O leopard, put off thy fierce heart and the beast-like part of your nature … for the apostles of the Divine Greatness are about to pass through here.’
The leopard guides them to where the wounded kid lay, and Bartholemew makes a prayer:
‘Lord Jesus Christ, come and grant like and breath to these creatures, that they may forsake their nature of beast and cattle and no longer eat flesh, nor the kid the food of the cattle…’
The image of the lion laying with the lamb as an emblem of God’s reign on earth is well-known from scripture (Isaiah 11:6). It is also known that Classical Gnosticism was essentially a syncretic Neoplatonic / Neopythagorean cult and that the Pythagoreans practiced vegetarianism.
After they pass through the desert, Philips entourage meet the she-dragon and its brood of serpents. These they destroy with the power of Prayer, and with minimal resistance. Such is the power of Jesus.
After this abrupt ending, the tale of Philip is taken up now by an alternate telling:
107 ‘In the days of Trajan, after the martyrdom of Simon, son of Clopas, bishop of Jerusalem, Philip the Apostle was preaching through all the cities of Lydia and Asia. And he came to the city of Ophioryme (Snake Street), which is called Hierapolis…’
Hierapolis (literally ‘Holy City’ in Greek) was a Hellenic Greek city in Asia Minor that was built on an ancient cult site dedicated to the worship of Phrygian Cybelle.
Cybelle is a mother goddess whose cult was wide-spread in the Roman world, and she is usually identified by the lions that flank her throne on either side:
But a tradition that ties the worship of Cybelle to serpent imagery is also represented in ancient ruins and artifacts:
It is from Erik Langkjer, who has written extensively on the subject of the kundalini serpent and it’s representations in prehistoric religions, that I have borrowed many of the above images, all of which show the serpent depicted on votive images of and altars to Cybele.
We’ve already seen how the mother Goddess Cybele had reached the Hellenic world in the guise of Artemis, Mistress of the Animals; and how Artemis and Venus (as Astarte) are also likely to have drawn influence from the Syrian nature goddess Atargatis/ Derketo; but in the gnostic ‘Acts of Philip‘ the holy city Heirapolis is presented to us as being consecrated to a serpent cult.
The ruins of Old Heirapolis allegedly hold the bones of Philip; for this is the city where he was martyred.
After a short mission of faith healing, preaching against the serpent and wrecking peaceful homes through religious conversion, the people of Heiropolois become enraged and rise up against the Apostles:
…And the apostles were arrested,
121 and scourged and dragged in the temple,
122 and shut up in it (with the leopard and the kid).
123 and the people and the priests came and demanded vengeance on the sorcerers.
125 [The priests] stripped and searched the apostles for charms, and pierced Philip’s ankles and thighs and hung him head downward, and Bartholomew they hung naked by the hair.
126 and they smiled on each other, as not being tormented. But Marianme on being stripped became like an ark of glass ful of light and fire and everyone ran away.
127 and Philip and Bartholomew talked in Hebrew, and Philip said: Shall we call down fire from heaven?
128 and now John arrived, and asked what was happening, and the people told him.
John’s rebuke of the people of Hieropolis is Gnostic gold, another shining badge of it’s authorship:
130 Then John addressed the people, warning them against the serpent.
‘when all matter was wrought and spread out throughout the system of heaven, the works of God entreated God that they might see his glory: and when they saw it, their desire became gall and bitterness, and the earth became a storehouse of that which went astray, and the result and the superfluity of the Creation was gathered together and became like an egg: and the Serpent was born.’
Unimpressed, the people and their priests promised to mix the blood of the Apostles with wine to give to the Viper. [This is where Philip invokes Sabaoth to swallow up the entire host of the Ophioryme.]
Then Jesus appears to rebuke Philip:
137 …since you have been unforgiving and wrathful, you shall indeed die in glory and be taken by angels to paradise, but shall remain outside it forty days, in fear of the flaming sword…
The kundalini serpent activated through intercourse might be the ultimate source-image of lamia, the half-serpent devil-woman cast as a hypersexual demon from the Roman Imperial era onward.
We got way off track by getting into the weeds of the Acts of Phillip since we are really just here to talk about She-Dragons, but we needed to develop the context. Because you’ve made it this far, we might as well imbibe the essense of Philip’s Gnostic Teachings.
Before he dies he crowns his life with a few stellar paragraphs:
140 … Be not grieved that I hang thus, for I bear the form of the First Man, who was brought upon Earth head downward, and again by the tree of the cross made alive again by the death of his transgression.
And now do I fulfill the precept. For the Lord said to me:
Unless ye make that which is beneath to be above, and the left to be right (and the right, left), ye shall not enter into my kingdom.
Be like me in this: for all the world is turned the wrong way, and every soul in it...
This is a pretty good line, too:
143 bury me not in linen like the Lord, but in papyrus, and pray for me for forty days…
The Tibetan Book of the Dead advises praying over the dead for forty days to guide the soul to a favorable incarnation; while forty days is the length of Philip’s sentence of purgation.
And, of course, the gross (get it? 12×12=144, a gross; but gross also means a sum total) of gnostic hopes:
‘144 Let not their dark air cover me,
That I may pass the waters of fire and all the abyss.
Clothe me in thy glorious robe and thy seal of light that ever shineth,
Until I have passed by all the rulers of the world and the evil dragon that opposeth us.
Having overcome the Kundalini Serpent Cult of Phyrgian Cybelle, Philip still had to confront the Great Dragon that encircles the fallen cosmos and stands in judgement of human souls after death.
When Sabaoth usurps the throne of Ialdabaoth and is seated at the Seventh Heaven Sabaoth becomes identified with Saturn, lord of the Seventh Heaven who some schools of thought relate to dragon symbolism.
In the Acts of Thomas, a 3rd century gnostic text, the serpent overcome by the Apostle says:
I am son to him that girdeth the sphere; and I am kin to him that is outside the ocean, whose tail is set in his own mouth…
The older pan-European cultus held the serpent as a dynamic symbol of healing and emancipation, while in the gnostic Christian interpretation it became a symbol of enslavement to the carnal or terrestrial. Sabaoth was the repemption of the Serpent Image; perhaps even tacit acknowledgement on the part of gnostic theologians that the kundalini awakening would be instrumental to their spiritual liberation.
Philosophical or religious tensions that appear to undergird myth systems from the Sumerian onward were still going strong in the layer of history where our modern image of the lamia was born.
She was, and remains, a potent symbol of the unrefined and ultimately sexual pulse of the creative universe. It’s a paradox known from ancient times; the womb of creation is the womb of destruction, and the procreative process might easily destroy and consume those who engage with it.
References:
http://demonax.info/doku.php?id=text:life_of_apollonius_of_tyana_book_4
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/20B*.html Diodorus Siculus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem)
https://www.enworld.org/threads/monster-encyclopedia-lamia.663690/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Philip
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Dio_Chrysostom/Discourses/5*.html
https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Projects/Reln91/Power/lilith.htm
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0160%3Abook%3D10%3Achapter%3D12%3Asection%3D1 Pausinias Book 10
https://www.theoi.com/Ther/Lamia.html
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126%3Abook%3D4&force=y Herodotus Book 4
https://www.italia.it/en/lazio/bomarzo-monster-park
http://www.hubert-herald.nl/Mermaid.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pergamon_Altar
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/arbroath_1320.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake-Legged_Goddess
https://greekreporter.com/2024/08/15/mycenaeans-minoan-crete-greece/
https://worldwidequest.com/?page=lets_travel&id=275
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atargatis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Iranians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#Ancient_China
http://en.posztukiwania.pl/2017/03/08/the-curse-of-melusine/
https://u-krane.com/famous-scythian-snake-goddess-gold-frontlet-tsymbalka-kugan/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake-Legged_Goddess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Ass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiamat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En%C5%ABma_Eli%C5%A1
https://www.foxnews.com/science/gate-to-hell-guardians-recovered-in-turkey
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