Lamia, Scylla and the Sirens
In may I posted an item on Melusine the water nymph who once a week mutated from a woman into a serpentine creature and finally one day turned into a dragon. Here are some more female mythical beings that humans should be wary of meeting. They always appear in stories as predators and seducers of men. LAMIA was often portrayed as a beautiful woman from the waist up but from the waist down as a serpent. Victorian painter John William Waterhouse sees her as a lovely nymph in the picture above. Robert Burton wrote in his "Anatomy of Melancholy" 1621 "One, Menippus Lycius, a young man 25 years of age, going betwixt Cenchreoe and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a gentlewomen, which taking him by the hand carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth and told him she was a Phoenician by birth and if he would tarry with her he should hear her sing & play and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should mo...