Lamia, a beautiful Libyan queen was, unfortunately, one of Zeus’ many objects of affection. As we know from other stories, most of Zeus’ lovers’ fates take a terrible turn, e.g., Callisto (turned into a bear and then, to spare her from Hera’s wrath, she was later turned into a constellation), Ganymede (boy youth abducted to become a cup bearer, which is somewhat of an honor, except that to spare him from Hera’s wrath he was later turned into a constellation), or Europa (abducted by Zeus in bull-form and ravished). In Lamia’s myth, Zeus falls in love with her beauty, and Hera finds out about the affair.
To punish Lamia, Hera transforms into a monster and kills all of Lamia’s children (except Scylla) while Lamia watches. Some variants of the story are accounted for here:
- As if killing her children isn’t enough, Hera then takes away Lamia’s ability to blink or close her eyes, so that she would be forever haunted by the sight of her dead children. (Also, in some variants of this particular strain, Zeus alleviates this curse by giving Lamia the ability to take her eyes out of their sockets.)
- Hera doesn’t actually kill the children—she only steals them—causing Lamia to go insane with grief and tear out her own eyes.
- Rather than killing the children herself, Hera forces Lamia to kill and devour her own children.
And whether it happens out of the madness found in grief for her children’s’ death, as a part of Hera’s punishment, or as a gift from Zeus in order to exact revenge on the world for what has been done to her, Lamia is transformed into a monster that hunts and devours other people’s children. Lamia’s name may derive from the Greek word, “laimos,” which means, “gullet,” or the word “lamia” itself, which in forms of Latin/Greek mean “swallower, lecher.” Lamia is sometimes referred to as being a daughter of the sea god Poisedon, or as a daughter to Belus, a king of Egypt in Greek mythology, who is himself a son of Poisedon. (Weird!) Some attribute the etymology of her name to meaning something like “lone shark.”
Lamia’s sexual depravity matches her bloodlust for children, in her famed penchant for sucking young men’s blood, giving way to notions that she is the mother of succubus and vampire myths.
Sources attribute the representation of Lamia as half-woman, half-snake to John Keats’ poem “Lamia,” but this is a bit of a stretch.
In the actual poem, Lamia is a snake that Hermes turns into a woman as a reward for helping him find an invisible nymph. In the poem, Lamia uses her new woman-shaped beauty to seduce a man she once saw.
Their passionate love, hinged on the illusory nature of Lamia’s womanly beauty, comes to a crashing halt when at their wedding banquet, a philosopher named Apollonius reveals her to be a serpentine creature and she disappears. Famous Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus, cites that she merely has a distorted face.
In Roman mythology, she maintains the figure of a beautiful woman and is depicted in famous twentieth century paintings as such, with a snakeskin in her lap.
Lamia’s surviving daughter, Scylla, seems to have inherited her mother’s bad luck, as she is also a beautiful maiden who is transformed into a hideous monster by another god’s jealous wife. Sometimes Scylla is described as having a serpent’s tail and an offshoot of twelve human legs, and/or as having six hideous heads with sharp teeth. Her voice was likened to the yelping of dogs. This description of Skylla is probably derived from the imagery of words associated with her name : namely, “hermit-crab” (Greek skyllaros), “dog” and “dog-shark” (skylax), and “to rend” (skyllô). In classical art she was depicted as a fish-tailed sea-goddess with a cluster of canine fore-parts surrounding her waist!
The story of Lamia has fallen into convolution and obscurity, and what remains is her image, or at least, images popularized by artists’ impressions of her monstrous form.
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