February has Valentine’s Day, and Valentine’s Day means romance. So, I’m taking that a step further and going to be talking about creatures of seduction: sirens. Sirens in our contemporary imaginations are more or less mermaids whose voices allure people to their deaths. But it didn’t start that way. Once upon a time, sirens were actually bird women.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus encounters the sirens on his journey home. To recap: Odysseus commands his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast because he is curious about the sirens’ song. He orders the crew to fill their ears with wax and not to loose him until they had sailed beyond the sirens’ voices. Beyond the sirens’ irresistible song, not much else is described. Scholars have suggested that it is because the audience already knew what sirens were and did not need to be reminded. But surviving images and literature from the period depict sirens as bird-like creatures with women’s faces. This later evolved into women with bird legs—sometimes with or without wings on their backs—holding musical instruments. At some point, all bird attributes disappeared, and they looked like human women, set apart only by their bewitching voices.
So how did we go from bird people to fish people? That’s a bit muddled. One source said that in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies (c. 615 A.D. – 630 A.D.), he wrote that in addition to feathered sirens, there were also winged serpents in Arabia called sirens. It is possible that a snake/woman hybrid emerged which was either changed to or confused with half-fish. As sirens are associated with oceans and seafaring, it would make sense for a half-woman, half-snake to be mistaken as half-woman, half sea-serpent/fish.
There were once depictions of male sirens too, but they seemed to have been phased out around the 5th century B.C., which I think is unfortunate. I don’t see male sirens being any less appealing than female sirens. I’m a sucker for a baritone as it is. Given that sirens are not the same as mermaids, I’m also arguing that male sirens are not the same as mermen. And I think male sirens should be brought back. #Feminism (and I only mean that half-jokingly).
Beyond seducing sailors, sirens had function within the Greek cosmology. Proclus, a contemporary of Plato, relayed that Plato had divided sirens into three categories: celestial, generative, and purificatory/cathartic. Celestial sirens were under the authority of Zeus, while generative sirens were under Poseidon; purificatory/cathartic sirens served Hades. The surviving sources seem to associate them more with the latter, as Ovid wrote that sirens were companions of Persephone, Hades’ wife. There are two versions of why this is: one is that Persephone’s mother, Demeter, gave the sirens wings to help them search for her daughter, then kidnapped by Hades. The other version is that Demeter cursed the sirens to be the winged, singing seductresses because they failed to stop the abduction. Hyginus wrote that sirens would only live as long as those who were trapped in their songs remained ensnared. If they escaped, the sirens would die.
On a tangentially related note, the word siren, used in reference to a police or ambulance siren, was first recorded in 1879. But how we got from “hypnotically beautiful singing” to “obnoxious cacophony” is an article for a different time.
Here’s some free advice: if your Tinder date has a beautiful voice from which you can’t seem to pull yourself away, plays a lyre, seems fishy or perhaps likes birds a little too much, maybe don’t fight your friends when they tie you to a ship’s mast until that ‘relation-ship’ has sailed. Happy Valentine’s Day.
