Lamia: Half-Woman, Half-Snake Monster in the Greek Myths

Be amazed by Lamia, a terrifying monster from Greek mythology. Discover her most popular legends and myths with us.

Lamia, beauty and terror

Lamia was a beautiful Libyan queen loved by Zeus. Therefore, through no fault of her own, she brought Hera’s wrath upon herself. Angry at Zeus’ interest in her, the goddess showed no mercy to Lamia: every time the girl gave birth to a child, Hera killed her or made Lamia kill her herself.

In any case, after a while, Lamia went mad and began stealing babies from mothers more fortunate than herself just so she could eat them. It is said that the evil of Lamia’s revenge was unprecedented and visibly disfigured her face. Over time, this child-eating monster became a ghost woman, a word Greek mothers used to scare their children into discipline and good behavior.

Who is Lamia?

Lamia is a devastatingly beautiful monster, part woman and part snake. Before she was cursed with her terrible new form, she was a powerful but relatively innocent woman. Now she is a bloodthirsty villain who slithers through the darkness of night in search of children to devour, or walks in beauty through the light of day, seeking men to make her dessert.

Appearance

According to ancient Greek tradition, Lamia has the head and breasts of a woman, but the rest of her body is serpentine. According to some accounts, her chimerical form is hideous, but other writers seem to have been mesmerized by her form, even describing her scales as precious gems and the coils of her body as graceful.

Other Greek writers abandon the serpent body entirely, simply writing that Lamia’s face became evil and contorted when she began her first wave of murders. Her face may also have been disfigured by the loss of her eyes; in some myths, she gouged them out in grief for her own children, and in others, Zeus gave her the power to remove them so she could sleep.

Zeus gave her the power to remove them so that she could sleep. In the 19th century, John Keats, a Romantic poet, created a vision of Lamia that was so beautiful that it usurped all previous descriptions of her:

“She was a gorgon of dazzling hue, stained with vermilion, gold, green, and blue; striped like a zebra, freckled like a leopard, speckled like a peacock, and all swept crimson; and full of silvery moons that, as she breathed, dissolved, or shone brighter, or intertwined their lustrous ones with the darkest tapestries, so that they touched the sides of the rainbow with their miseries.

She looked, at once, like an elf-lady, the lover of a demon, or the demon himself. Her head was a serpent, but ah, bittersweet! She had the mouth of a woman with all her pearls intact; and for her eyes, what could they do there but weep and weep for being born so beautiful? After the publication of Keats’ poem, it became the defining image of Lamia.

Special abilities

Apart from her powerful beauty, Lamia’s abilities vary greatly from story to story. In general, her most common abilities are shape-shifting, predicting the future, and witchcraft. In many myths, she is a shape-shifter who can shed her snake skin and move around in the form of an impeccably beautiful young woman.

This ability is especially useful in stories where the deposed queen prefers to prey on men rather than children. She uses her unconscious body to seduce men and then devour them. In other myths, she is a powerful prophetess who can foresee events before they occur. There are two possible mechanisms for her prophetic abilities.

Sometimes, her prophetic visions come to her in dreams, but this form of prophecy is complicated by the fact that, courtesy of a curse from Hera, she is forced to remove her eyes every time she wants to sleep. Other times, she separates her spirit from her body and glides over the earth, uncovering secrets that help her predict what men will do next.

Finally, Lamia has a variety of skills related to witchcraft. She is a minor sorceress, with the ability to perform small spells such as making women invisible or casting a fog over a man’s mind so that he cannot detect anything strange happening while in her company. She is also capable of brewing potions for similar purposes.

Related creatures

Lamia was not only a queen of Libya before her dramatic transformation, but she was also the daughter of one of the most powerful gods in Greece: Poseidon, ruler of the seas. Her mother remains unknown, although there are rumors that Ceto, a goddess with a special connection to sea monsters, or Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft, may be Lamia’s missing mother.

As an adult, Lamia maintained her connection to the gods by embarking on a passionate romance with Zeus. As the affair heated up, the couple even had several children together. Eventually, Zeus’s wife, Hera, discovered her husband’s betrayal and, to get revenge, transformed Lamia into a monster.

Despite their parents’ split, some of Zeus and Lamia’s children gained fame of their own. Skylla, a six-headed sea monster that claimed the lives of hundreds of sailors, inspired even more terror than her mother, while Herophyla, the gentlest daughter, could still fill your heart with fear just by mentioning your name in one of her dramatic prophecies.

Akheilos, the couple’s only known son, had a better start in life than his sisters. He had inherited his mother’s fascinating beauty, but even so, when he made the mistake of challenging Aphrodite to a beauty contest, he didn’t stand a chance. As punishment for his insolence, Aphrodite transformed him into an ugly, lifeless shark.

In a more indirect way, Lamia is also the mother of dozens of other monsters. She was such a feared figure in Greek culture that ordinary people began to pluralize her, thinking of her as a collection of voracious monsters (the Lamiae) rather than as a single, unhappy woman. Over time, the Lamiae may have spawned many other folkloric monsters, including succubi and vampires.

History

The story of Lamia originated in Greek mythology; she appears in the ancient writings of Homer and Horace, and has such a firm place in oral tradition that Greeks, even today, use the name Lamia to scare young children into behaving themselves.

Unlike many other Greek characters, Lamia did not fade away after the end of the Roman era, only to be rediscovered in Europe’s Romantic period. Her reign of terror continued into the Middle Ages, when she was persecuted by the newly formed Christian church and associated with witchcraft, until the Renaissance, when her Greek tradition was revitalized in paintings and texts.

After the Renaissance, Lamia was celebrated by the poets and painters of the Romantic period, who emphasized the tragedy of her story rather than the horror of her monstrous form. The most famous of these poems is the acclaimed “Lamia” by John Keats, which has been referenced time and again in other writings about Lamia.

Today, the legend of Lamia lives on. In the last two decades, she has appeared in multiple award-winning short stories and novels. She featured prominently in a television series and film written by Neil Gaiman, and her name has even been referenced in modern rock ballads.

Myths about Lamia

The most famous (and controversial) story about Lamia is how she went from being a beautiful queen to a feared snake, forced to crawl through the dust of the earth on her rainbow-colored scales. All myths agree that her romance with Zeus, which unleashed Hera’s fury, doomed her, but different myths give different details about Hera’s revenge.

Most myths agree that Hera transformed Lamia into a snake, but some of them exclude this punishment. Instead, they blame grief and madness for the transformation of the enchanting woman. Most myths agree that Hera also took revenge on Lamia’s children.

At the very least, she took all of Lamia’s children away. She may also have slaughtered the children or, in the darkest version of the Lamia legend, she may have forced Lamia herself to eat the children. In any case, the loss of her children drove Lamia mad, leading her to start stealing and eating the children of other women.

Fate

Finally, some myths claim that Hera added an additional curse to Lamia’s miserable fate. She made the poor woman unable to close her eyes, either so that she would be forced to watch her children being destroyed or so that she would be unable to sleep at night.

The weight of this final curse was unbearable for Lamia; according to some stories, she gouged out her eyes in despair, but in other stories, Zeus took pity on her and gave her the ability to remove her eyes whenever she wanted without harming them.

Lamia’s reputation as a seductress and man-eater came later, but it added numerous stories to her legend. Among them were her tricks with Menippus and Lycius; not only did she seduce these two men (after changing into the form of a woman, without her snake tail), but she also convinced them to marry her.

Fortunately, both marriages were interrupted by famous sages, who warned the men of her danger before Lamia had a chance to turn their honeymoon into a bloodbath.