Today we show you the legends of the Sirens in Greek Mythology. Get to know their most exciting stories and let yourself be attracted by their myth.
Mermaids in Greek Mythology
In Greek mythology, the world is populated, not only by humans and gods, but also by mythical creatures such as hydra and harpies, and mermaids. These creatures sometimes offered help to the gods or their mortal followers, but more often, they were depicted as a grave threat to mortals. The heroes of Greek mythology often had to defeat these monsters to prove their strength or rescue the innocent.
The Sirens of Greek Mythology
The Sirens or Mermaids appear in the cycle of sea deities. They were the daughters of Achelous and Calliope, and were the companions of Persephone / Proserpine.
The name of the Sirens, derived from the root seo = to bind, to unite, to join, clearly refers to the role assigned to them in mythology. However, we tend to see in them divinities symbolizing the souls of the dead.
They would be funerary genies, bloodthirsty and hostile to the living. Through their female bird-headed bodies, they recall the Lilith of the Jews, or, as Heuzey pointed out, the Egyptian falcon with a human head, which also embodied the souls of the dead.
Sirens were invoked at the moment of death and their image is frequently found on tombs. However, the legend has retained nothing of this conception, and only knows the sirens as evil sea monsters.
In Greek mythology, mermaids are half woman and half bird. In northern mythology, mermaids are half woman and half fish. According to the stories, mermaids are in groups of two, three or four. Their songs drove sailors away to run aground on the rocks.
Seductive trap
They would not hesitate to drown if the navigators did not fall into their trap. Some managed to thwart their plans, like Orpheus who covered their songs with his lyre, Ulysses who covered the ears of his companions with wax and tied himself to the foot of the mast to listen to them without dying. In some accounts, the sirens were the servants of Persephone, and helped Hades to kidnap her. They were punished by Ceres, Persephone’s mother, who turned them into half-woman, half-bird monsters.
Other accounts say that they would have been simple and beautiful girls, who rejected the advances of the gods. Aphrodite does not accept that mere mortals can reject the mighty Olympians. Mad with rage, she turned them into devious creatures.
Encouraged by Hera, they challenged the Muses in a singing contest. They lost and the Muses plucked their feathers to make crowns. They led the sailors to their deaths by singing. According to legend, they sang prophecies or songs inspired by Hades. But when they failed they were condemned to die becoming statues.
Origins of the mermaids
The origin of Sirens in Greek Mythology is not clear. According to mythology, they were daughters of the river Acheloos and the muse Calliope. The Romans also say that the sirens were originally normal women, who would have been the companions of Corea, who later became “Persephone”, and who would have let Hades take her to the underworld. The sirens would have received her form as punishment for this crime and, later, the sirens, sang prophecies and songs about the kingdom of Hades.
Euripides evokes in Helen the funerary character of the sirens, as confirmed by the representations of the sirens on funerary steles. But some myths say that the sirens come from the first Lamia who, as a lover of Zeus, received the curse of Hera and had a fish body (the conclusion of the serpent’s body is false).
Another explanation for her metamorphosis attributes the cause to the wrath of Aphrodite. The goddess of love gave them legs and feathers, while they kept their girlish faces because they had refused to give their virginity to a god or a mortal.
These river-born deities were very proud of their voices and challenged the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. The Muses won the challenge and demanded a crown of mermaid feathers, depriving them of the gift of flight. Defeated, they retreated to the shores of southern Italy.
The Argonauts
They are part of the story of the Argonauts, told by Apollonius of Rhodes. When the Argo approached their rocks, Orpheus triumphed over them with the beauty of his song. Only one of the sailors, Boutès, preferred the melody of the sirens to that of Calliope’s son. He threw himself into the sea to join the sorceresses, but was saved by Aphrodite.
Similarly, Odysseus and his companions managed to resist their seductive power. After being warned by Circé, Ulysses had wax poured into his sailors’ ears so that they could not hear the sirens while he was tied to the ship’s mast, and when he asked his sailors to detach him, they had to tighten their ties even more.
In this way Ulysses could hear their song without rushing toward them despite the temptation. As a result, the mermaids supposedly committed suicide despite throwing themselves into the sea from their rock.
Myths of the Sirens in Greek Mythology
The most famous appearance of Sirens in Greek Mythology is in Homer’s “Odyssey”; however, they are also involved in one or two other myths.
Odysseus
After Odysseus decided to leave Aeaea and return to Ithaca, the enamored Circe had no choice but to let him go. However, as he left, she warned him of the dangers that still awaited him on his journey.
“First you will come to the Sirens,” she told him, “who enchant all who come near them. If anyone comes too near and hears the song of the sirens, his wife and children will not welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and scream him to death with the sweetness of their song.”
There was only one way for a sailor to pass the sirens unharmed; and that was by not hearing them sing. So, advised by Circe, Odysseus ordered each member of his crew to stuff their ears with beeswax. As for himself, he opted for a much riskier solution.
Ever adventurous, he had tied himself to the mast, ordering his sailors to tie him even tighter if he started begging them to unbuckle or tried to get loose on his own. Ever adventurous, Odysseus didn’t want to miss the chance to experience the sirens’ seductive song and hear what the fuss was all about.
Orpheus
As enchanting as their songs may have been to mortals, the Sirens seem to have been no match for divine musicians. The Argonauts, for example, had no trouble evading these terrible creatures, for they had only Orpheus on board. As soon as he heard their voices, the divine poet unsheathed his lyre and began to play a melody so loud and beautiful that the sirens’ haunting song was instantly drowned out.
In truth, even a second of the sirens’ song was enough to entice a particularly sensitive member of the Argonauts’ crew – one Boutes of Athens – to jump overboard and start swimming towards them. Fortunately, he was saved by Aphrodite who subsequently took him as her lover and bore him a son, Eryx.
The Muses
The Sirens were never more humiliated than when Hera convinced them to challenge the Muses to a singing contest. Predictably, the Muses won and, as punishment, they plucked the mermaids’ feathers and used them to make crowns.
The death of the mermaids
It was said that the sirens were destined to die if any mortal heard them sing and live to tell the tale. So, once Odysseus had passed them unharmed, discouraged by their humiliating defeat, the sirens threw themselves into the sea and never bothered any man again.
Find out how Odysseus managed to survive the sirens’ song in the twelfth book of Homer’s Odyssey. You will find the Orpheus episode in the fourth book of Apollonius’ epic poem “Argonautica”. As for the contest with the Muses, consult the ancient geographer Pausanias.
By the fourth century, when pagan beliefs gave way to Christianity, belief in literal sirens was discouraged. Jerome, who produced a Vulgate Latin version of the Scriptures, used the word “sirens” to translate the Hebrew tenim (jackals) in Isaiah 13:22, also to translate a word for “owls” in Jeremiah 50:39, this was explained by Ambrose as a mere symbol or allegory of worldly temptations, and not as an endorsement of the Greek myth.
Sirens continued to be used as a symbol of the dangerous temptation that women regularly embodied in the Christian art of medieval times; however, in the 17th century, some Jesuit writers began to assert their real existence, among them Cornelius a Lapide, who said of the woman: “her look is that of the fabled basilisk, her voice, the voice of a siren with her voice that enchants, with her beauty which deprives of reason, both voice and sight, they are occupied with destruction and death”.
Noah’s Ark
Antony of Lorraine also argued for its existence, and Athanasius Kircher argued that the compartments must have been built for them on board Noah’s Ark.
Isidore’s Etymologies received an enduring boost to the early Christian euphemistic interpretation of mythologized humans. “The Greeks imagine that ‘there were three sirens, part virgins, part birds,’ with wings and claws. One of them sang, another played the flute, the third the lyre.
They drew sailors, drawn by the song, to shipwreck. However, according to the truth, they were prostitutes who drove travelers into poverty and were said to impose shipwrecks on them.” They had wings and claws because the flies of love and wounds.
Such euhemerist interpretations have been abandoned since the end of the 19th century, in favor of the analysis of Greek mythology in terms of the Greek historical social structure and its cultural system, and of the Greek taxonomy of the spiritual world.
