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Lamia
Lamia by Herbert James Draper (1909)
Creature
Name:	Lamia
Classification
Grouping:	Legendary Creature
Sub grouping:	Daimon
Similar creatures:	Empousa, Mormo
Data
Mythology:	Greek
Country:	Libya

In Greek mythology, Lamia was a Queen of Libya who became a child-murdering daimon. In later writings she is pluralized into many lamiai. Similar in type to other female monsters from Greco-Roman myth, such as the empousai and the mormolykei, she is distinguished from them by her description as half-woman and half-serpent.^[1] Her name is Greek for "devourer" or "large shark".^[2]

Contents 1 Mythology 2 Interpretations 3 Notes 4 References 5 See also 6 External links

Lamia was the daughter of Poseidon and Lybie^[3], a personification of the country of Libya. Lamia was a queen of Libya herself, whom Zeus loved.^[4] Hera discovered the affair and stole away Lamia's children, whereupon Lamia in her grief became a monster and took to murdering children herself. Zeus granted her the power of prophecy as an attempt at appeasement, as well as the related ability to temporarily remove her eyes.^[5]

Horace, in Ars Poetica (l.340) imagined the impossibility of retrieving the living children she had engulfed:

Neu pranse Lamiae vivum puerum extrabat alvo.

Which Alexander Pope translates

Shall Lamia in our sight her sons devour,

and give them back alive the self-same hour?

Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, describes the witch Meroe and her sister as Lamiae^[6]. Further passing references to Lamia were made by Strabo (i.II.8) and Aristotle (Ethicsvii.5).

In the Vulgate Jerome translated Lilith, the spirit in Isaiah 34:14 who conceived by Adam a brood of monsters, as lamia.

Stesichorus identifies Lamia as the mother of Scylla^[7], by Triton.

Mothers used to threaten their children with the story of Lamia.^[8] Leinweber states, "She became a kind of fairy-tale figure, used by mothers and nannies to induce good behavior among children"^[9]

Many lurid details were conjured up by later writers, assembled in the Suda, expanded upon in Renaissance poetry and collected in Bulfinch and in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Lamia was envious of other mothers and ate their children. She was usually female, but Aristophanes suggests her hermaphroditic phallus, perhaps simply for monstrosity's sake^[10]. Leinweber notes^[11], adding "By the time of Apuleius, not only were Lamia characteristics liberally mixed into popular notions of sorcery, but at some level the very names were interchangeable." Nicolas K. Kiessling compared the lamia with the medieval succubus and Grendel in Beowulf.^[12]

One interpretation posits that the Lamia may have been a seductress, as in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, where the philosopher Apollonius reveals to the young bridegroom, Menippus, that his hastily-married wife is really a lamia, planning to devour him.^[13] Some harlots were named "Lamia".^[14] The connection between Demetrius Poliorcetes and the courtesan Lamia was notorious.^{[15][16] [17]}

John Keats described the Lamia in Lamia and Other Poems, presenting a description of the various colors of Lamia that was based on Burton's, in The Anatomy of Melancholy.

In Renaissance emblems, Lamia has the body of a serpent and breasts and head of a woman, like the image of hypocrisy^{[citation needed]}.

• Graves, R (1955). "Lamia", Greek Myths. London: Penguin, 205-06. ISBN 0-14-001026-2. 
• Karl Kerényi, 1951. The Gods of the Greeks pp 38–40. Edition currently in print is Thames & Hudson reissue, February 1980, ISBN 0-500-27048-1.

• Lilith

• Lamia