How Does the Monstrous Lamia Work?

Lamia is a character from Greek myth who, in various tellings, devours children or seduces men. Learn about her legends in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://history.howstuffworks.com/history-vs-myth/lamia.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio,
Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. When it comes to
terrifying fictional characters to fear from children's stories, though, which
from Hansel and Gretel and Baba Yaga of many Slavic
myths certainly come to mind. But there's one character from

(00:23):
Greek mythology who might top them all in terms of
sheer scope of evil, Lamia. There are a lot of
roots and offshoots of this character, but she's basically a
female demon known for devouring children. For the article this
episode is based on, has to Work, spoke with mythology

(00:44):
expert Richard P. Martin, professor in Classics at Stanford University.
He explained she would get you if you disobeyed or
so kids were instructed. She once lived in Libya in
North Africa. The story goes that, like many a demon,
she used to be a beautiful woman. Zeus, as was
his usual habit, seduced and slept with her. The chief

(01:06):
God's wife, Harrah, got jealous and then killed the children
of Lamia. The poor mortal woman was so overcome by
continual grief that she became horribly ugly In appearance, and
then she began to kill the children of other women
in a sort of madness of revenge. According to Martin,
one version of the Lamia tale suggests that she was

(01:27):
actually the queen of Libya and ordered all newborn babies
to be snatched from their mothers and slaughtered, a tale
he points out that sounds similar to the story of
Herod in the Gospel of Matthew. Martin said there are
hints from late sources that she was thought of as
personally eating children. Hera, the queen of the gods, was

(01:48):
the ruler of marriage and family and the protector of women,
especially during childbirth. But the Greek gods were often epically
and humanly flawed characters. Harra was equally as known for
her fiercely protective instincts as she was for her pride
and jealousy, and her husband Zeus often tested those fiery

(02:09):
qualities with his constant infidelity. The stories go that Harra's
revenge in the case of Lamia was literal overkill, and
she murdered all of Lamia's children, regardless of whether Zeus
was the father or not. The loss pushed Lamia to madness,
and she then made it her mission to kidnap the
children of others and eat them, and these monstrosities made

(02:33):
her monstrous, a possibly serpentine or maybe shark light. Martin said.
Aristotle records in his History of Animals from the fourth
century BC that Lamia was the name of a kind
of shark, and other versions of the tale come with
other horrific details, and Martin said a one story preserved

(02:55):
only in late antique and medieval sources says Haara caused
Lamia to be bliss as well as killing her children.
So Zeus to give Lamia the opportunity to have some
rest made her eyes removable. That way they would not
always be open, at least not in her head. Lamia
was just one of several boogeymen or perhaps boogey women.

(03:17):
In Greek folklore, a monstrous is used to scare or warn,
Martin said. At taking the form of beautiful women and
then sucking the blood of their victims seems to have
been common features in the tales about these demon types,
and modern folklore in the region still preserves some of
these traditional stories. Martin said, maybe every culture needs a

(03:40):
way for mothers to keep their kids from doing dangerous
things like wandering off into the woods alone or just
from misbehaving. In the early nineteenth century, for example, British
nursemaids would frighten children with stories of Bony coming to
get them uh the dreaded enemy of the realm Napoleon
Bonaparte imagined as an ogre. An ancient Greece, a demonus

(04:01):
called Lamia played the same role. Scary stories often fill
a societal need to discuss and deal with very real
terrors or anxieties about terrible things happening, and thus you
can find Lamia like figures in any number of other
tales and cultures of female figures who are childless or

(04:21):
have lost their children, and who thus steal others children.
Martin gave an example from North America quote in the
Southwest and generally in Latin America, it seems la Urona,
the wailing woman, supposedly drowned her own children or they
drowned on their own, and now haunts places at night,
crying and stealing other children. Mother's worn kids that la

(04:45):
Roma will snatch them if they get too close to
the water, And as with many female demons, Lamia also
became associated with the sort of dangerous sexuality, and some
stories had the monstrous Lamia in disguise, seducing and then
sometimes eating men. John Keats wrote a poem All the
Way in eighteen nineteen based on some of those. Martin

(05:08):
said Lamia in every day Greek or Latin could also
be used as an insult hurled at any threatening, powerful,
or ugly woman in some ancient fictional stories. Courteson's get
called this as do, which is a clearly male anxiety
at work here, blaming seductive women for the guy's own
lust fueled ruin. Today's episode is based on the article Lamia,

(05:36):
the female demon who devoured children in Greek Mythology on
how stuff Works dot com, written by Michelle Konstantinovski. Brain
Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with
how stuff Works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang.
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