Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

Introduction

A SIREN, ACCORDING TO the Oxford English Dictionary and modern usage of the term, is a woman with an irresistible allure, dangerous to men. The word comes from the sirens of Greek mythology: beautiful bird-women, dangerous and desirable, feared for their fatal beauty yet propitiated for their oracular wisdom. Daughters of the river Achelous and Terpsichore (the muse of choral song), they were once the virginal handmaidens to Demeter’s daughter, Persephone — until the girl’s abduction to the Underworld by the dark god, Hades. Then the sirens shape-shifted, flocking to the island Anthemoessa where their famous beauty took on a dark aspect and a deadly power. Nesting on a pile of human bones, the sisters sang to the sun and rain; their song had the power to calm or to stoke the winds … and to inflame men’s loins. This music was irresistible, luring many a sailor to their shore — where he’d pine away without food or drink, unable to break the sirens’ spell. Odysseus filled his shipmen’s ears with wax to save them from this terrible fate; Orpheus drowned the sirens out with the music of his lyre to save the Argonauts. Yet in some stories, the men who lost their lives at the sirens’ bird-claw feet died blissfully, ecstatically, in a state of sexual enchantment …

In this collection, you’ll find the sirens’ daughters (women whose dark allure is bound with magic, myth, and mystery), daemon lovers, faery seducers, and all manner of lovers be-spelled. Animal brides and wicked wolves step from the woods of old folk tales; ghosts, spirits, and phantastes emerge from the shadows of the human psyche. These are tales of sexual magic — not only overtly erotic stories (although you’ll certainly find those here), but also stories about the power of Eros, the power of sensual love.

Such tales are rooted in a mytho-erotic tradition as ancient as myth itself, for among our oldest stories are explicitly sexual and bawdy ones, found in oral traditions and ancient writings from all around the world. Many of the earliest stories concern the amorous adventures of deities and other supernatural beings — most famously in the Greek tradition, where Zeus pursued nymphs and maidens with abandon, where sexual jealousies were rife between the gods, and where divine erotic energy was worshipped in the form of Eros, god of love. Eros was one of the first of the gods, born from Chaos with Tartarus (although later tradition made him the son of Aphrodite by Zeus.) He is pictured as a cruel, mischievous winged boy who carries two kinds of arrows in his sheath: the golden arrows of love and the leaden arrows of aversion. Unlike the simpering winged Cupids in our present-day greeting card imagery, Eros was a god both revered and feared, for he had the power (said Hesiod) to “unnerve the limbs and overcome the mind and wise counsel of all gods and all men.” Less well known than Eros is his brother, Anteros, the god of returned love, who punished all those who refused to return the love that they’d been given. Aphrodite herself was a goddess of love, as well as of beauty and marriage; she symbolized love of a higher nature than the capricious passions imposed by her son. Dionysis, the god of wine, was associated with the lower carnal passions. Dionysian rites involving great quantities of wine and riotous processions of sileni (drunken woodland spirits), satyrs (goat-men of insatiable lust), and bacchantes (participants in sacred orgies) were highly popular during the four fertility festivals dedicated to this god of pleasure.

In Egyptian myth, Atum is said to have made the world by masturbating, creating a god and goddess who then made love to produce the earth and sky. (The two had to be forcibly separated to give the world its present shape.) In Maori myth, the Rangi gods were born from the love-making of Nothing and the Night, crawling into a dark world made of the space between their bodies. In the earliest of the Upanishads of India, atman (the Self) caused itself to divide into two pieces, male and female. In human shape, these two copulated to make the first human men and women; in the forms of cow and bull they copulated to make cattle, and so forth, until the world was populated. In many of the oldest mythological stories, a mother goddess (Ishtar, Isis, Cybele, etc.) is partnered by a male sexual consort who dies each winter and is reborn each spring, symbolizing the seasonal cycle of nature’s renewal in forest and field … as well as the ancient idea that the phallus “dies” after orgasm, only to rise again with renewed potency. In Celtic lore, the wild Green Man of the wood (depicted as a male face disgorging vegetation from the mouth) has his female counterpart in the Sheela-na-gig, a female figure disgorging vegetation from between swollen vulva lips — a potent symbol of the mythic connection between human sexuality and the fecundity of the earth. (In a sexual rite found in cultures the world over, and still quietly practiced by some today, couples made love in freshly sown fields to insure a good autumn harvest.) Cousin to the Sheela-na-gig carvings found in old churches in Celtic countries are the carvings of female figures found near the doorways of shrines in India, seated with their legs apart to expose the vulva, or yoni (a sacred symbol of the feminine half of the double-sexed divine.) It was (and remains) customary to lick a finger and touch the yoni for luck; as a result, the carvings have been worn into deep, smooth holes with the passage of time.

In the East and the West alike, mytho-eroticism is found across a wide spectrum of stories both serious and humorous — from myths of “sacred sexuality” (sexual pleasure as a divine cosmological force) to bawdy tales about the follies engendered by rampant carnal appetites. It is in the later category that Trickster makes his appearance, a wicked gleam in his eye and a tell-tale bulge beneath his breeches. Trickster is a paradoxical creature who is both very clever and very foolish, a culture hero and destructive influence — often at one and the same time. Hermes, Loki, Pan, and Reynardine are all European aspects of the Trickster myth; others from around the world include Maui of Polynesia, Legba and Spider in African lore, Uncle Tompa in Tibet, and the shape-shifting foxes of China and Japan. Trickster is a particularly powerful presence in the legends of Native American tribes, where he takes the form of Crow, Raven, Hare, or Old Man Coyote. Coyote tales in particular are often sexual, scatological, and very funny — tales of seduction (usually foiled), rape (which usually backfires), and all manner of sexual tom-foolery: penises that sail through the air to reach their intended target, farts and turds with magical powers, gender switches or impersonations involving animal bladders disguised as genitalia, and other tricks intended to appease a gluttonous sexual appetite. The Asian shape-shifting fox Tricksters are darker and more dangerous, seeking sexual possession of men and women in order to feed upon the vital life force which maintains their power.

Trickster tales bridge the gap between the great cosmological myth cycles and folk tales told ’round the fireside — for Trickster is equally at home in the house of the gods (as Loki or Hermes) and in the woods with the fairies (as Phooka, Puck, or Robin Goodfellow.) Turning from mythological stories to humble folk and fairy tales, we find that the overwhelming force of Eros is still a common theme. The woods of Europe, the mountains of Asia, the rainforests of South America and the frigid lands of the Canadian north are all filled with fairy creatures, nature spirits, and other apparitions who bewitch, beguile, and entice human beings into sexual encounters. The fairy lore most people know today comes from children’s books or Disney animations, and so the popular image of fairies is of sweet little sprites with butterfly wings, sexless as innocent children. Yet our ancestors knew the fairies as creatures of nature: capricious, dangerous, and well-acquainted with the earthly passions. Folklore is filled with cautionary tales outlining the perils of faery seduction, reminding us that a lovely maid met on a woodland path by dusk might be a fairy in disguise; her kisses sweet could cost a man his sanity, or his life.

The Irish glanconer, or Love-Talker, appears in the form of a charming young man — but woe to the woman who sleeps with him, for she will pine for this fairy’s touch, and lose all will to live. The Elfin Knight of Scottish balladry seduces virtuous maidens from their beds; these girls end up at the bottom of cold, deep rivers by his treacherous hand. The leanan-sidhe is the fairy muse who inspires poets and artists with her touch, causing them to burn so brightly that they die long before their time. The woodwives of Scandinavia are earthy, wild, and sensuous — yet their feminine allure is illusory and from the back their bothes are hollow. Nix and nixies are the male and female spirits who dwell in English rivers, heartbreakingly beautiful to look upon yet very dangerous to kiss — like the beautiful bonga maidens who haunt the riversides of India, the čacce-haldde in Lapland streams, and the neriads in the hidden pools and springs of ancient Greece. Mermaids, the descendants of the sirens, sun themselves by the ocean’s edge and sing their irresistible song; sailors who lust for them are drawn into the waves and drowned. Mermen and selkies (seal-men) come to shore to mate with human maids … but soon abandon their pregnant mortal lovers for the call of the waves.

When we look at older versions of stories we now consider children’s tales (Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, etc.), we find they too have a sexual edge missing in the modern retellings. In the earliest versions of Sleeping Beauty, the princess is wakened from her long sleep not by a single respectful kiss but by the birth of twins after the prince has come, fornicated with her passive body, and left again. In “animal bridegroom” stories older than the familiar version of Beauty and the Beast, the heroine is wed to the beastly groom before his final transformation; by the dark of night he sheds his animal shape and comes to her bed. “Take off your clothes and come under the covers,” says the wolf to Little Red Riding Hood. “I need to go outside and relieve myself,” the girl prevaricates. “Urinate in the bed, my child,” says the wolf, a wicked gleam in his eye — and only then does she know it is not Grandmother beneath the bedclothes. These were not tales created for children; they were tales for an adult audience — for listeners and readers who knew that the passions of princes are not always chaste; that beautiful girls might grow up to marry beasts; and that lecherous wolves can lurk in the woods or dress up in women’s clothes. (Indeed, so ribald were the old fairy tales that one of the earliest publications of them;—Straparola’s The Delectable Nights—brought charges of indecency from the Venetian Inquisition.)

For centuries, men and women have drawn upon the wealth of sexual imagery to be found in folk tales and classical myths to create fine works of erotic art — in painting, pottery, sculpture, drama, dance, lyric verse, and prose. This legacy comes down to us in beautiful works of ancient poetry: from Anakreon of Ionia (“I clutched [Eros] by the wings and thrust him into the wine and drank him quickly”), from Sappho of Lesbos (“I am a trembling thing, like grass, an inch from dying”), from Catallus of Verona (“She fondles between her thighs, attacking with long fingers whenever she hungers for its sharp bite”). We find an equally vivid sexuality in the verse of the women poets of old Japan, like Onono Komachi (“When my desire grows too fierce I wear my bedclothes inside out”) and Izumi Shikibu (“How deeply my body is stained with yours …”). Ou-Yang Hsiu (“Behind the crystal screen, two pillows: on one, a hairpin fell …”) and the “Empress of Song” Li Chi’ing-Chao (“I hold myself in tired arms until even my dreams turn black”) created the celebrated love poetry of China in centuries past. In India, the delicious mytho-erotic tradition found in stories of Shiva, the dancing Goddess, and Krishna’s amorous exploits is beautifully evoked by numerous poets including Jelaluddin Rumi, whose verses became ecstatic dances for the whirling dervishes (“When lovers moan, they’re telling our story, like this …”), and the Indian princess Mirabai, whose gorgeous, passionate poems were addressed to Krishna, the Dark One (“At midnight she goes out half-mad to slake her thirst at his fountain …”).[1]

In the West, a repressive influence dominated the arts as Christian society sought to distance itself from the earthy sexuality of the older animist religions. As a result, we have only a paltry store of erotic poetry and sensual prose from the fourth century onward (compared to India, China, and Japan where sexuality continued to be perceived as a natural force and not a cause for shame.) Yet by using symbols drawn from pre-Christian myth and folklore, Western artists and writers found an important outlet for erotic imagery. We see this particularly in the luminous art of the Italian Renaissance, where Christian devotional works sit side-by-side with mythic works of a distinctly sensual nature — such as Botticelli’s voluptuous nymphs and pagan goddesses; Michaelangelo’s “Leda” (Leda’s rape by Jupiter in the form of a swan); and Raphael’s secret frescoes for the bathroom of Cardinal Bibiena in the Vatican (based on erotic stories drawn from Greco-Roman myth).

In Western literature, eroticism is firmly entwined with myth and fantasy in works by some of the greatest writers of the English language. We find it in the beguiling faery enchantresses of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur; in the men and women be-spelled by sexual glamour in the Lays of Marie de France; in the sexual violence and intrigue of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; in the amorous antics of the fairy court in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as the darkly magical sensuality of The Tempest; in the sexualized denizens of fairyland in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock; in the dangers of fairy seduction found in the ballads of Sir Walter Scott as well as the poems of Byron, Keats, Blake, Tennyson, and Yeats.

In Victorian England, folk tales, fairy lore, and Arthurian symbolism enjoyed an explosive popularity at the same time that sexual expression was most repressed in polite society. Fairy paintings by Fuesili, Noel Paton, and J. A. Fitzgerald fairly drip with an eroticism which would have been banned from respectable galleries if the nudes painted so lusciously had not been given fairy wings. Aubrey Beardsley, on the other hand, never courted respectability; this young man’s distinctive illustrations for The Rape of the Lock and other fantasies were overtly and deliberately erotic, full of languid women, lewd fairies, and satyrs sporting enormous phalluses. Rossetti’s mythic Pre-Raphaelite ladies, with their pouting red lips just waiting to be kissed, were attacked in the Victorian press as lewd and immoral images (albeit these paintings merely look quaintly romantic to us today). Goblin Market, the famous fairy poem by Christina Rossetti (sister to the painter), was ostensibly a simple story about the dangers of eating goblin fruit — yet it reads as a heated metaphor for the sexual seduction of innocent young girls. The “fairy music” composed for the harp — a popular fad in Victorian times — also had distinctly erotic overtones; these composers enjoyed the celebrity accorded to pop stars today, and flushed young women would sigh and swoon during their performances. Richard Burton’s translation of the magical Arabian stories of The Thousand and One Nights also brought erotic tales to the Victorian public in the form of fairy stories. Burton’s frank (for the times) translation caused a publishing scandal; nonetheless (or because of this) the book went on to become a bestseller, and a fad for Orientalism joined the popularity of Victorian fairy lore — a distinct thread of magical eroticism running through them both.

In the early twentieth century, the Celtic Twilight writers continued to give a covert erotic touch to works drawn from folklore and myth, such as the Irish fairy poetry of Yeats (“Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam …”) and the opium-dream prose of the Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany. But as the century progressed, fairy lore was relegated to the nursery (much like furniture that has gone out of style, as J.R.R. Tolkien has pointed out), and thus was stripped of all but the most tenacious elements of sensuality. To find magical eroticism as fin-de-siecle fairy lore became passe, we must turn instead to the Surrealists, whose dreamlike imagery often drew on the symbolism of mythic archetypes. Particularly notable in this regard are the stories and paintings of Leonora Carrington and her close friend Remedios Varo, both of whom had a keen interest in magical esoterica. The paintings of Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Salvadore Dali also display vivid, haunting, deliberately disturbing mytho-erotic elements. Loosely connected with the French surrealists was the Parisian writer Anais Nin, who went on to become one of the best known writers of literary erotica in this century. The stories published in Little Birds and Delta of Venus (some of which have a dreamlike, magical flavor) were written in New York when Nin was one of a circle of writers (along with Henry Miller) producing erotica, paid by the page, for the delectation of an anonymous Collector.

As Surrealism, too, faltered with the change of fashions after the second World War, magical erotica became harder to find … unless one looked at its darker manifestation: the vampire’s kiss. From Hertzog’s film Nosferatu to Interview with a Vampire by Anne Rice, the erotic element inherent in vampire tales surely needs no explication. While it is not the intent of this book to delve into eroticism in horror fiction (a vast subject all on its own), vampire tales seem to cross that elusive line between works of fantasy and horror, holding an irresistible appeal even to readers who traditionally avoid the latter (perhaps because of the close connection of vampires in traditional lore with the seductive, soul-sucking creatures who haunt the woods of the Faery Realm). As the century closes, and the field of literary fantasy enjoys a popular resurgence, we find that the magical tales which have a sensual or erotic edge still tend to hover close to that fantasy/horror divide, combining the symbols of myth and folklore with the tropes of Gothic horror. Angela Carter’s brilliant fiction, for instance, is sensual, sexual, magical and very dark — such as The War of Dreams, a voluptuous work of modern surrealism, and The Bloody Chamber, which brings adult eroticism back into fairy tales. (The Company of Wolves is a film based on some of the stories in the collection, with an excellent, rather Freudian screenplay written by Carter herself.) Tanith Lee’s Red as Blood is a collection of adult fairy tales retold in a similar vein, rich in sensuality and devilishly dark in tone. Sara Maitland’s The Book of Spells, Robert Coover’s Briar Rose, and Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins are three more superb variations on this theme. Anne Rice has also eroticized fairy tale themes (with an S&M twist) under the pen-name A.N. Roquelaure: The Claiming of Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release.

With the ubiquitous pairing of sexuality and violence in our modern culture, it is more difficult to find eroticism when we stray from the dark edge of the fantasy field … and yet a few “high fantasy” books exist containing lush, sensuous imagery — such as Ellen Kushner’s Thomas the Rhymer, a deliciously adult retelling of the Scottish ballad of that name; Patricia A. McKillip’s Winter Rose, a passionate reworking of the ballad “Tam Lin”; Delia Sherman’s The Porcelain Dove, a subtle and elegant exploration of sexual mores during the French Revolution; Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, an earthy, tactile, deeply mythological tale set in an English wood; and Midori Snyder’s The Innamorati, an exuberantly lusty saga based on old Italian myth. Beyond the genre shelves, we find sensuously magical works by the Magical Realist writers — such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Love in the Time of Cholera); Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate); and Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic and Second Nature). Pleasure in the Word: Erotic Writing by Latin American Women, edited by Margaritte Fernandez Olmos and Lizbeth Paravisini, contains Magical Realist works among other gorgeous selections of poetry and prose. In poetry, a number of writers have used folkloric themes to sensuous effect, including Anne Sexton, Olga Broumas, Bill Lewis, Liz Lochhead, and Jane Yolen. In the visual arts, Brian Froud explores the sexual nature of fairy lore (Good Faeries/Bad Faeries and Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book); while painters like Paula Rego and Leonor Fini portray starkly erotic, psychological symbolism drawn from fairy tales. “Doll art” is an unusual area in which to look for eroticism, since dolls, like fairy stories, are thought to be the exclusive province of children; yet in the annual Dolls as Art show at the CFM Gallery in New York one finds phantasmagoric imagery with deeply erotic elements by sculptors such as Wendy Froud, Monica, Richard Prowse, and Lisa Lichtenfels.

In both the literary and visual arts, fantasy is used as a potent means to express the inexpressible, to evoke archetypes, to provoke the Gods, to cross over known boundaries into the unknown lands beyond. Erotic art, like fantasy, is a realm the “serious” artist is not encouraged to travel or linger in. But fantasists learn early to ignore such limiting rules and boundaries, preferring to follow the beguiling creatures who beckon them into the woods.

“Regarding her whole self as an ear,” writes Toni Morrison (in the novel Tar Baby), “he whispered into every part of her stories of icecaps and singing fish, the Fox and the Stork, the Monkey and the Lion, the Spider Goes to Market, and so mingled was their sex with adventure and fantasy that to the end of her life she never heard a reference to Little Red Riding Hood without a tremor.”

In the following pages we offer stories mingling sex and fantasy, stories to produce a tremor or two, stories both dark and bright. These are tales dedicated to Eros, that capricious God of love and desire. And to the sirens, for somewhere in this wide world they’re still singing …