Restless Dead

by Sarah Iles Johnston

  Other sources for Lamia's myth make it clear that in the standard tradition, Lamia herself killed children, rather than commanding others to do so. The same story is told by the historian Duris of Samos but with one important variation: Hera did not kill Lamia's children herself but rather drove Lamia to kill them.27 This reminds us of Mormo's myth, for which we have one source only:

  [Aristides] speaks of Mormo, whose name frightens the children who hear it. They say that she was a Corinthian woman who, one evening, purposefully ate her own children and then flew away. Forever thereafter, whenever mothers want to scare their children, they invoke Morino .21

  The similarity between Mormo's story and that of Lamia is noted by the scholiast, who elsewhere in the passage calls Mormo a type of lamia. The scholiast to Theocritus Idyll r 5.40 explains the poet's reference to Mormo by saying that "Mormo" is just another name for Lamia, as is "Gello," and then telling an abbreviated version of Diodorus's Libyan story.29 Equations of two or all of these creatures are found in other ancient sources as well. Such equations should not surprise us; after all, in at least two cases and probably all three, the "names" are in reality adjectives that describe the ghosts' qualities. Mormones are "fearsome ones," and lamiai are "devourers." 30

  All of these myths express the belief that aorai have their origin in mortal women who died before they had borne or successfully nurtured children.31 Thus, they suggest that it is not enough simply for women to hold back from the overtly inhuman act of killing children if they want to retain membership in the human race-they must also become successful mothers. Failure to do so is tantamount to murder. In other words, the myths deliver the same message that a Greek woman heard constantly from other sources: her goal in life was to become a mother. Failure or refusal to meet this goal was virtually an attack against the most important structure by which human culture organized itself: the family.

  Zenobius and Hesychius not only refer to Gello as a virgin but explicitly define her as aore, "prematurely dead." 32 This term, as I have mentioned already, does not so much express Gello's failure to meet her reproductive obligations to others, such as the members of her oikos, as the fact that she had failed to experience those things that would have defined her as a successful woman. Although Lamia and Morino are never explicitly called aorai, we can assume that they were considered to belong to this group as well, for if it was not by marriage per se but rather by childbirth and nurture that a female was understood to have fulfilled her obligations to the family, then it is probable that her personal sense of completeness depended upon these accomplishments as well. This is what Alcestis means when, as she is about to die, she refers to herself as aoros in the same breath as she laments leaving her small children behind for others to raise.33

  Let us be exact about the ramifications of death in this state. It exiles the aore not only from the upper world, as all deaths do, but also from the Underworld, leaving her stranded betwixt the two. For, bereft of the only sort of honor that women could normally earn-the honor of having successfully borne and nurtured children-the aore is excluded from the society of the dead just as surely as is the warrior who is treacherously slaughtered instead of dying nobly on the battlefield, or the murder victim whose relatives have not avenged him. Like these biaiothanatoi, the aore can only wander between the worlds of the living and the dead, causing trouble. This is alluded to in literary sources as early as Odyssey z which describes virgins and young brides as lingering at the border between the upper world and the Underworld, and Odyssey zo.61-8z, which describes girls who died before their weddings as eternally wandering with the Erinyes. Hesychius tells us that mormones were called "wandering demons" (planetes daimones ).14 The frequent use of both female and male aoroi in magic rests upon the assumption that they wander restlessly, too. Unimpeded by Hades' gates, aoroi could travel back and forth between the lower and upper worlds more easily than a "fully dead" soul; unprotected by those gates, they were at the mercy of those who knew how to invoke them.

  Successful death, in other words, just like successful life, was open only to the complete, categorically perfect individual. Life and death themselves were both acceptable states for the soul to exist in; it was in the margin between them that significant problems lay.35 A comment by John Damascenus suggests that the eschatologically marginal status of Greek aorai had existential ramifications as well, for he says that gelloudes and striges were believed to retain some, but not all, of their corporality.36 They were neither fully flesh so as to enjoy life, nor fully free of flesh's constraints as were normal residents of the Underworld.

  How did aorai manifest themselves to the living when their wanderings led them into the upper world? There is no simple answer to this question, which, as Charles Stewart has suggested, is quite in accord with the nature of the demonic itself. In his study of beliefs in demons in the modern Greek countryside, Stewart notes that demons' physical traits and behavior patterns vary from locale to locale, from neighbor to neighbor, or even from one statement to the next during a conversation with a single individual.37 This is because the function of such traits and patterns is not to identify one demon in contrast to all others, but rather to say something about the nature of the demon as it is being experienced by a specific person at a specific moment. Demons are the clay with which people mold images of their fears and anxieties; in order to express the fears and anxieties of the moment effectively, that clay must remain malleable. It is not until those who stand outside of a community begin to make lists of its demons (i.e., "demonologies") for their own purposes that any real consistency of traits and imagery is obtained, and it is a very artificial consistency, born from a scholar's desire to organize or a missionary's desire to control and eventually overcome.

  Of course, even if we ignore the artificial constructions of church fathers and scholars, and attend, so far as we can, only to the reports of those for whom the demons are a real and active force in the cosmos, some consistency of description will emerge. Some traits symbolize some anxieties better than others; thus, those traits are called into use more frequently than others when that particular anxiety is expressed. An example borrowed from Stewart illustrates this idea. Many different types of demons in contemporary Greece (including lamies, khamotsaroukhoi, and neraides) are frequently described as being part goat. Goats are notoriously difficult to manage; for a culture in which herding is important, therefore, the goat is a potent symbol of trouble and possible loss of livelihood. This rather broad connotation makes the goat a symbol suitable for a variety of demons. But other symbols, expressive of different anxieties, are sometimes attached to the same demons as is the goat symbol. A neraida sometimes is described not as a goatish woman but rather as a woman who has abnormally elongated thighs. According to Stewart's analysis, this trait expresses her sexual deviancy and the danger she poses to married men.31 To pin down the symbol of the goat to one or two types of demons, or to delineate an exact, standardized iconography for the neraida, would rob them of any power to express real, everyday anxieties; under such circumstances, a demon becomes a quaint remnant of a bygone culture rather than a vital idiom. Thus, the symbolic value of any trait associated with a demon must be evaluated in isolation from the demon as well as in connection with it.

  When we try to apply this rule to Greek aorai, we face two problems that Stewart does not. First, our information is derived primarily from literary and artistic products; the informant has taken special care in choosing what he tells or shows us. A bigger problem is that our information is relatively meager: we cannot live among our subjects as Stewart did. Neither problem is new to those who study ancient cultures, but they do become more acute when we are dealing with material that is by its very nature fluid; any description of a demon that we possess is just a single-and perhaps very deliberate-selection from a wide range of possible traits. Nonetheless, some broad observations about the significance of the aore's iconography can be made.

  As we might expect, like many
demons throughout the world, aorai are generally described as ugly-indeed, the paroemiographers tell us that Lamia's ugliness was proverbial. Mormo's name, which means "Frightful," conveys the same idea.39 Lamia is portrayed as having disgusting personal habits, too: Aristophanes describes her as farting in public and as having filthy testicles.40 As noted earlier, scholars cannot agree on the origin of the name "Gello" but it seems likely that the Greeks would have heard in it an allusion to the root of words meaning "grin" and "laugh" (gel-), actions that distorted the face in a manner perceived as unfeminine and even threatening, as the horrible leer of the Greek gorgon demonstrates.

  Sometimes the aore went beyond simple ugliness: Lamia's dirty testicles, obviously, suggest that she was far from a normal woman. Nor did she have testicles alone. The fifth-century comic poet Crates portrays Lamia as having a "staff" (skutale).41 Elsewhere in comic theater, skutale is used as slang for "phallus," 42 and in a passage from Aristophanes that clearly alludes to Crates' earlier description of Lamia, the variant skutalon seems to be identically used: some women are busily disguising themselves as men; one woman shows the others the splendid skutalon that she has stolen from her sleeping husband; this follows immediately upon the other women's proud display of their "walking sticks" (bakteria). Slapstick involving that most essential piece of male comictheatrical attire, the artificial phallus, surely occurred here.43 A hermaphroditic Lamia may also appear on a fifth-century lekythos.44 It shows a naked, ithyphallic45 woman, tied to a palm tree, who is being tortured by satyrs. Her belly sags out over her groin, her breasts are horribly pen dulous,46 and fang-like teeth make her appearance frightening as well as repulsive-she seems a typical demon. The fact that her facial features, coloring, and hair follow the conventions used in antiquity to represent blacks suggest, especially in combination with the palm tree, an African setting, which would align with the mythic tradition that made Libya Lamia's home.47 The vase may illustrate a scene from Crates' play about Lamia or from another play on the topic.48

  Like her ugliness and filthiness, Lamia's hermaphrodism obviously runs counter to the standard of the desirable woman. But in addition, hermaphrodism made Lamia disconcerting in a way that she never could be as simply an ugly woman-or an ugly man-because she failed to fit neatly into either of the sexual categories. Shape-shifting and partial theriomorphism, two other traits through which demons flout categories, are frequently associated with the Greek aorai as well. Mormo is described by Erinna as "having a face that changes constantly." All of the aorai were, according to their myths, once women, and sometimes are portrayed as having retained human traits. Yet Lamia is also called a "beast" (therion). The second part of Mormo's common alternative name, mormoluke, means "she-wolf," and thus implies she is to be imagined as a werewolf. Theocritus describes Mormo as a horse. Erinna's description of Mormo as "having big ears" and "running around on all fours" would accord with her portrayal as either a wolf or a horse. The strix frequently is pictured as part woman and part owl or other bird of prey, a trait that other Greek aorai also display: lamiai are shown as birds in a fifth-century C.E. mosaic and several Byzantine sources describe gelloudes as flying. The Greek association of aorai with nocturnal birds of prey is also hinted at in a myth that goes back at least to the sixth-century poetess Corinna: the infanticidal Minyads become a "night-bird" or bat (nukteris), an owl (glauks or buksa), and a crow (kor(5ne ).49

  We can do more than simply note that such examples of theriomorphism situate the aorai between categories, however. Let us briefly consider the possible origins and, following Stewart's lead, the significance, of these three animals whose traits the aore borrows in extant sources: the bird of prey, the horse, and the wolf.

  The Bird of Prey

  Babylonian Lamashtu is always shown on amuletic plaques with the forelegs and claws of a bird of prey, and sometimes with wings. Semitic Lilith, too, is often pictured with the features of an owl or other bird of prey.50 However, we must not leap to the conclusion that the Greek aore owes her avian characteristics to the Eastern ones. Aorai are associated with birds of prey-and particularly with nocturnal raptors such as the owl-not only throughout the Mediterranean basin but in many other parts of the world as well.51 Moreover, many other types of Mediterranean demons have avian features-the Greek harpies and sirens, for example, are commonly represented as birds.52 The logic behind such associations is obvious: raptors-especially nocturnal raptors-are swift and unusually silent. It seems likely that any culture exposed to owls and their kin would come to associate them with the sudden sorts of illnesses and deaths that aorai and similar demons were believed to inflict.

  The Horse

  In Greece, the horse was strongly associated with Poseidon, a dark and marginal god of the frightening sea and destructive earthquake.53 Ac cording to myth and cultic tradition, Medusa and Erinys (or DemeterErinys) each assumed the shape of a mare to become the consorts of Poseidon and subsequently bore him the foals Pegasus and Arion. At one time, Erinys and Medusa probably were chthonic goddesses with beneficent as well as maleficent sides, but from Homer on they represent the threatening aspects of the chthonic world-appropriate mates and mothers for horses. Although the horse, particularly when ridden, could be a positive symbol for the Greeks representing victory and salvation,54 its connection with the aore surely draws, instead, upon the darker connotations represented by Poseidon and his consorts.55

  The Wolf

  It is scarcely necessary to comment on the symbolic significance of the wolf, an animal that still loomed as a threatening predator of both flocks and humans in Europe until quite recently. It was an animal that the Greeks particularly "liked to think with" and they frequently set it in opposition to all that represented civilized culture, the story of Lycaon's cannibalistic feast being a famous example.56

  What does require some comment, perhaps, is the relationship between the mormo and the luke of "Mormoluke." "Mormoluke" typically has been understood by scholars as simply a longer version of the name "Mormo," a version that delivers more information about the nature of the creature; the assumption therefore has been that Mormo was a sort of werewolf. This, however, causes problems for our understanding of Theocritus's association of Mormo with the horse. The key is to remember that "Mormo" began as a descriptive term-"The Frightening One." Given this-and given that demonological beliefs and iconography must remain fluid to serve any function-it is no surprise that Mormo could be conceived sometimes as lupine, sometimes as equine. We should remember, too, that Erinna describes Mormo as changing constantly from one form to another. This expresses the disorienting, hybrid quality of a shape-shifter, but at the same time attests to a basic uncertainty as to which of many "four-legged creatures with big ears" Mormo would choose to imitate. Perhaps in a given area, "Mormo" was associated primarily with one animal; the fact that the use of mor- moluke before the Roman period is restricted to Athenian authors suggests it was in Attica that she typically was imagined as part wolf. Elsewhere-perhaps in Sicily, Theocritus's home?-she normally may have been imagined as part horse, as a mormippos rather than a mormoluke. A paraphrase employed by a scholiast commenting on Theocritus, "he mormO hippos daknei," "the mormd-horse bites," brings us very close to this conjectured mormippos indeed.57

  In sum, the fact that aorai are associated with animals is significant not only taxonomically, in that the association signals the chaotic nonalignment of the shape-shifter or bimorph, but also because the individual animal chosen typically expresses some dangerous or undesirable trait. The geographical and genealogical associations of demons can often be analyzed similarly. In the case of Greek aorai, we have sufficient evidence to do this for only one of them, however: Lamia. In one late source, Lamia is called not the daughter of Poseidon, as she is in Plutarch, Pausanias, and Clement, but the daughter of Belus; Burkert took this as an indication that the Greeks themselves recognized her Eastern origins, as "Belus" is a hellenized form of the Semitic "Baal." 58 It seems likelier, however, that the name "Bel
us" functioned in Lamia's story as it does elsewhere in Greek myth-as a stopgap in foreign genealogies. In addition to Belus the father of Lamia, there was, for example, a mythological Belus who was the king of Tyre, a third of Lydia, a fourth of Persia, and a fifth of Egypt.59 All that "Belus" tells us about Lamia, in other words, is that the Greeks wanted to situate her outside their realm of "normal" civilization. Similarly, Lamia is typically said to have come from Libya; Libya and other African locales usually function in myth as barbarian lands at the borders of the known world, far removed both geographically and culturally from the civilized world of the Greeks.60 The Greeks also portrayed lamiai as dwelling in the wild areas of their own landscapes-the woods, the glades.61 Analogously, Lamashtu is called a "foreigner" and is said to dwell in the swamps or mountains, and Egyptian child-killing demons are believed to come out of Asia.62 Stewart charts the spatial associations of contemporary Greek demons in some detail; not surprisingly, aorai, as well as other demonic types, prefer to linger in caves, fields, mountains, and other wild areas. Regina Dionisopoulos-Mass notes that in the contemporary Greek village she has studied, people believe in malicious witches, but when asked to identify a few of them, said that such creatures live not in their own village but rather in the next village or among the Turkish gypsies.61