Sirens Energy of the Depths

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.

--from The Odyssey by Homer

Sirens…luridly irresistible mythical creatures that lure men to their deaths with the sweetness of their songs. Half woman, half bird, sirens are most famously known from Homer’s epic the Odyssey. They are depicted as living on the rocky isles off the coast of Sicily. There they entrap passing sailors with intoxicating sounds that cause profound stupor resulting in death. When Odysseus and his crew manage to resist them, the sirens fly into craven tiffs and take fatal nosedives from their perches on rocky cliffs. They descend to the Netherworld where, instead of singing, they wail in mourning for the dead.

So maybe this motif is drenched in metaphors about sexual impulse, gender conflicts, orgasm, loss of self, and death. But I read somewhere some time ago that sirens may be related to the Egyptian Ba—the part of the soul that traverses the underworld. Along those lines, I also somewhere brushed by the speculation that sirens—and mermaids, too—were psychopomps, beings that met folks as they transitioned from life to death and guided them to and through the Underworld. The fatal songs of sirens (later attributed to mermaids) may be symbolic of truths a person can’t handle while embodied. Like seeing the face of God, the song of the siren will wrench you from your mortal existence and deposit you in another mode of being. After all sirens were said to be sisters of the Morae (the Fates) who spun, wove, and cut the thread of life and may have been the collective prototype of the triple goddess.

Is the song of the siren horrible or ineffable, a curse or a grace, does it communicate a wisdom so profound as to snap the mortal coil and its lifeline and lead beyond, beyond to the far shore? Such questions fascinate me along with the idea, derived from dissection of myths and fairy tales, that a dragon (in us) really wants to be a princess and can transform into one when saved (from itself) through a hero’s transformative journey from soul to spirit.

#mermaids