What's a Witch and is a Strega a Strix?

La Striga 14x18 digital image Dee Rapposelli

Many neopagans self-identify as witches. And I did too at one point in my history, thinking myself a chip off the old block when my grandfather, after learning that I dabbled in palm- and card-reading, announced that I was following in the footsteps of his mother. He proudly announced that she was a strega—a witch.

Now, I knew that one of my maternal great grandmothers, who hailed from Bari, Italy, was a wise woman. Like many other people’s Old World great grandmothers, she divined and cast spells and was a living lexicon of folklore, folk healing, and superstition. Her philosophy was that of other Italian cunning folk: keep a positive attitude and not speak of disease or death lest doing so attract negative forces.

           

But my great grandmother was not a strega exactly. Perhaps she was a maga  (a lady mage) or a donna di fiori (an outsider), a fattuchiera (a fixer), or a myriad other regional names that people gave to local healers, diviners, charmers, and “unbewitchers.” No one in their right mind called him- or herself a witch anywhere in Europe until the latter half of the 19^th century when a romantic pseudo-history about paganism and the whole Western Occultist scene began to develop.

For a long blah blah blah about the history of the birth of Neopaganism, Wicca, and modern occultism (plus bibliographical references for claims made in today’s blog), see this post from an old blog of mine from days when I was “in the scene.” Yes, the geek alert is in effect.

Witches were thought to be malignant supernatural creatures that caused disease and ruin. They cavorted with demons and were dedicated to inflicting calamity and despair.  Their imagined human counterparts were bewitchers practicing malicious and coercive magic and diabolism. And the name for such practitioners was streghe.

Strega, the Italian word for “witch” (plural, streghe), is derived from the Latin word for screech owl,  striga. The Greek term, adapted into the English language, is strix (plural, striges). In Greek and Roman mythology striges were vampiric birds of prey that feasted on human flesh and blood—often that of infants. They also liked to seduce and destroy men. By the medieval era, they were equated with vampires.

Striga  14x18 digital print Dee Rapposelli

A strix may basically be a Greco-Roman version of the Semitic Lilith. Although Lilith is nowadays (misguidedly) positioned as an ancient suffragette and paean of female independence and sexual freedom, she originally was a demon responsible for miscarriage, crib death, maternal death, nocturnal emissions, and impotence. The myth of Lilith (beyond the “I wanna be on top” part) was meant to explain why these tragedies occurred. So it seems reasonable to conjecture that myths of striges feasting on human infants and sucking the life out of men were meant to explain infant mortality and emasculation--as the myth of the Semitic demon Lilith was meant to do.

I point this out as a contemplation on what is lost in translation and paradigmatic shifts. Memory, history, and labels are not fixed but fluid, malleable, and fabricated.

Striga/siren studies

For my sirens series, I developed a few pics of creatures that could also qualify as striges. Why? Because I simply have a fascination with mythological forms that, in part, are overtly meant to express something horrifically ambivalent about female sexuality but may have another meaning.  Although the horror of the siren may be a covertext for concepts about sublime spiritual mysteries, the striga is meant to be a monster and explain why monstrous things sometimes happen to human beings—male and female. Until very recently, historically speaking, the strega/witch was meant to explain the same thing.

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