Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

SIRENS AND OTHER DAEMON LOVERS Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Thanks are due to Tappan King & Beth Meacham (who may not even remember inspiring the idea for this book many years ago), and to the folks who generously provided research material for the introduction: Ellen Steiber, Alan Lee, Brian & Wendy Froud, and Alice Scott. Thanks also to our agent Merrilee Heifetz, and our editor John Douglas.

This book is for Robert Gould and Jamie Webb, with love on a very magical occasion, November, 1997.

—T.W.

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.