Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

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…

TERRI WINDLING,

September 1997

Devon, England

My Lady of the Hearth Storm Constantine

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN in the world have a cat-like quality. They slink, they purr; claws sheathed in silken fur. In the privacy of their summer gardens, in the green depths of forests, I believe they shed themselves of their attire, even to their human flesh, and stretch their bodies to the sun and their secret deity. She, the Queen of Cats, is Pu-ryah, daughter of the Eye of the Sun; who both roars the vengeance of the solar fire and blesses the hearth of the home. Given that the goddess, and by association her children, has so many aspects, is it any wonder that men have ever been perplexed by the subtleties of females and felines? Yet even as we fear them, we adore them.

When I was young I had a wife, and she was a true daughter of Pu-ryah. It began in this way.