Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio, Hey brain Stuff. Lauren Vogelbaum here. When it comes to terrifying fictional characters to fear from children's stories, though, which from Hansel and Gretel and Baba Yaga of many Slavic myths certainly come to mind. But there's one character from Greek mythology who might top them all in terms of sheer scope of evil, Lamia. There are a lot of roots and offshoots of this character, but she's basically a
female demon known for devouring children. For the article this episode is based on, has to Work, spoke with mythology expert Richard P. Martin, professor in Classics at Stanford University. He explained she would get you if you disobeyed or so kids were instructed. She once lived in Libya in North Africa. The story goes that, like many a demon, she used to be a beautiful woman. Zeus, as was
his usual habit, seduced and slept with her. The chief God's wife, Harrah, got jealous and then killed the children of Lamia. The poor mortal woman was so overcome by continual grief that she became horribly ugly In appearance, and then she began to kill the children of other women
in a sort of madness of revenge. According to Martin, one version of the Lamia tale suggests that she was actually the queen of Libya and ordered all newborn babies to be snatched from their mothers and slaughtered, a tale he points out that sounds similar to the story of Herod in the Gospel of Matthew. Martin said there are hints from late sources that she was thought of as personally eating children. Hera, the queen of the gods, was the ruler of marriage and family and the protector of women,
especially during childbirth. But the Greek gods were often epically and humanly flawed characters. Harra was equally as known for her fiercely protective instincts as she was for her pride and jealousy, and her husband Zeus often tested those fiery qualities with his constant infidelity. The stories go that Harra's revenge in the case of Lamia was literal overkill, and she murdered all of Lamia's children, regardless of whether Zeus
was the father or not. The loss pushed Lamia to madness, and she then made it her mission to kidnap the children of others and eat them, and these monstrosities made her monstrous, a possibly serpentine or maybe shark light. Martin said.
Aristotle records in his History of Animals from the fourth century BC that Lamia was the name of a kind of shark, and other versions of the tale come with other horrific details, and Martin said a one story preserved only in late antique and medieval sources says Haara caused Lamia to be bliss as well as killing her children. So Zeus to give Lamia the opportunity to have some rest made her eyes removable. That way they would not
always be open, at least not in her head. Lamia was just one of several boogeymen or perhaps boogey women. In Greek folklore, a monstrous is used to scare or warn, Martin said. At taking the form of beautiful women and then sucking the blood of their victims seems to have been common features in the tales about these demon types, and modern folklore in the region still preserves some of
these traditional stories. Martin said, maybe every culture needs a way for mothers to keep their kids from doing dangerous things like wandering off into the woods alone or just from misbehaving. In the early nineteenth century, for example, British nursemaids would frighten children with stories of Bony coming to get them uh the dreaded enemy of the realm Napoleon Bonaparte imagined as an ogre. An ancient Greece, a demonus
called Lamia played the same role. Scary stories often fill a societal need to discuss and deal with very real terrors or anxieties about terrible things happening, and thus you can find Lamia like figures in any number of other tales and cultures of female figures who are childless or have lost their children, and who thus steal others children.
Martin gave an example from North America quote in the Southwest and generally in Latin America, it seems la Urona, the wailing woman, supposedly drowned her own children or they drowned on their own, and now haunts places at night,
crying and stealing other children. Mother's worn kids that la Roma will snatch them if they get too close to the water, And as with many female demons, Lamia also became associated with the sort of dangerous sexuality, and some stories had the monstrous Lamia in disguise, seducing and then sometimes eating men. John Keats wrote a poem All the
Way in eighteen nineteen based on some of those. Martin said Lamia in every day Greek or Latin could also be used as an insult hurled at any threatening, powerful, or ugly woman in some ancient fictional stories. Courteson's get called this as do, which is a clearly male anxiety at work here, blaming seductive women for the guy's own lust fueled ruin. Today's episode is based on the article Lamia, the female demon who devoured children in Greek Mythology on
how stuff Works dot com, written by Michelle Konstantinovski. Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com, and it's produced by Tyler Klang. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.