The Siren: Talons and Song

And then other times they are essentially what we might think of as a harpie, you know, they are a winged creature, perhaps like an all out vulture type being, with even just the head of a maiden or the face of a maiden.

who enchant all who come near them. If anyone 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, and the flesh still rotting off them.

our absorption of Homer's original writings. We've had some great cinematic sirens over time, we've have, for example, to get into the adaptations of the Odyssey itself. There, of course the Three Sirens and No Brother, Where art thou? The three strange women that appear as beautiful washer women singing go to sleep, Little Baby. They of course lure in del Mar and turn him into a horny toad sort of.

I'm sure there's two thousand and one's Daygone. This is the Stuart Gordon film you have neat Split Tail that kidnaped Mermaids. In that, There's a two and another two thousand and one film titled She Creature that I have not seen since two thousand and one, but I remember having a nice little cast to it, and also having

a monstrous mermaid. More recently, I don't know much about the plot details here, so I don't know where this falls in terms of sirens, but there's a Polish musical horror film titled The Lure that seems to have resonated with a number of viewers. I've seen some nice reviews of that. And then I think we've had at least a couple of different Mermaids slash Siren TV shows in recent decades, but I have not seen them, So we'll have to lean on our listeners to write in and

tell us what those are like. Now again, to get back to what we were just talking about earlier, Though sirens are not definitively sea creatures or definitively mermaids, however, it's impossible to separate the two completely, so you know, we do have to acknowledge that to whatever extent. Sirens are based in this idea of undersea creature as well, you know, the idea of people and creatures from beneath

the waves. Naturally, it goes back very long ways. As long as humans have gazed out across the waves or peered down through clear waters from the side of their boats, they've dreamed of a mirror world to our own, a place where every animal has its watery reflection, where intelligent human like beings, no doubt dwell as well, along with various monsters and gods and so forth. There is a

paper by Nancy Easterlin. This is a two thousand and one paper again back to two thousand and one that we've we cited in a munch Older episode of the podcast titled Hans Christian Andersen's Fish out of Water, and she points out that the Babylonians recognize gods with fish

features or hybridity. You have like what Adappa, the fishermen of Oneius, the teacher of wisdom, even Mighty Inky, the ancient Sumerian water god, is sometimes depicted as having a cloak of fish or scaled skin, and the chief place of worship was a ziggurat known as the House of the subterranean waters, and additionally fishtailed gods, water dragons and so forth found throughout the cultures of India, China and

Japan and so forth. There's a quote from that Easter paper she writes some other mythological sea beings and deities, such as Poseidon and the Sirens were not originally associated with water and piicine anatomy. The sirens were originally birds. We'll get back to that in a minute, indicating that divine power and womanly allure became combined with the power and promise of the sea when ancient cultures overtook maritime

war and trade. So in that paper she gets into a familiar theme on this show when we're talking about deities and supernatural beings, is that, of course they are passed down and they do not stay in one form or another. They are reused, recreated, you know, different different, various relaunches and reboots of the brand over time, and.

and things that come out of folklore. You know, maybe sometimes it makes sense to say there's basically an authoritative version of a story, but most of the time there's not. Sometimes the characteristics aren't even given in the earliest works that are still extant today. So like searching after the canonical form of the monster or deity or whatever is fruitless. There just is no original that we can access.

So it just it changes. And there are probably better examples than Venom to turn to there.

But Homer neglects to physically describe them at all. So again, even by just briefly mentioning them as women, I'm airing because he does not ascribe gender to these creatures. But the thing is, it's really hard not to be infected by the various visual treatments of this encounter of these creatures from throughout Western art, you know, which has often served as a great opportunity to create dramatic and evocative scenes that make use of, you know, the the unclothed

or partially unclothed male and female bodies. I was talking about this with my son yesterday when I was researching this, and I mentioned to him, and he already knows his way aroun myths and monsters pretty well. I mentioned, you know that that Homer never actually describes them. So they could look like a woman, they could look like a fish monster, they could look like a bird person. We don't know. And he asked, well, could they just be like a banana peal? And I I dare say they could.

And he does not say that they do not look like banana peels, and provides no other physical description at all.

This was publishing the Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, and in it the author spends a lot of time talking about what at the time were like two dueling interpretations of the sirens in Homer's the Odyssey, and I think it's interesting to look at them here. So the first one that he references is the idea that the sirens are soul birds, again playing on the idea that in other texts we have the sirens described

an Avian term. And the connection here is that they would be representations of the souls of the dead in bird form, an idea that extends back through ancient Egyptian religion. This was an idea champion by the German classical archaeologist

Georg Viker. In short, this view sees the sirens as things that emerge from hades and or the grave and as Grethis explains, Homer likely wouldn't have thought that the soul became a bird upon death in this scenario, but he might have been influenced by older ideas still present in art and culture of his time. Okay, then there's this other idea, and that is that the sirens are

other world enchantresses. So an idea in this case champion by German archaeologist and translator Ernst Bouscher in response to Vicker arguing that homer sirens are anthropomorphic. This view sees the sirens not as creatures of the afterlife, but as something else that doesn't reside in Hades, though perhaps does resis guide in a different other world and might not even be directly malicious. That's the interesting thing about this

kind of view. They might be more in line with muses offering song and information that were just not equipped to resist. We just can't handle a song this beautiful and or information that's tantalizing, and therefore we are just

drawn into it. And this actually gets into the vagueness of how they actually bring about these men's dooms, because, as Aggressive points out, we don't have an answer for this in Homer either, and elsewhere, interpretations range from an overt and then the sirens ad him sort of situation to this idea that enraptured individuals just slowly die of exposure on the shores of the sirens, like they're drawn by the song, and then they just, you know, forget to eat, forget to stay out of the sun, and

just waste away. And so in that scenario, it's like, well, the muses, like they may not even be entities that are aware of what they are doing. They're just sharing song and information, but we just can't handle it as mortals.

Waterhouse is the Siren from nineteen hundred. This is a like a vertical piece in which there is a nude woman with a harp some kind of or is this a lute?

keep moving that way. The siren song doesn't infect the oarsman. It infects him, but he can't do anything about it because he's strapped to the mast.

crawl on the ship. And of course this is a. This image, of course, like a lot of the later treatments of Sirens, is of course very there's a certain sexual politics to all this and gender politics to it, because it's clearly showing like the feminine form is the aggressively alluring temptation that is coming at the men on the ship.

and he's raptured. In the second painting, the Draper painting from nine These these are beings that are obviously trying to seduce the men, and they are posed with seductive ill intent.

lot of struggling going on there. But in the foreground the sirens are just kind of like, hey, sirens, party, come on over, guys. And then next to them we see rotting bodies and bones. It's quite quite a quite a scene.

than the sirens. So you know, they explode or something.

part due to Homer being vague about it. This has always been an area of discussion, and apparently it's not the only area that Homer's vague, and for instance, according to Gressith, he never explains that the cyclops as one eye. So I think there are moments like that where we just kind of like assume, like we like we know as the as the reader what it's supposed to be or what it becomes canonized as later. But you can apparently get into discussions with any of this of like, well,

what did the original author intend? What was the shape of it? Then?

he points out three different traditions. He points out that Avid describes them as golden birds with the faces of virgins. He points out that Paulinius of Rhodes described them as women with the lower half of sea birds. And then much later medieval heraldry and bestiaries tend to present them just as straight up mermaids, again fusing these older classical tellings with Northern European traditions of mermaids. And I think

it's this is a reality you just can't get away from. Then, when you keep tugging at siren myths, because the terms are often used interchangeably, like some some tales of the siren, you could sort of maybe make a better case that these are actually mermaid stories. But some of them are very are very juicy, and I just couldn't resist getting into a particular one. This is one that Borges also talks about. This This would have been the sixth century

in northern Wales. It is said that a siren was caught and baptized, eventually becoming a saint in some traditions, by the name of Murgan or Murrgan, which I believe means Seaborn. She was reportedly carried to her baptism in a vat, and I believe and this is also tied to an Irish legend of lie Bon, and in fact I often I have elsewhere seen this character referenced as

li Bon Murrgan, for example. I've also seen Morgan described as an early discredited saint, so I don't know if I don't believe that she is officially a saint in the Catholic Church. This would have been around what five eighty eight CE, I think, But she had a feast day at one point, and it was January twenty seventh, which I think is also devoted to various other saints and so forth.

and she's just a normal human child. But then she is caught in the flood of a sacred spring with her dog and carried to an underwater cavern and she's trapped there for a year. But then she prays that she might be free like the fishes, and so her lower half becomes like a fish, and her dog transforms into an otter.

she may be baptized. But at her baptism she is or upon her baptism she is faced with a choice another three hundred years of life or immediate entry into heaven. So you know, do not pass go directly to heaven. She chooses heaven. So anyway, it's a lovely little little bit of folklore there. I like it quite a bit.

And they're apparently depictions of the saint here, Saint leban or Saint Morgan, and yeah, sometimes she's depicted with a crown, yeah quite oh and then and some depictions you also see her order there beside her.

Harpies and sirens may have been both female bird human hybrids, but of different demeanors. So harpies you can think of more as vengeful cannibal to spoilers, while sirens are alluring, musical beings of temptation and is. If faced with both, you'd need to fight the harpies off with physical weapons,

while the siren demands a more cerebral approach. So you know, in some ways, they're kind of if you're looking at them both as avian beings, they're kind of reflections of each other, one targeting the body and the other targeting the mind.

as a sign of wanton sexuality. So then and to this day, in some depictions we see the siren presented as this monstrous female temptress, a corruptor of menfolk, but also like this, indeed, like something that has been summoned

up to test ones resolve. Still, as Rose points out, there were still descriptions of the siren as a bird woman you know, well, you know, out of of the ancient world, pops up in the seventh and eighth century, leaving Monstroum also a twelfth century Latin Bestiaria, which describes them in much more harpy terms as winged, rock dwelling beasts well that will not only lure sailors to their death,

but pounce on them with flesh rending talons. And then during the nineteenth century we even see again kind of like bumping up against all of these depictions of sirens as mermaids and naked women in the water, we see John William Waterhouse's eighteen ninety one pain Ulysses and the Sirens. And what do we see here? We see big birds with the heads of women, and they are the ones as sailing ulysses strapped to the mast and his various oarsmen.

discovered the answer is yes. Apparently it is not very common in nature, at least as far as we know. But there is one excellent example I want to talk about, and this predatory song involves an animal that we just did a series on earlier this year, the cicada. In this case, the cicada not as the predator, but as

the prey. So I'm going to be referring to one major source here, a zoology paper from two thousand and nine published in Plus one by David C. Marshall and Kathy B. R. Hill called versatile aggressive mimicry of cicadas by an Australian predatory Katie did So. This paper begins by talking about the concept of mimicry in nature. Mimicry in the animal kingdom is when an animal has an adaptation that makes it seem like something other than what it is, and this can take a lot of different

forms and serve a lot of different purposes. A lot of animal mimicry is defensive in purpose and visual in format. So a vulnerable prey animal might try to fool predators into leaving it alone, perhaps by looking like something totally uninteresting to the predator, like a leaf, or like another animal that tastes bad and is non nutritious. In some cases,

visual defensive mimicry makes the prey animal look threatening. It makes it look like a different animal that is dangerous and could put up a fight, or one that is poisonous. But there are non visual forms of defensive mimicry as well. For example, a prey animal can smell like something uninteresting or something dangerous, so that's defensive mimicry. But there's also

what's called aggressive mimicry. This is when an animal disguises itself for aggressive purposes, usually to attract or gain advantage over prey if the mimic is a predator, or over a host if the mimic is a parasite, and apparently one of the most common strategies for aggressive mimics in nature is to exploit mating drive. So it's like, hello, fellow conspecifics, I am a member of your species and I'm very sexy. So the authors give some examples of this.

One is the bolus spiders collectively known as a Mastophora, which have been documented to attract male moths of at least two different species by copying the sex pheromones of female moths of those same species, so this would be

aggressive mimicry by smell. There's another interesting example, which is predatory fireflies known as Fouturis versicolor, which these animals use flashes of light to initiate mating within their own kind, but they can also copy the courtship flashes of females of other firefly species to trick the males of those species into getting close for a mating opportunity, and then the predatory fireflies just eat them, so this is aggressive mimicry by visual signal, and the authors note that this

case is particularly interesting because the predatory fouturist fireflies can copy the flashing patterns of eleven different prey species of fireflies. So that's incredible versatility in the predatory mimic behavior, and it's an interesting evolutionary question in cases like this how that much versatility in the predatory behavior comes about. The authors speculate that it might be possible in part because in this case the predator and the prey are closely related.

But whatever the explanation there, both of these previous examples work by the predator falsely appearing to be a female conspecific that is ready to mate, either by smelling like one or looking like one. This paper presents an example of aggressive mimicry that is interesting for several reasons. Like the fireflies, the predator in this case shows versatility in altering the mimic behavior to match multiple different prey species. But unlike the fireflies, the predator is not closely related

to the prey in a phylogenetic sense. And then, also, though I didn't notice this priority claim in the paper itself, a couple of news and blog sources I was reading about the paper say that this was the first scientifically documented case of an aggressive or predatory mimic relying on sound rather than on visual or smell based cues, though this mimic the mimic in question also does use visual

mimicry as a secondary appeal. I can't confirm there were no earlier documented examples in nature, and I'm a little curious why I found that claim in the popular sources and not in the research itself. But I did not find any earlier examples. So if that is true, this is the first documented case. Or sound is the medium being used for the aggressive mimic to mimic something that gets it access to its prey. Wow, So what is this dangerous mimic? Well, it is the spotted predatory katie

did or Chlorobalius leucoviritus. So this is a large green, green and white patterned katie did or bush cricket. It's a species native to Australia, mostly found in the dry interior regions of the continent, and it preys on multiple different species of cicadas belonging to the tribe Cicadatini, among other things. It's got multiple prey, but it likes to eat these cicadas of Cicadatini. Now it's important to note that these prey cicadas rely on a two part acoustic

signaling behavior to initiate sexual pair formation. And when we did our series on cicadas, we talked a lot about the songs of cicadas, how they use sound in their their mating behaviors. But in this case, these specific cicadas rely on what the authors call signal responds duets. So when it's time to mate, the male cicada initiates with a song particular to its species, and then if a female is nearby and she's receptive to mating, she will reply with a series of wing flicks, which can be

recognized visually if you're very close. But more importantly, the wingflicks produce an audible sound that matches with that specie specific mating call put out by the male. So the wingflicks can usually be heard for a range of several meters and they will help the male locate the female the author's right quote. Because a wingflick reply is structurally nondescript, it must closely follow the queue in the male cicada's

song in order to be recognized. But this leads to a kind of interesting situation where a clicking sound that has roughly the right sound quality and the right latency meaning I interpret this. I hope I'm right about this. I think they're talking about the the time delay between the end of the male cicada song and when the clicks start and stop in response to that. If it has these sonic qualities correct, it can be interpreted as

a female sexual signal by the male cicada. And as an example, the authors mentioned that with some of these cicadas in the tribe Cicadatini, you can attract males by like snapping your fingers if you time it right with respect to their songs. But different species listen for different things, and some are more wary than others. I guess some

just kind of rush right in there. Now, coming back to the katie DIDs, Chloribelius adults are most active in the summertime, and you will tend to find them perched in the upper branches of small trees and large shrubs, where they can take advantage of their green and white camouflage coloration pattern to hide in the foliage and rob I've attached a couple of pictures for you to look at, where one is against a white background where this animal

is very easy to say see. Another one is of its standing in the tree branches, where it's much easier to see how it would just kind of blend in, especially if you weren't looking very close.

This aggressive mimicry is accomplished both acoustically with tegmental clicks and visually with synchronized body jerks, so it's a two part mimic They imitate both the sounds and the visually recognizable body movements produced by female cicadas that are ready to mate, attracting male cicadas from the surrounding area, and when the male cicada gets close enough, the katie did will promptly snatch it, bite into it, and eat it. And observations of these predatory encounters find that the kdi

did typically just eats the whole thing. The entire cicada except for the wings, and they leave the wings behind. And I thought that was interesting because I recall from our series on cicadas this was also true of some bird predators, which would eat the whole cicada except the wings and then just leave pairs of wings everywhere.

to cicada calls. Interestingly, and perhaps relatedly, Chlorobelius also uses acoustic signals for its own reproductive purposes. So when it's time for this KTI did to mate, the male KTI DIDs will produce a trilling sound with a file and scraper system on the edges of their fore wings, which is thought to attract females which are interested in mating. Now,

coming to the discussion section of this paper. It's worth noting that this is not the only way that the mating call of a cicada could be used to help a predator eat a cicada. The predator could, for example, just follow the song to its source and eat the male, and many predators do exactly this. They do follow the mating calls of prey animals to hunt. But this is a different strategy like the siren, or at least one version of the siren. The kti did lures victims to itself,

and I think that's kind of interesting to consider. It's like a different evolutionary investment. I don't believe the authors say this, so this could be on the wrong track, but I was personally wondering if it could have something to do with the fact that the katie did already has a cryptic coloration pattern. It has camouflage, and so the fact that it may be using camouflage for one thing, it may be using camouflage defensively to hide from its

own predators, from birds and so forth. You know, whatever preis on it, it may be able to get double use out of that by specializing in a type of predation that allows it to hold still and hide among the leaves and have its prey come to it right right.

as well. Right now. The authors in this paper argue that the katie DIDs versatility and mimicry probably follows from the application of a few simple rules. For one thing, Since they're game to eat pretty much any cicada and not just one particular species, they can probably ignore everything about the male cicada's song except whatever part of it cues the female cicada to respond, so there's less information

to process. Just tune most of that out focus on whatever part you need to pay attention to to time your response, your clicks and response, which is typically probably something about the onset of a pause at the end of a song segment. And this was funny because it made me think about like text message scammers who are going to possibly ignore basically everything you type to them and just be looking for a couple of keywords to advance the scamscript to the next waypoint.

And fortunately for the kd DIDs, they already have all three capabilities for use in their own mating. Remember that from earlier they also use sound in their own mating. However, there's an interesting complication here, which is that if this predatory mimicry of cicada mating duets were based on the mating behavior of the predator species, you would expect the kd DIDs to also engage in duets, and as far as the authors could tell, this was not the case.

The kd DIDs do not seem to do male female duets. Instead, it seems as of the time of this paper that males generally produce a song which attracts a silent female to its source. So the male makes a song, the female comes and finds the male. But the authors acknowledge that not a lot is known about this katie did species,

so maybe some information is missing here. And also just a reminder that I said there was both an acoustic and a visual signal that the katie did also does this body jerking behavior which accompanies the mimicry clicks, and it does not seem to be physically necessary to make the click sound, so it's probably also a mimic behavior in this case to kind of look like a female cicada flicking its wings between the leaves, so the male's like, oh yeah, I see it right up there, and the

male's crawling up and then it gets.

And in fact there may be a fairly complex predator prey arms race in evolution between these cicadas and the katie DIDs. So here to read from the paper the author's write quote. Even though Cobonga ox lay, the species we observed being attracted by Chlorobelius luco viridus, has a structurally obvious song cue and an easily timed repetitive rhythm, we have found this species to be extremely resistant to

our artificial signals. Poorly timed finger snaps cause males of many species to become wary with k i ox lay an especially strong example. Perhaps persistent aggressive mimicry by Chlorobelius lucoviritis has selected kox lay males for greater sensitivity to

the occasional, poorly timed click. This possibility also suggests an additional evolutionary route for the cicada prey, the addition of false cues that elicit premature katie did replies without queuing female cicadas, whose response depends on a particular combination of song elements. Long continued selection of this sort might account for the extraordinarily complex songs of many Australian cicatatine species found in the arid Acacia dominated habitats where see Lucoviritus

is most common. So that's very interesting. We may have some cicada odysseuses on hand who have evolved a defensive reaction to this type of predatory mimicry by, for one thing, throwing out some decoy sound signals that are not going to get females of its own species responding. But if you do hear clicks in response to them, that's something

to be afraid of. Lets you know there's a monster nearby and then also perhaps by being more sensitive to incorrect timing on the response clicks in the duet.

you know that's a red flag fill in your own example. Well, sorry, I'm a little slow today. I can't come up with a good example that we can all stand behind as being the red flag for a first day.

especially with the Odysseus cicadas. To be clear, that's not their biological name, that's just what I'm calling him.

as having an objective reality. So I ran across this in Literature and Lore of the Sea, edited by Patricia Ann Karlson, specifically, in an article titled the Extraordinary being Death in the Mermaid and Baroque literature Eileen S. Goodman, She points out the seventeenth century German polymath and Jessuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who is sixteen o two through sixteen eighty, in one of his natural history volumes, seems to give

serious consideration to not only the objective reality of Noah's Ark, which isn't completely out of the ordinary. He still see that kind of thing going on today, but also spends a lot of time trying to figure out where Noah put all of the sirens.

you know, literal scrutiny. When you dig down into the two by two details of the endeavor. I think you know a lot of us who grew up, you know, going to Sunday school class. You reach that point where you're like, wait, how does this work? Now? Wait to two of each animal, you know, and then various questions arise.

But Kircher was very into figuring out exactly how all of this would work, and he, to be clear, seems to have believed in the reality of mermaids or sirens as well as unicorns, based on some like the tail and the bones of a mermaid that were in his museum.

what happened to the mermaids? So he explains in his writing, well that others have said, well, perhaps they lived on the outside of the arc, outside of this great boat, perhaps in some sort of a nest, something like a fixed to the hole.

that any existed outside. And I believe he argues against the idea that any creature lived outside the ship during the cataclysm, like even fish. I mean it, it's I have no answer there. It's like, even if you're even if I'm going to assume that fish surely get away with living outside of the arc. I think he's making the case that amphibian creatures could not. They would have

to be aboard the arc. H Okay, So I'm assuming here, based on what I'm reading, that Kircher is arguing that the sirens would have ridden inside the arc, and I have to acknowledge that, yes, that sounds ludicrous to even be wondering about that. But I also I don't want to give everyone the wrong idea about this man, because by all accounts he was. He was a brilliant mind, you know, a brilliant man of his time, sometimes described as being the last man to know everything. So this

is a guy who studied religion, linguistics, geology, medicine. He tried to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and claimed that he had translated them, but apparently not. He wrote an encyclopedia on China. He kept a vundokama, or a cabinet of curiosities, and he spent the majority of his career at Roman College. He was fascinated by fossils. He made proposals about the cause of plague that apparently line up with some of the actual the actual reality of it. He was intrigued

by various devices, made little inventions. He was a science superstar of his day, even if he's often eclipsed in our recollection by such contemporaries as Galileo. And there is the fact that he seemed to believe in the existence of both mermaids and unicorns based on the evidence in his museum.

of like speculative material. But yeah, he wrote this article in twenty twenty one titled a mishmash of brilliance and absurdity, and he stressed that, yeah, there's here's this guy Kirchner, who was brilliant, you know, was obsessed with optics, acoustics, you name it just like everything that could be learned or known about the world. He was all in on it.

But on the other hand, he wrote three volumes on how Noah managed to fit all of the animals and their food into the arc, and then also speculates about the sirens as well.

mermaids hurt anything? Well? Maybe not, Maybe it's fine.

And if you just follow what's exciting, then you're, you know, you're in search of with Leonard Nimoy or something, you know, you're you're in the realm of let's just talk about these ideas because they are entertaining and not because they actually explain the world around us.

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