Women Expressed Pain Through Belief In Female Monsters, Know Why

Sarah Clegg’s Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi is about ancient demonic figures, expressly the infamous child-killing monsters of the Near East and Mediterranean. Intimately tied to childbirth and infant and child mortality, such monsters were female in form.

Often, they were negatively connected to female sexuality. Chronicled over centuries, monsters such as the Mesopotamian Lamashtu, the Greek Lamia, and the Hebrew (and Mesopotamian) Lilith are, in Clegg’s thesis, a significant part of women’s lore, “a tradition kept alive by women, that tells the story of women’s lives, from 2000 BC to the present day”. 

Clegg begins with Lamashtu. Born of divine parents but quickly disowned because of her inherently evil nature, Lamashtu was the subject of curses written on clay tablets designed to drive her away from vulnerable mothers and children.

Included in the spells are some spectacularly graphic descriptions of her, such as the excerpt below, which comes from one of the oldest extant incantations (c. 1800 BCE):

She has hardly any palms but very long fingers

And very long claws.

Lamashtu’s body was subject to change, depending on the source. Clegg includes an amulet, from 800–500 BCE, which depicts her with the head of a lion (a traditionally male symbol in Mesopotamian culture), clutching snakes and suckling animals.

She has bird talons for feet and stands atop a donkey (this donkey, it was hoped, would carry Lamashtu to the Netherworld and away from her victims).

Her embodiment as the antithesis of the archetypal mother is evident in her suckling animals, a dog, and a pig, in a parody of the maternal figure who nurtures human babies.

Suggested Reading: What Greek Mythology Teaches Us About Women’s Resistance And Rebellion

Beauties and demons

The ancient Greeks and Romans had their own equivalent to Lamashtu: Lamia, “a direct descendent of the Mesopotamian child-and mother-killing demon” (Clegg notes the etymological connection between the names Lamashtu and Lamia).

Lamia was also a seducer of young men – a skill she managed by concealing her monstrously snaky lower body parts. She also ate babies and children and, like other Mediterranean monsters, such as Mormo and Empousa, was a shapeshifter.

Mythologies surrounding the origins of Lamia are redolent with themes of female loss and pain. In one version of how Lamia came into being, Durius of Samos, writing in the third century BCE, explains:

Lamia was a beautiful woman in Libya. Zeus had sex with her. Because of Hera’s envy towards her she destroyed the children she bore. Consequently she became misshapen through grief, snatched other people’s children and killed them.

While other accounts have Lamia as a fearsome and destructive monster from the start, Durius’ story highlights the vulnerability of women as subject to rape and subsequent punishment. Such plot lines are common in Greek and Roman myths, pointing to the casualisation of rape in certain socio-political circumstances.

Sarah Clegg's Book Women Lore

Clegg’s first two chapters on these creatures examine women’s lore through the monstrous feminine. And, along the way, her book provides a host of related cultural history on magic, ritual, and ghost traditions, offering a series of poignant insights into women’s lives in these ancient societies. An excerpt from an incantation against Lamashtu composed for a woman to recite, reads:

I was pregnant, but unable to bring my child to term; I gave birth but did not bring a child to life. May a woman who can grant success release me <…> may I have a straightforward pregnancy <…>

Herein is the pain of a woman who did not carry her baby to term, the grief of stillbirth, and the desperation to bear a healthy child.

Such insights into women’s lived experiences are also evident in the category of demons called the Lilitus, whom, Mespotamians believed were “the spirits of young girls who had died still virgins, before marriage and before children”.

Robbed of a future, the Lilitus were forever seeking to fulfill sexual initiation or male contact, driving them to visit sleeping men. These visits were the Mesopotamian aetiology for wet dreams and night discharge. Clegg regards Lilitus as more to be pitied than hated, citing an incantation:

She is a woman who has never seen a city feast, nor ever raises her eyes, who never rejoiced with the other girls, who was snatched away from her spouse, who had no spouse, nor bore a son.

While magic was largely practised by men throughout the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean, Clegg includes several examples of women inscribing their own demon bowls.

For example, there is a cache of bowls written by the same woman, Giyonay (otherwise unknown). Giyonay writes one bowl spell to drive Lilith away from her husband and herself and others to protect members of her family.

Melusine and contemporary incarnations

Clegg also examines mermaids, particularly in Medieval traditions, tracking their connections to earlier demons, such as the Lamia who, as Clegg notes, were believed to swim the waters of the Greek islands until the 1980s.

We also meet Melusine, a beautiful, serpentine female from Europe (particularly France, Luxembourg, and the Low Countries). Clegg suggests that she is also a successor to Mediterranean and Eastern demons, including Byzantine fantasies of Gello possessing a snake-tail. She is, however, more akin to the fairy or fae creatures of Europe and Britain (which Clegg does concede).

Melusine’s backstory reads like a classic fairy tale, complete with feminine deception and a narrative taboo. Told by Jean d’Arras in Roman de Mélusine (The Story of Melusine) in the 14th century, it chronicles Melusine’s marriage to the mortal, Raymond. Like most marriages between mortals and non-mortals, Melusine and Raymond’s union ends in tears. While the couple are initially happy, their marital bliss ends when Raymond breaks the one taboo that Melusine insists on: not to enter her chambers on a Saturday.

The act, which reveals Melusine in her true form as she enjoys a bath, sets in chain a series of disasters, culminating in Raymond cursing her – at which point she transforms into a dragon and flies away forever.

While Melusine may be a monster, Clegg points out the positive aspects of her, including the cultural capital she brings to the mortal family tied to her.

A child or a descendent of these fairy marriages was viewed as something to be proud of: a sign of greatness much like being a child or descendent of a god in ancient Greece or Rome.

Additionally, Melusine builds, albeit by magic, some pretty impressive infrastructure for her husband, including – or so the story goes – the very real, Château de Lusignan.

Clegg’s final chapters deal with later receptions of these terrifying, seductive, bewitching, destructive, and ultimately intriguing female monsters.

In chapter nine the reader meets some of these creatures in contemporary guises. Herein, Lilith dominates. We meet her as a symbol of second-wave feminism through to the latest manifestations of the same and also an icon of modern spiritual worship. We read about the origins of the Australian feminist research journal, Lilith, and the appropriation of the demon by Octavia E. Butler in her Lilith’s Brood trilogy.

Clegg also includes a revisioning of the tricksy Melusine, transformed in Serge Ecker’s 2013 statue, erected in Luxembourg for the city’s 1050th anniversary.

As Clegg rightly observes, these ancient figures:

have proven enormously adaptable to women’s causes – symbolizing everything from the need to leave home and husband to find equality to sexual freedom and LGBTQ rights.

Marguerite Johnson, University of Queensland, published the article first with The Conversation.