Sirens were creatures that were half-bird,
half-woman, in origin, perhaps like the Egyptian ba. To the ancient Egyptians, the ba was the surviving part of a person that flew to the Underworld
when a person died, but sirens were renegade creatures. According to classical
myth, they lived on treacherously rocky isles off the coast of Sicily. They
wanted nothing more than to entice passing sailors. Being lured, these sailors,
thinking they’d get good head, instead found themselves in listless,
dumbfounded stupors from which they languished and died.
It was portended that if a ship passed in
which the occupants were resistant to the sirens’ song, the sirens, in frenzied
dismay, would kill themselves. Thus, it is told in the Odyssey that these creatures leaped off cliffs when the epic’s
hero, Odysseus, and his crew sailed by.
The sirens descended to the Underworld where
they continued to sing, this time in mourning for the dead. Their imagery
became mixed up with that of mermaids who themselves, in lore, were the
mystical remnants of disposed-of women, who taking vengeance on the violence
done to them, lured men to their deaths with the promise of sex through the
sweetness of their song.
--Excerpt from Chapter 2 .[The High Priestess] The Legacy of Lunaris Dracon from The Fallen Fairy by Soror ZSD23
