On Sirens: An Excerpt from The Fallen Fairy

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.

It all meant something metaphorical about men, women, ecstasy, sense control, and, of course, sex and death. One had to ponder it and trace the theme and imagery across cultures and time. 

--Excerpt from Chapter 2 .[The High Priestess] The Legacy of Lunaris Dracon from The Fallen Fairy by Soror ZSD23