Wapsi Square Forum

lake_wrangler wrote:

Sidhekin wrote:

Catawampus wrote:blue-footed booby

Did you write that with a straight face?

Unless I'm quite mistaken, that was actually typed with a keyboard...

I always grin when I type 'Booby'...

I'll bet Atsali has a form that will make all the boys jaws 'Hit the Floor'.
Just like Penny in Glasses.

Oh - I forgot to mention that while Harpies are view as harbingers of doom, Hoppies are seen as ides of good fortune! Hence the phrase: "Hoppy go lucky!"

The pun vault craves your attendance...

Catawampus wrote:

shadowinthelight wrote:Forms? This might get interesting.

Well, there does seem to be a lack of consensus on how sirens are shown or described in art. This could be because they can choose amongst many forms.

Pottery from the 6th and 5th century BC tends to show them as birds with human heads. Tomb sculptures from the cemetery in Athens around the 4th century show human heads, torsos, and sometimes arms, but with bird wings and legs. Then you have later paintings that show them as fully human, or human top halves and fish lower halves.

Homer never described them in The Odyssey, just saying that they lived on a flowery island. Euripides wrote that they were "pteroforoi neanides", or winged young women.

So, take your pick. We've seen Atsali as the 4th Century BC version and the 19th Century AD version. She could still appear as a human-headed bird or a fish-tailed human. . .or as something totally different. Perhaps she has the form of a bird that she finds very embarrassing, such as a kiwi or a penguin or a blue-footed booby?

Thanks for this. I knew I'd seen/remembered sirens depicted with wings, but didn't have time to look it up and didn't want to take a firm stand on that idea without something to back it up.

Julie wrote:Thanks for this. I knew I'd seen/remembered sirens depicted with wings, but didn't have time to look it up and didn't want to take a firm stand on that idea without something to back it up.

If you want to see one of the earliest pictures of a siren, look up some photos of the Kerameikos Painter's work. He painted black-figure vases around 600 BC in Athens. An even better and more famous example, though, would be the "Siren Vase" that was found in Vulci. It's a red-figure vase painted by a guy known as Siren Painter (pottery historians aren't the most creative when it comes to naming ancient artists) around a century later, and it has a beautiful and clear image of a number of sirens tormenting Odysseus as he sails along. These sirens are all of the human-headed bird type, which we haven't seen Atsali as. To see sirens who look as she did when she was being all winged and bird-legged and ready to rip a grown man in half, you'd have to look another century or so later at something such as Kerameikos statues.

What's just now struck me as interesting is that some historians think that the early Greek concept of the siren might be based on the Egyptian concept of the part of our personality that survives into the afterlife. Egyptian funerary art would often show this part of the soul flying off to the afterlife in the form of a bird with a human head. Seeing as how early Greek art was heavily influenced by borrowing and then adapting imagery from the bigger and older and more fancy civilisations across the Mediterranean, and also the way in which sirens are often linked to death and mourning in Greek art, it's figured that sirens might have been connected somehow in early Greece with the passage of souls to the afterlife as well. Which, given all that we've seen in our storyline here so far about souls and passage to the afterlife, could get complicated.

(I read a number of books and journal articles on ancient pottery not too long ago, so I probably know more about this stuff than is really good for me. But I'm all set now for the next time I'm standing in line at the grocery store and some random stranger decides to start chatting to me about the history of gorgons in art, or the orientalising of early Greek pottery. Which I'm sure will happen any time now.)

Catawampus wrote:

Julie wrote:Thanks for this. I knew I'd seen/remembered sirens depicted with wings, but didn't have time to look it up and didn't want to take a firm stand on that idea without something to back it up.

If you want to see one of the earliest pictures of a siren, look up some photos of the Kerameikos Painter's work. He painted black-figure vases around 600 BC in Athens. An even better and more famous example, though, would be the "Siren Vase" that was found in Vulci. It's a red-figure vase painted by a guy known as Siren Painter (pottery historians aren't the most creative when it comes to naming ancient artists) around a century later, and it has a beautiful and clear image of a number of sirens tormenting Odysseus as he sails along. These sirens are all of the human-headed bird type, which we haven't seen Atsali as. To see sirens who look as she did when she was being all winged and bird-legged and ready to rip a grown man in half, you'd have to look another century or so later at something such as Kerameikos statues.

What's just now struck me as interesting is that some historians think that the early Greek concept of the siren might be based on the Egyptian concept of the part of our personality that survives into the afterlife. Egyptian funerary art would often show this part of the soul flying off to the afterlife in the form of a bird with a human head. Seeing as how early Greek art was heavily influenced by borrowing and then adapting imagery from the bigger and older and more fancy civilisations across the Mediterranean, and also the way in which sirens are often linked to death and mourning in Greek art, it's figured that sirens might have been connected somehow in early Greece with the passage of souls to the afterlife as well. Which, given all that we've seen in our storyline here so far about souls and passage to the afterlife, could get complicated.

(I read a number of books and journal articles on ancient pottery not too long ago, so I probably know more about this stuff than is really good for me. But I'm all set now for the next time I'm standing in line at the grocery store and some random stranger decides to start chatting to me about the history of gorgons in art, or the orientalising of early Greek pottery. Which I'm sure will happen any time now.)

Yep. That settles it. You're officially my hero for the day. (I'd totally have that conversation with someone in line at the grocery store if only there was a convenient way to bring it up )

MerchManDan wrote:Also, I'm surprised to see Atsali doesn't take pride in her siren form. Could there be some kind of paranormal prejudice against her kind?

I'm thinking that at the moment it is more the adolescent's unease at her growing body--compounded by the supernatural speed of a siren's puberty. Most girls have at least a few months to get used to the idea of growing breasts and hips--Atsali had, what? a few seconds? And even then, about 99% of women seem to have some issue of how their body is not what they want.