User:Rlawless125/Siren (mythology)

Late antiquity
By the fourth century, when pagan beliefs were overtaken by Christianity, the belief in literal sirens was discouraged. Although Saint Jerome, who produced the Latin Vulgate version of the bible, used the word sirens to translate Hebrew tannīm ("jackals") in Isaiah 13:22, and also to translate a word for "owls" in Jeremiah 50:39, this was explained by Ambrose to be a mere symbol or allegory for worldly temptations, and not an endorsement of the Greek myth.

Middle Ages
The early Christian euhemerist interpretation of mythologized human beings received a long-lasting boost from the Etymologiae by Isidore of Seville: "They [the Greeks] imagine that "there were three sirens, part virgins, part birds," with wings and claws. "One of them sang, another played the flute, the third the lyre. They drew sailors, decoyed by song, to shipwreck. According to the truth, however, they were prostitutes who led travelers down to poverty and were said to impose shipwreck on them." They had wings and claws because Love flies and wounds. They are said to have stayed in the waves because a wave created Venus."

Dante's Divine Comedy
The depiction of the siren in Dante's Divine Comedy is present in Purgatorio when in canto 19 the pilgrim dreams of a female that is described as, "stuttering, cross-eyed, and crooked on her feet, with stunted hands, and pallid in color." It is not until the pilgrim "gazes" upon her that she is turned desirable and is revealed by herself to be a siren. This siren then claims that she, "turned Ulysses from his course, desirous of my / song, and whoever becomes used to me rarely / leaves me, so wholly do I satisfy him!" However Dante did not have access to the Odyssey and thus the siren's claim that she "turned Ulysses from his course" is inherently false because the sirens in the Odyssey do not manage to turn Ulysses from his path. Him and his men were warned by Circe and prepared for their encounter by stuffing their ears full of wax except for Ulysses who wishes to be bound to the ships mast as he wants to hear the siren's song. Scholarly work claims that Dante may have "misinterpreted" the siren's claim from an episode in Cicero's De Finibus. The dream comes to an end when a lady "holy and quick" who had not yet been present before suddenly appears and says, "O Virgil, Virgil, who is this?" Virgil then steps forward and tears the clothes from the siren's belly which, "awakened me [the pilgrim] with the stench that issued from it." Thus ending the encounter between the pilgrim and the siren.

Early Modernity (1550-1800)
By the time of the Renaissance, female court musicians known as courtesans filled the role of an unmarried companion, and musical performances by unmarried women could be seen as immoral. Seen as a creature who could control a man's reason, female singers became associated with the mythological figure of the siren, who usually took a half-human, half-animal form somewhere on the cusp between nature and culture. Sirens continued to be used as a symbol for the dangerous temptation embodied by women regularly throughout Christian art of the medieval era; however, in the 17th century, some Jesuit writers began to assert their actual existence, including Cornelius a Lapide, who said of woman, "her glance is that of the fabled basilisk, her voice a siren's voice—with her voice she enchants, with her beauty she deprives of reason—voice and sight alike deal destruction and death." Antonio de Lorea also argued for their existence, and Athanasius Kircher argued that compartments must have been built for them aboard Noah's Ark.

Late Modernity (1801-1900)
Charles Burney expounded c. 1789, in A General History of Music: "The name, according to Bochart, who derives it from the Phoenician, implies a songstress. Hence it is probable, that in ancient times there may have been excellent singers, but of corrupt morals, on the coast of Sicily, who by seducing voyagers, gave rise to this fable." John Lemprière in his Classical Dictionary (1827) wrote, "Some suppose that the sirens were a number of lascivious women in Sicily, who prostituted themselves to strangers, and made them forget their pursuits while drowned in unlawful pleasures. The etymology of Bochart, who deduces the name from a Phoenician term denoting a songstress,   favors the explanation given of the fable by Damm. This distinguished critic makes the sirens to have been excellent singers, and divesting the fables respecting them of all their terrific features, he supposes that by the charms of music and song they detained travellers,   and made them altogether forgetful of their native land."