We all love Sirens, don’t we? They usually travel in three, like witches. Though sometimes they hunt alone, like the Lorelei siren, luring sailors to their death on the rocks. Their typical characteristics are: physical beauty that is often a mirage or facade and that is used to seduce, song or music to sooth the senses or even to call unnatural slumber to fall upon their prey. They lie in wait, ready to snare the unwary, the naive, the innocent adventurer who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the scene with the Sirens in the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou?”, there is a pleasurable anticipation of what might happen. They have mysterious powers, and they can bend a man to their will, no matter how good and chaste he may be. Maybe he’ll get ‘loved up and turned into a horny toad’! Sirens are bringers of doom, of ruin. They are depicted as mercurial, evasive, changing and insubstantial, there one minute and gone the next. We don’t see their true self until our ruin is complete. No one can resist the lure of the Siren when she has decided to call them.
But the Siren is not the only one who owns this fatal attraction.
The innocent – pure or naive, chaste of body or merely without guile – this person is as alluring to the Siren as she is to him. Evil craves purity. Wickedness pursues goodness to overtake and devour it. Monsters are always appeased – and manipulated – by their need to consume maidens. The dark always seeks the light, because in its own way the light has become the Unknowable to those who live in darkness. The Siren can never know or experience innocence, because that would mean a subjugation of their own essential nature – it would requite cleansing, sacrifice and purity, a way of life that is alien and impossible for the Siren to bear because they are forced by their nature to live outside of society’s acceptance and to live by instinct alone. Thus the innocent, completely oblivious to their power, draw in Sirens after them as the moon cannot help but follow its preordained journey across the night sky in the wake of the golden sun.
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