Strix (mythology)

"Stryx" redirects here. This is also an incorrect spelling of the true owl genus Strix.

The appearance and calls of owls, such as the Eurasian scops owl, may have influenced Roman ideas of the blood-drinking strix.

Strix (pl. striges or strixes), in the Ancient Roman and Greek legends was a bird of ill omen, product of metamorphosis, that fed on human flesh and blood. The name, in Greek, means "owl".^[1]

Description

They are birds with long golden beaks that they use to suck the blood of infants, their favorite victims. They also have wings, usually red, and four black legs, all with clawed feet. Their eyes are yellow and round, without pupils.

Classical stories

The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boios, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte and her two sons Agrios and Oreios (their father being a wild bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, like Lycaon, by being transformed into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix "that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men".^[2] The first Latin allusion is in Plautus's Pseudolus,^[3] dated to 191 BC, in which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the striges—i.e., disemboweling a hapless victim. Horace, in his Epodes, makes the strix's magical properties clear: its feathers are an ingredient in a love potion. Seneca the Younger, in his Hercules Furens, shows the striges dwelling on the outskirts of Tartarus. Ovid tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king Procas in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus and placated with the meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the Kalends of June.^[4]

Though descriptions abound, the concept of the strix was nonetheless vague. Pliny, in his Natural History,^[5] confesses little knowledge of them; he knows that their name was once used as a curse, but beyond that he can only aver that the tales of them nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat^[6] suckled its children.

Medieval

The legend of the strix survived into the Middle Ages, as recorded in Isidore's Etymologiae,^[7] and gave both name and attributes to the being referred to as striga in Latin throughout central and eastern Europe. In Romanian, strigăt means 'scream',^[8] strigoaică is the name of the Romanian feminine vampire,^[9] and strigoi is the Romanian male vampire.^[10] Both can scream loudly, especially when they become poltergeists - a trait they have in common with the banshees. Strigăt is also the Romanian name of the barn owl and of the death's-head hawkmoth.

See also

• Lamia
• Lilith
• Strigoi
• Vampires in popular culture#Strix
• Stirge

References

1. Greek-english lexicon compiled by Henry George Liddell, D. D. and Robert Scott D. D, 7th edition, New York, 1883, pag. 1439 and 1575.
2. Translation by Oliphant, pp. 133–134.
3. Pseudolus 819
4. Fasti, vi.101 ff.
5. Natural History xi.232
6. In the ancient world the bat was commonly classified as a bird; only Aristotle differed, considering it halfway between bird and land animal. See Oliphant, p. 134 n. 4.
7. Etymologiae book 12, ch. 7.42.
8. DEX Online
9. DEX Online
10. DEX Online

Bibliography

• Oliphant, Samuel Grant (1913). "The Story of the Strix: Ancient". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 44: 133–49. doi:10.2307/282549. JSTOR 282549.
• "Carna, Proca and the Strix on the Kalends of June", by Christopher Michael McDonough, in Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974–), Vol. 127. (1997), pp. 315–344.