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Dark as the rose’s thorn.

Louise Bogan, “After the Persian,” from The Blue Estuaries: Poems 

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Into the Lake of Evil

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"SHEEP AND HOUSE" (MENDOCINO COAST) ANSEL ADAMS // CALIFORNIA, circa 1962 [gelatin silver print | 10 5/8 x 10 3/4"]

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Most cultures have a female monster who preys on pregnant women, fetuses, newborns, and children. It's a near-universal nightmare: the creature who rips babies from the womb or steals them from the cradle. her name is Abyzou, Penanggalan, Lamashtu, La Llorona. Her purpose is sometimes to scare children into compliance, but it's often to scare women into compliance as well. Only monsters stand in the way of the natural order: women as incubators, as conduits for birth. In ancient Greece, the baby stealer's name was Lamia. The myths agree on her name, and her role as a murderer of children, and that's about it. Her backstory and her appearance vary almost psychedelically from story to story. In some, she is a sea monster; her name is the ancient Greek for a rogue shark. In others, she is half-woman, half-snake -- or, as in Keats's poem "Lamia," a multicolored snake with a woman's mouth. In some, she is even plural: the Lamiae, a swarm of vampiric demons. She also appears in a seventeenth-century bestiary with a woman's face and breasts, a four-legged body, front paws, back hooves, scales, and a penis and testicles. Unlike so many of her sister monsters -- snake-haired Medusa, lion-bodied Sphinx -- the important feature of Lamia is not what she looks like, but what she does. The fear of the monstrous mother can have many faces, many forms.

Zimmerman, Jess. Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.

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Agnes Sewell. possibly ca. 1800. Credit line: Gift of Elise Shackelford Black, 1945 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436635

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Ada Limón, from “Sometimes I Think My Body Leaves a Shape in the Air”, The Carrying: Poems

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©Philomena Famulok

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Chimera's multiplicity outlives her because, unlike the other hybrid monsters of antiquity, she's not simply an agglomeration of fearsome beasts, lion and eagle and serpent and man. That kind of multiplicity makes sense: double a monster's terrible strength by grafting two powerful creatures together. And yet, here's the goat: practical, simple, domestic, content. Wild goats do exist, but the ancient Greeks would have been well acquainted with the goat as a reliable farm staple; other goats in mythology include Amalthea, the nanny goat who acted as a literal nanny to the god Zeus when he was an infant, nursing him on her milk and keeping him safe from his vengeful father. The goat doesn't strengthen the lion or the snake -- in fact, she's as vulnerable to them as a man might be. What she adds is not new strength, but another kind of fearsomeness: the fear of the irreducible, of the unpredictable. We are suspicious of a creature so vast and multifarious that it can even contain its own contradictions.

Zimmerman, Jess. Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology. Beacon Press, 2021.

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Carol Kane photographed by Robert Royal on the set of "La Sabina" in Madrid, Spain. 1979.

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Bob Kaufman, Darkwalking Endlessly

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