Mythical creatures: Harpy

The harpy, the name conjures up pictures of flying woman covered in slime punishing the old and infirm. That image is possibly due to the film Clash of the Titans that I saw when I was growing up but since then the media has always portrayed these creatures as old, ugly and wicked. 

Role playing games haven’t helped either with harpies being shown as invariably evil. Are these facts based on real life myth?

The name harpy is literally translated as “that which snatches” and according to Greek myth, there were originally three harpy sisters who were given birth to by Electra, an oceanid or sea nymph who in turn was the daughter of Oceanus, a Greek sea god. 

By this route they were at the very least divine in nature. This divinity can be seen in the way that they can fly. Originally they could assume both a winged human form and a bird form but that seems to have become blurred down the ages. Since they were divine progeny, this ability to take two forms was not seen as unusual. 

They also seemed to have been beautiful at one point since Hesiod called them “lovely haired creatures” in his theogony. One of the harpy sisters, Celaeno, even becomes the lover of the west wind Zephyrus and bears him the winged horse Pegasus, so we can assume that originally these creatures where not the slime ridden harridans that they eventually became.  

The three harpy sisters were Aello (storm swift), Celaeno (the dark) and Ocypete (swift wing). Their principal duty was to kidnap and punish people on their way to Tartarus, so they seemed to be instruments of vengeance and punishment. Not a nice duty but one which the kindest of gods have had to do throughout mythical tales. 

It was however the tale of Phineas the king of Thrace where we get today’s idea of how harpies look and behave. Phineas was blessed with the gift of prophecy but he angered Zeus, king of the gods, by revealing too much about the future. 

Zeus punished him by blinding and imprisonment on an island. Everyday a huge table of food would appear but before Phineas could reach and eat anything, the harpies would swoop down and snatch the food away and befoul what they couldn’t take. It wasn’t until the arrival of Jason and his Argonauts that they were driven away.

Even in this tale they where agents of punishment but it was here, that they became a little less than beautiful and a little more evil. Dante in his inferno places harpies on the second level of hell in a wood full of suicides. 

This was taken up as a motif by the painter William Blake in his picture “the wood of the self murderers”.  This trend has continued pretty much unabated and today the harpy is a picture of evil, something that should be killed.

Like so many mythical creatures, the harpies started out as a part of the Greek myth world. Used as agents of punishment they kept the wicked in check but thanks to the media and losing these tales down the ages, they have been turned into something to be feared and reviled.