Mar 28, 2021

Are witches insatiable birds descended from harpies?

These are insatiable birds, not the harpies that deprived

     Phineas of his feasts, although it is from them that they descend: 

Their heads are large, their eyes unblinking, their beaks made for hunting; 

    Their wings are white, their talons hooked, 

At night they fly and seek out children separated from their nurses 

    To snatch them from their cradles and rend their bodies; 

They are said to tear out children’s milky entrails with their beaks 

    And fill their gullets with the blood they have drunk. 

There is a name for those birds–striges–so called 

    Because of their strident shrieking in the night. 

Whether therefore they are born birds, or are made such by enchantment 

    And are nothing but women transformed into fowls by a Marsian spell.


                           from Ovid's Fasti

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