Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Where the Rhine narrows below Sankt Goarshausen, the river makes its deepest and most treacherous passage: a channel once split by reefs and whirled by crosscurrents, overhung by a colossal slate cliff more than a hundred meters high. The boatmen of the old river feared the place doubly—for its water and for its voice, since the rock returns a manifold echo , and the murmur of a hidden waterfall once threaded through it, so that the cliff itself seemed to speak. Its name is the Lorelei : from lureln , to murmur, and lei , the old word for slate rock—"the murmuring stone." And upon that murmuring stone, the legend seats a maiden: golden-haired, golden-combed, singing at dusk high above the water, so that the boatmen look up, and looking up, forget the reef, and the Rhine keeps what the song has caught. She has been called the German siren, and the label is almost right and completely insufficient—for the Lorelei is that rarest of legendary beings, a phantom whose birth certif...

*The Mermaid* by Howard Pyle (1910) — the siren in her evolved form, calling from the liminal boundary between sea and shore. There is a music that calls to the depths of the human soul — a music that promises everything, that seems to contain within itself the fulfillment of every longing, the resolution of every sorrow. The Greeks gave this music a source, and a face: the Sirens , those extraordinary beings who sang from their rocky island in the Odyssey, whose voices carried across the sea to draw sailors from their course toward a beautiful death on the rocks. Every sailor who heard them and did not resist was destroyed. And yet Odysseus — bound to his mast, ears of his crew stopped with wax — heard their song and lived, and became perhaps the only mortal in all of mythology to know the full content of what the Sirens called out to the human heart. The Sirens are one of the most complex and symbolically rich creatures in the mythological tradition — complex partly because the...