Sirens: The Enchantresses of the Deep, Call of the Soul
*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...