10 Years After

Surfin' Dead
Wednesday in Spanish the class watched a National Geographic movie about Mexico. That'd be great except we have a test on Monday and I feel like I wasted time that could have been more constructively used. I'm sure that there are students in the class glad that lame movies are watched, classes are cancelled, etc. However, I'm in the class to learn the language so that I can take three more semesters in order to graduate. So frustrating. At least we are scheduled to do a review for the test today.

In British Literature I turned in my essay on Wordsworth's philosphy of Nature. It was to be a four page paper, but turned out to be 6. I had a lot of information to discuss so hopefully its organization is lucid. In class we completed out discussion of Christabel and then rushed through the remaining few STC poems. While reading Christabel I picked up on the references to Geraldine being a vampire, as well as the images comparing her to a snake. However, I hadn't heard of a Lamia and didn't recognize her from Greek mythology. The instructor told us that these were mythological creatures that were half-human and half-snake. Ah, I remembered such creatures from my AD&D day, only they were called Naga. So, I thought I would put something down here after I did a few quick searches. Below is a compsite of stuff about Naga, Vampires, and Lamia : -

Naga is one of a handful of rare words surviving the loss of the first universal language. The word Naga is rooted in Sanskrit and means "Serpent". In the East Indian pantheon it is connected with the Serpent Spirit and the Dragon Spirit. It has an quivalency to the Burmese Nats, or god-serpents. In the Esoteric Tradition it is synonymous for Adepts, or Initiates. In India and Egypt, and even in Central and South America, the Naga stands for one who is wise. In Buddhism, wisdom has always been tied, symbollically, to the figure of the Serpent. In the Western Tradition it can be found as used by the Christ in the Gospel of Saint Matthew (x.16), "Be ye therefore as serpents, and harmless as doves."

Nobody knows when the first vampiric figures were conceived, but they date back at least 4,000 years, to the ancient Assyrians and Babylonians of Mesopotamia. Mesopotamians feared Lamastu (also spelled Lamashtu), a vicious demon goddess who preyed on humans. In Assyrian legend, Lamastu, the daughter of sky god Anu, would creep into a house at night and steal or kill babies, either in their cribs or in the womb (sudden infant death syndrome and miscarriage were generally attributed to this figure).

Lamastu, which translates to "she who erases," would also prey on adults, bringing disease, sterility and nightmares and sucking the blood from young men. She is often depicted with wings and birdlike talons, and sometimes with the head of a lion. To protect themselves from Lamastu, pregnant women would wear amulets depicting Pazuzu, another evil god who once defeated the demoness.

The ancient Greeks believed in the strigoe or lamiae, who were monsters who ate children and drank their blood. In one version of the legend, Lamia was one of Zeus' mortal lovers. Filled with anger and jealousy, Zeus' wife, the goddess Hera, made Lamia insane so she would eat all her children. Once Lamia realized what she had done, she became so angry that she turned into an immortal monster, a demoness with the head and torso of a woman and the lower body of a snake, sucking the blood from young children out of jealousy for their mothers.

A tale known by both the Greeks and Romans, for example, concerns the wedding of a young man named Menippus. At the wedding a guest, who was a noted philosopher called Apollonius of Tyana, carefully observed the bride, who was said to be beautiful. Apollonius finally accused the wife of being a vampire, and according to the story (as it was later told by a scholar named Philostratus in the first century A.D.) the wife confessed to vampirism. Allegedly she was planning to marry Menippus merely to have him handy as a source of fresh blood to drink.