Sirens in Plato

Some more on Odysseus and the Sirens. (Perhaps I should just send you a copy of Rahner’s article! Well, yes, but I’m quite enjoying digging the interesting bits out of it and, in fact, today’s post isn’t going to be a quotation from the article itself but a chunk of Plato’s Republic, which I looked up as a result of my reading.)

Rahner’s point is that, in pre-Christian mythology, the Sirens are sometimes seen as the guardians of divine wisdom. They are pretty much always dual in nature – destructive yet alluring – but the notion that their duality involves a combination of danger and something other than erotic allure is obviously very important for these more interesting Patristic interpretations. And one source of this idea is Plato. In the eschatological ‘Myth of Er’, which comes in the last book of the Republic, Plato describes the ‘spindle of necessity’ around which the eight circles of the universe turn:

The spindle turns on the knees of Necessity; and on the upper surface of each circle is a siren, who goes round with them, hymning a single tone or note. The eight together form one harmony; and round about, at equal intervals, there is another band, three in number, each sitting upon her throne: these are the Fates, daughters of Necessity, who are clothed in white robes and have chaplets upon their heads, Lachesis and Clotho and Atropos, who accompany with their voices the harmony of the sirens – Lachesis singing of the past, Clotho of the present, Atropos of the future; Clotho from time to time assisting with a touch of her right hand the revolution of the outer circle of the whorl or spindle, and Atropos with her left hand touching and guiding the inner ones, and Lachesis laying hold of either in turn, first with one hand and then with the other. (Republic 617 B)

As Rahner puts it: ‘The Sirens ultimately thus become angels who help the soul in its ascent to God. An eloquent fragment of Euripides has been preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria: “And now golden wings are laid upon my back and the sweet soles of the Sirens. I rise up into the heights of the aether to become the companion of Zeus” (Stromata IV, 26, 172, I). So, in Plato, the Sirens are both chthonic deities associated with the underworld and heavenly beings that sing the music of the spheres – strange, no?