Biblical Sirens: Job 30, 29-30

So, the first passage in the Septuagint to mention Sirens is in the book of Job (30, 29-30). This is Rahner's version of the text:

I am a brother to sirens
and a companion of ostriches.
My skin is black and falleth from me
and my bones are burned with heat.

Here Job is lamenting the afflictions he has suffered and the terms he uses suggest that his estrangement from God is a figurative exile in the desert. I notice that in the King James translation, we have 'a brother to owls', and in the Latin Vulgate, 'frater ... draconum'. The relevant phrase in Greek is:

I've mentioned Job on this blog before. It was when Gilfillan was writing about the shape of Lake Itasca and suggesting that it was an image of the Trinity, written into the heart of the North American continent. The quotation he uses comes from Job 19, 24 and my post is here.

Sirens in the Bible (oh yes!)

Having discussed the dual nature of the Sirens in Greek mythology, Hugo Rahner goes on to talk about the use of the word seirēnes in the Septuagint:

The reason why the symbolism developed around these figures continued for so long a period of time to be a living influence was that, when reading the Scriptures in his own tongue, the Greek Christian could find certain words there which acted as entry ports through which the imagery of profane mythology merged with the Christian interpretation of the Bible.

The Alexandrine translators who produced the Septuagint found six places in the ancient Hebrew books where there was a mention of mysterious beasts referred to as tannîm and benôt and ya'anâh, terms which mean literally "jackals" or "hen ostriches". They render these words by the
Greek Seirēnes (Sirens). What inspired this gross but most interesting mistranslation in the minds of these Hellenistic translators is a mystery which has hitherto remained unsolved. The result, however, is plain enough: for over a thousand years Greek Christians read the word "Sirens" in the passages concerned, and the association of ideas connected with these mystical beings, so universally familiar in the folk-lore of antiquity, was sufficiently strong to arouse in the Christian Greek much the same horror that these deadly creatures had inspired in pagan forerunners and contemporaries.

So, where do these mentions of Sirens appear? More on that later, but - by way of preview - we need to look at the books of Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah.

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?

kaimos

Hello there - I've been listening to Kaimos and I have to say that I like both versions. (It's a beautiful text, by the way! There's something about Halepas' reply that sounds rhetorical in a rather classical sense - echoes of a very long history! ) For me, though, I think that the text works best when it feels less 'performed'. I'm not sure I can articulate this very well but I guess I prefer the opening of the second version, where the words are spoken aloud rather than whispered, and that's something to do with the fact that there is already enough drama in the interaction of voice and music. And I also like the second half of the first version, where the repetition of the text happens at wider intervals because, again, it sounds less as if the voice is working towards a climax.

But, even as I'm writing this, I'm imagining a version in which the whispering from version 1 is followed by the three closely placed utterances of version 2 - it would be a more 'theatrical' presentation of the text but that might cohere with the rhetorical quality I mentioned before. And, actually, that might have an interesting effect on how the music is heard, framing it rather than drifting over it. Yes, actually I'm erring a little on this side!

Clement on Odysseus

Following on from yesterday's post, this is a passage (quoted by Rahner) in which Clement of Alexandria develops his interpretation of the story of the Sirens. It is from Stromata, II, 89, I. (Where Rahner cites a Greek term, I've transliterated it because I can't get my Greek font to work in Blogger.)

It seems to me, that most of those who subscribe to the name of Christian are like the companions of Odysseus; for they approach our doctrine (logos) without any sense for a high culture. It is not so much the Sirens that they sail past and put behind them as the rhythms and melodies (of the genius of Greece). They stop their ears by their rejection of learning (amathia) because they would never find their way home again once they had opened those ears to the wisdom of Greece (hellenikois mathemasin). Yet he who seeks to choose what is serviceable in all that for the instruction of catechumens - especially since many of these are Greeks (for the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof) - should in no wise turn aside from the love of wisdom (philomathia) like a beast without reason. On the contrary he should make a kind of beggar's collection (eranisteon) - and that on as liberal a scale as he can - of helpful thoughts (from the wisdom of the Greeks). All that we must guard against is that we should dally there and go no further instead of returning home again to the true philosophy.

Rahner helpfully provides a gloss of the term eranisteon, which - he says - 'suggests the practice according to which a group of friends would arrange a feast, each friend making a contribution'.

Odyssey XII 53-60

This is the section of Odyssey XII where Circe tells Odysseus how to protect himself from the Sirens:

And this is Robert Fagles' translation of the passage:

Race straight past that coast! Soften some beeswax
and stop your shipmates' ears so none can hear,
none of the crew, but if you are bent on hearing,
have them tie you hand and foot in the swift ship,
erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast
so you can hear the Sirens' song to your heart's content.
But if you plead, commanding your men to set you free,
then they must lash you faster, rope on rope.

Odysseus and the Sirens

When I was writing about the notion of exile as a kind of ideal, I posted here about Christian appropriations of the story of Odysseus/Ulysses and I mentioned an essay by Hugo Rahner on this topic. I've recently been looking at Rahner's book, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery and, as a result, I'm becoming more and more interested in the Odyssey and its interpreters. It seems that the legend of Odysseus' encounter with the sirens is particularly important in this context. This did emerge in the paragraph from Gerhart Ladner's article that I quoted in the earlier post:

[T]he Christian stranger on earth, the peregrinus, could be said to travel through strange and awesome seas in a ship, which is the Church, affixed to the mast of the Cross, absorbing the sweet and far from meaningless Siren songs of the world, without being deflected from the right course.

But Ladner's comment misses out one very significant aspect of the story: the fact that Odysseus had his men fill their ears with wax so that they couldn't hear the voices of the sirens, whereas he himself chose to experience their voices while having himself tied to the mast so that he could not act upon his desire to succumb to them. Rahner cites Clement of Alexandria as an example of someone who places importance on this aspect of the myth:

There is a passage in the writings of Clement that has considerable relevance here and is indeed of the utmost importance for the whole history of Christian humanism. In it the writer seeks to defend his own breadth and generosity of mind against the more narrow-minded Christians of the day and his conviction that Greek culture should in no wise be denied a place within the Christian scheme. The incident of Odysseus and the Sirens proves an apt text for his discourse. Certain kinds of petty and hypercritical Christians, he avers, are like the companions of Odysseus who stop their ears with wax in order not to succumb to the sweet peril of the Sirens. Odysseus had been a different kind of man. Knowingly and with his ears open, he had approached the Siren's isle without yielding to its temptation.

There is something about this that I like. Indeed, from our perspective, I really LOVE the fact that this is a myth about VOICES and how we might respond to them.