Sarah Clegg – Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi

Sarah Clegg – Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi

But when we return 4,000 years, the roots of these demons lie in horrific creatures like Lamashtu, a lion-headed Mesopotamian demon who strangled infants and murdered pregnant ladies, and Gello, a virgin ghost of historic Greece who killed expectant moms and infants out of jealousy. Removed from engaging males into hazard and destruction, these monsters had been half of ladies’s ritual practices surrounding childbirth and being pregnant.

So how did their mythology evolve into one centered on the seduction of males?
Sarah Clegg takes us on an absorbing and witty journey from historic Mesopotamia to the current day, encountering a large number of serpentine succubi, a toddler-consuming wolf-monster of historic Greece, the Queen of Sheba and a bunch of vampires. Clegg exhibits how these demons had been appropriated by male-centred societies, earlier than they had been finally recast as symbols of ladies’s liberation, providing new insights into attitudes in the direction of womanhood, sexuality and ladies’s rights.