The snake-vampire in Keats's LamiaThe origin of the myth of the lamia lies in one of Zeus' love stories. Olympus falls in love with Lamia, queen of Libya, which for the Greeks was the entire African continent. When Hera discovers their love, she destroys each of Lamia's children at birth. In her misery, Lamia retreats to the rocks and caves of the sea coast, where she preys on the children of other women, eating them and sucking their blood. To reward his lover, Zeus gives her the power to change shape. Perhaps as a reflection of this versatility, the monstrous lamia race of Africa are composite beings, with the heads and breasts of women, but the bodies of serpents. In this first incarnation, Lamia is a cannibal and a bloodsucker. Lamia's position in the myth is clearly that of an outcast. She is a jilted lover, non-Greek, and violator of the near-universal taboo against eating human flesh. However, the fact that he takes on this role out of anguish over the loss of his children does not arouse sympathy. Lamias later become more closely associated with vampires who return from the grave to suck the blood of the living. Since no community tolerates vampires, such a creature is otherness or difference personified. Other female mythical figures show affiliations with the lamia and her vampirism: the deadly femme fatale, the goddess who offers the hero a paradise of ease and immortality, and the female monster, sometimes visibly hideous, sometimes seemingly benign, who hides in the cliffs (Skylla), under the waters (Kharybdis) and on the rocks (Sirene). Homer's Odyssey conveniently provides us with examples of all these women. The deadly femme fatale, represented in the center of the card...uncongenial, wants to transform Keats from romantic to Victorian. Works Cited1. Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks (London: Thames, 1992), 38-40.2. All Homer quotations are from Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's Odyssey (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).3. I am indebted to Barbara Fass and her book, La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1974), for help in deciding how to classify female temptresses. A subcategory of the enchantress is the "foul lady", who possesses the knowledge the hero needs (like the old woman in the Wife of Bath's Tale) or who can sometimes be seen to resemble the female monster in all her ugliness (like Duessa in The Fairy Queen).4. F. C. Conybeare, trans., Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Cambridge: Harvard U. P.., 196