Strix (mythology) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Strix was the Ancient Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

and Greek word for owl. In folklore it was considered a bird of ill omen that fed on human flesh and blood, a product of metamorphosis

Shapeshifting

Shapeshifting is a common theme in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales. It is also found in epic poems, science fiction literature, fantasy literature, children's literature, Shakespearean comedy, ballet, film, television, comics, and video games...

. The name is Greek in origin and means "owl

Owl

Owls are a group of birds that belong to the order Strigiformes, constituting 200 bird of prey species. Most are solitary and nocturnal, with some exceptions . Owls hunt mostly small mammals, insects, and other birds, although a few species specialize in hunting fish...

" (the name of the genus Strix
Strix (genus)
Strix is a genus of owls. They belong to the typical owl family Strigidae, one of the two generally accepted living families of owls, with the other being the barn-owls . Common names are earless owls or wood owls though they are not the only owls without ear tufts, and "wood owl" is also used as a...

follows this meaning).

Classical stories

The earliest recorded tale of the strix is from the lost Ornithologia of the Greek author Boios

Boios

The obscure Boios , Latinized Boeus, was a Greek grammarian and mythographer, remembered chiefly as the author of a lost work on the transformations of mythic figures into birds, his Ornithogonia, which was translated into Latin by Aemilius Macer, a friend of Ovid, who was the author of the most...

, which is partially preserved in Antoninus Liberalis

Antoninus Liberalis

Antoninus Liberalis was an Ancient Greek grammarian who probably flourished between AD 100 and 300.His only surviving work is the Metamorphoses, , a collection of forty-one very briefly summarised tales about mythical metamorphoses effected by offended deities, unique in that they are...

's Metamorphoses. This tells the story of Polyphonte

Polyphonte

Polyphonte was a woman in Greek Mythology who worshipped Aphrodite until she was ordered by the goddess to fall in love. Afraid, Polyphonte became a chaste follower of Artemis. Aphrodite angrily made the woman fall in love with a bear, resulting in Artemis' hatred, and the birth of two half-bear,...

and her two sons Agrios and Oreios
(their father being a wild bear), who were punished for their cannibalism, like Lycaon, by being transformed into wild animals. Polyphonte became a strix "that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men". The first Latin allusion is in Plautus

Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus...

's Pseudolus
Pseudolus
Pseudolus is a play by the ancient Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. It is one of the earliest examples of Roman literature. The play begins with the shortest prologue of any of the known plays of Plautus, though it is not known whether Plautus wrote this prologue himself or if it was added...

, dated to 191 BC

191 BC

Year 191 BC was a year of the pre-Julian Roman calendar. At the time it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Nasica and Glabrio...

, in which a cook, describing the cuisine of his inferiors, compares its action to that of the striges—i.e., disemboweling a hapless victim. Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

, in his Epodes, makes the strix's magical properties clear: its feathers are an ingredient in a love potion. Seneca the Younger

Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...

, in his Hercules Furens
Hercules Furens
Hercules Furens can refer to:*Herakles , also called Hercules Furens*Hercules Furens, a play by Seneca the Younger...

, shows the striges dwelling on the outskirts of Tartarus

Tartarus

In classic mythology, below Uranus , Gaia , and Pontus is Tartarus, or Tartaros . It is a deep, gloomy place, a pit, or an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering that resides beneath the underworld. In the Gorgias, Plato In classic mythology, below Uranus (sky), Gaia (earth), and Pontus...

. Ovid

Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...

tells the story of striges attacking the legendary king Procas

Procas

Procas or Proca was one of the Latin kings of Alba Longa in the mythic tradition of the founding of Rome. He was the father of Amulius and Numitor.-The name:...

in his cradle, and how they were warded off with arbutus

Arbutus

Arbutus is a genus of at least 14 species of flowering plants in the family Ericaceae, native to warm temperate regions of the Mediterranean, western Europe, and North America.-Description:...

and placated with the meat of pigs, as an explanation for the custom of eating beans and bacon on the Kalends

Kalends

The Calends , correspond to the first days of each month of the Roman calendar. The Romans assigned these calends to the first day of the month, signifying the start of the new moon cycle...

of June.

Though descriptions abound, the concept of the strix was nonetheless vague. Pliny

Pliny the Elder

Gaius Plinius Secundus , better known as Pliny the Elder, was a Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher, as well as naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and personal friend of the emperor Vespasian...

, in his Natural History, confesses little knowledge of them; he knows that their name was once used as a curse, but beyond that he can only aver that the tales of them nursing their young must be false, since no bird except the bat

Bat

Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera "hand" and pteron "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly,...

suckled its children.

Medieval

The legend of the strix survived into the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, as recorded in Isidore

Isidore of Seville

Saint Isidore of Seville served as Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and is considered, as the historian Montalembert put it in an oft-quoted phrase, "le dernier savant du monde ancien"...

's Etymologiae
Etymologiae
Etymologiae is an encyclopedia compiled by Isidore of Seville towards the end of his life. It forms a bridge between a condensed epitome of classical learning at the close of Late Antiquity and the inheritance received, in large part through Isidore's work, by the early Middle Ages...

, and gave both name and attributes to the strigă—the name of a Romanian imaginary evil feminine being (also the name of the Common Barn Owl and of the Death's-head Hawkmoth

Death's-head Hawkmoth

The name Death's-head Hawkmoth refers to any one of the three species of moth in the genus Acherontia. The former species is primarily found in Europe, the latter two are Asian, and most uses of the common name refer to the European species...

), strigoaică—the name of the Romanian witch, strigoi
Strigoi
In Romanian mythology, strigoi are the troubled souls of the dead rising from the grave. Some strigoi can be living people with certain magical properties. Some of the properties of the strigoi include: the ability to transform into an animal, invisibility, and the propensity to drain the vitality...

—the Romanian vampire, and to the strega
Stregheria
Stregheria is a form of ethnic Italian form of Wicca originating in the United States, popularized by Raven Grimassi since the 1980s. Stregheria is sometimes referred to as La Vecchia Religione The word stregheria is an archaic Italian word for "witchcraft", the modern Italian word being...

, the Italian witch. The Romanian striga was further borrowed into Albanian (shtriga

Shtriga

The Shtriga , in Albanian folklore, was a vampiric witch that would suck the blood of infants at night while they slept, and would then turn into a flying insect...

) (via Macedo-Romanians) and Polish Strzyga

Strzyga

-Origin::According to Aleksander Brückner, the word is derived from Strix. Compare with Strigoi a female demon with bird's claws who feeds on human blood...

(via Gorals

Gorals

The Gorale are a group of indigenous people found along southern Poland, northern Slovakia, and in the region of Cieszyn Silesia in the Czech Republic...

) or Slovak Striga - a word for both fairy tale (Jezibaba, Yaga Baba) and real village witch.

Classical stories

Medieval

See also