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THE ENGLISH REVIEW
Parthenope dead ? Who, then, is Santa Lucia ? The madonnas
of Naples are all sea-queens whose crowns shine with a borrowed
lustre ; the Madonna della Libera, the Stella di Mare—they
are all re-incarnations of antique shapes, of the Sirens, of Leucothea,
Euploia and the Nereids, and their cult to this day is pagan
rather than Christian. You will not find such saints in Tuscany.
A large Siren literature has sprung up within recent times.
But I would still like to see a book which should develop the
idea as a whole, tracing their genealogy from birth through all
the changes of character they have undergone since ancient
days—a book which might be entitled Les Sirenes a travers les
slides (why does it sound better in French ?), and which would
afford an interesting measure of the corresponding state of the
human intelligence. For we create our gods in our own likeness.
There is an imp of the imagination called the familiar spirit
or guardian angel, who often runs parallel to these eerie waterladies.
Like the Sirens that occur everywhere—in Chinese
and Saxon tradition, in Brazil and in the grey-green reaches of
Polar seas, the attendant demon is of animistic growth, springing
up, independently, in Burma, among the old Irish, the Esquimaux,
the Chilians.
Our particular Sirens are probably of Phoenician origin,
while our particular guardian angels come from the Chaldeans.
The crystal spaces of their aether were alive with fluttering divas
who grew in holiness as they receded from earth ; Hellenic
and Roman culture took them over from direct contact with
the East, but Christian Europe received them indirectly as a
legacy from the Jews, who had imbibed this poetic demonology
during their Babylonian sorrows and had enriched their sacred
books with these terrible and lovely creatures of air, which the
Gnostics and Sabaeans elaborated into a glittering hierarchy.
So the seven planetary spirits of Persian mythology melted into
the seven archangels of Cabalistic dreamings ; but our ideas
of ordinary ones, of winged forms intermediate between God
and man, are purely Chaldean. Christians were actually
forbidden by the Council of Laodicea to call upon the angels,
and it was not till the second Council of Nicea that this " idolatrous
practice" was sanctioned; Byzance gave them loving
attention ; Byzance, indeed, rather than Rome, is the mother
of angiolatry.
Even as the Sirens soon took on fixed aesthetic attributes,
so the guardian angel was early installed in his moral functions.
Every man had his own, angels and gods likewise ; the graves
of the dead likewise, the high divinities were sometimes pleased
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