Whose Strange Stories? P'u Sung-ling (1640 - East Asian History

WHOSE STRANGE STORIES?
Philostratus, in his fourth book de Vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance
in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man
twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such
a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which, taking him by the hand,
carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she
was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tany with her, he should hear her
sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should
molest him; but she, being fair and lovely, would live and die with him, that
was fair and lovely to behold. The young man, a philosopher, otherwise staid
and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this oflove, tarried with
her a while to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding,
amongst other guests, came Apollonius: who, by some probable conjectures,
found her out to be a serpent, a lamia; and that all her furniture was, like
Tantalus' gold, described by Homer, no substance but mere illusions. When
she saw herself thus descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent,
but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was
in it, vanished in an instant: many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was
done in the midst of Greece.
The contemporary writer A. S. Byatt reminds us
of the rich Western tradition of spectral seduction in
her novel Possession, purporting to quote Paracelsus:
The Melusinas are daughters of kings, desperate
through their sins. Satan bore them away and
transformed then into spectres, into evil spirits, into
horrible revenants and frightful monsters. It is
thought they live without rational souls in fantastic
bodies, that they are nourished by the mere elements,
and at the final Judgment will pass away with these,
unless they may be married to a man. In this case,
by virtue of this union, they may die a natural death,
as they may have lived a natural life, in their marriage.
Of these spectres it is believed that they abound in
deserts, in forests, in ruins and tombs, in empty
vaults, and by the shores of the sea .. . . 19
The late nineteenth-century essayist, translator
and poet John Addington Symonds (1840-93) effectually
evokes the image of the nympholept in his
three-stanza poem, "Le Jeune Homme Caressant Sa
Chimere-For An Intaglio-," which portrays the
young man possessed, haunted by the winged,
serpentine delusion of passion:
years mid myrtle-boughs
love-languid on a morn of May,
Watch'd half-asleep his goats
insatiate browse
Thin shoots of thyme and lentisk,
by the spray
Of biting sea-winds bitter
made and grey:
Therewith when shadows fell,
his waking thought
Of love into a wondrous dream
was wrought.
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