Ligea_

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Ligea_
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

^ Hyginus , Fabulae Preface

^ Bane, Theresa (2013). Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology . McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers. p. 216. ISBN 9780786471119 .

^ Virgil , Georgics 4.336

^ Tzetzes , Chiliades 1.14 , line 339 & 348

^ Tzetzes, Chiliades 6.40

^ Lycophron , 720-726; Eustathius , l.c. cit.; Strabo , 5.246 & 252; Servius commentary on Virgil , Georgics 4.562; Tzetzes, Chiliades 1.14, line 337 & 6.40

^ Suida , s.v. Seirenas

^ Lycophron, 724


This article includes a list of Greek mythological figures with the same or similar names. If an internal link for a specific Greek mythology article referred you to this page, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended Greek mythology article, if one exists.
In Greek mythology , Ligeia or Ligia ( Ancient Greek : Λίγεια means "clear-toned" from ligeios ) may refer to two personages:



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‘Ligeia’ is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1838. Weaving together a number of Poe’s favourite themes and preoccupations, it’s an unsettling and ambiguous tale about love, beauty, death, resurrection, and drugs (yes, we’ll come to that). Poe also considered the story his favourite.
Before we proceed to a summary and analysis of this critically acclaimed and hotly discussed story, you can read ‘Ligeia’ here if you haven’t previously encountered this classic slice of Poe horror.
The story begins with the narrator describing a woman named Ligeia. Ligeia is beautiful, with dark hair and dark eyes, although she is described as being ‘slender’ and even ‘emaciated’. But she is also very intellectually gifted. The narrator’s memory is hazy concerning her family name and her history. Did he ever know those details? He cannot remember.
Eventually, the narrator married Ligeia. But she fell ill and died. The narrator moves from the Rhine to England, where he buys an abbey. He also starts to use opium. Soon after this, he remarries to a woman who is physically Ligeia’s opposite: a blonde-haired and blue-eyed woman, Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine. However, it is purely a marriage for money, it seems, and he quickly grows to detest his new bride.
Two months into their wedded life, Rowena falls ill, and although she seems to recover, she relapses one night. As she is about to faint, the narrator pours her some wine. He has been taking opium, and appears to see some drops of ruby fluid form in the air and fall into the goblet. He also thinks he sees some shadowy figure of ‘angelic aspect’ in the room.
Three days later, Rowena dies, and as the narrator keeps watch over her body, he seems to hear a sigh from the dead corpse, and a flush of colour return to his dead wife’s pale cheeks. However, this soon fades again, and he convinces himself he was mistaken.
But then, shortly after this, the corpse, wrapped in its funeral shroud, rises up and walks into the middle of the room. Rowena’s hair has transformed into the raven locks of the narrator’s first dead wife, Ligeia – and, indeed, to the narrator’s delight, the figure which stands before him is none other than Ligeia, supposedly back from the dead.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a pioneer of what we’d now call the ambiguous horror story, where the supernatural elements of the tale may actually be explained (or explained away) with a psychological explanation. As philosophers and psychologists became more interested in the underlying causes for hallucinations, so writers like Poe began to depict the blurred boundaries between drug-induced visions and supernatural sightings. Was a ghost really a ghost, or was it a figment of a troubled or unstable imagination?
This question applies to Poe’s ‘Ligeia’, as it does to a number of other Poe stories, perhaps most famously ‘ The Tell-Tale Heart ’. The first-person narration immediately restricts us to the unnamed narrator’s account of events, without the distancing and objectivity that an impersonal third-person narrator would provide. What’s more, the narrator is clearly a man of unstable moods who marries his second wife despite hating her, and who uses opium frequently.
Some critics and biographers have analysed ‘Ligeia’ in light of Poe’s childhood, especially the death of his mother when he was still an infant. People returning from the dead in Poe are sometimes a figure of horror (as in most ghost stories), but in ‘Ligeia’ the narrator is filled with joy when Ligeia returns (seemingly) from the dead and is resurrected from the dead body of Rowena. Is ‘Ligeia’ Poe’s attempt to ‘cheat’ death, to show the triumph of life over death in the figure of the revitalised Ligeia?
Perhaps. But the fact that this narrator is an unreliable narrator – he is addicted to the ‘shackles’ of opium, and by his own admission has a faulty memory – gives us pause:
There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact – never, I believe, noticed in the schools – that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
As he later confides, as Rowena lies dying, ‘Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me.’ This is not unlike the magic lantern or phantasmagoria (the forerunner to the later cinematograph) in which images would ‘flit’ quickly in sequence, generating the appearance of a moving image. Indeed, the word ‘phantasmagoric’ is important in ‘Ligeia’, and appears twice. The narrator tells us, shortly after he marries Rowena: ‘The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies – giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.’ And, later on, he refers again to the ‘phantasmagoric influences’ of this same strange bridal chamber. ‘Ligeia’ is, among other things, a story about the visual image, how our minds and our eyes play tricks on us. This should be borne in mind when attempting to decipher what happens at the end of the story.
Even the story’s epigraph is unreliably attributed to Joseph Glanvill (1636-80), an English writer and philosopher (the quotation which begins the story has not been found in any of Glanvill’s works). True, epigraphs are the work of the author rather than the fictional narrator of a story, but even here, Poe blurs the boundaries between himself and his unreliable narrator, by having that narrator quote the words from the epigraph in the story itself: ‘I bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in Glanvill –“Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”’
A summary of a classic Poe poem ‘To Helen’ is one of the most popular poems by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). It still regularly appears in some of the best poetry anthologies – though, confusingly, Poe went on to write another poem with the same title. The ‘To Helen’ we…
After ‘The Raven’, which is undoubtedly Poe’s most popular poem, ‘Annabel Lee’ is perhaps his next best-known and admired. ‘Annabel Lee’ has been called ‘the simplest and sweetest of [Edgar Allan Poe’s] ballads’ (by Poe’s biographer, George Edward Woodberry), but how ‘simple’ the poem is remains to be seen. Is…
A reading of an early detective story Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) often gets the credit for inventing the detective story. Although some earlier candidates have been proposed – such as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘Das Fräulein von Scuderi’ (1819), and ‘The Secret Cell’ (1837), written by Poe’s own publisher, William…
Thanks – excellent post. Harry Clarke’s celebrated illustrations of Poe’s tales are magnificent and well worth googling.
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aquiline: Curving like an eagle's beak, or resembling an eagle.
ardor: Extreme energy or vigor. Sexual excitement.
Ashtophet: Most likely refers to "Ashtoreth, the Phoenician and Egyptian goddess of love and fertility and "Tophet", a version of hell associated in the Old Testament with the Egyptian worship of Moloch.
Azrael: The "Angel of Death" in Moslem and Jewish legend. Azrael is also the name of Gargamel's cat in the 1981 animated series, "The Smurfs".
bedight: To dress or decorate especially in splendid or impressive attire.
benighted: lacking enlightenment or knowledge or culture; overtaken by the night.
castellated: Having battlements and high walls like a castle.
censer: A covered incense burner, usually swung from a chain at funerals or other religious ceremonies.
charnel: A building or chamber in which bodies or bones are deposited.
chrysalis: A pupa of a butterfly. A protecting covering. A sheltered state or stage of being or growth.
Cleomenes: Cleomenes III lived from about 260 to 219 BC He was king of Sparta from 235 to 222 BC Read More > Cleomenes is also a secondary character in "A Winter's Tale", a play by Shakespeare. Read More >
daughters of Delos: The three daughters of king Anius of Delos, Oeno (wine), Spermo (wheat) and Elais (oliveoil). Their grandfather was Dionysus, and he gave them the powers to change water into wine, grass into wheat and berries into olives. When the Greek fleet set out to make war in Troy, it was the daughters who stocked their ships. Agamemnon was so impressed with this that he kidnapped them. Dionysus saved them by turning them into white doves.
dotage: A condition of decay marked by decline of mental poise and alertness, usually attributed to old age.
Druidical: Like one of an ancient Celtic priesthood appearing as a magician or wizard.
effulgence: Brilliance, radiant splendor.
epithet: Expression. A characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing.
erudition: Learning; extensive knowledge acquired chiefly from books.
ethereal: Heavenly. Of or relating to the regions beyond the earth.
fathom: As a unit of measurement, a fathom is six feet. 15 fathoms = 90 feet 40 fathoms = 240 feet It also means, "to understand".
Homeric: Relating to, or characteristic of the Greek poet Homer, author of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Houri: One of the beautiful maidens that in Muslim belief live with the blessed in paradise. In general, a voluptuously beautiful young woman.
hyacinthine: Of the color of a hyacinth, either the gem or the flower. In the Odyssey, Homer wrote, "... she also made the hair grow thick on the top of his head, and flow down in curls like hyacinth blossoms..."
imbibed: Received into the mind and retained. Absorbed.
imbued: Infused. Permeated, as if with dye.
incipient: Beginning. Becoming apparent.
Joseph Glanvill: Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) was an English writer, philosopher, and clergyman. He wrote Sadducismus Triumphatus, which contained a valuable collection of seventeenth century folklore about witches. Read More >
Lady Rowena Trevanion: "Lady Rowena" was also a character in the book, Ivanhoe , by Sir Walter Scott in 1820. Poe writes, "Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine." In Disney's version of "Cinderella", Lady Tremaine is Cinderella's wicked stepmother. In the original version of Cinderella, written by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812, the stepmother does not have a name.
lambent: Flickering. Playing lightly on or over a surface.
Lord Verulam: One of the titles of Francis Bacon, born in London, 1561. He was a brilliant writer and philospher. He originated the saying, "Knowledge is Power". Bacon's actual quote, paraphrased by Poe in "Ligeia" is, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." Read More >
Luxor: The temple of Luxor was built in the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes by King Amenhotep III, 1390 BC. Today, the Luxor is a hotel and casino in Las Vegas that is shaped like a pyramid. The original Luxor temple in Egypt was not a pyramid. Read More >
Norman: A native or inhabitant of Normandy. One of the Scandinavian conquerors of Normandy in the 10th century.
Nourjahad: A reference to "The History of Nourjahad", written in 1767 by Frances Sheridan.
pall: A heavy cloth draped over a coffin; an overspreading element that produces an effect of gloom
palpably: Easily perceptible by the mind. Capable of being touched.
phantasmagoric: A constantly shifting complex succession of things seen or imagined. An exhibition or display of optical effects and illusions.
placid: Tranquil, gentle, quiet, or undisturbed.
Rhine: A river in Europe, flowing from Switzerland to the Netherlands, bordering Austria and Germany.
Saracenic: A member of a nomadic people of the deserts between Syria and Arabia. Arab.
sarcophagus: Coffin, particularly ones from ancient Egypt.
seraphs: An order of angels; The 6-winged angels standing in the presence of God.
transcendentalism: Philosophy that advocates that there is an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through a knowledgeable intuitive awareness that is conditional upon the individual. The concept emerged in New England in the early-to mid-nineteenth century (during Poe's lifetime).
verdant: Green in tint or color. Also, unripe in experience or judgment.
volition: The act of making a choice. The capability of conscious choice and decision and intention.
wan: Dim, faint, pallid, suggesting poor health.
well of Democritus: According to legend, the well of Democritus was bottomless. It should also be noted that Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates and Plato, is known for laying the foundation for the modern atomic theory, declaring that matter cannot be destroyed but merely changes from one form to another.
by Edgar Allan Poe (published 1838)

And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.
- Joseph Glanvill

I CANNOT, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine . Of her family --I have surely heard her speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia! Ligeia! in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone --by Ligeia --that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own --a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself --what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream --an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos . Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. "There is no exquisite beauty," says Bacon, Lord Verulam , speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion." Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity --although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed "exquisite," and felt that there was much of "strangeness" pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of "the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead --it was faultless --how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine! --the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet , " hyacinthine !" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose --and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline , the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly --the magnificent turn of the short upper lip --the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under --the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke --the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid , yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin --and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek --the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes , the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad . Yet it was only at intervals --in moments of intense excitement --that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty --in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps --the beauty of beings either above or apart from
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