Details
Region Additional (if applicable)
Greek
Region
Category
Spirit
Gender
Female
Time Period
c. 5th century BCE (Aristophanes' Frogs, 405 BCE); folk belief likely older
Symbol
Donkey Leg & Claw
Tags
greek, empusa, hecate, spectre, shape-shifter, aristophanes, crossroads, monster
Introduction
Empusa is the shape-shifting spectre of Greek mythology, the phantom servant of Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft and the crossroads, sent to terrify travellers on the roads by night. She is the monster of the mismatched legs: one of bronze, and the other of an ass or of dung, a detail so absurd that only the Greeks could have made it frightening. She is the apparition who ambushed the god Dionysus himself on his journey to the underworld in Aristophanes' comedy Frogs, melting before the audience's eyes from ox to mule to beautiful woman to dog, while the terrified god begged his own priest for protection. She is the mother of a whole brood, the empousai, vampiric she-demons with flaming hair who seduced handsome young men in order to drain them of blood and life. She is the phantom that the wandering sage Apollonius of Tyana shouted down on the banks of the river Indus, driving it shrieking into the dark with a storm of curses. And she is a fright that has never quite gone away, from the insults of Athenian politicians to the monster pages of the Percy Jackson novels, where her flaming daughters still hunt young heroes.
Gallery
Empusa the demon goddess depicted as a vampiric seductress and also as a demonic being with donkey leg.
Who or What was...
Empusa
Empusa belonged to the court of Hecate, the torch-bearing goddess of crossroads, ghosts and sorcery, who walked the night with packs of baying hounds and a retinue of restless spectres. Among these Empusa was the most feared: not a goddess, not a ghost of any dead person, but a phasma, a pure apparition, a thing whose whole nature was to appear. She had no fixed shape because her shape was never the point; her power was transformation itself, and she shifted from form to form, beast to woman to monster, faster than the eye could settle. Ancient commentators explained her name as the One-Footed, and her feet were her signature: one leg was made of bronze, flashing like a sword in the dark, and the other, depending on who told the tale, was the leg of an ass or a lump of dung, a grotesque joke that somehow made her worse. She waited where Hecate ruled, at crossroads and lonely stretches of road after nightfall, and she came for travellers who walked alone.
Her most famous appearance is the funniest scene of terror in all ancient literature. In 405 BCE the comic playwright Aristophanes of Athens staged his masterpiece Frogs, in which Dionysus, the god of wine and theatre, despairing of the city's tragedians, disguises himself as the hero Heracles, the one man who had gone to the underworld and returned, and journeys down to the land of the dead to fetch back the playwright Euripides. With him goes his smart-mouthed slave Xanthias, and after crossing the lake of the dead on the ferry of Charon, the gaunt boatman of the underworld, master and servant hear a sound and see a light. Xanthias describes the thing coming towards them: an enormous beast that will not hold its shape, an ox, then a mule, then a beautiful woman. Dionysus perks up and wants to run to meet her, but Xanthias calls back that now she is a dog, and the god groans the name the audience has been waiting for: Empousa. Worse follows. Her face is on fire, and one of her legs is bronze, and the other, Xanthias swears, is made of dung. The brave god of theatre, dressed as the bravest hero in Greece, is so frightened that he turns to the front row of the audience and begs the priest of Dionysus, whose seat of honour stood there at every performance, to protect him, breaking the fourth wall a full two thousand years before the term existed. The phantom vanishes in a blaze of light, and the road to the underworld is safe again, at least from her.
The sage Apollonius of Tyana, the wandering wonder-worker of the first century CE whose life was written by the biographer Philostratus, met her kin on the far side of the world. Travelling with his companions along the river Indus in India, the party saw a phantom drifting near their camp, changing shape and gliding closer, and his companions froze in dread. Apollonius knew the old remedy: spectres of this kind cannot bear abuse. He loosed a stream of curses at the thing and told his companions to curse it too, and the empousa fled shrieking into the night as such phantoms do. The Greeks also knew her daughters, the empousai, she-demons of the roads and cemeteries who shared the bronze leg and the flaming hair of their mother and added a worse habit: they took the shape of beautiful women, seduced young men in the dark, and drank their blood and life away drop by drop, cousins in appetite to the child-devouring Lamia.
In the everyday life of Greece, Empusa's name was a household word for fright. Mothers used her as a bogey to scare children indoors before dusk, and her name became a ready insult: the great orator Demosthenes, addressing the Athenian assembly in 330 BCE in his speech On the Crown, reached for the worst thing he could say about his rival Aeschines and said it about his mother, publicly calling the woman an Empousa. The word lived on in Greek for centuries as a term for phantoms and nightmares, and Byzantine scholars were still explaining her to readers a thousand years after Aristophanes made a theatre full of Athenians laugh and shudder at her.
Her afterlife in the modern world is strangely lively. The genus Empusa, a group of praying mantises with twisted, otherworldly bodies and leaf-like limbs, was named for her shape-shifting oddness, and stalks the fields of Europe and Africa to this day. In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, beginning with The Lightning Thief in 2005, millions of young readers have met the empousai exactly where the Greeks left them: servants of Hecate with flaming hair, one bronze leg and one donkey leg, disguised as beautiful girls and hungry for the blood of heroes, most memorably a pair posing as cheerleaders in The Battle of the Labyrinth. The phantom of the crossroads has walked from the night roads of Attica into paperback fiction and insect anatomy without ever losing her mismatched legs.
Summary
Empusa stands as the shape of fear itself in Greek belief, the spectre who is nothing but a shifting apparition, the bronze-legged daughter of Hecate who made even a god scream for his priest. From the lamp-lit stage of Athens to the banks of the Indus, from a political insult to a nursery bogey, from Riordan's flaming-haired cheerleaders to a mantis on a Mediterranean leaf, her story is two and a half thousand years of changing shape without ever disappearing. Ancient commentators traced her name to the verb for appearing suddenly, and she has never stopped doing it. Every flicker at the edge of a dark road, every figure that changes as you approach it, is still her territory.
References
Validation References:
- Aristophanes, Frogs (405 BCE) - Lines 288-306 (the Empousa on the road to the underworld: the changing shapes and the bronze leg)
- Scholia on Aristophanes' Frogs 293 (ancient and Byzantine commentaries) - Empousa the bronze-legged spectre of Hecate and the meaning of her name
- Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana (c. 220 CE) - Book 2.4 (the Empousa driven off by curses on the Indus); Book 4.25 (the phantom bride of Corinth, named empousa and lamia)
- Demosthenes, On the Crown (330 BCE) - Section 18.130 (Empousa hurled as an insult in the Athenian assembly)
- Hesychius of Alexandria, Lexicon (c. 5th - 6th century CE) - Entries on Empousa (the spectre and her names)
- The Suda (10th century CE) - Entry "Empousa" (the apparition sent by Hecate)
- Johnston, Sarah Iles, Hekate Soteira (Scholars Press, 1990) - On Hecate and her retinue of spectres
- Johnston, Sarah Iles, Restless Dead: Encounters Between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece (University of California Press, 1999) - Chapter on the returning dead and road-haunting spectres
- Felton, Debbie, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (University of Texas Press, 1999) - Chapter on bogeys and apparitions
- Patera, Maria, Figures grecques de l'epouvante de l'antiquite au present (Brill, 2015) - Study of Empousa and the Greek bogey tradition