What The Sirens Actually Sang
A bird-woman’s discography through Homer, Plato, Kafka, Atwood, and three thousand years of human temptation
There are two famous paintings of the sirens, and they disagree about pretty much everything. Herbert Draper’s is from 1909, and this is the one your brain will likely go to when you hear the word siren: gorgeous women, mostly unclothed, literally hauling themselves over the side of Odysseus’s ship with intentions nobody aboard is confused about. John William Waterhouse, on the other hand, painted the same scene eighteen years earlier, but the imagery, and by extension the message, feels like a different species altogether. These sirens are birds. Like, actual birds, women’s heads on heavy gull bodies, mobbing the ship the way seagulls mob a bag of chips on Brighton beach. Waterhouse had done his homework, and the surprise is that he wasn’t looking to Homer, who never actually says what the sirens look like (but we’ll get back to that), but to a Greek vase in the British Museum. On the vases, the sirens are regal, unsettling birds, and the imagery repeats across antiquity. They are alluring, sure, but not in the come-hither, Britney breathing through ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ kinda way. The original siren song, it turns out, contains no seduction of the expected kind at all.
We remember the song as a warm voice promising the flesh, but the record tells us something far more brutal and poetic. Each age’s sirens sing whatever their listener cannot resist. Read them in order, and the songbook starts to look like a portrait gallery of human weakness across three thousand years. The stakes, however, are worth knowing, because they ran both ways. On that same vase, painted around 480 BC, one of the sirens is plunging headfirst into the sea, because the lore tells us that they died if a listener ever passed them unmoved. These bird-women were singing for their god damn lives, and revising the material under a death clause. With Odysseus back in cinemas, it seems a fair moment to check the setlist.
Track one is Homer’s. The lyrics survive, and the spoiler is that there’s no sex in them. In Book Twelve the sirens call Odysseus by name and make their offer, and the seduction is knowledge. They know everything that happened at Troy, and everything that has happened on earth, they sing, and he will sail away knowing more than he arrived with
Folded inside the offer is a personal touch, customised to each pair of ears. For Odysseus, his own war is sung back to him, complete, by voices that claim they were there for all of it. There is nowhere to hide. The siren song at its core is an archive with your name in the catalogue. That is what the pile of bones in their meadow means, the one Circe warns him about. Those men died of wanting to hear about themselves, and it is not a weakness anyone has since outgrown. The sirens’ credentials as truth tellers, incidentally, were genuine. They were daughters of a Muse, which is where their knowledge came from. The origin story, according to this telling, is that they lost a singing contest to the Muses themselves, who then plucked their feathers and wore them as crowns. Every Muse did, at least, except Terpsichore, who happened to be the sirens’ own mother and apparently that’s where she drew the line.
Track two is a chorus. At the end of the Republic, written around 375 BC, Plato describes a vision of the universe as a great spindle, eight rings turning inside one another, representing the orbits of the heavens. Everything spinning on the knees of the goddess Necessity herself with her daughters the three Fates serenading the past, the present and the future. On each ring stands a siren, each singing one note, and the eight notes together make one harmony, the music the cosmos runs on.
We have come a long way from the monster at the edge of the shipping lane, because now sirens have landed a record deal and are holding the planets in tune. The song you must not listen to has become the song everything is made of. It is the same temptation, now at a bigger venue.
With track three comes the body swap, which is how we got the tail. Greek and Roman sirens were birds almost without exception, but it was Homer’s silence about their bodies that left the door open for interpretation. The fish half walks through it in the early Middle Ages, courtesy of a catalogue of fantastical creatures called the Liber Monstrorum. Here, the sirens are described as sea-girls, human from head to navel, with scales below, and the bestiaries repeated this hybrid until the mermaid had swallowed the bird-woman entirely.
Inevitably, once something gets written down, it has a way of becoming official, at least until the next translator comes along anyway. Case in point: in Spanish and Italian, the word is sirena; in French, sirène, both simply meaning mermaid to this day. Then biology entered the chat with Sirenia, the name given to manatees and dugongs after centuries of sailors mistaking these slippery, whiskered ladies for what we have come to know as mermaids. Columbus saw three himself, apparently, and wrote in his journal, with the air of a man checking the goods against the receipt, that they were “not as beautiful as they are painted,”
Meanwhile, the Church had turned the whole scene into a sermon, reshaping the story to fit its own allegory. The mast then became the cross, the wax in the crew’s ears was interpreted as prudence, and the sirens represented worldly pleasure, which mostly meant scantily clad women with too much to say. Yawn. Simply put, they were not to be trusted. A song that had once offered all knowledge was now reduced to a half-baked warning about lust (errm hello Eve). It is probably the least interesting thing anyone has done with them, and it lasted a thousand years.
Track four is a single page, and it’s Kafka’s 1917 short piece, The Silence of the Sirens. It proposes that the sirens have a deadlier weapon than the song. You guessed it. The silence, which may be deadlier still.
As Odysseus sailed past, Kafka suggests, they did not sing at all. Maybe they decided silence was the only weapon that would work on him. Or perhaps the sheer sight of a man confronting his own deepest, darkest truths was already its own kind of death. But this being Kafka, and Odysseus being cunning Odysseus, perhaps he noticed the silence and pretended to hear the song anyway, and survived by bluffing them back.
As an entry in the songbook goes, I think it is perfectly fitting for its moment, because by 1917 silence itself had become the loudest sound available. The sound you cannot resist is the one being withheld, and anyone who has stared at a read receipt with no reply under it knows the mechanism still works. It is the folklore equivalent of a message in a bottle that has never been opened and, in any age, the god who does not answer.
Track five is an incantation disguised as a poem, and it belongs to Margaret Atwood. Her 1974 poem, Siren Song, and if you read one thing after finishing this essay, read that. It is under thirty lines, and I am about to spoil it.
The siren herself narrates that she is bored, stuck in the bird suit, tired of the island and her two feathered colleagues, and she offers to tell you the secret of the song. The secret, she confesses, is that the song is really a cry for help. She tells you that only you can save her, that you alone, out of everyone, are special enough to hear the truth. Of course, the closing lines reveal that the confession you have just read is the spell itself, working on you the whole time. Atwood names the temptation that humans have been vulnerable to, I think, probably since the beginning of time, and that is being needed. Tell someone they are the only one who can rescue you, and they will row straight onto the rocks. If that sounds far-fetched, maybe check it against whichever rescue mission is currently running in your own life.
Track six is the linguistic footnote of comprehension itself. In 1819, the French engineer Cagniard de la Tour built some sort of instrument (sorry, I’m not an engineer) that produced a pure tone by blowing air through a spinning disc. Discovering that it worked even under water, he named it the sirène. By all accounts, it was a machine that sang beneath the sea. Perfect. Fitting in every wave, shape, and form.
His joke became the modern word for the factory siren, the air-raid siren, the ambulance siren, and the tsunami warning siren. The name of the creatures who once sang sailors onto the rocks now belongs to the sound whose whole job is to send people in the opposite direction. Poetic, really, despite the echo still ringing in the ear.
The last siren has an address, and that is where this ends. Parthenope, one of the three sirens the poets named, was said to have washed ashore after Odysseus escaped. I use ‘escaped’ loosely, because he was not quite unharmed, but escaped and alive nonetheless. The settlement founded at her tomb took her name. Then a newer, bigger city rose next door and called itself Neapolis, the new city. Parthenope’s city became the old city, Palaepolis, which the new city eventually swallowed whole anyway.
Which feels oddly familiar as I’m writing this, because I have somehow spent this entire essay watching the same thing happen. The mermaid swallowed the bird-woman, the new city swallowed the old one, and eventually the newer version is the only one anyone remembers. Myths have a habit of doing this: life imitates art, art becomes lore, and lore eventually redraws the map. Anyway, that was the long way around of saying the new city is Naples.
So the city is built over a dead siren, old town under new town, under traffic, and after all these centuries it still carries the memory of Parthenope. And down its streets, at all hours, go the ambulances, sounding her one note over the city built on her bones, warning everyone away from everything.
I do not know what she would sing this decade, if the contract still held and the water still waited. I only know, on three thousand years of evidence, that I would lean closer.
