Lamia: The Mother of All Vampires

She came at night, while the household was sleeping, or slinked through the shadows of the day, if the child was left alone. The lurid details of what happened next changed depending upon the story-teller, but each were devastating for the parents.

In some tales, Lamia lifted the infant from its cradle and literally devoured it whole. In others she drank the blood and discarded the tiny corpse. In the most common of all, the vampiric demigoddess left no visible trace of her visit. The lifeless little one would display not a single mark upon its body. But she had consumed its very being. Lamia had fed upon its life-force.

Today we might call it cot death, or any of the other heart-breaking conditions, which leave a baby listless or dead.  In the classical world, there was no knowledge of these medical facts. There was only Lamia, and her own legend was as terrible as the revenge that she wrought on humankind.

Either way, the sequence of events begins with the head of the pantheon pursuing her as His lover. Lamia had children of her own, part human, part divine, or all demigods, depending upon which origin story you prefer.

This could have continued without the horrors to follow, but Zeus already had a consort. The Mother Goddess Hera was not a deity to be humiliated in this way. She tracked down Lamia and enacted Her revenge.

Driven mad with grief and the eternal living memory, Lamia was unleashed upon the world. Zeus was made aware of the situation - they had been His children too - but there was little He could do after the fact.  He couldn't (or wouldn't) reverse His wife's retribution. 

His only act of alleviating it was to confer one final divine power onto Lamia. She could remove and reinsert her own eyes at will.  While they were removed, she wasn't actually seeing that bloody scene in constant replay, nor could she see anything else at all.

Of all the deities in the Greek Pantheon, Hera and Zeus stood supreme. They were parents of all. There was none more powerful, more absolute, more untouchable. The only divine being able to thwart either of them was each other.

With Zeus unwilling to take on Hera, there was little that Lamia could do.  She was supposed to simply crawl into a hole somewhere, then spend her eternal life regretting ever having taken the Mother Goddess's man. She didn't. She attacked in the only way open to her. She went after the faith in Hera Herself.

New mothers prayed to Hera. She was the Great Mother. Those wishing to become pregnant left offerings for Her too. Older mothers watching their children grow into adulthood still turned to Hera. She could protect their babies. She was not just a mother, but The Mother.

So Lamia killed the babies. All those grieving mothers had placed their trust in Hera, now the cradle was empty. Where was Hera then?  Moreover, who had sent this horror into their midst?  It was Hera.

Relentlessly, immortally, the insane Lamia preyed upon the nurseries. She took her sustenance from the bodies, blood or life-force of the infants; she took her revenge by eroding human belief in Hera's greatness.

And who won in the end?  While classical scholars and Pagans may know all about Hera, it's vampires who survived the centuries to take over popular culture.  The legends have changed and the focus had shifted, but the fact of the blood-suckers remains.  Lamia's children haunt our literature and movie screens, while Hera is nowhere to be seen.