La donna diavolo nella grecia antica: Lamia, Circe, Empusa e le stagioni della vita umana

Abstract

Aim of this paper is to investigate the history of female monstrosity in ancient Greek literature in order to recover some archetypal structures of thought concerned with ancient and modern collective consciousness on the evil’s problem, its nature, its reasons and also its absence of reasons. So, I retrace the ‘parallel lives’ of three famous femmes fatales of classic mythology that, placed at turning points of horrific genealogical trees full of ‘genetic curses’, are able to form a well defined triptyque of ‘medallions’ framed by a fil rouge of uninterrupted monstrosity. Paradigmatic of the ambiguous dialectics between male-female, right-evil, victim-executioner, normality-deviance, and of the uncontrollable dynamics between crimes and punishments, ancestral fears and wish of discovery, good and bad demons, the myths of Lamia, Circe and Empusa highlight the irrational attraction that, in the ancient, so rationalistic, Greek culture, feminine personifications of evil are imagined to move, so as to influence human behaviour in the main seasons of life