Random Harvest

August 33, 2014

New Feature on The Ambiguities

Random entries* from “a work in progress,” Gaspar Stephens’ Neo Encyclopedia of Greek and Roman Mythology (forthcoming from Balthazar Stephens Press).

Limnades [Gk. limna/dev]. According to Smith (Dictionary of Roman Biography and Mythology, 1880), “a class of inferior female deities” (italics mine) – which designation, no doubt retroactively contributed to the limnades’ irritable dispositions.  Water-nymphs, inhabiting lakes, streams, and marshes, they could see into the hearts of men come to a tryst with their lovers.  Luring the unsuspecting stupes by imitating the voices of those they’d come to meet, the nymphs pulled them into the water, then drowned and ate them.  They ate hard-hearted men for dinner and gentle-hearted men for dessert, false-hearted men for lunch and true-hearted men at tea.  In today’s godless and etiolated world, they seem to be confined to golf course water hazards and the fishing holes of unlucky anglers, where they continue to waste away, barely subsisting on a diet of curses and sighs.

_____________

     * Our motto: “Everything is random, and there is nothing that not random is.”