774 GLOSSARY OF MYTHOLOGICAL WORDS AND PHRASES IN ENGLISHsoul is the mind, the seat of thoughts and feelings,
our true self, which seeks to orient our lives to our
surroundings.
python Apollo established the major sanctuary
for his worship and his oracle at Delphi, but to do so
he had to kill the serpent that guarded the site. He
named his new sanctuary Pytho, from the rotting of
the serpent after it had been killed (the Greek verb
pythein means to rot); or the serpent's name was
Python. A python today belongs to a particular fam-
ily of nonvenomous Old World snakes.
Rhadamanthus/Rhadamanthine or
RhadamantineRhadamanthus, along with Minos
and Aeacus, is one of the judges in the Underworld.
Rhadamanthus and Rhadamanthine describe anyone
who is rigidly just and strict.
rich as Croesus Croesus was the king of Lydia
who possessed great wealth that became legendary.
Thus to emphasize their possession of extreme riches
we describe a person as "rich as Croesus."
saturnalia/saturnian/saturnine/saturnism The
titan Saturn (equated with the Greek Cronus) cas-
trated his father, hated his children, devoured them,
and was castrated and overthrown by his son Zeus.
After his defeat, Saturn ruled over the Golden Age
of the world; according to Roman mythology, he fled
to the west and brought a new golden age to Italy.
Originally Saturn was an old Italic diety of the har-
vest; the Romans built a temple to Saturn on the
Capitoline Hill and each December celebrated the
winter planting with the Saturnalia, a time of revelry
and the giving of presents. Saturnalia today denotes
a period of unrestrained or orgiastic revelry. Saturn
gives his name to the sixth planet from the sun, the
second largest planet in the solar system after Jupiter.
Anyone born under the influence of Saturn may have
a saturnine temperament, which is to say gloomy or
melancholy, characteristics of the god who castrated
his father and was overthrown. Saturnian simply
means pertaining to the god or the planet Saturn. The
planet Saturn was also associated with the element
lead, and so the term for lead poisoning is saturnism.
satyr/satyriasis Satyrs were male woodland
deities with the ears and legs of a goat who wor-
shiped Dionysus (Bacchus), god of wine, often in a
state of sexual excitement. A satyr today is nothing
more than a lecher. A man who has an excessive and
uncontrollable sexual drive suffers from satyriasis.
See nymph/nymphomania/nympholepsy.
Scylla and Charybdis Scylla, once a beautiful
maiden, was transformed into a hideous creature with
the heads of yapping dogs protruding from her
midriff. Charybdis was a terrible whirlpool. Both these
dangers were said to lurk in the Strait of Messina be-
tween southern Italy and Sicily, a terror to sailors who
endeavored to navigate these waters. The phrase be-
tween Scylla and Charybdis is much like the English
between a rock and a hard place; it denotes a precari-
ous position between two equally destructive dangers.
siren/siren song The Sirens were nymphs (en-
countered by Odysseus) often depicted with birdlike
bodies, who sang such enticing songs that seafarers
were lured to their death. A siren has come to mean
a seductive woman. It can also denote a device that
uses compressed steam or air to produce a high,
piercing sound as a warning. A siren song refers to
something bewitching or alluring that also may be
treacherous.
sisyphean Sisyphus was a famous resident of
Hades who was condemned to roll an enormous rock
up a hill only to have it fall back down, a punish-
ment for revealing the secret of one of Zeus' love af-
fairs. A sisyphean task has become a term for work
that is difficult, laborious, almost impossible to com-
plete. See tartarean and tantalize.
sphinx The sphinx terrorized Thebes before the
arrival of Oedipus (see Oedipal complex). She was
a hybrid creature with the head of a woman, body
of a lion, wings of an eagle, and the tail of a serpent.
She punished those who failed to answer her riddle
with strangulation (the Greek verb sphingein means
to strangle). At some point the Greek sphinx became
associated with Egyptian iconography, in which the
sphinx had a lion's body and a hawk's or man's head.
When we liken someone to a sphinx, we have in
mind the great riddler of the Greeks and not the
Egyptian conception. A sphinx is an inscrutable per-
son given to enigmatic utterances (the Greek word
ainigma means a riddle).
stentorian Stentor, the herald of the Greek army
at Troy, could speak with the power of fifty men. To-
day we may liken a powerful orator to Stentor and
designate the effect of his voice as stentorian.
stygian Across the river Styx, the "hateful" river
that circles the realm of the Underworld, the ferry-
man Charon transports human souls to Hades. The
gods swear their most dread and unbreakable oaths
by invoking the name of the river Styx. Stygian de-
scribes something to be linked with the infernal re-
gions of Hell, something gloomy or inviolable.
syringe Syrinx ("pan-pipes") rejected the god
Pan and was turned into a bed of reeds from which
he fashioned his pan-pipes. A syringe is a device
made up of a pipe or tube, used for injecting and
ejecting liquids. Syringa is a genus of plants used for
making pipes or pipestems.