Page:Heavenly Bridegrooms.djvu/61

 the Vulgate, "Lamia;*' in Luther's Bible, "Kobold." Lamia or Lamya is found in the Great Bible, and in Coverdale's, Matthew's, Beck's and the Bishop's Bible.

Now a lamia is a mythical serpent-woman of a demoniacal character. Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, gives a memorable instance. A young man on the road near Corinth met a charming woman who invited him to her house in the suburbs of the city, and said that if he would remain with her, "he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; and she being fair and lovely would live and die with him." The young man was, as Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, puts it in giving the account, "a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love," and he "tarried with her awhile to his great content." At last he married her. To the wedding came Apollonius, and he at once recognized her as a lamia, and declared that all her furniture was but illusion. She wept and begged Apollonius to be silent, but he persisted in exposing her, whereupon she, her house and its content vanished.

This is probably a Beauty and the Beast myth on the masculine side, Apollonius playing the part of the outsider who separates the lovers by harping on the things which are illusory and monstrous in the young man's psychic manifestations. It is worth noticing in this connection, that the young man had been living a temperate and self-controlled life when he was first approached by this Lamia or Lilith, so that he was evidently found worthy to taste the joys of affectionate connubial intercourse with his mysterious bride. Here evidently, the young man is not strong enough to endure the training required to consummate Borderland wedlock. He also, evidently, does not have his sub-consciousness well under control, but allows it to run away with him. Mastery of self in every possible aspect, physically, intellectually, morally, affectionally is one of two requisites for sustained marital relations on the Borderland; the other requisite being steadfast aspiration to personal communion with the Divine.