Introducing: Harpies!

Each month we’ll introduce one scary Monsters of the Mind to all you out there who may know lots about nature, but little (yet) about mythology! This month we’re kicking it off with card #47, the Harpy.

The harpies were among the foulest creatures in Greek mythology. These monsters attacked from the air with incredible strength on missions to steal food from people’s mouths, or to snatch up humans and carry them to the underworld; they were cruel and violent. Anywhere the harpies went, a terrible odor lingered. But what did they look like?

In one of the most famous masterpieces of world literature, Dante’s Inferno, we learn of an imagined wood infested with these part vulture, part witch harpies:

Here the repellent harpies make their nests…
They have broad wings, a human neck and face,
Clawed feet and swollen, feathered bellies; they caw
Their lamentations in the eerie tree

So creepy and haunting! So haunting, in fact, that one of meanest looking-birds native to America, the American Harpy Eagle, was named after this mythological animal.

Fingers crossed that you don’t run into either the real or mythological bird!