There are two parts to the Tiamet mythos and Tiamet the woman. The first in which Tiamet is a creator goddess, peacefully creating the cosmos for centuries. Duh! Everything she makes is amazing. She effortlessly creates and she looks very good for her age. Like really, really good. She's an artist. Her talent is boundless. She makes a meal and a bed better than most. She's an organizer and extremely clean. No one cleans as thoroughly and skillfully as this goddess. The second side of Tiamet is considered the monstrous embodiment of primordial chaos. Don't lie to Tiamet. She hates liars and being disrespected. She'll rip your head off, punt it & breathe fire on you. She'll use her words to make you cry. She's super smart, very sharp. Plotting, nope. Watching, yes. She'll catch you slipping. Like now. Then she'll take a nap. Why, bc her favorite hobby is sleeping. Some sources identify her with images of a sea serpent or dragon.
The story of the fairy Melusine dates from the late fourteenth-century, but has its origins in many human-hybrid folktales of the oral tradition.[2] Melusine, a daughter of a human father and a fairy mother, could be said to have started life as a hybrid and in the course of her mythical career exhibited a number of different hybrid forms. Having transgressed against her father, she was cursed by her mother, the fairy Presine, to turn into a serpent every Saturday. Her only hope of salvation was to find a man who would love her enough to a) respect her privacy every Saturday; and b) if he ever did find out that she was part serpent, to ignore this fact and keep her secret.
The story (or perhaps in Melusine’s case we should say the tale), tells us that Melusine met Count Raymondin, and the two fell in love. Together they had ten sons, eight of whom bore some mark of their fairy ancestry and many of whom proved to be fearsome warriors. Melusine and Raymondin remained very much in love until one day Raymondin’s cousin, the Count of Forez, counselled Raymondin to find out what his wife actually did on a Saturday. Could she be having an affair? Why was there such mystery? The doubts gnawed at Raymondin until eventually he decided to spy on her and, when he did, he realised that Melusine’s secret was that she was only part human. From the waist upwards she was a beautiful woman, but from the waist down, she was a serpent – as we see in this woodcut from one of the first printed versions of the story.
But what type of hybrid creature was she? As the images above and below demonstrate, categorizing Melusine proved difficult. In the 1478 woodcut of the French editio princeps she is very much like a mermaid, although her tail is that of a serpent, rather than a fish. Her chronicler Jean d’Arras tells us that when Raymondin saw Melusine in her bathtub ‘from her head to her navel she had the form of a woman and was combing her hair; and from her navel down she had the form of a serpent’s tail, as thick as a herring barrel, and very long, and she was splashing her tail in the water so much that she made it shoot up to the ceiling’.[3] In the image below, from a contemporary manuscript, we see that she is depicted with wings (an allusion to her final transformation into a dragon), for Melusine’s story did not end with the initial betrayal by Raymondin.[4]
According to the legend, after Melusine built the tower in one night, she would return every night afterwards to climb one of its 365 steps. She would fly off its peak on December 31st before starting the January 1st.
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