Siren

The strings of the siren Ecstasy cry not here
Or soon are silenced in the human heart.
     — Book 6 Canto 1

In lands where siren Wonder sings its lures
     — Book 11

The sirens are represented by birds with a woman’s head. They are, therefore, symbols of past realizations in the mind.

In the myth of Jason, they seduce with their songs and bring ’languor to the sailors’: they symbolise the nostalgia for the harmonious periods of past evolution. They are the images of idealised past, of the escape from the present reality and its challenges, and thus a formidable obstacle in Yoga.

In the Odyssey, they are more like spiritual illusions, the temptations to take refuge in the paradises of the mind.

Sirens Sirens

Odysseus and the Sirens Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

If in the story of the Golden Fleece they symbolised some luminous experiences of the higher mind, in Savitri Book 6 they stand for the experiences of the highest planes of the mind – intuitive mind, overmind – which give access to the memory of the past and to the knowledge of ‘what is’, wherever the consciousness might be focused, for ’they know everything of the past and present in all places’.

This trial or test is to be distinguished from that of the Lotus-eaters (or lotophages) which urges the adventurer of consciousness to beware of spiritual sweetness.