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Furies
In Greek mythology the Erinyes (the Romans called them the
Furies) were female personifications of vengeance. They were usually said to
have been born from the blood of Uranus that fell upon Gaia when Cronus
castrated him; i.e., they were chthonic (earth) deities. According to a
variant account, they were born from Nyx. Their number is usually left
indeterminate, though Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source,
recognized three; Alecto ("unceasing"), Megaera ("grudging"), and Tisiphone
("avenging murder"). The heads of the Erinyes were wreathed with serpents,
their eyes dripped with blood, and their whole appearance was terrific and
appalling. Sometimes they had the wings of a bat or the body of a dog.
The Erinyes generally stood for the rightness of things within the standard
order; for example, Heraclitus declared that if Helios decided to change the
course of the Sun through the sky, they would prevent him from doing so. But
for the most part they were understood as the persecutors of mortal men and
women who broke "natural" laws. In particular, those who broke ties of kinship
through patricide, murdering a brother (parricide), or other such familial
killings brought special attention from the Erinyes. It was believed in early
epochs that human beings might not have the right to punish such crimes,
instead leaving the matter to the dead man's Erinyes to exact retribution. The
goddess Nike filled a similar role. When not stalking victims on Earth the
Furies were thought to dwell in Tartarus where they applied their tortures to
the damned souls there.
The Erinyes are particularly known for the persecution of Orestes for the
murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. Since Athena had told Orestes to kill the
murderer of his father, Agamemnon, and that person turned out to be his
mother, Orestes prayed to her. Athena intervened and the Erinyes turned into
the Eumenides ("kind-hearted"), as they always did in their beneficial
aspects.
The Furies, (their Roman name) or Dirae ("the terrible") typically had the
effect of driving their victims insane, hence their Latin name furor.
Source:
Wikipedia.org
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