Mormo

Mormo (Mormṓ) constitutes the third member of the trio of child-scarers of ancient Greece, together with Lamia and Empusa, all of them linked to the nocturnal retinue of Hecate. Greek wet nurses and mothers invoked her name to terrorize small children and force their obedience, to the point that the derived term mormolýkeion came to designate any frightening mask or bogeyman. Tradition attributes to her a tragic origin: she would have been a queen of the Laestrygonians who, after losing her own children, went mad with grief and began to devour those of others, repeating the pattern of Lamia. Aristophanes, Theocritus in Idyll XV, Erinna in The Distaff and Lucian of Samosata in Philopseudes mention her as a domestic threat.

Mormo is represented biting, with deformed features, and his face was painted on ritual masks used to scare children. His symbology gathers the mask as an element of concealment and terror, the bite as an act of devouring, and the darkness of the children's room as the scene of his appearance. More than an entity with its own biography, it functioned as a domestic warning transmitted by nurses and mothers to impose obedience. The generic use of mormolýkeion for any terrifying figure demonstrates to what extent his name overflowed the concrete creature.

The name of Mormo survives in modern Greek as designation of any terrifying figure. Its linguistic survival shows how an entity almost without myths of its own could mold everyday language and child-rearing practices for centuries. From Theocritus comes the formula with which mothers conjured it before the reluctant child, warning him that Mormo bit, and from that gesture its figure remained united forever to the bite. Unlike Lamia and Empusa, to whom tradition endowed biographies, adventures and transformations, Mormo remained as pure threat without tale, which makes it the clearest example of a collective fear crystallized in a single name. Its association with the retinue of Hecate and its functional kinship with those two companions integrate it fully into the cast of female specters of the Greek night, direct antecedent of the coco and the sack man of later cultures.