Strix

The strix (plural striges; from the Greek strinx, "screech") is the ill-omened night bird of Roman superstition. Ovid describes it in Fasti VI, 131-168 with four strokes repeated for two thousand years: a large head, staring eyes, a beak made for plunder, hoary plumage and hooked claws. They fly by night, seek out infants left without a nurse, snatch them from the cradle, tear their entrails and greedily drink their blood. Ovid himself admits he does not know what they are: "whether they are born birds, or made so by spells, and a Marsian crone turns them into birds with her chants". Pliny the Elder (Natural History XI, 232) is more sceptical still: he records the belief that striges suckle infants from their teats, declares it fabulous, admits that the strix already figured in ancient curse formulas, and confesses that no one knows which bird it is. That uncertainty, bird or witch, is what the word would later carry across all of Europe.

The only complete account we have is Ovid's. Proca, future king of Alba Longa, was five days old when the striges fed on his breast ("exsorbent avidis infantia pectora linguis"); the nurse found the child livid, his cheeks scratched, and called on Cranaë, the nymph to whom Janus had given power over hinges and thresholds, also known as Carna. She touched the doorposts three times and the threshold three times with an arbutus branch, sprinkled the entrance with water, held in her hand the raw entrails of a two-month-old sow and pronounced the substitution ("heart for heart, entrails for entrails: this life we give you for a better one"), leaving the viscera in the open with the order not to look back. Finally she placed a twig of whitethorn, the rod of Janus, in the small window through which light entered the room. The birds did not return and colour came back to the child's face. It is the oldest infant apotropaic rite that Rome sets down in writing, and it should be read precisely: the whitethorn goes not in the cradle but in the window, and the arbutus at the door.

In Petronius' Satyricon (63), Trimalchio tells at his banquet how, while keeping vigil over a boy's corpse, they heard the strigae shrieking around the house; a burly Cappadocian went out with his sword and ran one through, but came back bruised as if he had been flogged and died within days, and when the mother went to embrace her son's body she found a straw doll in its place: the witches had taken the child. Here the strix is no longer a bird but a woman who flies by night, and that is how the laws of the Germanic peoples take her up: the Salic Law punishes with a fine anyone who calls a free woman "stria" without being able to prove it, and the Edict of Rothari (643) forbids killing another man's maidservant "as if she were a striga", because, says the Lombard king, it is not possible for a woman to devour a living man from within. From the Latin strix descend the estrie of the Ashkenazi Jews, the Italian strega, the Polish strzyga and the Romanian strigoi: in each language, the screech of the Roman bird ended up naming the witch or the dead one who returns to suck blood.