Saturday, November 27
From J. L. Borges' Libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967 ed., p. 132, under the heading "Sirens":
...to the Spanish playright Tirso de Molina (and to heraldry) [sirens] are 'half woman, half fish.' No less debatable is their nature. In his classical dictionary, Lempriere calls them nymphs; in Quicherat's, they are monsters, and in Grimal's, they are demons... In the sixth century, a Siren was caught and baptized in northern Wales and in certain old calendars took her place as a saint under the name Murgen. Another, in 1403, slipped through a dike and lived in Haarlem until the day of her death. Nobody could make out her speech, but she was taught to weave and she worshipped the cross [sic] as if instinctively. A chronicler of the sixteenth century argued that she was not a fish because she knew how to weave and she was not a woman because she was able to live in water.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
