Interpretation of “Enchantress” by Protesilaos

2025-10-09

For this entry in the series, I have picked a poem from my own collection: https://protesilaos.com/poems. I usually do not explain what my poems mean or, rather, what I think they are about, because I do not want to bias the reader’s interpretation of them. The beauty of art is that it does not have to have one canonical meaning; a dogma that does not tolerate alternatives. Art is inclusive and open-ended, for it begets many thoughts that can coexist even when they directly contradict each other.

Still, commenting on my poetry gives me the opportunity to elaborate at greater length on my thinking process. Not in an effort to foreshadow other readings, but simply to expound on how I feel about the message I am conveying.

Here is the original poem from 2022-12-03, followed by my philosophical remarks about it, and then my subsequent revision of it.

Enchantress

Enchant me Siren
Guide my ship to your rocks
N'kiss me as I drown

The Siren is a figment of the Greek imaginary. In our mythology, it is a woman who inhabits rock formations at sea. Sirens are exceptionally skilful singers. Their chants have the power to capture the minds of sailors and make them perform the typically deadly manoeuvre of turning their ship towards the rocks.

Sirens are not malevolent beings. They do what their condition renders possible, which is to live in places where few else dare to go and to sing their captivating songs. If men happen to drawn as a result, it is because they did not take the appropriate precautions.

In the Greek world there is no pure good or pure evil incarnate. Put differently, there is no equivalent of an all-benevolent god and a corresponding agent of evil. What we always experience is in a state of admixture where the degree is the determining factor between the analytical extremes. For example, the symbol of medicine involves a snake, which we might assume to be venomous. The idea is that any given substance can function as both remedy and poison depending on its dosage. The substance, as such, is neither good nor bad: the dose determines whether the result is beneficial or detrimental to the patient, given their particularities. Such is the nuanced insight that underpins Greek culture.

Like all our mythology, Sirens are a symbol for phenomena in our quotidian reality. The Greek artistic mind tends to anthropomorphise those to make them more relatable, though not to imply that they are indeed limited to the human condition. The Siren is an alias for the allure of adventure; the appeal of the escape into a possible world beyond whatever baseline of normality one subsists in. The Siren’s song, then, is that irresistible call that some people heed in their head, which compels them to perform deeds that others do not dare to try.

The person who seeks adventure usually is a male. More specifically, they are single and/or are not tied to a place owning to a sense of duty towards dependants. This applies to sailors, but also mercenaries, and risk-takers of all sorts, who seek a challenge with full knowledge of the fact that their lives or livelihoods could be forfeit in the process (they could literally die or, more figuratively, lose everything they hold dear). Adventurers will likely not be those who have already found their calling in life, such as by settling down to raise a family and contribute to the wellness of a community.

The adventurer is fundamentally not content with the status quo. Their milieu is too restrictive for them. They dream of a way out and hope to find new possibilities in the process. We can think of it in banal terms, such as a single man leaving his village because there are no women there in hope of finding a mate somewhere else. Or we can consider the case of someone who is not willing to conform with the normativity they are subject to and who would rather take on a challenge of epic proportions.

In this regard, the Siren has to be a female figure to communicate how allure works its ways to attract certain men. She lives where danger is at its highest to demonstrate how knowledge of the risks is not a deterring factor. For example, whomever leaves behind the safety of dry land to board a boat heading to the unknown is fully aware of the fact that the journey may bring riches but might just as well result in a gruesome death. Similarly, the soldier of fortune operates with knowledge of what it means to fight in one of all the wars: only destruction awaits on the battlefield. Yet, these sort of people still choose to do what they do. What is that, if not the work of some magic spell? Hence the Siren’s enchanting powers.

Do Sirens need to be women and adventurers to be men? No. Every mythological narrative comes with a tacit “mutatis mutandis”: apply the edits you consider necessary, but make sure you retain the overall dynamics. It is mythology and not the putative true word of an omnipotent god exactly because we are the ones making it and we are those adapting it to our experiences. The gods and all of the creatures of our myths are artistic devices. They are useful insofar as they capture patterns in the cosmos which pertain to something we can relate to. And they have interpretive, predictive, descriptive, or creative value to the extent that they help us make sense of the phenomena.

With that granted, I will continue to refer to the Siren as a “she”. There is no singular psychosynthesis of the adventurer. Different individuals have their own motivating factors. One among them may be loneliness: an escape from the prevailing conditions might increase the chances of finding this elusive “her” figure. Another factor, probably related to that one, may be the will to outgrow whatever mould one is cast in by their social environment.

The boy who salutes his family and friends, never to live in their midst again is, at some level, seeking ways to become another person. Two decades will pass by and the boy, now a gritty man, will still be away from his home town, destined to forever live abroad as he does not identify with who he was and with the society that conditioned him thus.

To the adventurer, their place of origin is where they were an alien in and a misfit for. There is no going back, but only forward unto the world of their making. The only locus they consider “home” is where they realised their becoming. To their old friends and family, such people might as well be dead, long claimed by the enchantresses of the ocean.

In truth, there is no binding magic that drives men mad. We are fully aware of the potential of openendedness: it can give us everything our heart desires, yet it can just as well forfeit all we have . This, too, is a pattern that the Greeks anthropomorphise as the lord of seas, Poseidon. The sea is a proxy for the dual potential of the world in its capacity to grant us everything, such as material comforts and knowledge through the commerce and exchange it facilitates, all while having latent in it the untimely death that awaits at its darkest depths or times of tempest.

Poseidon is a male god. Comparing him to other male gods, like Apollon, Hermes, and Dionysos, shows us how he also is depicted as a bulky, powerful man. This is no coincidence. His peerless strength symbolises the capacity to be a provider of the highest order: a strong man has the means to guarantee access to resources, at least in terms of appearances (of course, there is more to being a provider than raw strength, but you cannot symbolise, say, patience and situational awareness as easily/memorably as you can represent vigour).

In the case of the sea, the provision of valuable goods happens through fishing and trade. Waters, however, have their own logic and cannot become anybody’s playground. Poseidon is neither friend nor foe: he does what he wishes. At times the ocean enables commerce, at others it inhibits it. This, too, is inherent in the strong man who has the sheer power to inflict a great deal of harm and to be abusive, should his temperament go unchecked. This is Poseidon and, more generally, the world we live in: we enjoy what it offers us until the day it is not ours anymore.

Coming back to the theme of the enchantress, I have personally responded to her call several times. I left Greece when I turned 18, never to return. At one point in my early 20s I was set on a comfy career path, which some may consider prestigious, that I quit because I was not content to conform with the demands of a role-playing environment. In me there is the potential for hubris: I want to be different. Such is the binding of the spell that moves me.

I chose the mountain life in large part because I sought a challenge unlike anything I had tried hitherto. And I did it knowing that the rural life does not grant the same opportunities as a city. Then again, I followed the Siren’s song when I decided to defy the odds by building my house: “the hut”, as I have been calling it.

When I first got here, the place was unnerving: wild vegetation everywhere, poisonous snakes, rodents, mosquitoes, dense swamp-like air, and an overwhelming sense of desolation… The average person would understandably seek an alternative. But therein we discern the seaborn enchantment that governs me, in that I do not want to be “the average person”. Not for this, anyway. In the face of such a dreadful place, I envisaged a new beginning and was poised to act. I had confidence in my eagerness for work and believed that I possessed the tools to refashion this into a comfortable habitat. Everything has gone according to plan and continues to unfold as expected. Not a day passes without me doing something for my long-term stay here. I am pleased with the results. I persist with unyielding dedication in full knowledge that Sirens live in hard-to-reach rock formations: the only place I would be happy to settle in, after all.

With the above in mind, this is how I revise my poem to better communicate the decisiveness and absence of regret that characterise my choices in life:

Enchantress (version 2)

Enchant me Siren
Guide my ship to your rocks
and drown me in your kiss