Scylla

Accounts diverge on the parentage of Scylla. Some say she is the daughter of Phorcys, god of the sea depths, and Hecate. Others give her parents as Typhon and Echidna — the monsters who spawned Cerberus and the Hydra. This ambiguity underlines her hybrid nature, on the boundary between the human world and that of primordial creatures.

In her youth, Scylla was a sea nymph of great beauty, beloved by the Nereids. Among her admirers was Glaucus, a sea god who had himself been transformed after eating a magic herb. Unable to seduce her, Glaucus called upon the sorceress Circe for a love potion. But Circe herself loved Glaucus, and jealous, poured poison into the fountain where Scylla bathed.

As soon as Scylla entered the poisoned waters, she transformed into an abominable monster: six serpentine heads with triple rows of sharp teeth, twelve tentacle-like legs, and a belt of howling demonic dogs around her waist. Horrified, she fled to the sea and took refuge in a cave on the side of a steep cliff in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the mainland.

From there, she terrorized sailors who had to pass through the strait. On the other bank stood Charybdis — another sea monster who sucked in and expelled the waters three times a day in immense whirlpools. Sailors had to choose between two perils — the origin of the expression "between Scylla and Charybdis."

Odysseus, during his Odyssey, had to pass through the strait. Circe herself advised him to hug Scylla's cliff rather than risk Charybdis's whirlpool. Scylla seized six of Odysseus's companions and devoured them before his eyes. The pain of this calculated sacrifice marks one of the most poignant moments of the epic.

The Argonauts also crossed these dangerous waters, guided to safety by the goddess Thetis and the Nereids. In another legend, a second Scylla — daughter of King Nisus of Megara — betrayed her father for love of Minos of Crete, only to be rejected and transformed into a bird or fish.

Scylla is a marine creature linked to Poseidon's domain. In the Poseidon Saga of Saint Seiya, the god of the seas gathers marine generals whose names evoke the creatures and figures of the depths — in the same symbolic vein as Scylla.

The transformation of a beautiful nymph into a sea monster through divine jealousy illustrates the arbitrary cruelty of the ancient gods that Saint Seiya regularly portrays: innocent beings crushed by the conflicts and passions of divinities infinitely beyond them.