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In Greek mythology the Erinyes (the Romans called
them the Furies) were female personifications of vengeance. They were usually said to have been born from the
blood of Uranus that fell upon Gaia when Cronus castrated him; i.e., they were chthonic (earth) deities.
According to a variant account, they were born from Nyx. Their number is usually left
indeterminate, though Virgil, probably working from an Alexandrian source, recognized three; Alecto ("unceasing"), Megaera ("grudging"), and Tisiphone ("avenging
murder"). The heads of the Erinyes were wreathed with serpents, their eyes dripped with blood, and their whole appearance was
terrific and appalling. Sometimes they had the wings of a bat or the body of a dog.
Tisiphone fell in love with Cithaeron. She caused his death by snakebite,
specifically, one of the snakes from her head.
The Erinyes generally stood for the rightness of things within the standard order; for example, Heraclitus declared that if Helios decided to change the course
of the Sun through the sky, they would prevent him from doing so. But for the most part they
were understood as the persecutors of mortal men and women who broke "natural" laws. In particular, those who broke ties of
kinship through patricide, murdering a brother (parricide), or other such familial killings brought special attention from the
Erinyes. It was believed in early epochs that human beings might not have the right to punish such crimes, instead leaving the
matter to the dead man's Erinyes to exact retribution. The goddess Nike filled a similar role. When not stalking victims on Earth the
Furies were thought to dwell in Tartarus where they applied their tortures to the
damned souls there.
The Erinyes are particularly known for the persecution of Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. Since Athena had told Orestes to kill the murderer of
his father, Agamemnon, and that person turned out to be his mother, Orestes
prayed to her. Athena intervened and the Erinyes turned into the Eumenides ("kind-hearted"), as they always did in their
beneficial aspects.
As a euphemism, the Erinyes were known as Semnai ("the venerable ones").
The Furies, (their Roman name) or Dirae ("the terrible") typically had the effect of driving their victims insane, hence their Latin name furor.
Virgil VII, 324, 341, 415, 476.
In DC Comics, The Furies are invoked in the ninth collection of The Sandman, The Kindly Ones by Hipployta Hall. She mistakenly believed that Dream had kidnapped her baby, and she summoned the Furies, or the Kindly
Ones, as they are known in the Sandman mythos, in a desperate attempt to recover the child.
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