This comes out very clearly in representations on vase-paintings. A black-figured aryballos[515] of Corinthian style (fig. 37), now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is our earliest artistic source for the Siren myth. Odysseus, bound to the mast, has come close up to the island: on the island are perched ‘Sirens twain.’ Above the ship hover two great black birds of prey in act to pounce on the mariners. These birds cannot be merely decorative: they in a sense duplicate the Sirens. The vase-painter knows the Sirens are singing demons sitting on an island; the text of Homer was not in his hands to examine the account word by word, but the Homeric story haunts his memory. He knows too that in popular belief the Sirens are demons of prey; hence the great birds. To the right of the Sirens on the island crouches a third figure; she is all human, not a third Siren. She probably, indeed all but certainly, represents the mother of the Sirens, Chthon, the Earth. Euripides[516] makes his Helen in her anguish call on the ‘Winged maidens, virgins, daughters of the Earth, The Sirens,’ to join their sorrowful song to hers. The parentage is significant. The Sirens are not of the sea, not even of the land, but demons of the underworld; they are in fact a by-form of Keres, souls. * * * * * The notion of the soul as a human-faced bird is familiar in Egyptian, but rare in Greek, art. The only certain instance is, so far as I know, the vase in the British Museum[517] on which is represented the death of Procris. Above Procris falling in death hovers a winged bird-woman. She is clearly, I think, the soul of Procris. To conceive of the soul as a bird escaping from the mouth is a fancy so natural and beautiful that it has arisen among many peoples. In Celtic mythology[518] Maildun, the Irish Odysseus, comes to an island with trees on it in clusters on which were perched many birds. The aged man of the island tells him, ‘These are the souls of my children and of all my descendants, both men and women, who are sent to this little island to abide with me according as they die in Erin.’ Sailors to this day believe that sea-mews are the souls of their drowned comrades. Antoninus Liberalis[519] tells how, when Ktesulla because of her father’s broken oath died in child-bed, ‘they carried her body out to be buried, and from the bier a dove flew forth and the body of Ktesulla disappeared.’ The persistent anthropomorphism of the Greeks stripped the bird-soul of all but its wings. The human winged _eidolon_ prevailed in art: the bird-woman became a death-demon, a soul sent to fetch a soul, a Ker that lures a soul, a Siren.