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Updated: June 11, 2025
These spore-forming filaments are connected with others which fill the interior of the fly's body like so much fine wool, having eaten away and destroyed the creature's viscera. This is the full-grown condition of the Empusa.
"There sat Auld Nick in shape o' beast, A towzy tyke, black, grim, an' large, To gie them music was his charge." Hence, perhaps, the name Valant applied to the Devil, about the origin of which Grimm is in doubt. One foot of the Greek Empusa was an ass's hoof. Salt was forbidden at these witch-feasts. De Lamiis, p. 59 et seq.
The Empusa, who is comparatively rare on the brushwood in the neighbourhood, is also rare in the store-houses of the Wasp; nevertheless her presence is repeated often enough to show that the huntress appreciates the value of this prey when she comes across it. The three sorts of game are in the larval state, with rudimentary wings.
The legend takes these data, and gives them a supernatural turn, for mimicry substituting metamorphosis. Our modern pantomimes have the same gift, and Proteus himself sometimes appears as the subject of their rapid transformations. And it may be conjectured that in that versatile lady Empusa we have but another artist of the same kind, mythologically treated.
The celebrated Empusa was a female dancer, whose agility was so prodigious that she appeared and vanished like a spirit. But it was at Rome that the Pantomime art received its highest improvement. Pilades born in Cilicia, and Bathillus of Alexandria, where the two most surprising geniuses, who, under the reigns of Augustus Cæsar, displayed their talents in their utmost lustre.
A group of men had entered the farthermost cellars, led by one who bore an electric pocket-lamp. The hard, white ray danced from bloated gray fungi to others of nightmare shape, of dazzling, venomous brilliance. Do not be deceived by its size. It is a giant variety of my own culture and is of the order empusa.
"Whence does the Mantis derive its excessive hunger, its pugnacity, its cannibalism, and the Empusa its sobriety, its peaceableness, when their almost identical organization would seem to indicate an identity of needs, instincts, and habits?"
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