Charybde and Scylla

Charybde and Scylla is two monsters of the Greek Mythologie, whose legend is at the origin of the expression " to sail of Charybde in Scylla" , which means " to avoid a danger to fall on another ".

Greek mythology

According to Greek mythology, Charybde was the girl of Poséidon and Gaïa. She was perpetually famished. When it devoured the cattle of Héraclès, Zeus punishes it by sending it to the bottom of a strait. It started to swallow the sea and the boats three times per day.

However, not far from there Scylla lived. In the beginning, Scylla was a nymph with which Glaucos was madly in love. This one went to ask for the magician Circé a philter of love, but that Ci was insane in love with Glaucos and jealous of Scylla, and benefitted from the occasion to change it into a terrifying monster, having twelve stubs for feet and six fixed heads of long necks.

Thus, a sailor who succeeded in escaping the one from the monsters was extremely likely to fall into the mouth from the other. Charybde and Scylla respectively symbolize the tides and the reefs of the strait.

Localization of the strait

The legend, expressed at the origin in the Odyssey of Homère, does not make it possible to define with precision about which strait it is. In the Odyssey , Ulysses has to cross a Détroit that some identified today like that of Messine, others as being the the Bosphorus at the time of its formation, twelve thousand years ago, as reported in the accounts of " Jason and Argonautes " , " the epopee of Gilgamesh " like in the Mahabharata.

Two terrible dangers threatened the sailors: a swirl and a reef, which were personified under the features of the two monsters.

One of the last theories related to the Myth of the Atlantis, known as bridge-euxine , place the two creatures in the strait of the the Bosphorus, then bearing the names Sanskrit S of Kâlî and Shiva on the shelves cimmérien be found in 1972 with Ploestli, in Romania.

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