Serpent-Legged Ancestress

Chthonic serpent-footed ancestress / mistress of animals. Treated as a deity (per the type rule for spirit/ancestress classes), distinct from the war-god and from Argimpasa though scholars debate the overlap. Genuinely unnamed in the native record; term carries the Greek descriptive 'mixoparthenos echidna'.

Parentage

• parent: Earth-and-Water Mother Api

Children

• Banished Brother Agathyrsus
• Banished Brother Gelonus
• Royal Founder Scythes

Domains

• fertility
• ancestral motherhood

Powers

• bore the three royal sons to Heracles
• declares herself mistress of the land and keeps Heracles' mares

Epithets

• the Snake-legged Goddess latin · the serpent-footed mother · literaryThe serpent-bodied ancestral mother who bore the first Scythians to HeraclesHerodotus 4.8–10 (primary)

Relations

• lover: Strongman Forefather (Scythian Heracles)Reciprocal of scythian_herakles.lover — The serpent-legged mistress of Hylaea withheld his strayed mares until he lay with her; from the union came Agathyrsus, Gelonus and Scythes.Herodotus, Histories 4.9-10 (primary)

Sources

• In the Pontic-Greek myth the mother of the Scythian kings is a mixoparthenos, woman above and serpent below, mistress of the land of Hylaia, who keeps Heracles' horses until he fathers three sons on her.: Herodotos, Histories 4.9 (Godley) (primary)
• She corresponds to the widely-attested Scythian anguipede 'Snake-Legged Goddess' of Black-Sea art, a chthonic life-giving ancestress read as a daughter of Api and closely (but not wholly) identified with Argimpasa/Artimpasa; the Greeks assimilated her to Hecate near the Borysthenes.: Y. Ustinova, The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom (1999); S.S. Bessonova, Religioznye predstavleniya skifov (1983) (secondary)