Echidna was a monster, the offspring of Chrysaor and
Oceanus' daughter Callirrhoë. (Other accounts give her parents as
Tartarus and
Gaia, however, or Ceto and
Phorcys.) She was part beautiful
woman, part
snake, and bore Chimaera,
Hydra and Cerberus (a fearsome threesome!) to
Typhon. She also bore the
Sphinx by her brother
Orthus. Her name simply means '
viper', 'adder' (echidna).
By
something of a semantic twist, the modern English word 'echidna' is used for the creature known as the spiny ant-eater, otherwise, as Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary describes it, 'a genus of Australian toothless, spiny, egg-laying, burrowing monotremes'. This sounds even more horrific than the original mythological monster.
