Lamia was a beautiful queen of Libya who became a child-eating daemon. Aristophanes claimed her name derived from the Greek word for gullet, referring to her habit of devouring children. The Lamia Instinct includes the darkest of natures in women's instincts, more so than even the destructive Medusa, who developed her evil out of having been assaulted and robbed of dignity, herself. That Lamia kills children speaks to the self-destructive impulse in women (since they are the creators of children), who would spite themselves, destroying the product of their own greatest power, just to seek revenge or the destruction of others. She is analogous to the primordial Christian deity, Lilith.
Lamia is a mistress of the god Zeus, causing Zeus' jealous wife, Hera, to kill all of Lamia's children and transform her into a monster that hunts and devours the children of others. Another version has Hera stealing all of Lamia's children and Lamia, who loses her mind from grief and despair, starts stealing and devouring others' children out of envy, the repeated monstrosity of which transforms her into a monster.
Some accounts say she has a serpent's tail below the waist.
Later traditions referred to many lamiae; these were folkloric monsters similar to vampires and succubi that seduced young men and then fed on their blood.
Lamia was cursed with the inability to close her eyes so that she would always obsess over the image of her dead children. Hera forced Lamia to devour her own children. Myths variously describe Lamia's monstrous (occasionally serpentine) appearance as a result of either Hera's wrath, the pain of grief, the madness that drove her to murder, or—in some rare versions—a natural result of being Hecate's daughter. Zeus then gave her the ability to remove her eyes.