Fata Morgana (mirage) - Etymology

Etymology

"La Fata Morgana" ("The Fairy Morgana") is the name of Morgan le Fay in Italian. Morgan le Fay, alternately known as Morgane, Morgain, Morgana and other variants, was described as a powerful sorceress and antagonist of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere in the Arthurian legend. As her name indicates, the figure of Morgan appears to have been originally a fairy (Fata, Le Fay) rather than a human woman. The early works featuring Morgan do not elaborate on her nature, other than describing her role as that of a fairy or magician. Later she was described as a woman, King Arthur's half-sister, and an enchantress.

After King Arthur's final battle at Camlann, Morgan le Fay takes her half-brother Arthur to Avalon. In medieval times suggestions for the location of Avalon ranged far beyond Glastonbury. They included the other side of the Earth at the antipodes, Sicily, and other locations in the Mediterranean.

Legends claimed that sirens in the waters around Sicily lured the unwary to their death. Morgan le Fay is associated not only with Etna, but also with sirens. In a medieval French Arthurian Romance, Floriant et Florete, she is called "mistress of the fairies of the salt sea" (La mestresse fées de la mer salée.)

Ever since that time, Fata Morgana has been associated with Sicily.

It was summer, early in July, the morning calm and delightful; the winds were hushed face of the bay remarkably smooth – the tide at its full height, and the waters elevated in the middle of the channel. The sun had just surmounted the hill behind Reggio, and formed an angle of forty-five degrees on the noble expanse of water which extends before the city. Suddenly the sea that washes the Sicilian shores presented the aspect of a range of dark mountains while that on the Calabrian coast appeared like a clear polished mirror, which reflected and multiplied every object existing or moving at Reggio, with the addition of a range of more than a thousand giant pilasters, equal in altitude, distance, and degree of light and shade. In a moment they lost half their height, and bent into arcades, like those of a Roman aqueduct. A long cornice was then formed on the top, and above it rose innumerable castles, which presently divided into towers, and shortly afterwords into magnificent colonnades.To these succeeded a sweep of windows ; then came pines and cypresses, and innumerable shrubs and trees : in shadier places,
"Pan or Sylvanus never slept ;

nor nymph Nor Faunus haunted."

This glorious vision continued in full beauty till the sun was considerably advanced in the heavens; it then vanished in the twinkling of an eye ; and instead of pilasters, groves, and colonnades, nothing was to be seen but the mountains of Reggio, Messina, and a beautiful expanse of water, reflecting its cultivated shores, and the cattle that were grazing on its banks.

Walter Charleton, in his 1654 treatise "Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana," devotes several pages to the description of the famous Morgana of Rhegium, in the Strait of Messina (Book III, Chap. II, Sect. II). He records that a similar phenomenon was reported in Africa by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian writing in the 1st century B.C., and that the Rhegium Fata Morgana was described by Damascius, a Greek Philosopher of the sixth century A.D. In addition, Charleton tells us that Athanasius Kircher described the Rhegium mirage in his book of travels.

An early mention of the term Fata Morgana in English, in 1818, referred to such a mirage noticed in the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily.

*Fata Morgana, phr. : It. : a peculiar mirage occasionally seen on the coasts of the Straits of Messina, locally attributed to a fay Morgana. Hence, metaph. any illusory appearance. 1818 In mountainous regions, deceptions of sight, Fata Morgana, &c., are more common: In E. Burl's Lett. N. Scotl., Vol. II. p. in (1818).