THE FOUNTAIN OF SALMACIS

British 1970s pop band Genesis drew, during the Peter Gabriel era, heavily from myth, literature, and sacred texts.

I first discovered this band at the age of eleven. "The Fountain of Salmacis", the last song in Nursery Cryme, was (together with "The Snow Queen") one of my favourite works at this stage in my life.

Whether the plot, narrated in Book IV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, is a folktale or a literary tale is still the subject of debate: the illegitimate child of two beautiful deities grows into a dashing young gentleman. The nymph of a spring falls for him, but he doesn't love her. Salmacis, for that is the nymph's name, doesn't give up and makes a wish to the powers that be (the gods in these stories, despite having human flaws, can do almost anything, regardless of the laws of physics)... and she is fused together with her beloved!

Here's the song, with lyrics:

Both the Salmacis story and "The Snow Queen" fired my imagination when I wrote "The Tale of Katinka". In its second (Swedish) part, there are interesting parallels: Gustav Adolf (as innocent as both Kay and Hermaphroditus), loved by a female pixie, loses all feelings he had for the titular heroine after having drunk from a spring that said pixie had deliberately enchanted.