Veela

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston) <catlady@wicca.net>]

No: HPFGUIDX 50693

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, kewiromeo at a... wrote:

> There are female veela. Is that to say that there are no male veela
> and that they mate with eachother and only produce more female 

In the Muggle RL, veelas come from the Slavic world (with various 
names and a Greek influence, so they are nereids in Greece and 
rusalki in Bulgaria), where they are believed to begin as the spirts 
of women/girls who die young and unmarried/childless. They fly by 
turning into swans by wearing a swan skin. A man who finds veelas 
dancing or swimming in their human form can capture one as his wife 
by stealing her swan skin. She will be beautiful and fertile, do the 
housework well and raise the children, but if she EVER gets a chance, 
she will grab her swan skin and fly away and her husband and children 
will never see her again.
 
In the Potterverse, veela probably do not start as the ghosts of 
Muggle girls. They may grow on trees, which could mean only female 
veela. They may be a veela species, of which the males might be 
lovely boy-toys as you, Tzvi, suggested, or the males might be as 
magically ugly as the females are beautiful. While the females live 
in lakes, streams, and forest (RL), the hypothetical ugly males 
might live underground, perhaps like kobolds, and come up to the 
surface only for annual May Day orgies with the females.

It is also possible that veela are really witches from a population 
so in-bred that 1) they all look much the same, 2) they all have two 
unusual genetic female-sex-linked conditions, one of which is an 
automatic Imperius with the command "Desire me" at all post-pubescent 
human males in the vicinity, and the other is an Animagus-like 
transformation into some kind of giant vulture/eagle.