Dibat & combing the waters and the dust

[Terrance]

[93] Baring-Gould, Book of Werewolves, p. 133.

We have seen that the original werewolf, howling in the
wintry
blast, is a kind of psychopomp, or leader of departed souls;
he is the wild ancestor of the death-dog, whose voice under
the window of a sick-chamber is even now a sound of
ill-omen.
The swan-maiden has also been supposed to summon the dying
to
her home in the Phaiakian land. The Valkyries, with their
shirts of swan-plumage, who hovered over Scandinavian
battle-fields to receive the souls of falling heroes, were
identical with the Hindu Apsaras; and the Houris of the
Mussulman belong to the same family. Even for the
angels,--women with large wings, who are seen in popular
pictures bearing mortals on high towards heaven,--we can
hardly claim a different kinship. Melusina, when she leaves
the castle of Lusignan, becomes a Banshee; and it has been a
common superstition among sailors, that the appearance of a
mermaid, with her comb and looking-glass, foretokens
shipwreck, with the loss of all on board.

One thinks of Eliot's Poem and combing seas. 

In Moby-Dick the comb, the white comb of the sea is death
and life all mixed up
in the fathomlessness of the sea or on the great Prairie. 

And that Prairie is the brow of white brow of the whale, a
mystery as man and life. 

And that Prairie has tales to be told, like the one Sancho
tells to his Donny Q.
The one about Lope Ruiz and his love for the shepherdess
Torralva. 

Torralva, who knew of it, went after him, and on foot and
barefoot
followed him at a distance, with a pilgrim's staff in her
hand and a
scrip round her neck, in which she carried, it is said, a
bit of
looking-glass and a piece of a comb...

Venus wants him to remain within dark matter. Hence she
ensues the struggle betweeen sexual love and Love, and it is
a struggle displaying the fundamental anguish felt by fallen
angels while confined in bodies all too human. 

Love in the Western World.61-66,  Denis De Rougemont