Occupation: Goddess (self-styled)

Legal Status: Citizen of Greece with no known criminal record

Identity: The general populace of Earth is unaware of Calypso except as a mythological character.

Other Aliases: Tia Dalma

Place of Birth: Unrevealed

Marital Status: Single

Known Relatives: Oceanus (possible father), Tethys (possible mother), Achelous, Inachos and the Potamoi  (possible brothers), Metis, Doris, and the Oceanides (possible sisters), Telegonus (son), Athena (niece),

Group Affiliations: ally of the Gods of Olympus

Base of Operations: Ogygia

First Appearance: (historical) The Odyssey by Homer, (modern) Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2003)

History: Calypso is a member of an extra-dimensional race of beings known as the Olympians who were worshipped as gods by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Her parentage is speculative; most accounts claim she is the daughter of Atlas, one of the Titans, but she is not usually counted or listed as among his progeny. An alternate tradition makes her the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys and one of the Oceanides who like Calypso who were known to claim islands in the Mediterranean as their own.

Sometime after Zeus defeated the Titans, Calypso claimed the island Ogygia west of Greece as her own. She was frequently visited by sea-deities such as the Oceanides and the Nereids and by stranded sailors. One of theses sailors was King Odysseus of Ithaca. Upon failing to honor the god Poseidon at Troy, Odysseus had been condemned to wander the Mediterranean without reaching home. After losing his ship to Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus was found shipwrecked on Ogygia by Calypso who loved him and nursed him to health, but after seven years, he soon began pining to return home. Calypso preferred to keep him as a lover, but the god Hermes implored her to release Odysseus to return home to his wife. In one legend of these accounts, she dies of loneliness, but in most stories, she gave birth to Telegonus, Odysseus's son, who traveled to Ithaca to meet his father, but met Odysseus in battle instead, mistaken for an invading chieftain. Odysseus died in the melee, but his son, Telemachus, traveled to Ogygia and was a guest of Calypso on several occasions.

In later years, Calypso visited Rome and Egypt. She was a favored guest of Cleopatra in Alexandria in the First Millennium, but she rarely left the Mediterranean until after the fall of the Roman Empire when she traveled to the Caribbean Sea to escape the invading Persians. In the 17th Century, she became lovers with Captain David Jones, a British pirate, who manned a ship called The Flying Dutchman, named for the ghost of Captain Bernard Fokke, a Dutch captain who had lost his ship in a storm while trying to round the Cape of Good Hope in the early 16th Century

After Jones drowned at sea, Calypso used mystical means to restore him to life as a spirit and gave him the chore of ferrying the souls of those who drowned at sea into the afterlife. As a reward for carrying out a decade of service, Jones would be allowed to be reunited with her for a single day, but when he returned to her after ten years, he learned she had taken and discarded several other lovers. Abandoning his duty as ferryman for the dead, Jones united with the First Brethren Court, a loose alliance of pirate captains, and used mystical means to bind her spirit to a mortal Haitian voodooienne named Tia Dalma. Just what happened to Calypso's physical body is unrevealed, but as a result of his treachery, Jones degraded into an amalgamation of human and tentacled creatures to reflect his cursed soul.

As Tia Dalma, Calypso made a living as a minor mystic in Haiti wearing a locket identical to one she had given Davy Jones. She used her voodoo powers to resurrect a pirate named Captain Hector Barbossa to collect for her the nine pieces of eight that kept her bound to mortal form. One of them was briefly lost in a portion of the afterlife known as the Locker (as in Davy Jones' Locker) set aside for spirits lost at sea by a rogue pirate named Jack Sparrow. Barbossa used the nine pieces to separate Calypso from the body of Tia Dalma, briefly transforming her into a giant, in order to get revenge on Davy Jones, but Calypso removed herself from their feud, whipping up a storm to confound and complicate their rivalry. Just what happened to the true Tia Dalma is unrevealed.

Restored to her true form, Calypso returned to Ogygia and presented herself as a descendant of the true Calypso to the people who had populated it in her absence. She was recently visited by the young demigod named Percy Jackson who appeared on Ogygia after being lost underground. Healing him of his injuries, he stayed with her briefly before Calypso helped him to return to New York City. Calypso gave him one of the flowers on her island as a gift to plant in Manhattan.

Calypso's recent activities since are unrevealed.  

Height: 5' 11"
Weight: 330 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black

Strength Level: Calypso possesses the conventional strength level of an Olympian woman of her size, height and build who engages in extensive regular exercise; she possesses superhuman strength enabling her to lift (press) 25 tons under optimal conditions.

Known Superhuman Powers: Calypso possesses the conventional physical attributes of the Olympian gods. Like all Olympian Gods, she is immortal; she has aged at an extremely slow rate since reaching adulthood and cannot die by any conventional means. She is immune to all Earthly diseases and is resistant to conventional injury. If she were somehow wounded, her godly life force would enable her to recover with superhuman speed. It would take an injury of such magnitude that it dispersed a major portion of her bodily molecules to cause her a physical death. Even then, it might be possible for a god of significant power, such as Zeus, Poseidon or Apollo, or for a number of Olympian gods of equal power working together to revive her. Calypso also possesses superhuman strength and her Olympian metabolism provides her with far greater than human endurance in all physical activities. (Olympian flesh and bone is about three times as dense as similar human tissue, contributing to the superhuman strength and weight of the Olympian Gods.)

Calypso has some latent ability to tap into and perform feats of magic, but she is not nearly as powerful as the majority of the Olympian gods. Her powers seem limited to the manipulation of elemental spiritual energies, such as restoring life to the body of Davy Jones and enabling him to cross from planes of existence between the world of the living and the spirit world. She can call upon spirits to cause storms and whip up tidal waves at her bidding. She also has empathic abilities to feel the emotions of others and to heal minor injuries. Calypso also retains some knowledge of the Voodoo religion due to her existence as the mortal Tia Dalma, but she is reluctant to tap into these foreign spells in order to stay faithful to her Mediterranean heritage.

Abilities: Calypso is a highly charismatic and seductive individual capable of stirring passion and emotional responses in her potential lovers.

Comments: This bio involves Calypso as she has been depicted in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies and "Percy Jackson: The Battle Of The Labyrinth." It is unknown if she has made any appearances in the Marvel or DC Universes.

Calypso was played by Vanessa Williams in "The Odyssey" (1999); Tia Dalma was played by Naomie Harris.

While a historical pirate named Davy Jones existed in the 1630s, the term "Davy Jones' Locker" has mostly been credited to the Biblical Jonah who was cast into the sea for bringing the wrath of God upon sailors and a corruption of "the devil Jonah." The first known inscription of the phrase in modern literature appears in in 1824 in "Adventure of a Fisherman" by Washington Irving, at least twenty six years before Herman Melville wrote "Moby Dick."  

Last updated: 11/22/11