Harpies Explained:
In ancient Egypt they discovered that cow pats helped crops to grow and so worshiped the cow as an embodiment of Ptar, the god of fertility. However a rising trend of animal sacrifice in the name of Osiris, the god of death, meant that the myth changed into cows were selected from birth to be ritually sacrificed on the day of death, believing that it would increase the fertility of their crops. As the Harpy, or sacrificial cow, became more synonymous with death, weird methods of death were invented around it, including individuals being cooked to death in an iron and clay cow-shaped structure. Linders were evil heather-like plants that would pull people under the earth and drown them in the bog where they live. Cows eat grass so they were seen as being protectors of the farmers. The jellyfish-like webbing the cow produces from its mouth is most likely a confusion between a cow's afterbirth and the saliva that drips from their mouths. Since Harpies are exclusively male, the webbing had to be oral as they hadn't the female parts to produce it otherwise and the anus was reserved for holy cow pat deposits.

Harpies are believed to consume evil spirits via entrapping them with jellyfish-like webbing they produce from their mouths and swallowing them whole. Normally Harpies feast on short grasses that can be found on muddy patches near to a river or in an area with poor drainage. These grasses are considered evil as they hide the dangerous mud beneath that a farmer might get trapped in. The evil spirits are then cooked inside the cow's body to produce a cow pat which when spread on the farmer's fields will bring great fertility to their crops.

Later stories tell of farmers who were so happy that their farms were prospering after getting a cow that they celebrated by sacrificing the cow itself, not knowing that the cow pats were the source of the fertility. Later their crops die and the farmers starve to death.

The Harpy tale is the inspiration for the story of The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs and the Jack And The Beanstalk tale. There are also elements of Harpy tales used in The Stubborn Donkey and The Minotaur.