Meramaids

So, this book is a favorite at Ocean Heir, and recently I sold a copy to a family (mom, dad, teenage daughter).  As they brought the book up to the register mom turns to the daughter and says "Are you sure you want this?"  The daughter nods her head.

Mom turns to me and says "She's in love with mermaids, I just don't understand, she  can't stand the ocean and hates the water, the sand, hates the beach."

To which the daughter replied "I like the sand, its just the water I don't like." Dad had the look of a man that couldn't wait to get out of the store.

That exchange made me to wonder, why are we so fascinated by mermaids?  Thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the book, what I found was  amazing. I can't cover everything that is cool to say about mermaids in one blog entry without risking extreme mermaid saturation and potential boredom, so I'll get the  Joseph Campbell stuff out of the way first and pick up on some of the juicier bits another time. 

A Brief History

To begin with, its hard to know where to begin, since it looks like water spirits (or mermaids) have been a part of us since man began consider the world around him.

Mermaids almost certainly evolved from  ancient fertility goddesses and spirits, who were generally associated with water and the moon (think amniotic fluid, tidal rhythms, etc.).  In 1000 BC Assyrian fertility goddess Atargatis became the first recorded mermaid myth.   After accidentally killing her human lover, she was overcome with grief, and threw herself into a lake turning herself into a fish. The waters refused to hide her beauty, instead they transformed her into a creature with a human head and torso and the tail of a fish.  Presto! we have a mermaid.

We know mermaids go farther back than Atargatis, since the first known image of a mermaid appears on a Babylonian sealing stone dating to the 18th century BC.  That image had to evolve from something, so no doubt the mermaid is even older.

 

Stories similar to Atargatis sprang up all over the globe, as each cultural group developed a cosmology attempting to explain the world and man's place within it.  The water spirits of each culture differed in appearance from one another.  In some traditions the spirits looked human, but were able to live in the water (as does Triton - son of Poseidon - in the famous painting).  In others they may have had webbed feet, a fish or reptile tail (like the French maiden Melusine) , or even two tails (like Mixoparthenos), or the head of a fish, sometimes they retained their legs (like Atargatis).  For sure, they were not a homogeneous group like we  see today and for sure they were everywhere.

Civilization spread. In most places the old religions were replaced or faded.  The old  spirits took refuge in indigenous folklore. Trade between cultures grew,  local myths and superstitions were part of the exchange.  The look of the water spirits  began to conform to an ideal. The process accelerated during The Age of Discovery, until mermaids became beautiful long-haired young women, with a tail  ending at the calves or the knees.  Then the Victorians came along trapping the mermaid in a waist high tail, so as to completely cover all the naughty bits.  And then there was Disney.

And so we have the modern mermaid.  But still, why are we so fascinated?  Why are they generally female?  Could they be real?  I guess we'll just leave those questions for another day.  

In the meantime, Skye Alexander's book "Mermaids- The Myths, Legends and Lore" is beautifully crafted book and a great place to start your own research, even if you can't stand the ocean and hate the beach.