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The image of the Mermaid, the sea-swelling half-woman, half-fish,
has been an endearing and popular one; each age had invested this
enchanting creature with new shades of meaning and new elements in
her myth.
Although her male counterpart, the merman, had
his place also in the collective consciousness, the female of the
species with her special feminine symbolism, is far more often represented;
it almost seems as though the male version fundamentally exists
because he logically must in order to facilitate continuation of
their race. However, despite this, the first representation
of the half-human, half-fish hybrid was a male; the sea-god Oannes, the 'great fish of the ocean', who was also the sun-god,
rising out of the sea each day and disappearing back under the
waves each night.
Oannes was worshipped by the Babylonians around
5000BCE. Early images of Oannes show him as a man wrapped in
a fish cloak, but later the image evolved into the half-man,
half-fish form in which he became more widely known. A
civilizing force for the good, and light and life to his people,
Oannes represented the positive values connected with the sea.
Oannes' goddess counterpoint was Atargatis (or,
Atergatis, or in Greece, Derketo) a Semetic moon goddess who
became the first official mermaid, being depicted with a fish's
tail; fish were sacred to her. She and Oannes were said to
be the parents of the legendary Semiramis, an historical queen of
Babylon. Atargartis was an important fertility goddess, also
representing the darker, night forces of love and their
potentially destructive power. As Dea Syria, her cult
reached as far as Britain; the migration of the ubiquitous mermaid
had begun.
Later this goddess became identified with
Aphrodite, who was born from the sea, and retained close
connections with it, but in fully human form again; her fish
attributes were transferred to her escorts the Tritons, and more
rarely, the female Tritonids. Aphrodite was also a fertility
goddess, and goddess of fair sailing, her companion the sacred
dolphin. Many of the symbols associated with Aphrodite,
subsequently the Roman Venus, have been retained in the mermaid
myth. Her mirror, later a symbol of her vanity, originally
represented the planet Venus in astrological tradition.
Her abundant, flowing hair, symbolizing an
abundant love potential, was also an attribute of Venus in her
role as fertility goddess. Her comb, necessary to keep all
that hair in order, carried sexual connotations for the Greeks, as
their words for comb, kteis and pecten, also signified the female
vulva. Thus the mermaid is the surviving aspect of the old
goddesses, particularly as the link between passion and
destruction.
How did one goddess then become a multitude, a
whole race of sea-people? The Greeks were a great sea faring
people and obviously aware of the abundance of all life in the
oceans. The incestuous union of brother and sister Oceanus
and Tethys bore eloquent testimony to the legendary fertility of
the sea; they produced 300 sea-nymphs called Oceanids, along with
much other issue. Among these were Metis, mother of Athene
by Zeus; Euromyne, who was represented as a mermaid in a statue at
Phigalia; and Doris, who became the wife of another sea-god,
Nereus. These two then produced 50 more sea-nymphs known as
Nereids. Among these were Thetis, mother of Achilleus, and
Amphitrite, who became the wife of the later sea-god Poseidon, and
bore the race of Tritons, already mentioned in connection with
Venus.
Nereids had become synonymous with mermaids by
the time of Pliny (80 CE) and the Tritons the originators of the
mermen. The original sea-gods were Wise Old Men of the Sea
in keeping with the tradition begun by Oannes, but the Tritons
were a lustful and rapacious lot, fond of assaulting unwary
sea-nymphs and human women alike, doubtless as a result of their
association with Venus.
The Nereids on the other hand were protective of
sailors, and reserved their beautiful singing voices to entertain
their father, unlike the dangerous Sirens who ensnared sailors
with their enchanting voices and lured them to watery
deaths. The Sirens were originally bird-women related to the
Egyptian Ra, or soul birds, demons of death sent to catch
souls. But the Sirens eventually became synonymous with
mermaids; thus the mermaids acquired their unpleasant reputation
for drowning sailors. This evil aspect can also be traced to
a certain degree as stemming from Greek sea-monster propaganda,
promoting a fearful image of the sea to discourage commercial
rivals in shipping and colonization.
Whilst the Sirens tempted Odysseus with supreme
knowledge, a god-like attribute, later the emphasis shifted to
worldly temptation. Thus the mermaid/siren symbol was used
by the Mediaeval Church as embodying the lure of fleshy pleasures
to be shunned by the God-fearing. The mermaid became a
victim of the repressive sexual attitudes of the Christian
Church. Mermaid carvings figured prominently in church
decorations in the Middle Ages, to symbolically serve as a vivid
reminder of the fatal temptations of the flesh. These
rapacious soul-eaters (the legacy of the bird-sirens) were of
course not considered to have souls of their own. Thus the
legends of the more highly-principled mermaids, anxious to acquire
souls, arose.
Apparently one method for a mermaid to gain a
soul was to marry a human being; the best known form of this
legend is Hans Christian Anderson's 'Little Mermaid', recently
popularized once again, and sanitized of the darker aspects of the
legend, by the Disney Studios. But similar legends abound in
the folklore of many countries. Celtic mythology included
the sanctified Liban, a young woman drowned and transformed into a
mermaid, who after 500 years enlisted the aid of the Irish St.
Comgall to save her soul; also the Mermaid of Iona who wept many
bitter tears over her inability to leave her ocean home to gain
her promised soul. St. Patrick allegedly had a custom of
transforming pagan women into mermaids, adding to the marine
population in Ireland.
France has the legends of Melusine and Undine,
both water-spirits who married noblemen. These mixed
marriages in legend almost invariably fail miserably, with the
unhappy mermaid ultimately unable to abandon her ocean element.
In Germany on the Rhine River they had their
Lorelei or Nix, a beautiful blonde siren who sat on a cliff luring
boatmen to their deaths with her songs, in traditional style.
There are the 'morgens' of Brittany, seemingly descendants
of Morgan Le Fay, the sorceress of Arthurian legend. These
creature lure all who come too near, down to their gold and
crystal underwater palaces.
In Norway the 'havfrau' portends imminent
disaster if sighted sitting on the surface of the water combing
her long golden hair with a golden comb.
The Japanese have their mermaids known as Ningyo.
In fact the mermaid archetype is so widespread among cultures that
one may conclude it is very ancient, and fulfills a particular
need in the human collective consciousness. The mermaid in
our culture is the most persistent and pervasive symbol of the old
Goddess energy that represents women, particularly the mysterious,
life-generating element. The Christian Church, in promoting
the ideas that mermaids
a)
were dangerous temptresses and
b)
had no souls of their own,
was actually stating deeply-held beliefs about
all women, much as in the case of the witchcraze, when harmless
old women were put to death by burning or hanging for practicing
traditional herb-lore; this being the province of women it was
destroyed by the Church in support of male domination.
This beautiful, helpful and compellingly
attractive goddess-mermaid has been stripped of all her spiritual
qualities; hence the stories involving the mermaid's soul could
never end happily. They emphasized the supposed
faithlessness and inconstancy of women, the danger of their
attraction, and the unlikelihood of their gaining humanity.
In Elizabethan times the mermaid was used as a
symbol of prostitution, and thus popularly applied to Mary Queen
of Scots, as Queen Elizabeth's hated rival. Shakespeare, in
the Midsummer Night's Dream, included these lines supposedly
referring to Mary, five years after her execution:
'Thou
rememberest
Since
once I sat upon a promontory,
And
heard a mermaid on a Dolphin's back
Uttering
such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That
the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And
certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To
hear the sea-maid's music.'
The 'mermaid', 'sea-maid' meaning Mary; a
dolphins back', she married the Dauphin of France; 'the rude sea',
the Scotch rebels; 'certain stars' referring to the Earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland and the Duke of Norfolk; 'shot
madly from their spheres', revolted from Queen Elizabeth,
enchanted by Mary's feminine qualities.
These lines may been disguised flattery; but it
seems unlikely since Mary was dead, and also due to the
prostitution symbolism of the mermaid at the time. More likely it
was directed at Elizabeth, Shakespeare's patroness, in the sense
of censuring the behaviour of her rebel nobles. The mermaid
was a popular poetic and allegorical symbol in Elizabethan
theatre.
In our own times the mermaid-symbol has been
completely trivialized; stripped of her power to frighten or
impress, all deeper meanings forgotten. Although just a cute
toy for little girls, the persistence of this creature, despite
her biological unlikelihood, is interesting. My personal
favourite theory is based on Desmond Morris' suggestion in 'The
Naked Ape', that possibly the human species spent some time living
in the ocean at the time of the separation from our closest
relatives, the great apes. This could explain some of the
obvious differences between human beings and other apes, i.e.
relative hairlessness, upright stance (both for streamlining)
freeing the hands for manipulation, protruding noses, and the fact
that the human, alone among the great apes, actually enjoys
immersing in water and seeks it out for pleasure. Could the
mermaid also be a symbol of our affinity with the sea, gained in
this way?
Resources; 'Mermaids' - Beatrice Philpotts 'The
Witches' Goddess' - Janet & Stewart Farrar Brewer's Dictionary
of Phrase & Fable - See additional for Postscripts (unavailable
now that link is broken)
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