Mermaids Are Doin' It For Themselves.

"Should I stand amid the breakers or should I lie with death my bride? Hear me sing 'swim to me, swim to me, let me enfold you'. Here I am, here I am, waiting to hold you".  - Song to the Siren, Tim Buckley.

An absolutely hilarious pub debate of yore used to be the vexatious question of what kind of mermaid would be best. Top half woman/bottom half fish or bottom half woman/top half fish? Either would prove logistically challenging and both are almost certain to never have existed. Discussions, however, could be guaranteed to be both ribald and ridiculous.

Needless to say, Sophia Kingshill's talk for the London Fortean Society, Mermaids:Fish, Flesh or Fowl, was slightly less puerile - though that's not to say there wasn't a fair bit of bawdy laughter along the way. The LFS have hosted talks on vampires, witches, killer clowns, and even talking mongooses so an evening of mermaid consideration would neither be out of their remit nor even particularly bonkers by the standards of the LFS.

In fact the talk had proved so popular that this was the second time the LFS had hosted it. They'd sold out Conway Hall with it back in February (an event that for some, now forgotten, reason I did not attend) and now they were back at The Miller in Borough for a second run through. Again it had sold out. A regular occurrence, it now seems, with these Fortean events.

Sophia had the air of a school teacher, but one with a wicked sense of humour which would later reveal itself, and she launched into the talk by explaining something we all know. Or we all think we know. What a mermaid is. A woman with a fishes 'tail' who lives in the sea, right?

Yes and no. The word 'mermaid' means simply 'water-woman' and, as such, mermaids are just as at home in ponds as they are oceans or treacherous rivers and straits. Some of the oldest images of mermaids from Mesopotamia and what is presently Syria show creatures with human bodies and fish tails that correspond with their modern equivalents.

Sirens too, now, are believed to have a similar genetic make up but more than two thousand years ago sirens had, instead of fish tails, wings and they'd often appear as decoration on tombs. Homer's Odyssey was written in the 8th century BC and contains this verse:-

Once he hears to his heart's content, sails on, a wiser man.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so
All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!

 

Sirens, in the poetry of Homer, were just song. They may as well have not had bodies at all. It was later illustrators who gave them, first, wings and then, eventually, fish tails. Presumably drawing something that is 'just song' being a little tricky. But why the move from birds to fish? What's that all about?

Could another character from the Odyssey, Scylla, hold the key? Scylla was described by Homer as a mutant octopus with about as many heads as she had tentacles (if not more). As time moved forward, Scylla's image was simplified and, eventually, she came to be drawn with just the one head (any more, presumably, a sign of decadence).

The prophet sea-god Glaucus (who'd been born mortal but had become immortal after eating a magical herb, obvs) had the hots for Scylla - and who wouldn't? - but the enchantress Circe was most displeased with this, Circe harbouring a tendresse for Glaucus that soon turned to bitterness and revenge. Circe, and this is bang out of order, "poured a baleful potion into the sea water which caused Scylla to transform into a frightful monster with four eyes and six long snaky necks equipped with grisly heads, each of which contained three rows of sharp shark's teeth. Her body consisted of twelve tentacle like legs and a cat's tail while six dog's heads ringed her waist".

This is the form Scylla took as she attacked the ships of passing sailors seizing separate crew members with each of her heads. It's one of those fantastic tales that crop up so often in Greek mythology and, like many others, it seems to have caused a little confusion down the centuries. Even artists of the time seemed to mix up Circe, Scylla, and the sirens.

Understandable perhaps at a time when most stories were passed on orally but in 13c Florence, Dante (who, it is generally understood, had access to manuscripts) confounded the mistake and mixed them up further. The full change from winged creature to tailed creature took about 1,600 years (800BC-800AD) and once Dante had not reversed it that change appears to have become permanent.

Sea nymphs, naiads, and tritons all get caught up in the mix too! With half, or more than half of your body, hidden by water it's difficult to tell who's who or what's what. The classical world seemed to have far more mermen than it did mermaids but come the age of the great cathedrals it seems mermaids started to take over. Sophia's theory being that craftsmen simply enjoyed carving breasts and monks, for obvious reasons, liked looking it at them. "Men like tits" - a memorable, and concise, explanation for the rise of the mermaid.

But while men most certainly do like tits they don't always like women. Mermaids and sirens were known to tempt, lie, and destroy - just like Satan, who were they seen as agents of. Even if the sight of mermaids was said to warn sailors of storms and tempests.

Many sailors of 15c/16c believed in mermaids and that's put down to the fact that many maps and charts of the era were embellished with images of mermaids. Ships figureheads too. Columbus claimed he saw three mermaids in what is now the Dominican Republic and complained that they were "not so fair as they are painted".

That's because they were, most probably, dugongs or manatees. Dugongs were so regularly mistaken for mermaids that one desperate sailor in the Red Sea did the 'deed of lechery' with one and remarked that the dugong genitalia was a remarkably good fit for a man. Rhinoceroses may have been more difficult to coerce into a session of inter-species sex but they were, around about the same time, often mistaken for unicorns. The 'mermaids' sighted in northern waters are believed to have probably been walruses. It's not held on record how accommodating a walrus vagina is to a human penis.

When people weren't molesting marine mammals they were creating images of mermaids. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century a cottage industry, particularly big in Japan, sprang up in which crude mermaids were constructed from parts of dead monkeys and chickens. Phileas Barnum owned the Feejee Mermaid which looked as ludicrous as it did grotesque. It didn't bother him though. Barnum was in the business of selling 'humbug'. Truth was irrelavent to Barnum and exposure was everything.

If dead mermaids could make this much money, what about live ones? In Edwardian times actresses would impersonate them to great acclaim and much amusement. Mermaids had come a long way from the legendary sirens, the Greek and Roman stories of metamorphosis, and with their new found popularity and the modern zeal for science people were beginning to ask how sex with mermaids could actually happen bearing in mind their bottom halves were all scaly. If you're after meat, you can't accept fish.

A theory developed that these fish tails were not permanent and that, in fact, mermaids could, and did, change from woman to fish at will. When the mermaids (and selkies, let's not forget them) come on shore to dance in the moonlight and tempt men they're half fish (half-seal for those selkies) but when you get them back to their mermaid beds they're all woman!

Another theory posited that mermaids would 'trick' men into marriage before revealing their inhuman form. These stories of water women seem to come from all continents. We touched on Chinese 'dragon brides', Russian 'waterfowl women', and the German Lorelei. Lorelei was originally, and still is, a rock on the river Rhine that's believed to be haunted by a female spirit who regularly crushes sailors to death against the said rock.

The Danube has a similar story and Paracelsus, the 16c Swiss physician, wrote of 'undines'. Or 'ondines' even. Undines/ondines are water nymphs that have cropped up in literature from Ovid to Hans Christian Andersen and one was the subject for a John William Waterhouse painting, dismissed by Sophia as "basically a page three girl".

Further grot in grottoes came in the form of other mermaids who were barely more than Victorian porn. Edward Burne-Jones's The Depths of the Sea for example. Jocular and fruity music hall songs about mermaids further propagated the myth that they were both sexually available and sexually unavailable at the same time and even suggested they were, to use that somewhat unpleasant term, 'ballbreakers'. Not least because in the realms of the underwater world, divorce was not permitted - so you'd be stuck with a fishy old hag for the rest of your life.

Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid appears to be the first story about a child mermaid. The first one about a mermaid who's not sexually mature, let alone sexually active. That didn't stop illustrators drawing her flashing off a bit of pert bum but Andersen can't be held responsible for all illustrations of his work and Sophia approved of Andersen's story because it was a rare example of a tale told from the mermaid's point of view.

 

Following on from The Little Mermaid, mermaids became perceived as virtuous and when Disney desexualised (Disneyfied even) mermaids further with their film version of the book it seemed that mermaids had finally come in from the deep and were now accepted as a non-threatening part of the fictional world.

The story of mermaids, of course, echoed and ran parallel to the story of women throughout the centuries. Or at least the story as it's been told by men. They were evil temptresses. They were hags. They were both sex mad and frigid at the same time. They were responsible for all of man's woes and, eventually, they were accepted - but only on the terms of men.

Nobody needed Sophia Kingshill to spell this out. It was apparent from the start of her fabulous talk and only became more so as the evening wore on. A Q&A afterwards touched on Marina from Stingray, Greek mythology (again), centaurs (aggressive drunks apparently - keep them away from the booze), sheela-na-gigs, and satyrs as well as a well informed debate on the etymology of the word 'nymphomaniac' and I haven't even managed to fit in two other parts of the talk. One about the battle between mythology/romance and crypotozoology and another that looked back to a time when people wondered if mermaids could be observed, caught, and exploited for financial gain!

In summing up, Sophia claimed the lasting fascination with mermaids may be because they offer an example of femininity that is not based around motherhood. These mermaids, we all agreed, are doin' it for themselves and in honour of both Sophia Kingshill and mermaids my final image is Sophia's favourite mermaid painting, Evelyn de Morgan's Sea Maidens from 1886. Now I return to the water.