Lie Back And Think Of Atlantis:Monkeying Around With Mermaids.

By any sane metric, attending three lectures about mermaids in an eighteen month period is too many. Two too many kind people would say. Three too many would be the cry of more harsh critics. Following Sophia Kingshill's Mermaids:Fish, Flesh or Fowl for the London Fortean Society at The Miller in May last year and a SELFS evening in The Old King's Head near London Bridge this February (back in the days when these events could still take place in pubs) I was online, for obvious reasons - and in Tadley lying on a bed with a glass of water instead of in London behind my desk with a bottle of San Miguel, for Merpeople:A Human History with Vaughn Scribner. I'm not obsessed with mermaids. I just like these evenings. I find them interesting.

With the video conference set up by the helpful and brilliant Conway Hall, Vaughn Zoomed into our rooms from Arkansas where he works as Associate Professor at the University of Central Arkansas and, once he'd done a quick - and understandable - plug for his books - he's written about early American taverns and the history of slavery in the West Indies, he told us how he fell into researching mermaids, how he doesn't believe they exist, and yet how interesting he finds belief in them. A belief that forms the basis of his main thesis:- that to understand merpeople (mermaids, mermen, and even merbishops) is to gain a better understanding of the most mysterious, dangerous, and capricious creature that exists on Earth. The human being.  

Vaughn's interest in merpeople was first piqued when he came across the story of the 17c Englishman John Josselyn who, on his travels in Virginia, is said to have had his arm gnawed off by a merman who crawled out of the water and into Josselyn's canoe. Josselyn was the author of 1671's New England's Rarities, discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Country so it could be claimed that he had a vested interest in creating an interesting, or wholly untrue, back story to help shift his book. 

But he's far from the only person to report sightings of merpeople around that time. Though ancient South African cave drawings of merpeople exist and the concept of mermaids predate the invention of Christianity (there are images made in 8c BC Iraq and Homer's tales of mermaids on the Odyssey are possibly two or three centuries older than that) and even run concurrent with it in depictions on Roman funerary plaques it seems the heyday of mermaid belief began with Columbus arriving in the new world.

Before then merpeople could be find in many Christian buildings of Britain and Europe (York Minster, Westminster Cathedral, and Exeter Cathedral being prime examples) and many of them appear to be based on the Christian belief, or fear, of women being promiscuous. Many were depicted with their two tails spread wide open to receive, the original Starbucks logo featured just such a mermaid, and it seems that this was an early Christian tactic to try and discourage women's ownership of their own sexuality. As if to say to women, or mermaids, don't get involved. Just lie back and think of Atlantis.

Around the medieval period ideas began to congeal around mermaid identity. Mermen, who'd previously shared an equal billing, were edged aside in favour of topless, sexualised women at a time when such imagery, certainly in the cases of actual women and not ones that were half-fish, would have been incredibly rare and highly taboo in Christian churches.

The few mermen and merbishops that were depicted were conservatively attired but the mermaids had it all hanging out. As with Sophia Kingshill's not dissimilar talk on this subject, it seems that the male church leaders were having it both ways. They were able to paint an image of sexually available women/mermaids that they could, simultaneously, fantasise over and admonish for supposed moral laxity. Imagine the thoughts of guilt that would resonate in the head of a randy young priest who'd just drained his balls over a cold stone mermaid adorning a pew of a remote rural chapel.

Not everyone was so aroused by mermaids. In 1493, Columbus claimed to have encountered one on his travels and complained that she was not as beautiful as the rumours had it and, it seems, he had hoped. Those long Atlantic crossings can do things to a man. Forty years later the Spanish novelist and historian Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's ardour was equally dampened when he claimed to witness a mermaid leaping around like a "monkey with reason". 

Moving into the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries the map of mermaid sightings expanded to include the modern day countries of Cuba, Canada, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Portugal, Norway, Brazil, and Eritrea. The fact that China and Japan do not appear on this map suggests the colonial powers simply took the legend of the mermaid with them as they expanded their empires into Africa, the Americas, and parts of Asia. 

The map, essentially, was one of colonialism more than it was one of mermaids (people expected to see mermaids on their travels - so they did see them - the movement of water can play tricks on the mind) but maps, conversely, became the natural home of merpeople who'd soon start appearing on them representing the far reaches of the oceans much as the legend 'HERE BE DRAGONS' may represent unchartered terrain on land. Were these simple illustrations to jazz up otherwise potentially dull maps or was there a deeper reason for the mermaid inclusion? Vauhghn believed the truth was a bit of both.

This was a time when to claim you'd encountered a mermaid was almost the mark of an educated man, to not have seen one would be akin to not having listened to Pet Sounds, read Nietzsche, or watched Game of Thrones - you'd be rendered rather infra dig, and so desperate was the famous Swedish botanist and pioneer of binomial nomenclature Carl Linnaeus to see one he spent much of his life in fruitless pursuit of tail. The invention of modern taxonomy, it seems, was something of a booby prize.

The rise in the popularity of mermaids was also the start of the end for them too. At least as a serious scientific endeavour. The late eighteenth century craze for collecting mermaid skeletons may have easily separated the curious and unwashed from their money as crowds gathered to gawp but more serious minded critics were easily able to debunk these crude hybrid specimens. Scientists could easily identify a skeleton torso of a fish as that of a fish and the skeleton skull of a monkey to which it'd been attached as that of a monkey.

To begin with there plenty who preferred to believe and almost every cabinet of curiosities worth its salt wasn't complete without a mermaid skeleton and then popular racial theories, not far short of eugenics, were applied to mermaids of different skin colours. Intersectionality was a hot topic in the world of the mermaids, some of whom (despite not being real) suffered both sexism and racism, long before the American civil rights advocate and philosopher Kimberle Williams Crenshaw coined the term in 1989.

The boom for 'circus mermaids' continued and took an Orientalist direction as the Japanese idea of a mermaid was foisted on to willing Western audiences by Captain Eades who exhibited a supposed Japanese mermaid in London in 1822 and PT Barnum who took the very same mermaid on an American tour twenty years later. 

The differing reactions said more about that twenty year gap than they did about the differing levels of gullibility between American and British audiences. Eades wowed the crowd but Barnum's tour took place on the cusp of the Age of Science and Reason and found a much more cynical if no less receptive audience. Mermaids would soon move away from science and find new homes in the spheres of culture and creativity while still maintaining a second, nicely furnished, place in the land of capitalism.

The Australian swimmer and vaudeville star Annette Kellerman became famous for being one of the first women to ever wear a one piece bathing costume and for being the first major star to ever appear nude in a Hollywood production (1916's A Daughter of the Gods). Some called her the 'perfect woman' but she was also, to others, the perfect mermaid as she fine tuned an act she'd developed in Melbourne as a child into a regular screen appearance as a mermaid. Sometimes swimming among crocodiles.

This was the precursor to films like Ron Howard's Splash with Daryl Hannah as well as lesser known mermaid flicks like 1948's Mr Peabody And The Mermaid, 1999's Sabrina Down Under (a Sabrina the Teenage Witch spin off), and 1965's Beach Blanket Bingo with Linda Evans as Sugar Kane and the Norwegian actress Marta Kristen as a mermaid called Lorelei. Mermaids even cropped up in the Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises.

Nobody really believed mermaids were real anymore but that didn't stop them using their sexuality to shift product, be it ropy sounding b-movies or mass produced coffee. A Q&A took in subjects as diverse as Plato, the LGBTQ+ community's adoption of mermaid culture, Queen Elizabeth I, Disney's Little Mermaid, selkies, the National Gallery, Fishmonger's Hall, Zennor in Cornwall, sheela-na-gigs, Middle Temple, and the patriarchy but the gist of the talk, one Vaughn veered from often but always found his way back to, was that we instil our own hopes and shortcomings on these fantastical hybrids and though, for the most part, these days, we prefer to imagine aliens or lost civilisations when conjuring parallels to humanity and telling stories about ourselves that sometimes aren't easy, mermaids, at least in our invention and treatment of them, are really not so different to us after all. In a previous blog I wrote how 'mermaids are doing it for themselves' but the truth is they're not. They're doing 'it' for us. Linnaeus, I'm joining you.