Where Do Mermaid Legends Come From? Sirens, Sea Cows and a Very Old Goddess
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Columbus recorded in January 1493 that he had seen three mermaids off the coast of Hispaniola and that they were not as beautiful as they are painted, which is the most honest sentence in the history of the subject; he had almost certainly seen manatees. Half-fish, half-human figures appear in Assyrian carvings three thousand years old, in Greek myth, in Japanese folklore, in West African religion and in the fish tanks of Victorian sideshows, and the creature that most people picture, a beautiful woman on a rock with a comb and a mirror, is an assembly of at least four different things.
The oldest one
The earliest mermaid in the record is Atargatis, a Syrian goddess worshipped from about 1000 BC, who in the Greek retelling threw herself into a lake in shame at having killed a mortal lover, and was turned into a fish from the waist down because the water would not conceal her beauty entirely. Her temples had sacred fish pools, and her cult spread through the eastern Mediterranean; a Babylonian fish-tailed god, Oannes or Ea, is older still, and Assyrian reliefs show fish-bodied attendants. From these the fish-tailed deity passed into Greek and Roman art as the tritons and nereids of the sea, male and female, and into the decorative vocabulary of the Mediterranean, which is where the medieval carvers on church benches got it.
The sirens are a different animal
The sirens that sang Odysseus nearly onto the rocks were not mermaids. In Homer and in all early Greek art they are birds with women's heads, creatures of the shore whose danger is their voice, and they are shown that way on vases for centuries; the word siren in modern French, Spanish and Italian nonetheless means mermaid, because the two merged in the medieval bestiaries, which took the bird-woman of the classical texts and drew her with a fish tail. The merger gave the mermaid her most persistent attribute, the song that lures sailors to their deaths, which the Syrian goddess and the manatee never had, and it is why the two words have been interchangeable in most of Europe for eight hundred years.
What sailors actually saw
Two orders of marine mammals are the usual suspects, and both are plausible at a distance, in poor light, to tired men:
- •Manatees and dugongs, the sirenians, named for the legend: they have forelimbs that bend like arms, they nurse a single calf held to the chest at the surface, they have a rounded head and a horizontal tail fluke that looks nothing like a fish's from above and much like one from the front
- •Seals: they haul out on rocks, have large eyes and an expressive face, hold their heads up and vocalise, and in northern waters are the likelier original, which is why the selkie of Orkney and Shetland is a seal that removes its skin to become a woman
- •Whales and dolphins at a distance, and floating debris in a swell
- •Hoaxes: the Fiji mermaid of the 1840s, exhibited by P. T. Barnum and others, was a monkey's torso sewn to a fish's tail, a Japanese craft made for temple offerings and sold to Western sailors
The world's versions
Water spirits in human form are close to universal, and only some have tails. Mami Wata, worshipped across West and Central Africa and carried to the Caribbean and Brazil by the slave trade, is a water deity of wealth, beauty and danger often shown as a mermaid, and her iconography absorbed a nineteenth-century German poster of a snake charmer. The ningyo of Japan is a fish with a human face whose flesh grants centuries of life to whoever eats it, usually to their sorrow. The rusalka of Slavic folklore is the ghost of a drowned girl, the Scottish selkie a seal-woman who must return to the sea when she finds her skin, the Irish merrow wears a cap, and the Yoruba Yemoja and the mermaid of the Caribbean are the same figure carried across an ocean. What they share is the water's character: it gives life, it takes people, and it is female in most of the traditions that imagine it as a person.
The modern mermaid
The tragic, longing mermaid who wants legs is Hans Christian Andersen's, written in 1837, and she is a Danish literary invention rather than a folk figure; the original ends with the mermaid dissolving into sea foam having refused to kill the prince, and the happy ending is Disney's, from 1989, which also gave the world the shell top and the red hair. Between them stand the pub signs, the ships' figureheads, the coffee logo derived from a sixteenth-century woodcut of a two-tailed siren, and the professional mermaids who now swim in monofins for a living. The figure has outlasted every explanation of it because it is not one thing: a Syrian goddess, a Greek bird, a Scottish seal, a tropical sea cow and a Danish fairy tale, wearing the same tail.
The takeaway
Mermaid legends are an assembly: the fish-tailed goddess Atargatis and her Babylonian predecessors, the bird-bodied Greek sirens who acquired a tail in medieval bestiaries and lent the creature her deadly song, the manatees, dugongs and seals that sailors reported, and the water spirits that nearly every culture imagines, from Mami Wata to the selkie and the rusalka. The pining mermaid who wants to be human is Andersen's invention of 1837, and the happy ending is a film's.