Mermaids: Art, Symbolism and Mythology

By Axel Müller, Christopher Halls and Ben Williamson

Women with fish tails are among the oldest and still most popular of mythological creatures, possessing a powerful allure and compelling ambiguity. They dwell right in the uncanniest valley of the sea: so similar to humans, yet profoundly other. Mermaids: Art, Symbolism and Mythology presents a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and beautifully illustrated study of mermaids and their influence on Western culture. The roots of mermaid mythology and its metamorphosis through the centuries are discussed with examples from visual art, literature, music and architecture—from 600 BCE right up to the present day.

Our story starts in Mesopotamia, source of the earliest preserved illustrations of half-human, half-fish creatures. The myths and legends of the Mesopotamians were incorporated and adopted by ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman cultures. Then, during the early medieval period, ancient mythological creatures such as mermaids were confused, transformed and reinterpreted by Christian tradition to begin a new strand in mermaid lore. Along the way, all manner of stunning—and sometimes bizarre or unsettling—depictions of mermaids emerged. Written in an accessible and entertaining style, this book challenges conventional views of mermaid mythology, discusses mermaids in the light of evolutionary theory and aims to inspire future studies of these most curious of imaginary creatures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804130049

Axel Müller

Axel Müller is Professor in Mineralogy and Petrology at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in Norway. He has a strong interdisciplinary geoscience career and teaches economic geology. 

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: WHY MERMAIDS?

For thousands of years, mermaid legends and symbols have captured the imagination. The name ‘mermaid’ comes from the Middle English mĕre, ‘deep and marshy lake or ocean’, and maiden, meaning a virgin girl. The mermaid—a woman with the tail of a fish—appears in folklore all over the world, including Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, West and Central Africa, Central Asia, Japan and the populated Arctic regions. Because of this wide geographical range, mermaids show strong variations in their symbolic and mythological representations, while the meanings of these have changed over time. This book investigates the roots and evolution of mermaid iconography and mythology in the Western world, and its exploitation and dissemination in European cultures and art movements. Today, it is often believed that accounts and myths of mermaids have their origins in sightings of aquatic mammals that can resemble humans from a distance, such as manatees, dugongs or seals. In order to be able really to imagine women with fish tails, however, the observer is likely to have been told stories about the existence of such creatures or to have seen illustrations of them.

During the Early Middle Ages, the Christian world’s vision of the mermaid was of a beautiful long-haired young woman with one or two fish tails instead of legs, commonly holding a comb and a mirror in her hands. She was the quintessential symbol of seduction, combining the image of a virgin with that of a soulless, immortal creature, but also encapsulating that profound human fear of the unknown in the depths of the sea. Anyone who has swum far out in the ocean, with no land in sight, can understand this well.

Mermaids are often depicted as half-human, half-animal creatures and sometimes as the guardians of gates, such as in mermaid reliefs on porticos around the doors of Romanesque churches. From a Christian perspective, a natural relationship with a human being would never be possible, so, despite all her female attraction, a mermaid remains a virgin forever. This paradox has been the major inspiration for mermaid tales, songs and images.

The first illustrations of Christian fish-tailed mermaids appeared in manuscripts in Central and Western Europe in the eighth century, if not earlier. These were accompanied by myths that mermaids bewitch mariners with their songs, to lure them off course to be wrecked on the rocks (Figure 1.1), and that treasures from these wrecks are hidden in their deep-sea lairs. This is the same fatal lure as that of the Sirens, described in Homer’s Odyssey (c.700 BCE); however, the Sirens were half-human, half-bird creatures of Greek mythology, very different in appearance to the mermaids of medieval times. Meanwhile, another seductive technique employed by mermaids is to swim close to ships to embrace sailors, who are then dragged slowly under water to their doom (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1A mermaid with a mirror and a comb, symbols of vanity or luxury, carved on a wooden pew in St Senara’s Church, Zennor, Cornwall, c. sixteenth century.

Figure 1.2Medieval illumination showing a mermaid luring a sailor to his death (left) and a centaur (right), 1250–1300. The mermaid and centaur were commonly depicted as a couple in early medieval times.

To create a common baseline for modern understandings of the mermaid myth in the Western world, the following definition will be used: a mermaid is a half-human, half sea-fish creature with the upper body (from the head to the hip) of a pretty young woman and with one or two fish tails instead of legs. There are no descriptions or illustrations of aged mermaids. An anatomical impression of a mermaid with a single fish tail by the Brazilian contemporary artist Walmor Corrêa is given in Figure 1.3. Mermaids should not be confused with the selkies of north European folklore, which resemble a seal in the water but a woman on land, nor with the nymphs of Celtic mythologies and the rusalka of Slavic mythologies, both of which do not have fish tails and live in fresh water or in the forest.

Figure 1.3Ondina by Walmor Corrêa, 2006: an artist’s impression of the inner organs of a mermaid.

It is said that mermaids have beautiful voices, which they use to sing their seductive songs. Some mermaids can speak, others not. Those who cannot may learn a human language if they come into contact with humans. A mermaid does not have a soul, but might attain one if she falls in love with a human, a characteristic that first appeared in fifteenth-century tales. Most intriguing is the notion that when a mermaid enters the human world on land, the fish tail(s) transformsinto human legs within the space of few minutes, a metamorphic process called shapeshifting. Unfortunately, human interaction with a mermaid usually leads to the death of the person involved, wherein lies a crucial dilemma in proving the existence of mermaids: all witnesses who have been in direct contact with them have disappeared. There are also of course no fossil records or remains of deceased mermaids.

The idea for this book arose on a stormy December night while listening to miners’ Christmas songs in St Senara’s Church, Zennor, near Pendour Cove in west Cornwall. Cornwall is the home of numerous mermaid tales, in particular at Zennor where, according to legend, a tragic event took place in the sixteenth century. This is captured in a carving of a mermaid on a bench in St Senara’s Church (Figure 1.1). The Land’s End peninsula, where the village of Zennor is located, is the very western tip of Cornwall, a wild and mysterious land. Around its coast, the sea sings constantly. Here, when staring out into the fog-cloaked ocean towards the coastal islets and skerries, it is easy to imagine mermaids intoning their seductive and fatal melodies, providing the material for mysterious tales.

In this book, emphasis has been placed on the theme of the mermaid figure in the Christian world, with a primary focus on Western Europe. Here, the possible roots of the mermaid mythology, its cultural evolution and its mythological and pictorial metamorphosis through the centuries are described and illustrated with examples from visual art, literature, music and architecture. It is the nature of myths to change over time, and different versions can exist concurrently. The mermaid features extensively in the literature and art of many cultures and eras and has been passed on in a great diversity of tales. This book focuses on a few art objects and their specific stories which—we think—are representative of the different cultural periods of ancient and modern civilizations in the Middle East and Europe. We do not aim to provide a complete list of art objects related to the mermaid theme or a complete history of mermaids in art, but rather attempt to address a number of questions related to the origin and evolution of mermaid mythology, such as why the Aramaean deity Antargatis is considered to be the mermaid goddess, how and why the ancient half-woman, half-bird Sirens transformed morphologically into Sirens with fish tails during early Christian times, when and why the first mermaid with a brassiere appeared, and so on. These questions have already been considered by researchers in numerous articles; our book attempts to compile this knowledge in a thought-provoking and comprehensible way. References are provided to inspire the reader to explore specific topics in more detail.

Our story commences in Mesopotamia, where the oldest preserved illustrations of half-human, half-fish creatures have been recorded. Only by starting at the beginning is it possible to identify and understand the roots of Western mermaid mythology. Women with fish tails are among the oldest and still most popular mythological creatures. The puzzle surrounding the archaic meaning of the mythical mermaid figure has fostered continuous reinterpretations, so that new stories and depictions have emerged. The myths and legends of the Mesopotamians, our knowledge of which is very fragmentary, were partially incorporated and adopted within the mythologies of the ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman cultures. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, however, caused another loss of stories and depictions. As a result of the establishment and spread of the Christian religion during early medieval times, ancient mythological figures were confused, transformed and reinterpreted by Christian clerks and historians to teach morality and to create a fear of soulless creatures. In Chapter 3, we offer an explanation for this transmutation as documented in the form of cultural objects and historical texts. From there, the evolution of Christian mermaid mythology can be traced to the present day, illustrated and described through representative art objects that are to be found in Chapters 4 and 5. Over time, the myth of the mermaid underwent multiple changes, which constitute a cultural evolution. This book aims to develop a better understanding of that process. It is not the intention to provide a complete and exhaustive history, applying a purely scientific approach, but to examine some of the steps in the development of the mermaid myth, to challenge conventional views and to inspire future studies. The closing chapter describes, probably for the first time, mermaids in the light of evolutionary theory, through an examination of the fantastical idea that mermaids lie on a side branch of human evolution.

Finally, we would like to note that we are aware of the existence of merman depictions and tales. The merman is the male form of half-human, half-fish creatures, and in Western cultures they are much less often described or depicted than their female counterparts. To most people, mermen are less attractive and seductive than mermaids, and therefore they seldom appear in Western art. Yet male half-human, half-fish beings seem to have been much more common in Assyrian and Babylonian art, and are therefore probably much older than the female versions (e.g. Green, 1986), as discussed in Chapter 2. The following chapters focus on female half-human, half-fish creatures, a topic so vast and complex that it deserves more than one book.

CHAPTER 2

MERMAIDS CONCEIVED: HYBRID GODDESSES AND BEASTS IN ANTIQUITY

Mesopotamia: the cradle of mermaid imagery

In seeking the roots of Western mermaid imagery and legends, we need to go back far into the past, to the beginning of the cultural evolution and development of religious belief. Only by getting a sense of these very early first depictions of mermaid-like creatures will it be possible to appreciate how these were transmuted and reformulated centuries later by Christian thinkers and artists.

The history of figures combining body parts of humans and animals—called hybrids—goes back to the Old Stone Age (Palaeolithic period; 2.6 million to about 12,000 years ago). Examples of early depictions of hybrid figures are the ‘Lion-man’ found in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany (33,000–38,000 BCE) and the ‘Sorcerer’ painted on a wall in the cave of Trois-Frères in south-west France (c.13,000 BCE). These imaginary hybrids were created by combining the strength of animals with the intellect of humans. To imagine such creatures is a unique human ability. The fact that early conceptions of them arise in different geographical areas in pre-Christian civilizations suggests that they indicate how humans were beginning to understand the threatening and puzzling environment in which they lived: an assumption was made that there must be creatures, apart from deities, that were able to survive in harsh and difficult conditions. Creating images of hybrids was probably believed to have a strong protective power, but at the same time they appeared to be thought of as destructive.

It is intriguing that of the many hybrid images to have survived from before around 2,200 BCE, none combine the body parts of humans and fish. There are many possible explanations for this, but perhaps the most likely is that creatures such as lions, deer or eagles were perceived to be more powerful than fish. The idea of human–fish hybrids might have originated in a dream of discovering the marine world and swimming as fast as a fish. Still, it is most likely that these depictions began to be created because fish were considered in some periods and regions to be sacred, as well as an important source of nourishment.

The oldest preserved illustrations of creatures with fish tails are associated with the mythologies of Mesopotamian cultures, the Bronze Age world of the Middle East in 3,500 to 550 BCE (Figure 2.1). The first illustrations of these hybrids probably originate from the Third Dynasty of Ur in Mesopotamia, also known as the Neo-Sumerian Empire, in the twenty-second to twenty-first century BCE (Edzard, 1994). An early illustration of a female half-human, half-fish figure appears on a cylinder seal print from the seventh century BCE (Figure 2.2). On the left-hand side of the print is a human wrapped in a fish cloak, holding a bucket, and on the right-hand side there are a woman and a bearded man with fish tails. In the centre is a natural-looking palm tree, probably a sacred form.

Figure 2.1Early Bronze Age kingdoms (in colour) and civilizations of Europe, the Middle East and north Africa. The art of the Ur III (Neo-Sumerian) Empire (2114–2004 BCE) included the oldest preserved mythological creatures that combine the body parts of humans and fish. Grey lines mark modern state boundaries.

Figure 2.2Chalcedony cylinder seal (left) from 600 BCE and its print on brown clay (right). The seal is 2.6 cm tall and originated in Assyria (modern northern Iraq, north-eastern Syria, south-eastern Turkey and the north-western fringes of Iran). The print shows Apkallû wrapped in a fish cloak on the left, a palm tree in the centre, and one female and one male creature with fish tails on the right.

The human in the fish cloak on the left is probably Apkallû (wise man), who is commonly interpreted to be the priest and demigod Adapa, one of the mythological Seven Sages of the ancient Middle East (Dalley, 2009). In Sumerian mythology, Adapa was responsible for bringing the arts of civilization to humankind. Illustrations of the fish-cloaked Apkallû, who can represent Adapa but also possibly high-ranking priests or kings, are rather common in Babylonian as well as Assyrian art (Figure 2.3). Small figurines of Apkallû were often used as protective talismans.

Figure 2.3Detail of a relief carved in the wall of a square water basin made of a massive basalt block; 117 cm tall. It shows two Apkallû (wise men) wrapped in fish cloaks and holding small buckets of sacred water, purifying the water god in the centre. It dates from the Neo-Assyrian period, 704–681 BCE. When the basin was discovered in the courtyard of the Temple of Assur (in modern Qalʿat Sharqāṭ, Iraq) during excavations by a team from the German Oriental Society between 1903 and 1913, it was completely destroyed.

Cylinder seals of the Mesopotamian cultures

A cylinder seal is a small round cylinder, typically 2 to 3 cm in length and about 1 cm in