Siren

The mermaids (in ancient Greek: Σειρήνα - Seirēna; pl.: Σειρῆνες - Seirēnes, «those who bind and unleash/chain», perhaps related to the Semitic Sir, "song", and with the Greek Χίμαιρα - Khimaira, "chimera") are mythological marine creatures belonging to legends and folklore.

An anthropomorphic figure created from a striped and trimmed. Museum of Mashhad, Iran.

Originally, in classical antiquity, they were represented as hybrid beings with the face or torso of a woman and the body of a bird (similar to the Ba of Egyptian mythology) who lived on a rocky island; from the Middle Ages they acquired a fish-like appearance: beautiful women with the tail of a fish instead of legs who lived in the depths. In both cases they were attributed an irresistible melodious voice with which they madly attracted sailors.

The mermaids are navy maidens who deceive the navigators with their great beauty and the sweetness of their singing; from the head to the navel they have a virgin body and form similar to the human genus, but they have a scaly tail of fish, which always hide in the sea.

Due to the double form with which they have been presented throughout history, many non-Latin languages distinguish the classic woman-bird siren (English siren, German Sirene) of the mermaid with a fish tail (English mermaid, German Meerjungfrau).

Mermaids in Greek and Roman Mythology

Estatua funeraria de sirena, c. 370 a. C., Museo Arqueológico Nacional de Athens.

Russian miniature of the centuryX in which appears a mermaid represented in the manner of Ancient Greece, with a bird body and a woman's face.

In the framework of classical mythology, mermaids are slightly diffuse creatures due to the remote background of their origin, probably linked to the world of the dead. They were beings with the body of a bird and the face or torso of a woman, exactly similar to their relatives the Harpies, possessors of a prodigiously attractive and hypnotic musical voice with which they bewitched the navigators who passed along their coasts and led them to death. Tradition made them live on a rocky island in the Mediterranean off Sorrento, on the coast of southern Italy (sometimes identified with the island of Capri).

Different accounts make them descend from the river gods Acheloos —one version made them come from their blood when it was shed by Heracles— or Phorcys, either without female intervention or with that of the muses Esterope, Melpomene or Terpsichore, related to singing and dancing. Their number is also imprecise, counting between two and five. Recorded names include Agláope (the one with the beautiful face), Telxiepia (of acclaiming words) or Telxínoe (delight of the heart), Pisinoe (the persuasive one), Parthenope (scent of a maiden), Ligeia (later used by Edgar Allan Poe for the famous tale of the same name about a woman of mortal beauty), Leucosia (pure being), Molpe (the muse), Radne (breeding) and Teles (the perfect). Sometimes the use of musical instruments such as the flute or the lyre is attributed to them in addition to the voice.

The first written testimony of them is their mention in Homer's Odyssey, but they already figured in much older artistic representations, often in monuments and funerary offerings. Thus, their link with the other world is presumed, being very plausible that at first they iconographically represented the spirits of the deceased and/or that they were considered in charge of transporting souls to Hades (a function that the god Hermes would later assume in his role as psychopomp).

Their fame derives mainly from the famous episode they star with Odysseus (Ulysses) in the aforementioned Homeric poem: the Achaean hero, during the journey back to his homeland Ithaca and warned by the magician Circe, passes by his island and manages to escape unscathed from the danger of his singing, thanks to the fact that he is tied to the mast of his ship while the rest of the crew uses wax plugs to avoid succumbing to the spell. However, the mermaids also figure in other mythical episodes, often with reminiscences of that previous role as chthonic deities of the afterlife: some versions narrate that they accompanied Persephone when she was kidnapped by Hades and that their bestial appearance was the punishment imposed by Demeter for not protecting her daughter from the god of the underworld; in others, the winged body is a gift from Zeus to allow them to pursue the abductor, and in still others it is a penalty imposed by Aphrodite for resisting voluptuousness or envy of her great beauty. It is also said that they lost their feathers as punishment for challenging the Muses to a singing competition that they lost, although this anecdote supposes to ignore their maternal ancestry.

Since the very establishment of the myth according to this meaning, it is a firmly accepted custom to assume that the mermaids enthralled the sailors so that they crashed against the nearby rocks and thus be able to devour them, since Homer describes how the shores appear full of bones humans. However, it is never expressly mentioned that the objective of these creatures is murder and anthropophagy, and it is detailed that those bones still have the skin attached to them that "rots in the sun." Coupled with the fact that (according to the text of the Odyssey) the content of the sirens' song is an invitation to pleasure and knowledge, not a few scholars point out that it is possible that they were limited to attracting the travelers and they would end up dying of starvation on the island, absorbed in the ecstasy of those captivating voices that made them forget everything else. In any case, the nature of the mermaids is always imbued with a certain seductive perfidy.

Anthropologists who subscribe to the kinship of mermaids with the afterlife hypothesize: in parallel with archetypes from other cultures, perhaps these beings were initially genies guarding the passage to the Gates of Death. Doors that could very well be symbolically related to the passage of Scylla and Charybdis, to which the sirens are geographically close according to sources. Euripides, in a stanza of Helena's chorus (verse 168) calls them παρθηνικοι κοραι parthenikoi korai, 'young maidens'; Laurence Kahn-Lyotard and Nicole Loraux rely on this fragment to include them within the figures of the Beyond, identifying them with the singers of the Islands of the Blessed described by Plato.

Regarding his disappearance, the most widespread version is that, fulfilling an oracle by the goddess Gaia, when Odysseus (or Orpheus in the case of the Argonautics) resisted the effect of their voices, the mermaids fell into the sea and became cliffs or perished. In this last variant, the corpse of one of them, Parténope, was dragged by the waves to the mainland and around her sepulcher the current city of Naples was founded.

Sirenum scopuli

A mermaid waiting on a rock.

According to the Greek poet Hesiod, the mermaids inhabited the island called Antemoesa ("rich in flowers"), where they waited alone in a flowery meadow, waiting to spot the ships for which they sang their song. According to the Roman poets Virgil (in the epic Aeneid) and Ovid, they lived on the Sirenum scopuli or mermaid rocks, three small rocky islands.

The exact location of this island has varied, but always within the same area. According to Homer's Odyssey, it was located between Aea and the Strait of Messina (dwelling place of the monster Scylla). It has often been located in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off the coast of southwestern Italy, near the city of Paestum or between Sorrento and Capri (sometimes identifying with it, as did the 18th century English essayist and screenwriter XVIII Joseph Addison). Other traditions point to the islands of Punta del Faro and/or Islas de Li Galli, whose traditional name is Sirenuse and whose name "Los Gallos" refers to the bird form of these beings.

All of these locations have in common that they are surrounded by cliffs and rocks.

Mermaids from other mythologies

On the back of a coin of Demetrius III Eucarios, the goddess Atargatis appears as a woman with a fish tail.

In the Middle East: The first known stories about mermaids appeared in Assyria, before 1000 BC. C. The fact of representing them with half the body of a fish is due to the legend referred to by Diodoro Siculo in which Derceto offended Venus and then the goddess inspired him to love a shepherd. From this love a girl was born, Semiramis, who would become queen of Babylon. After her daughter was born, also by Venus, the love ended. Derceto, full of anger, abandoned her daughter, had the man she had loved killed, and threw herself into the water ready to commit suicide, which the gods did not allow. This is how it gave rise to its amphibian morphology. This goddess Derceto is very similar to the figure of Atargatis, the Syrian goddess in the form of a mermaid to whom the fish were consecrated. The goddess was worshiped in temples where there were large pools, and since she was the deity who ruled the seas, her priests used to sell fishing licenses to sailors.

Painting of Ilya Repin.

Slavic peoples: Rusalkas are the Slavic counterpart of the Greek sirens and naiads.

The nature of rusalkas varies among folk traditions, but according to ethnologist D.K. Zelenin all share a common element: they are the restless spirits of the unclean dead. They are often the ghosts of young women who died violently or prematurely, perhaps by murder or suicide, before their wedding and especially by drowning. Rusalkas are said to inhabit lakes and rivers. They appear as beautiful young women with long pale green hair and pale skin. pale. They can be seen after dark, dancing together under the moon and calling the young by name, luring them into the water to drown. The characterization of the rusalkas prevails in the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian tradition, and was a point of reference for Russian authors of the XIXth century, the best known of the operas of the great Czech nationalist composer Antonín Dvořák is called Rusalka.

In the British Isles: Mermaids were noted in British folklore as omens of bad luck. Mermaids could also swim in fresh water and reach rivers and lakes and drown their victims, making them believe they were drowning people. Sometimes mermaids could cure diseases. Some mermaids were described as large monsters up to 600 m.

• The story of Dahud, the princess of Caer Ys, a city that, due to the sins of the daughter of the King (the young and beautiful Dahud), was condemned by the gods to be swallowed by the waves. When Dahud's father escaped, his daughter fell to the sea, and there he continues since then, transformed into a mermaid, swimming among the ruins of Caer Ys. Another popular legend in Wales is that of Murgen: In the centuryVI, a mermaid was captured and baptized in northern Wales, and was taught the native language. It was said that it was not a fish because it was sewing and talking, but it was not a woman because she could live under the water. The mermaid fixed as a saint in certain ancient dens, under the name of Murgen that means woman coming from the sea.

John Collier's painting.

• In Ireland the servants call them merrows. They believe that the number of females is higher than that of males, although these are more ugly than their companions: a merrow masculine teeth have sharp teeth and face like a pig. All merrows are characterized by the membranes of their hands, their hostility towards humans and their magical garments, which allow them to pass through any oceanic current. Every man or woman who robs a garment merrow He has power over him, and in many accounts, several men hide these garments by forcing the females to marry them. Men thus gain beautiful and rich wives (because of the booties that the mermaids get with the shipwrecks), but if the wife merrow recover your garment, the call from the sea will be so strong that you will end up abandoning your children and your husband.
• In Scottish mythology, there's a mermaid called Ceasg or "doncell of the waves." The bottom of this mermaid is a salmon. It is said that those who catch it give them three wishes if they return it to the water, but when a man falls in love with it, the salmon woman seduces it and drags it to the depths. Famous are also in Scotland the selkies, sea fairies that in the sea adopt the form of a seal, but when they reach the earth they get rid of their skins to take shape as a woman. Like with the merrowsEvery man who wants a wife selkie She just has to steal her seal skin, but if she finds the skin, she'll come back to the sea forever. Children born of the union of men and selkies They had membranes that joined their toes or hands.

In China: In some ancient tales, mermaids are a species whose tears turn into precious pearls. Mermaids can also weave a very valuable material that is not only light but also beautiful and transparent. Because of this, the fishermen always wanted to catch them, but the song of the sirens made it difficult. In other Chinese legends, mermaids are wonderful, skilled and versatile creatures and it was frowned upon for fishermen to want to capture them.

In the Iberian Peninsula: Mermaid stories are also very famous on the peninsula, there are a large number of stories about fish-women who seduce sailors, although in others, these nymphs they are totally benevolent.

• It is famous in Cantabria the history of The SirenucaA mermaid that was human before. Her mother, tired of her disobeying to go to the cliffs, shouted "God allow you to become a fish," and so it happened. Since then, he alerts with his singing the sailors to approach the cliffs dangerously. This is one of the few benevolent mermaids of European mythology.
• In Asturias, besides this legend, where the girl is called Serena, there is the legend of the Gaviluetu. Legend says that in Luarca, a mermaid had a son with a Viking. When she returned to the north she was sad and lonely and abandoned the child in the rocks. The seagulls heard him crying and they flew him to the parish priest of the people, who raised him and made him a Christian. The boy became a great warrior and fought against the Moors. In the end he married a princess from Portugal.

Rótulo en castellano y en asturiano, en Ribadesella.

• In the Basque Country the mythological beings called Itsaslaminak, which in Spanish means Lamias of the sea. Also called Arrainandereak (women-pez). Instead of legs or feet of duck like all Lamia of the Basque-Navarre mountains, they have a long tail of fish. Just like the other Lamias, Itsaslaminak combs their hair with gold combs that they depend entirely on. Whoever wants to dominate them can steal the comb, even if it pisses them off, being able to drown the thief or bring bad time to the shores. However, they are not always bad and sometimes passionately fall in love with the sailors who go along the Basque coasts.
• In the extreme mythology there are also sirens, but these live in the rivers, from which they go out to drown the men after seducing them with their songs. It is believed that there is a mermaid that nothing in the waters of the Tagus in Garrovillas, and another one that every night of San Blas, comes out of the Lunah Fountain in Usagre to attract and drown his victims.
• In Galician mythology there is the legend of Mariña, Marina or Marinha, this was rescued or rescued Duke Don Froilaz from the stormy sea of Finisterra. Unlike others, Marinha is a good, totally beautiful mermaid and falls in love with Don Froilaz and this one of her. They both have a son whom they call Xoan at the night of St.John and which is the origin of the Mariño lineage. The mermaids were a widespread motif in the sculptural representation throughout Galicia, for example in the facade of Praterías de la Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, the peaceful Torrado de Cambados or the shield of the Torrado-Mariño in which Castelao was inspired for the lay shield of Galicia. According to X.L. Axeitos, a RAG scholar, the reason for choosing that symbol was that it was repeated frequently and could become a symbol of unity.

Mermaid on the Romanesque facade of Platerías, Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

Mermaids in reality

There are currently opinions about the existence of these mythological creatures. We find this diversity in documentaries and articles that assure and even argue its existence. An example is a fantasy in the form of a televised documentary on the Discovery Channel's Animal Planet, Mermaids: the body found and many people thought it was proof of existence.

Mermaids and the Christian faith

In the 4th century century, when traditional beliefs were eclipsed by Christianity, belief in mythological beings was eradicated Along with the mermaids. Jerome, who produced the Vulgate version of the Bible, uses the word "mermaids" by translating םינת Thanim (jackal) in Isaiah 13:22 and (owls) in Jeremiah 50:39, this was explained by Ambrose as a symbol of the world's temptations, and not as an endorsement of Greek mythology.

And among the ruins of their palaces shall resonate the echoes of the owls, and shall sing the sirens in those places which were consecrated to the delight. Isaiah 13:22

The early Christian euhemerist interpretation of human beings received a long-lasting boost in Isidore's Etymologies. 'They [the Greeks] imagined that 'there were three mermaids, part virgin, part bird with wings and claws. 'One of them sang, another played the flute, and the third the lyre.

Sirens continued to be used as a symbol of the dangerous temptation embodied by women, regularly throughout Christian art from medieval times; However, in the 17th century, some Jesuit writers began to assert their actual existence, including Cornelius, who said of the woman, "her gaze is like that of the legendary basilisk, her voice like that of a siren, which enchants and with its beauty deprives one of reason". Antonio de Lorea and Atanasio Kircher argued that the mermaids would have appeared aboard Noah's ark. Others suggest that the mermaids were sinners who somehow managed to survive the flood, but claim that God does not create part human, part animal beings.

The Bible does not mention mermaids, but it does mention some hybrids that come directly from Greek mythology such as the Satyr: the book of Yashar indicates that before the flood, the fallen angels were mixing their genes with the women of the earth, that gave resulting in hybrid creatures, called Nephilim.

Typology

The typology of the graphic representation of mermaids is varied. The mermaids of classical mythology usually appear in amphoras, kraters, vases and mirrors, and as a general rule they are naturalistic: a beautiful face and long hair, which often fly or wait on the rocks holding musical instruments or caressing their hair in flirty attitude. In the 16th century, the most common attitude of mermaids was to hold a mirror and a comb in their hands. The tail was an emblem of prostitution and the mirror, considered a magical object, was an attribute of the impure woman, and was used to contemplate the face of death or the cult of the devil (similar to the attitude of Aphrodite in the classical world).. The mermaid also implies a symbol of the times of transition from Carnestolendas (land meats) to Lent (fish). Later, the mermaids appear nursing their young. The mermaids' milk was known to alchemists as a protein that allowed heroes stranded in the water to grow rapidly. On the other hand, the typology that enjoyed the greatest prestige in Gothic representations was the unique fish-tailed mermaid.

In world literature

Ulysses and sirens (attic ceramics, 480–470 BC, British Museum).

In the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, the sailors enchanted by the voice of the sirens were saved from disaster thanks to the skill of Orpheus, who managed with his singing to cover up the music of the sirens and distract the Argonauts who had wandered off. otherwise stranded in the sirenum scopuli where they lived. Defeated by Orpheus's superior skill, the mermaids turned to stone, or in other versions threw themselves into the sea to die.

In the Odyssey (XII, 39), Ulysses prepared his crew to avoid the music of the sirens by plugging their ears with wax; Eager to hear them himself, he had himself tied to a mast so that he could not jump into the water when he heard his music.

In the story The sireniteAndersen, the protagonist is a mermaid in love who comes to a witch to give her legs in exchange for her sweet voice.

In A Thousand and One Nights mermaids are conceived as anatomically identical to human beings with only one distinction, their ability to breathe and live underwater. In this story, humans and mermaids can reproduce. As a result, the children of these unions have the ability to live underwater. In the short story 'Abdullah Abdullah of the Fishermen and the Merman', the protagonist Fisherman Abdullah gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater society that is presented as an inverted reflection of the society above. the earth. In 'The Adventures of Bulukiya', protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of mortality leads him to explore the seas, where he encounters the kingdom of mermaids.

Christopher Columbus states in his Diary of his First Voyage (1492-3), that he saw the mermaids in the New World, which he believed to be the easternmost part of Asia. According to Bartolomé de las Casas' transcript:

Last day, when the Admiral went to the Gold River, he said he saw three mermaids that went well high from the sea, but they were not as beautiful as they painted them, they somehow had a man's shape on their faces. He said he sometimes saw some in Guinea on the coast of Manegueta.

Already in the classic literature of the 19th century, Hans Christian Andersen in his story The Little Mermaid presents a tender character and lovesick who saves a prince from shipwreck.

Allure of mermaids

Mermaids of Charles Edouard Boutibonne

Siren of bronze of Antoni Alsina, in Madrid, Spain (1922).

Although in modern iconography mermaids are generally depicted as overwhelmingly beautiful, it is likely that in the classical tradition their only appeal lay in their voice and that their appearance was nothing short of monstrous. Horace, in the Epístola ad Pisones, mentions a hybrid of a woman and a fish as a hilarious subject:

desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne;
spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici

if the fish ended what a beautiful woman is above,
Would you hold your laughter when you saw it, comrades?

It has been commented that possibly the mermaids that intrigued Sigmund Freud so much are the late intellectualization of a narrative fact that combines danger and beauty. In any case, that would be an addition elaborated over the centuries to their origin as horrendous and extraordinary singers who concealed murder and cannibalism.

Mermaids in film and television

• Splash: It is one of the first mermaid films, it is a mermaid that falls in love with a human and decides to go to the surface to marry him, but a scientist discovers it and has to go to the sea with his lover.

• Andersen Dowa: Ningyo Hime: It is one of the first anime films and the plot is the most faithful to the story The sirenite by Hans Christian Andersen, along with a tragic ending.

• H2O: A series of Australian youth television released in 2006. It deals with three 16-year-old girls who develop their day-to-day on the sunny beaches of the Costa Dorada. The girls find a day lost in the sea, floating towards the mysterious Mako Island. In it, they discover a submarine channel, and they decide to swim for the exit. As you go out to the surface, the light of a full moon illuminates the water, creating a beautiful radiance. Emma, Cleo and Rikki leave the island as fast as they can, and they return to "normal" life. However, girls discover that their life will not be normal again, since in 5 seconds after touching the water, they become sirens.

• Pichi Pichi Pitch: this is a series of Japanese sleeves of great success created in 2003. The series deals with Luchia, the mermaid princess of the pink pearl who, together with her faithful guardian Hippo, went out looking for the boy she met when she was a girl and her pink pearl, who had lost in the human world to give her to the boy and save him. During a walk on the beach he knows Kaito, the boy who saved years ago, but does not recognize her because her human form is different from her siren form. Enrolment in high school meets Hanon, who turns out to be one of the seven mermaid princesses, the one with the aquamarine pearl. Later they know Rina, another of the seven mermaid princesses who own the green pearl. They must fight against the aquatic deables that try to kidnap them and take them with their master for evil purposes and thus achieve peace in the 7 seas.

• Peter Pan (2003): Peter helps Wendy find her brothers asking the sirens.

• Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: There appear sirens who seduce and try to drown men after singing; besides, there is a specific one that falls in love with a mortal (The character who represents Christianity in the film as a "missionary")

• The Mermaid: It is a television drama of South Korea broadcast in 2014 by tvN deals with a mermaid princess named Aileen who decides to become human through a magic potion, after this she has 100 days to find true love, otherwise she disintegrates herself forever.

• Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid: American film that recounts the encounter of a vacationer with a mermaid when going fishing. He captures it and takes it first to his bath tub, and then to the pond where he is living to finally return it to the sea, staying only with her comb as a souvenir of her adventure.

• Once Upon a Time: In the third season of this television series appears during some chapters the Ariel mermaid, referring to the famous Disney character.

• Mako Mermaids: “Mako Mermaids: An H2O Adventure” (Netflix), “Mako Mermaids” (in Spain), “Mako: Island Of Secrets” (in Australia) or globally known as “Mako Mermaids”, is a series of adventures for children and adolescents. It emerged as an H2O spin-off: Just Add Water, originally premiered on 26 July 2013 in all Netflix territories and in Australia by the Network Ten chain. Its premiere in Spain was on October 28, 2013 at Disney Channel. The second season was filmed in February 2014, and its premiere was on 13 February 2015 the first 13 episodes in all Netflix territories, and on 29 May the remaining 13 episodes.

• The Legend of the Blue Sea: Also known in Spanish The legend of the blue sea, is a series of South Korean fantasy television broadcast by SBS between 2016 and 2017, whose plot is inspired by a classic legend of the Joseon era obtained from the collection Eou Yadam Yoo Mong In, who narrates about a man who releases a captive mermaid, developing the history of the series between the year 1598 and the present, when the doppelgänger of the mermaid returns and meets the doppelgänger of that man.

• Siren: It is a series of American television broadcast in Freeform since 2017, it tells the story of a mermaid in search of his sister who was captured, for this it is seen in the need to become human, causing havoc in the people he now lives in, in this series unlike most, the mermaids are portrayed as monsters of the sea.

Other uses of the term

In allusion to these mythological beings, the name mermaid is given par excellence to any woman who practices water sports such as swimming, water polo, artistic swimming or diving or simply if she is a very good swimmer even if she does not practice the mentioned sports.