Mermaid Problems Run Deep
Now that Disney has released a trailer with a non-white mermaid, it feels like the right time to talk a little bit about the mermaid’s history. The truth is the half human, half fish being has been with us for thousands of years. By the time the mermaid showed up in the texts of Ancient Greece, she had been a goddess of Ancient Assyria, a “Mother of the Gods.” As people debate the “purity” of the mermaid form it seems an appropriate time to take a quick dive into the deepest part of the mermaid story because it is only in the depths that we can understand what is at stake.
We won’t be running an exhaustive history on all the mermaid style creatures that stretch the globe. In fact, the half human, half “creature” being has been both God, and Goddess, and all sorts of iterations of lesser deities throughout the history of the world.
In fact, the newer mermaids, or what were called ‘sirens,” might have been part of that lesser role that came over time. That lesser role would have come after a period of global animism, and deities shaped like Earth and its many powerful creatures. That lesser role would have also come after the move away from animism and animal deities into more and more sophisticated feminine and male deities, with an emphasis on the femme. Eventually those feminine deities would fall to their masculine counterparts. Those men then evolved into bigger and bigger bro-style gods.
The combinations and the recombinations of the sacred and the symbolic is dizzying but traceable. The history of the the half-fish deities and the feminine is tangible today, because it persists in stories told and retold, always with a twist. Never fully erased from the pantheon of our mythic selves, the mermaid persists.
If you follow the history of religions and you follow the history of technology, you see that we progress in both sectors. As one door of understanding opens, we adapt our sense of God to match this new expanded understanding of the world’s mysteries.
Sometimes the evolution grew according to a particular status quo and sometimes it grew according to disruption. By the time the Greeks wrote down their stories, language had gone from oral, and pictorial to linear and written. By the time they wrote down the mermaid, she was an alarming character, a literal siren, of death.
During the great upheavals that led to our civilization, the one now heaving under its own weight of success, the siren became a kind of warning sign.
The ancient half fish lady became the symbol of some kind of beauty so great, that by simply opening her mouth she would lead sailors away from their planned paths, and onto their deaths. The siren became a symbol of treachery and maybe of something much deeper.
The siren of those ancient and somehow modern-ancient times, might have been a warning to turn away from beauty. In fact, the mermaid of our ancient times, might have been a kind of policing figure, one with much deeper significance than we could imagine.
Turn away from song and oral storytelling, the siren might have implied. Turn towards the age of reason, reduction, and conquering. Turn away from your relationship to the seas that gave us life, and disconnect yourself from the flow, onto the dryness of land.
That is what the siren might have been saying to those ancient humans who came from different times, who still might have held onto the bits and pieces of the millennia prior. To those ancients that we can recall through their books and pottery, there was a long line of subtext, a list of names and concepts around the seas, the rivers and lakes. The richness of those ages that preceded the siren is lost to us.
The ancient mermaid might have been a warning of even deeper, less obvious changes. The siren might have carried the symbolic weight of more nomadic times, when people ranged instead of settled to farm and be farmed.
In this context, the mermaid and her astounding voice, was not the killer except in the way that too much nostalgia or too much of a good thing can kill.
To those sailors who would have been killed by the ocean for any myriad reasons, the mermaid sang to remind them of something deep and constant, something out of time. As they sunk to their deaths, or starved due to the rapturous song they could not escape, the siren’s song was both death knell and a welcome to the afterlife. It was a symbolic herald of an in between state that her body personified, but that the dying sailor lived. The mermaid was in fact, a mirror. Only later did the mermaid herself come to be the one full of longing.
So, the mermaid who comes to us now — this one that is causing in some an uproar of outrage — she is perhaps the mermaid’s revenge. However, that might be me, projecting. In fact, this may be the mermaid’s reconciliation, which means — She is a mirror of our reconciliation, of our return to a time where all that we thought we left behind, is showing itself as essential to our very next level of survival.
It might be more accurate to say, that this return of the mermaid, in skin more akin to the color of the original humans on Earth, might be a redeemer. This new mermaid and all she inspires might be a recaller, a link to our recollection of a lineage that unites us all in our humanity and in our planetary unity.
This new edition of the mermaid is part of the reminder of truths that were submerged for years and she will not be alone. She will be mixed with the corporate power of Disney of course, but despite that, she will be seen and heard in her own right. From the corporate image the resurfaced mermaid will swim in countless, unbounded directions. She will be loved by her fans and shaped and re-shaped, mixed and remixed by them into their image and into their own hero’s journeys. Mermaids, merpeople, merbeings, come in what we realize is an almost infinite range of iterations.
The traditional mermaid of longing, of being cut between two worlds will in fact adapt to her circumstances. This powerful symbol of life’s bittersweetness will offer us a new way of looking at ourselves through her fandom.
We can not go back to the oceans of yesterday. We can not return to the worship of the ages marked by stone or iron. We can never go back to the womb, but we can go forward and loop back around, recalling the old reverence, and reinventing it for our times.
The old Mother of all Gods, is not our goddess, nor is Poseidon our God, but in seeing and re-seeing some slice of them in our modern media we can get in touch with some ancient and enduring part of ourselves.
The sea is no less sacred today than it was when it began. All the creatures of Earth are no less mesmerizing today than they were when they first started to respire, swim, fly and crawl. The many colors of skin are no less beautiful or worthy than when they evolved to match the temperature and pressure of the skies of their times.
The new mermaid is worthy of our love, worthy of our appreciation, not only as a character in a state of the art movie, but as a part of our collective psyche.
The newest mermaid is a swell in the tide of change. This new mermaid is part of a larger call to leave the heaving paths of a dying paradigm of supremacies behind. She is a call out of the stasis of status quo — a return to flow. Past the rigid structures that are no longer new and able to flex, the newest mermaid jumps high above the gates of the old.
The new mermaid is a lot like the old mermaid and still she is of her time, coupled to an age where the very essence of being human requires one to be mobile. That mobility does not start and end in the devices themselves but in the paradigm of myriad identities, of innumerable senses of self that come from avatars to extreme changes in weather conditions, and everything in between.
This mermaid is matched to the language we call emoji. She is live action without being reality, and so somehow she is a very deep mirror.
The mermaid is here in her way, brought back from the depths of the ages to remind us that before we walked on land, much less bought and sold it, we rode the waves.
The mermaid is surfacing now not as a minor demon but as a kind of hero, who is singing to us of some ending and its attendant new beginning. It is only correct that as the mermaid rises she reflects the shade of human skin that has been demonized the most in recent times. It is only correct that the mermaid sing in her beautiful way, calling us all into the flow of truth, into the waves of our next evolution.
