Mermaids, mermen and other strange creatures on the blurred limits between terrestrial and marine life

By Dimitra Mylona and Roxani Margariti.

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living”

Anais Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart, 1950.

They are not fish, they are not humans either… they are not of the land, but neither are they unequivocally creatures of the sea.  They look like us, but not quite.  They are alien, but not completely.  They are the mermaids, the mermen and the other strange creatures that are found on the blurred limits between terrestrial and marine life. They are magical, they have special powers, and they invariably have an involvement in human life. 

They inhabited many seas of the world at different points in time!  They appear in myths, in religious narratives, in iconography, in scientific works, in early ethnographic accounts, in the occult literature.  Some have even survived in our enlightened, rational era and people are still fascinated by them.  These are the beings that inhabit both the imaginary and the perceived real world of mariners, of those people who live by the sea or challenge its might to make a living.  Fishermen, sailors, and travelers of all sorts are the people who encountered these creatures and who told the stories that reach us today.   

The presence of merfolk, their personalities, their way of life, their habits and adventures and their interactions with humans were all ideas developed over time, exchanged between different cultures, adopted and retold a bit differently each time.  This process gave birth to a panorama of alternative marine beings and to a myriad of theories about them. 

In this post, we will touch upon the riddle of the magical creatures of the sea in the Greek and Roman Mediterranean, in ancient Mesopotamia, and in the western Indian Ocean of the Middle Ages. 

The ancient Greeks, the marine pantheon soap operas, the mermen and the hideous sea monsters.  

The ancient Greek seas were inhabited by fish, by ketoi (very large fish), by sea monsters, by gods and goddesses of every caliber, some famous across the Mediterranean (for instance Poseidon) and others of a more regional or local renown! Poseidon, Nereus, Phorcus, Pontus, Proteus, Glaucus, Triton, Ketos, Halios Geron but also Thetis, Amphitrite, Steno, Euryale, Medusa, Ceto, Nereids, Haliadae are just a few of them. The genealogies of the sea gods, goddesses, and monsters form such a tight tangle of relations and connections, of mattings, births, metamorphoses, passion and revenge, that the normal cause-and-effect order of rationalism fails to describe. They make for veritable marine divinities soap opera!

Ancient Greek and Latin authors have tried to bring order to the multitude of stories that were told across the shores of Eastern Mediterranean, and they attempted to describe it in an orderly fashion. Yet, the chaotic nature of this marine community of gods, monsters, magical creatures and their acolytes, the dolphins the crabs, the escort fish and others, prevails. A common theme across these stories is that the interaction of gods or their off-springs with humans created fantastical hybrids: some of them were half-fish and half-humans, or combined the fish nature with other species, e.g. fish-horse (or even half-fish and half-goats in faraway Assyrian Nimrud close to Tigris River in present day Iraq in the 10^th-9^th c. BCE – on the merpeople in that traditions see below at what Roxani has found out).

Triton, probably the same person, which is elsewhere known as Glaukos, is one of the most straightforward of these creatures, and one that people in ancient Greece felt close and familiar. He was the son of Poseidon, the mighty sea god, and Amphitriti, the queen of the sea and herself a daughter of other sea deities, Nereus and Doris, or according to other sources, of Oceanus and Tethys (for the biography of Greek pantheon see here). Triton’s lower body was that of a fish (appearing occasionally in art with two fish tails) and the upper body was of a man. In some parts of Greece, he was venerated as a minor god. 

The Roman author Aelian, who lived in the 2^nd and 3^rd c. AD, gave a detailed account on Triton lore at his time. One of his sources was a treatise on fishing by Demostratus (for whom nothing else is known). Demostratus claimed that he, himself, saw the dead body of Triton preserved in brine at Tanagra in Boeotia. According to him, the body looked much like it is shown in art, but its head was too damaged, and one could not tell what it looked like. Upon touch, however, tough scales fell off it. Looking for a verification of the fishy nature of the triton tail, a local dignitary cut off a snippet of skin and burned it. A heavy smell was released but none became any wiser as to the marine or terrestrial origin of the relic.  This need to experiment and dig for the truth was, however, perceived by Triton as defilement and the dignitary was drowned at sea, shortly after this event. When he was brought on land his body exuded a smell like that of the burned Triton skin hinting at the reason for his drowning.

Other ancient authors had also something to say about Triton. Ephorus from Cyme, Aeolis, who lived in the 4^th c. BCE, in his treatise Histories recounted the Triton myth, as it was told at Tanagra six centuries before Aelian. Pausanias repeated the story in the 2^nd c. AD, while the great playwright Aeschylus in his satiric play Glaukos Pontion in the 5th c. BCE, connected Glaukos to Anthedon, a city not far from Tanagra.

Itanos on Crete also features as a place related to Triton. He was the protector god of the city and was portrayed on some of its silver coins in the 4^th c. BCE. On one side of the coins Triton showed his might in the sea raising a trident. On the reverse of the coin two serpent-like sea monsters accentuated the marine theme hinting perhaps to a myth known to all at the time.

In this watery world, where gods mated with goddesses and mortals, all sorts of powerful, yet monstrous, creatures were born and called the sea home. Some ventured onto the land and the result was nothing short of magical every time. Even after death their powers did not disappear. We read such a story in the work of Ovid, the Latin poet who was born in 43 BCE and died in 17/18 AD, indicatively called Metamorphose.

The mythical hero Perseus, himself son of a god, Zeus, and progenitor of Hercules, slaughtered many monsters in his days. One of them was Medusa, a winged human female gorgon with a hybrid nature. She had living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those who gazed into her eyes turned into stone. Although her body did not bear any signs of her marine nature, she was the daughter of a primordial sea god Phorcus and his sister Ceto. Despite her divine ancestry and her horrible abilities, Perseus killed her, by cutting her head off. After this feat of bravery was over, the hero begun the return trip to Seriphos Island where he grew up. He carried Medusa’s head in a magical sack.

On his way, he passed by Ethiopia, and, on a rocky shore there, he encountered the beautiful Andromeda, daughter of Ethiopia’s king Cepheus, tied up on a sea rock. She was punished by Poseidon because she boasted that she was more beautiful than his daughters and minor sea goddesses, the Nereids.  Her destiny was cruel. She was about to be eaten by the sea monster Ketos. Perseus used Medusa’s head to kill Ketos and he freed Andromeda.

Here a side story begins that shows the potency of the sea monsters’ magical powers. Ovid tells us that after the kill, the hero used seaweed to make a nest for Medusa’s head while he washed his hands from the blood of Ketos. The still live, fresh seaweed twigs absorbed the magical force of Medusa’s head and they turned into stone. The Nymphs, who happened to be there, surprised, threw the twigs back to the sea to multiply. Since then, every time some of them are brought out of the water, they harden and become stone-like. That is how the corals were born!

Mermen and mermaids of the Ancient Near East

In the imagination of various ancient cultures further east, too, fish-human composite creatures abound. Mermen (kulullu), with human torso and head and fish-shaped lower body, appear already in the iconography of the Old Babylonian period (first half of the second millennium BCE) and go back even further, to Akkadian times (second half of the third millennium BCE).  Anthony Green has speculated that the Mesopotamian mermen may constitute the models for the later Mediterranean and western European counterparts. Female versions of this hybrid being (kulilltu) are less frequent and appear later in time.

Fascinatingly, these ancient Near Eastern merpeople are primarily associated not with the briny sea but with the abzu, the underground sweet water source of all streams, rivers and lakes on earth. Such correlation is of course logical in a predominantly riverine world. Mesopotamian merpeople routinely cross into the non-watery world to protect humans. As is clear from Dimitra’s account above, the marvelous hybrid sea creatures of the pre-Islamic, pre-Christian, polytheistic Mediterranean often partake in divinity. Like fish and other fish-hybrids, merpeople in Mesopotamian literature and religious practice are associated with the water god Ea/Enki, god of wisdom, crafts, and magic.  It is thus not surprising that they emerged as benevolent and protective of humans. They decorated monumental doorways, where they stood guard, and partook in magic rituals, where they presumably deployed their protective magic powers.

As fishy humanoids, the mermen and the less frequently occurring mermaids are joined by the figure of the fish-clad apkallu, one of a set of seven demi-divine antediluvian sages. The fishy part of both merpeople and fish-clad apkallu derives from the carp (Cyprinus carpio), a sweet-water fish and a clear debt to the great rivers of Mesopotamia, Tigris and Euphrates. As for the connection between benevolent wisdom and fishy creatures, it clearly runs deep in Ancient Near Eastern mythology. The monotheism of later times did not completely extricate it, although it robbed these creatures of their divine character!

The transformation of merpeople in medieval Islamicate literature and art

In medieval Arabic literature of wonders, travel accounts, and cosmographies few echoes of the supernatural and the divine persist in the representation of merpeople. Most texts range between a sense of marvel and a taxonomic sensibility. This literature raises and variously answers a number of questions.  What are the characteristics of these beings and what is the range of creatures inhabiting that conceptual space? Where do they occur in space and time? What is their relationship to other beings, and especially to humans? How do humans interact with them and how should they interact with them?

Resemblance and affinity between human and certain non-human marine creatures dominate the admittedly sparse discussions of mermen and mermaids in the Arabic travel and wonders literature and in the cosmographic tradition.  Reports of human-like physical features (face, extremities, sexual organs) ascribed to merfolk and of sexual intercourse between humans and them, especially merwomen, suggest that the affinity between the two kinds was strong.  One term used to refer to merpeople, insan al-ma’, literally “human being of the water”, points quite strongly in the same direction. At the same time, reports of human exploitation of merpeople’s skin and flesh—as material for shoes and as food respectively—can only be justifiable if merpeople were conceived as much closer to other marine species that are similarly exploited.

The collection of sailors’ tales, ascribed to sea captain Buzurg b. Shahriyar, and entitled The Wonders of India, offers a fascinating example of the preoccupation with what today we might call interspecies sex and its outcome. He also provides an evolutionary account of merpeople’s place in the taxonomy of living beings. The narrator ascribes the story to an informant reporting from Zaila, in present-day Somaliland, and “the Ethiopian Sea,” which could either refer to the western reaches of the Gulf of Aden or the southwestern shores of the Red Sea, or both. There, the narrator avers, lives a fish with a human face and body, hands and feet that resemble these same human parts.  The creature becomes a solace to fishermen who range far and wide from their home and do not see another soul for months. Sexual intercourse leads to the birth of “beings who look like men and live in the water and in the atmosphere” (Freeman-Grenville translation) and the cycle of mixed births goes on for centuries.  The author then interjects speculation about how this fish with a human face came about in the first place, ascribing it to unions between (presumably regular, non-humanoid) fish and men. Rationalizing the crossing of the species boundary, the author then digresses to describe the evolution of other animals with human features (monkeys born of human couplings with hyenas) as well as other types of miscegenation where no humans are involved.

Another clue about how medieval Arabic-speaking authors and audiences would have categorized merpeople’s nature, or where the latter would fall in mental taxonomies of the day, appears in the 11^th-century Book of Curiosities that we have mentioned in a previous post. The anonymous author provides an extensive account of different exotic aquatic creatures, including some with human characteristics (faces, extremities, genitalia).  Among them, he writes, is a community or nation (umma) called the “daughters of the sea” (banāt al-baḥr).  Like Buzurg but in greater detail, the author of the Book of Curiosities fully sexualizes these mermaids: they have long hair, strangely colored skin, enormous genitalia, breasts, garbled speech, and, when captured, provide sailors with great sexual pleasure.

Among the different humanoid “fishes” listed in the Book of Curiosities is the ‘aṭum that inhabits the Persian Gulf: its genitalia and hair are like those of women, its skin is scale-less, its face that of a pig. Variations of this description in the geographical literature suggest that we are here dealing with refracted knowledge, procured no doubt by people of the sea, about the dugong, that remarkable marine mammal about which you can learn a lot from this video!

In Buzurg’s anthology, this identification corresponds with the eastern seas’ ẓalum, said to have male or female sexual organs that resemble those of humans but also to be subject to fishing. I think that the marine animal intended here is the dugong, or ‘aṭum, and given the shape of the letters involved in the Arabic spelling of the two terms—ẓ-l-m and a-ṭ-m— it is not unlikely that there is simply a misreading of the term in the unique manuscript of Buzurg’s Wonders. As to its use, Buzurg somewhat callously reports that its thick, scale-less skin (elephant-like, is how the author describes it) was tanned and used in shoemaking. As mentioned earlier, it appears that eating humanoid aquatics was not off limits; the 16^th-century treatise on hunting and fishing by the Yemeni al-Nashiri discusses the prohibition against eating prey during the pilgrimage with the notable exception of fish, which he claims include “even the human being of the sea” (insān al-baḥr)!

Thus, whether closely resembling humans, like the banāt al-baḥr, or further removed, like the ‘aṭūm and other creatures, these beings are perceived as belonging to a different category than humans and being available for exploitation. The implicit argument, in other words, is that they are inferior to humans and fair game for them: there seems to be little repercussion for subjecting them to treatment that is either forbidden or highly regulated in the case of humans.

There are some remarkable exceptions to this mode of othering the marine humanoids, however! Abdullah the Merman is the virtuous hero of a fascinating tale in the famous Arabic anthology known by the title A Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights. The Merman is an ideal Muslim of unshakable faith. He helps his land-born namesake, Abdullah the Fisher, when the latter is down on his luck and losing faith. Through a religiously motivated universalism, this tale conveys a less hierarchical understanding of creation and the most positive representation of merpeople as belonging to a species equivalent rather than inferior to humans. Abdallah the Merman serves to highlight the possibility of virtue across creation but also to expose the shortcomings of ordinary, fully human beings.

And then there’s Qazwini’s insan al-bahr and the Tabib al-bahr (which in Arabic means “the doctor of the sea”!), an even more marvelous hybrid, who appears in the writings attributed to the renowned alchemist Jabir b. Hayyan. The speech of these creatures is unintelligible , but they are wise and steadfast.  The Tabib, moreover, carries a jewel on his forehead that transforms silver into gold, an underwater alchemist of sorts!

As Dimitra pointed out when we discussed this, Iggy Pop and Goran Bregović got it right: “the fish doesn’t think, the fish is mute, expressionless, the fish doesn’t think, because the fish knows–everything”!

Do you want to know more? We have suggestions!