Women of the Deep A Light History of the Mermaid by Anthony Piccolo
U
nder the strain of voyaging, sailors through the ages have seen in the ocean the embodiment of their deepest desires and fears. On early maps the figure of the enchanting mermaid shared space with the hideous monsters and fearsome beasts who lay in wait for the explorers of unknown waters. The woman who lures men to their death has a rich life in the annals of sea history . Where and how does the myth begin? And why and how does it persist into our own time? Columbus reported that he saw three mermaids on hi s first voyage to the Americas. On January 4, 1493, according to Purchas, the admiral observed in his log that the female forms "rose high out of the sea, but were not as beautiful as they are represented. " The creatures were probably dolphins or manatees, but Columbus, like other mariners of his day, was ready to see new marvels in every latitude. His mind was conditioned by medieval illustrations, fables , travelers ' accounts, and astrological prophecies about unseen territories far beyond the familiar coastlines of Europe. The historian Arciniegas points out that Columbus's favorite book was Cardinal Pierre D 'Ailly 's Imago Mundi, a preposterous description of the unknown world by an early 15th-century "new age" philosopher. If, as D ' Ailly claimed, the lands of the "other hemisphere" were inhabited by giants, pygmies, dog-faced savages and Amazons, the seas around these lands could very likely teem with seductive creatures, half woman, half fish .
Cardinal D ' Ailly's book and the fantastic published narratives of Mandeville, "Prester John," Marco Polo and others were imaginative stimuli for early mermaid sightings among privileged explorers who could read. But for the vast majority of illiterate sailors, there were only superstition and the wild rumors that always circulated in the ports of Europe. The acute physical and emotional deprivation of the early sea voyage, added to these, could easily trigger fantasies and mutinous hallucinations, as some of the ships' logs confirm. As far back as the first century AD, Pliny the Elder was convinced of the existence of mermaids or "Nereides," with bodies "rough and scaled all over." But the full image, the classic form of the creature, was provided by the influential 5th-century Bestiary, of Physiologus. This treatise on animals and their natures was published and circulated throughout the world in many translations until 1724. In Physiologus, the mermaid is "a beast of the sea wonderfully shapen as a maid from the navel upward and a fish from the navel downward, and this beast is glad and merry in tempest, and sad and heavy in fair weather." The odd contrariety of her nature suggests a dark side developed and elaborated later by Christian writ-
ers, especially clerics. By the middle of the 13th century, the mermaid was fully defined, physically and spiritually, in the annal s and theological encyclopaedias of Christian monks and scribes. One of these works, De Propietatibus Rerum, by Bartholomew Angel icus, made the mermaid a lethal seductress. Mermaids charmed seamen through sweet music. "But the truth is that they are strong whores," who lead men "to poverty and to mischief. " Typically, a mermaid lulled a crew to sleep, kidnapped a sailor, and took him to "a dry place" for sex. If he refused, "then she slayeth him and eateth his flesh ." It is not surprising that priests and clerics were involved not only in the moral monitoring of mermaids but also
At left, an etching of the merman and mermaid of the Nil e, from the Hi stori a Monstrorum of Aldrovandi, 1599. Shown above is a more "scientific" inte1pretation, engraved in 1793 to illustrate a serious volume of natural history.
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SEA HIISTORY 68, WINTER 1993-1994