Photo: "Water People" from Chinese mythology.
The Natural History of India, published in 1717, contains references to an exotic living creature from the Far East that was caught near the Moluccas in Indonesia: “It was 59 inches long (one and a half meters) and somewhat resembled an eel … Lived in a barrel with water for 4 days and 7 hours … made soft sounds, did not eat anything and then died."
A mermaid is usually depicted as a girl with a fish tail, but she can have a pair of legs and a pair of tails, which, in turn, can be not only fish, but also dolphin or snake. She sings wonderful songs, and sometimes also plays the harp. In addition to mermaids, there are also "mermaids" sometimes just as romantic, sometimes hot-tempered and angry. Mermaids love to bask in the sun on the coastal sand or on the rocks, combing their long hair with combs. They live not only in the sea, but also in lakes, rivers and even wells. In Russia - in the whirlpools.
An unknown eyewitness writes: “That year we rested on the Sea of Azov. Once I, a twelve-year-old boy, walked waist-deep in water, bypassing shallows and depressions that alternated smoothly, and unexpectedly fell into an underwater hole. I dived, wanting to see what kind of hole it was, and … face to face ran into a small green man! He was resting on the sandy bottom. His eyes were out of proportion to his face - large and strongly protruding. He lifted his eyelids, our eyes met and both flinched. The little man waved his hand and accidentally scratched my stomach with his long nails. We both rushed in different directions. He is inward, and I - up. Mortally frightened, I ran home and never again entered the sea that year. Later I did not see the green man."
This is far from the first evidence of observation of humanoid creatures in water. In 1610 the Englishman G. Hudson saw a mermaid near the coast. She had white skin and long black hair on her head. Sailors of the past centuries met mermaids so often that it was impossible for scientists to simply dismiss their stories.
Attempts to convince people who saw mermaids that they were sea animals ran into serious difficulties. In most cases, the habitats of, say, walruses or seals did not coincide with mermaids. And how can you confuse the mustachioed black muzzle of a walrus with a woman's face?
The famous American zoologist K. Banze drew attention to the fact that stories about humanoid creatures living in water bodies are too widespread, and the details of their descriptions largely agree. Thus, a typical mermaid has binocular vision (that is, her two eyes look in the same direction). The mermaid's thumb is opposed to the rest of the fingers, which allows you to grip tools. A large head is visible in all images. The back of the body is depicted with a kind of fin.
According to the available descriptions, K. Banze concluded that there are three types of these creatures. The common mermaid lived in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of Spain and Portugal from the ocean. The Indian mermaid, which was first observed by the naturalist K. Nereus, a participant in the third voyage of Columbus, lived off the Atlantic coast of America. The Eritrean mermaid chose the waters of the Red and Arabian Seas, as well as off the coast of the Indonesian islands.
Mermaids ate seaweed, shellfish, fish. Many sources contain stories that, going out at night in shallow water, mermaids with wonderful singing lured people to themselves. The weight of an adult female is slightly less than the weight of a human. Since she has two mammary glands, it means that she gives birth to one or two cubs.
Here is the entry of the famous English traveler the navigator Henry Hudson, made in the early 17th century: “One of the crew's sailors, looking overboard, saw a mermaid. Her chest and back were like a woman's … Very white skin and falling black hair. When she dived, her tail flashed, like the tail of a brown dolphin, speckled like a mackerel."
At the beginning of the 18th century, a book contained an image of a mermaid with the following caption:
“A siren-like monster caught on the coast of Borneo, in the administrative district of Amboina. It is 1.5 meters long and has an eel-like constitution. Lived on land for 4 days and 7 hours in a barrel of water. Periodically made sounds resembling a mouse squeak. The offered mollusks, crabs and sea crayfish are gone …"
For some reason, mermaids were most often seen in Scotland. In the 17th century, the "Aberdeen Almanac" stated that travelers in these places "will certainly see a lovely flock of mermaids - amazingly beautiful creatures."
In 1890, the Scottish teacher William Monroe saw a creature on the beach with “hair on its head, a bulging forehead, a plump face, ruddy cheeks, blue eyes, a mouth and lips that were naturally shaped like humans. Chest and belly, arms and fingers the same size as that of an adult human; the way this creature used its fingers (when brushing) does not imply the presence of membranes."
In 1900, a mermaid, who had wavy golden-red hair, green eyes, as tall as a man, met a certain Alexander Gann. Fifty years later, two girls saw the mermaid in the same places. According to their description, she looked exactly like the mermaid seen by Gunn. In 1957, a mermaid-like creature even jumped on the raft of the traveler Eric de Bishop. The hands of this strange creature were covered with scales.
In our country, the inhabitants of one village near Vedlozero in Karelia have long noticed in him water creatures of one and a half meters in height with a round head, long hair, white arms and legs, but a brown body. Seeing the fishermen, they dived under the water. These aquatic ones are described in the book by S. Maksimov, published in 1903.
The frequency of encounters with mermaids began to decline after the era of great geographical discoveries and in our century dropped to almost zero. Sea people became extinct, and, apparently, this happened relatively recently - in the middle or late 19th century. The reason is increased fishing and water pollution. The chances that somewhere in the warm bays of the southern seas we will still meet the last representatives of the mermaid tribe, no more than a meeting with a Bigfoot in the Himalayas or a dinosaur in the Congo.
Zhanna Zheleznova from Petrozavodsk told the following story:
“During an ethnographic expedition, I learned about a meeting of a man with an unprecedented amphibian humanoid creature.
It was during the Great Patriotic War in Belarus. The soldier lagged behind his platoon, catching up with him, walking along the forest road. And suddenly he sees a man lying on this road. He rushed to him, and when he ran up, he realized that this was not quite a person, but who or what was impossible to understand. He looks like a man with a beard, but all in fish scales, and on the arms and legs instead of fingers there are membranes. The soldier turned him over on his back, saw that he had a human face, although you cannot call him beautiful, you cannot call him ugly either. And this scaly one began to show the soldier at himself and somewhere to the side, apparently, asked him to take him there. The soldier went in that direction and soon saw a small forest lake. He dragged the scaly one there, put it in the water. He lay a little in the water, came to his senses and swam away. And he even waved his hand to the soldier goodbye.
The legend of the mermaid arose relatively recently in mythological terms and took its final form in the Middle Ages. The first literary mention of mermaids was made in The Novel of the Rose by the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (1366): “It was a miracle, like the singing of sea mermaids.”
In the culture of almost all nations, there are legends about the spirits of water, often these spirits are singing women who personify the beauty of the sight and sound of water. Mermaids are capricious, capricious and powerful (like rivers). They can reward, but they can also hurt.
The oldest known sea deity is the Babylonian god Ea (or Oann, as he was called in the Greek texts). He came out of the Eritrean Sea and taught people the arts and sciences. On a bas-relief from the 8th century BC, exhibited at the Louvre, Oanne is depicted as a man with a fish tail. In the Middle East, in ancient times, the mermaid was revered - the goddess of the moon, whom the Syrians called Atargat, and the Philistines called Derseto.
In Indian mythology, the guardians of the waters were the heavenly nymphs apsaras who played the lutes, in China and Japan - dragons and their wives. In Greek and Roman myths, many water gods and creatures appear: the king of the oceans Poseidon (Neptune), his son Triton, the sea nymphs Nereids - the daughters of Nereus, river naiads and, finally, the oceanids. Triton was usually depicted with a fish tail, the rest of the water spirits often looked like people.
In Britain and Ireland, legends were made about sea maidens who shed their fish tail before going on land. In Scandinavia and Germany, aquatic creatures were divided into sea and river. In France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, they were called sirens, although in Greek myths sirens were birds with female faces. The heroine of French legends Melusine, a woman-snake, was sometimes depicted as a mermaid with two tails. In Russian folk tales, the spirits of the waters act - mermaids who drown bathers, and rogue water ones. In African legends, these are water women and witches. The legends of the North American Indians speak of two-tailed sea deities and fish maidens.
The cult of worship of ancient water deities is a thing of the past, but the belief in mermaids, wise and powerful aquatic creatures, continues to live on. Perhaps the first myths about mermaids arose from stories about drowned people and human sacrifices brought to water deities. In England, for example, Sabrina, the illegitimate daughter of King Locrinus, was thrown by her stepmother into the river, which has since been called the Severn, and became the river goddess - the patroness of innocent girls.
A similar transformation, with less pleasant consequences, occurred with the servant Peg O'Nell of Ireland, who fell through the ice, taking water from the hole, and now drowns swimmers in the Ribble River every seven years. There are a lot of such stories, which, most likely, were invented to protect children from dangers: the legend of the unfortunate servant Peg is not much different from the stories of Jenny Grintis from Lancashire, Grandilow from Yorkshire, Peg Powler - a mermaid from the Tees River and others. The Rhine nymph Lorelei, known from the poem by Heine, is also an unkind river spirit: after listening to her songs, the sailors sent their ships straight to dangerous rocks. In the image of Lorelei, there is an obvious connection with the ancient Greek sirens.
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However, mermaids often do good deeds: they warn of the approaching storm, grant wishes, raise treasures from the bottom, or teach science. In Welsh legend, the nymph of Lake Llyn-i-Fan-Fach married a mortal and, having given birth to a son, disappeared. Then three sages appeared and taught her son everything they knew. Mermaids do good deeds not only of their own free will. According to the legends, a mermaid can be made to fulfill any desire if one of the items of her toilet is taken away from her. Mermaid marriages are usually short-lived. The conclusion of such a marriage is always associated with some condition, and when the condition is violated, the mermaid disappears. Mermaids often take mortals to the underwater kingdom. Blind Maurice Connor, the best piper in Munster, followed the mermaid into the sea. According to legend, his singing is still sometimes heard from under the water.
After the final victory of Christianity in Europe, representatives of the clergy tried to stifle the remnants of pagan beliefs. However, minor characters, such as mermaids, with whom the main pagan cults were not associated, did not pose a great danger to the new religion and continued to live in folklore. In the Christian religion, a mermaid with a comb and a mirror in her hands has become a symbol of vanity and female cunning, leading men to moral death.
Like many other fictional creatures, mermaids and their symbolic meaning were repeatedly described in medieval bestiaries (treatises about real and fantastic animals). The characters of the early bestiaries were not mermaids, but sirens. However, after the sirens and mermaids mixed in the minds of the peoples, the same thing happened in the bestiaries. In White's Bestiary (12th century), mermaids are described as half-human-half-fish, but the illustration depicts a girl with wings at the waist, bird paws, and a fish's tail. Guillaume Leclerc's 13th-century Divine Bestiary says that the lower part of the mermaid is bird or fish. Bartholomew of England claims that the sirens are fish-maidens, although he notes that according to some sources, the lower part of their body is a bird.
Among the scientific sources, it is worth noting the descriptions of Nereids and Tritons given by Pliny the Elder (1st century) from eyewitnesses. Apparently, the creatures described by Pliny are sea cows and seals.
In the Icelandic chronicles of the 12th century, evidence of a half-woman, half-fish, which was seen off the coast of Greenland, is captured. She had a terrible face, a wide mouth and two chins. Raphael Holinshed reports that during the time of King Henry II of England (50-80s of the 12th century), fishermen caught a fish-man who refused to speak and ate both raw and boiled fish. He escaped to sea two months after his capture. In 1403, after a storm in West Friesland, a mermaid was found entangled in seaweed. She was dressed and fed with ordinary food. She learned to spin and bow before the crucifix, but she never spoke. She made frequent unsuccessful attempts to escape back to sea and died after fourteen years of living among humans.
This and other similar evidence has long supported the belief in the existence of humanoid sea creatures, although since the Middle Ages no one has been able to catch or find the body of any of them. Most likely, tropical manatees, small whales, fur seals and seals were mistaken for mermaids. Close up, these animals, of course, do not at all resemble people, but in the water element their postures and cries are sometimes very "human". The fish-man and the mermaid, caught by medieval fishermen, were apparently dumb people with extraordinary swimming abilities. Or?..
Let the skeptics grin once more, but in 1830 on the Benbekyula island in the Hebrides, the funeral of a real mermaid took place … It all started with the fact that the inhabitants of the island, collecting seaweed, saw a strange creature frolicking near the coast. Outwardly, it resembled a little girl with long black hair. White delicate skin and huge breasts caused an unprecedented delight among a strong half of humanity, and the men made a lot of efforts to catch the little mermaid. However, she deftly eluded them, and then one of the adolescents, heated up by this unusual hunt, launched a weighty stone at the underwater maiden. Although the mermaid disappeared under the water, the blow was fatal for her, and after a couple of days the corpse of the amazing creature washed ashore. Crowds of people gathered to watch the real miracle- after all, the creature almost did not differ from a person, except for a huge fish tail. There was no doubt that this was a real legendary mermaid. Moreover, her resemblance to a person was so strong that the authorities of the island gave orders to make a coffin and sew a shroud. This is how the most unusual funeral in the world took place - the funeral of a mermaid … Unfortunately, her grave was lost, and in the 20th century an attempt to find a burial ended in failure. However, this fact itself speaks volumes. The inhabitants of the island were not profane and knew all the marine life, so they could not mistake a dead seal, a shark or other marine life for a mermaid.that the island's authorities had given orders to make a coffin and sew a shroud. This is how the most unusual funeral in the world took place - the funeral of a mermaid … Unfortunately, her grave was lost, and in the 20th century an attempt to find a burial ended in failure. However, this fact itself speaks volumes. The inhabitants of the island were not profane and knew all the marine life, so they could not mistake a dead seal, a shark or other marine life for a mermaid.that the island's authorities had given orders to make a coffin and sew a shroud. This is how the most unusual funeral in the world took place - the funeral of a mermaid … Unfortunately, her grave was lost, and in the 20th century an attempt to find a burial ended in failure. However, this fact itself speaks volumes. The inhabitants of the island were not profane and knew all the marine life, so they could not mistake a dead seal, a shark or other marine life for a mermaid.
Reprinted from the book "DIKOVIN ZOO OF OUR PLANET" Author Nikolay Nepomnyashchy
