On the world's largest river, the Amazon, I was lucky enough to see pink dolphins. The sound of a motor boat made them jump out of the water, but they moved so rapidly that for only a second a powerful, elastic body appeared on the surface, looking in the rays of the setting sun like a huge flower petal the color of dawn. Then the dolphins dived noisily into the dark water.
All children are ours
Locals call these huge (up to two meters!) River inhabitants of the boto. One Indian legend says that boto is sung in sweet voices, drawing lonely travelers into the abyss. Another legend tells that dolphins transform into beautiful women with long, silky hair on moonlit nights. They go ashore, comb their hair. and the enchanted Indian youths forever go after them to the underwater kingdom.
These legends are strikingly reminiscent of the ancient Greek myth of sirens - beauties with fish tails, who, with their wonderful singing, killed sailors. Among those who saw real sirens - pinniped dugongs (sea cows), there is such a joke: the first person who mistook a dugong for a seductive woman, of course, was either very young or did not leave the ship for a long time.
It is interesting that such similar legends were created by peoples separated from each other by thousands of kilometers!
By the way, the inhabitants of the Amazonian selva believe that male dolphins can turn into slender youths. Such werewolves take part in the dances on the shore, which the Indians arrange during their many festivals. While dancing, the boys choose the prettiest girls. If after a while it is discovered that one of them is pregnant, the Indians believe that the dolphin is the culprit. Fortunately, the customs of the Amazonian Indians are not at all harsh, and the girl will not be punished, but a prosperous family life. Parents love "Dolphin children" as well as other babies. The Indians say: "All children are ours."
In the lower reaches of the Amazon, there are stories that the owner of the selva, Zhurupari, a distant relative of the devil and the water, often turns into a dolphin. In this way, it is easier for him to spy on the inhabitants of coastal villages and choose an object for his endless antics and jokes on people.
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Descendants of the brigands
At the other end of the world - in Vietnam - one amazing tradition has been observed since antiquity: if people find a dead dolphin on the shore, they mourn and bury him just like a person. And in Japan there is still a temple, whose monks daily offer prayers to the souls of departed dolphins and whales.
In ancient Greece, there was also a myth about the blood relationship between dolphins and humans. Once the god of wine and fun Dionysus was attacked by pirates, mistaking him for an ordinary person. They chained the son of Zeus, but the fetters suddenly fell from the hands of God and, turning into vines, wrapped around the masts and sails of the pirate ship. And Dionysus himself appeared before his offenders in the form of a ferocious tiger. Frightened robbers, looking for salvation from the enraged beast, jumped into the sea, where God gave them the appearance of dolphins, but left the human mind. Since then, they have been trying with good deeds to atone for their sins committed in a past life.
The famous Roman, historian and philosopher Pliny the Elder stated: - The voice of dolphins is like a human groan, because they never forget that they were "once human."
Brothers in mind are next to us
The fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it … Nowadays, scientists have discovered an unexpected confirmation of ancient myths, which literally blew up all ideas about the connections of people with their neighbors on the planet. Initially, it turned out that the blood of humans and marine mammals, including whales and dolphins, is similar in composition. And then the statement by scientist Christopher Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sounded like a bolt from the blue. Moore stated that blood not only transports oxygen and nutrients through the body, but also … affects the thought processes! “According to our hypothesis, blood actively regulates the information processing processes performed by nerve cells,” the researcher explains. If this theory is correct, then humans and dolphins think the same way!
In 1949, American psychoanalyst John Lilly, known for his work in the field of neurophysiology and psychiatry, learned from his fellow zoologists that cetaceans have a brain that is superior in absolute weight to that of a human. This fact shocked Lilly so much that he delved into the study of dolphins for many years. 12 years later, the researcher expressed the striking idea that on our planet, perhaps, there is another truly intelligent humanoid, comparable to a person in terms of his mental development. And in 1967 his sensational book “The Mind of a Dolphin. Intelligence Beyond Human. " The scientist was not afraid to declare to the whole world that people will have to free themselves from the usual ideas about "Homo sapiens" as the crown of creation.
They returned to the "cradle of life"
Anthropologists added fuel to the fire, who found that with the onset of a global cooling, known as the ice age, the ancestors of people off the coast of the Indian Ocean led a semi-aquatic lifestyle. They spent most of the day looking for food in shallow waters. From this, a stone's throw to such a picture: the ancient people went further and further from the unkind land into the generous sea. Prolonged swimming gradually led to the disappearance of their hairline, for warmth the body was "overgrown" with subcutaneous fat. Man has learned to control his breathing in order to dive for edible shellfish and algae. He returned to land less and less …
Here the image of Ichthyander comes to life in memory - a young man whose new home has forever been the sea.
It is known for certain that millions of years ago, the ancestors of modern dolphins did just that - leaving the land, they went to sea, which is proved by both excavations and the structure of the dolphin's front fins. Under the flippers of these representatives of cetaceans are hidden bones, very reminiscent of a human hand.
Such serious authorities of antiquity as Herodotus and Plato assumed that after the death of Atlantis, some of its inhabitants turned into "water people" who founded an underwater state on the wreckage of their continent sank to the seabed.
And the ancient Indian texts tell about the underwater people of the Danavs.
In medieval books, you can find repeated references to the fact that in various reservoirs - from the shores of Spain to the Armenian lake Van - strange creatures are introduced, having the appearance of a man and at the same time features of underwater inhabitants.
Ichthyandra from Venezuela
This true story full of tragedy was described by the Spanish monk and humanist Bartolomé de Las Casas. On the territory of modern Venezuela lived a tribe of lukai - skilled swimmers and divers. The Spanish conquerors turned them into slaves to get pearls, forcing them to dive to great depths from morning until sunset. "Their black hair by nature burns out and becomes like the hair of sea lions," wrote Las Casas, "salt build-ups form on their backs, and people cease to resemble people, resembling some kind of monsters." At night, the lukai were chained on the seashore so that they could not escape. The result of such inhuman treatment was that the tribe disappeared from the face of the earth. Have the lukai gone into the depths of the sea?
Perhaps … reasonable "people of the sea" are still afraid of a man who for centuries hunted marine mammals, ruthlessly killing whales for meat and blubber, and dolphins for fat and … also meat from which sausages were prepared. Commercial dolphin fishing in the Black Sea was banned only in 1967.
Crimean mermaids
The "Masters of the Waters" are in no hurry to renew the contacts they had with our ancestors in the distant past. Therefore, today the only irrefutable evidence of the existence of sea people is a bronze mermaid off the coast of Miskhor in Crimea. Dropping her flexible dolphin tail into the water, she is holding a baby in her arms - another evidence of human contacts with marine humanoids, although these contacts are legend.
However, they say that "dates" between people and mermaids on the Crimean peninsula still take place. More than a dozen evidence of this was collected in his last book by Anatoly Tavrichesky, an experienced diver, the author of a unique map of the Crimean underwater treasures. Eyewitnesses report that Crimean mermaids have large eyes, matted hair and an unfriendly attitude towards humans. The first feeling that people have when meeting them is panic. Perhaps, such creatures, like dolphins, can make sounds at frequencies inaccessible to human perception. These sounds can affect the human psyche, causing him an inexplicable fear.
Ritta Kozunova. Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" № 30 2011