"... once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music."
                          --  SHAKESPEARE (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

The Mermaid as we know her is a woman to the waist, with the tail of a fish, and she is usually of great beauty. Her long hair is either green or gold, and she has often been seen on moonlit nights in the rivers or shallow seas that she frequents, holding a mirror in one hand and combing this lovely hair with the other. Even more often she is only heard singing. It is then that she is dangerous, for her voice is the voice of the sirens and when she is in happy mood she sings with such haunting beauty that men are lured too close to the rocks where she is hiding and are ship-wrecked, while if she is angry her song turns into the howling wind and it is she who brings the storm. Sometimes she herself can be seen dancing in the storm waves; one of her strongest characteristics is a love of dancing.
     The mermaid is found in all Western countries; she is the German Meriminni or Meerfrau, the Icelandic Marmenill, the Danish Maremind, the Irish Merow and many others, and there are echoes of her story from the East as well. The Matsyanaris, figures sometimes found sculptured in Indian temples, are nymphs with fishes' tails, and superstitious Chinese sailors firmly believe in the existence of similar creatures in the China seas.
     It is possible to see in the legend of the mermaid, and of the corresponding merman who, although perhaps less familiar to us, is equally firmly established in mythology, simply a confused description of the bladder-nosed seal or of certain aquatic mammals known as sea-cows. The dugong especially, one variety of sea-cow, has a way of raising the upper part of its body out of the water and looking around that is almost human; it also produces a single offspring at a time and cares for it with great affection, carrying the infant under its fore fin exactly as a woman will hold a child in her arms. It is thought that, seeing this, early travelers in the Indian Ocean may have been convinced of the existence there of a creature half fish, half man or woman, and so brought home the story of the mermaid.
     Certainly these sea-cows or sirenia, mammals who browse on underwater grasses as their land cousins do on meadow grass and who are often to be seen in shallow bays and estuaries, must have strengthened belief in the mermaid. But we must go back tens of centuries to find the origin of these half-human beings of the sea. Their master seems to have been no less than the great water-god of the Babylonians, Ea, the same Ea who counted among his creatures the goat-fish, the possible prototype of the makara. On a Babylonian seal stone of the eighteenth century B.C., Ea is pictured standing on a goat-fish and on a mermaid.
     Ea's abode was thought to have been in the depth of the waters. From there he would send messengers with words of wisdom and magic incantations to gods and mortals who sought his help.

"He of supreme intelligence, skillful, ingenious,
Ea, who knows all things...

was always the deity most friendly to mankind. It was he who saved the earth from complete destruction at the time of the Flood, and who thwarted the intentions of the other gods whenever they decided to do away with mankind.
     The legend of Ea is preserved in the writings of one of the Fathers of the Church who copied it from a late manuscript of a Babylonian priest. It tells of great numbers of people of divers origin who had come together in Babylon and lived there like animals in orderless confusion. In the first year, a creature by the name of Oannes appeared from out of the Erythrean Sea where it borders on Babylonia (the part of the ocean which today we call the Persian Gulf). He was endowed with intelligence and had the body of a fish. Under the head of the fish, however, another human head had grown; human feet appeared below the fish tail, and he spoke with a human voice. The natural home of this being was in the sea and, although he came ashore every morning at daybreak, he would accept no food on land, and every evening at the setting of the sun he returned to the sea. He taught the humans the arts of civilization, showed them how to plant seed, so that they need not rely only on fruits that could be gathered wild; how to build houses and temples, and how to write with a stylus on clay tables. He gave them laws, taught them something of science and astronomy, and told them stories of the lands whence he had come, and of the gods that dwelt there.
     This picture of Ea (see pics in right column) -- for it is undoubtedly he who is described under the name of Oannes -- differs from that of the exalted god praised in Babylonian hymns and myths. This late version must have been inspired by one of the surviving images of Babylonian priests in huge fish masks of whom we know that they warded off evil and helped to heal the sick, but of whose association with Ea there is no proof.
     Yet the mermaids and mermen who held vases of life-giving water and who certainly belong to Ea, the water-god's, retinue in Babylonian times, seem to have been forgotten by the man who told this tale. They had to be reborn of man's imagination, inspired by legends such as that of Oannes-Ea.
     There are tales of fish-gods from other parts of the world and, although none are of the stature of Ea, they also are usually bringers of culture and protectors of mankind. The Polynesian Vatea, father of gods and men, was half human, half porpoise in form. The North American Indians tell a story of how they once lived in a land far away to the west, a barren coast land where they were hungry and cold and did not know how to find food. Then a man appeared from the sea, rising every day out of the waters and coming quite close to shore, though he never actually touched the land. He was a strange figure, like a man from the waist up but with two fish tails instead of legs and a face that might have been human yet was oddly like that of a porpoise. His long hair and beard were green. He would float on the surface of the water, his fish tails clearly visible, and sing to the people. He told them how beautiful was the land whence he had come, the land of the sea. He told them of the treasures that lay under the waves, and of the strange fish people, and of the lovely green light that shone in the deeper waters, and the people, knowing that those who disappeared under the water never returned to earth, were frightened. But then he told them that across the waters lay another land to which he could guide them, a land where they could live and find food.
     The Indians hesitated. But eventually, since they were nearly starving in their own land, they decided to trust the words of the fish-man. They built boats, gathered up their families and their few possessions, and followed in the wake of this strange green-haired creature who called to them. He led them east, straight across the sea to the land of which he had told them, and there they landed safely and there they founded a new tribe; it was thus that the Indians came from Asia to North America. The fish-man, or fish-god, as he may have been, then disappeared, still singing, and was never seen again.
     According to the East Indians the god Vishnu took the form of a fish to save Manu from the great flood. Manu, a sage and -- like his counterpart Noah -- a virtuous man, one day found a tiny fish in the water with which he was performing his morning ablutions. He was about to throw it back into the river by which he stood when the fish spoke to him, begging him not to leave it in the water until it had grown bigger, because it was afraid of the great creatures of the sea. Manu accordingly placed the little fish in a bowl, but by morning it had grown so that the bowl was too small, and soon even the largest cauldron would not hold it. He took it to a lake nearby, but even that was too small, and it was with difficulty that he at last managed to get the now gigantic fish down to the sea. There it spoke to him again.
     "In seven days' time," the fish said, "there will be a great flood. I will send a ship for you and for the seven sages, and you must take with you in this ship two of every creature that lives on earth or in the air, and you must take the seeds of every plant."
     Manu made ready as he was told, and in seven days the sea rose out of its bed and flowed over the earth. At the same time a great ship appeared and Manu and all his menagerie embarked, guided by Vishnu in his fish shape. This same fish, huge and with golden scales, then fastened the ship to his single horn and towed it up to the peak of the great mountains in the north. From thence, as the waters subsided, Manu was able to guide his vessel gradually down the slope of the mountain and back to the lands he knew, the mountain having ever since borne the name "The Descent of Manu."
     These fish-gods may seem a long way from the mermaid we know, and there are indeed many more recent creatures of myth and legend who have had something to do with the shaping of the modern mermaid. The sirens of classic story had the face and breasts of a woman, their bodies ending sometimes as bird, sometimes as fish, and they too were associated with the moon. They were known above all for their sweet voices, by whose magic they could calm the wildest storm but which they more often used to lure men to their death by drowning. They were said to have been the daughters of the river-god Achelous, transformed into semifish form because of their pride in their own beauty.
     A similar transformation into sea-nymphs is told of the ships of the Trojan fleet. These ships, after escaping from ruined Ilium, eventually anchored off the coast of Italy in what they thought was a safe harbor, only to be set on fire by Turnus, the rival and enemy of Aeneas. Before they could be completely destroyed the gods, who at that moment seem to have favored the Trojans, invoked a great storm to rise and quench the flames, while at the same time they transformed the half-burned ships into mermaids. Ovid describes this:

"Now, wond'rous, as they beat the foaming flood,
The timber softens into flesh and blood;
. . . and by degrees
The galleys rise green daughters of the seas."

     These sea-nymphs thereafter drifted happily in the Mediterranean waters they had known so well as ships, sunning themselves on the rocks or singing to each other. Whenever, anywhere, a Trojan ship was caught in a storm they hastened to its rescue; other ships they left to their fate.
     Mermaids are also closely related to the swan-maidens who are common to most folklore. Such are the Vedic Apsaras (their name apparently derived from "those who go in the water"), maidens in feather dress who welcome the souls of heroes to the Vedic heaven and who are thus very like the Valkyries. Stories are plentiful of swan-maidens and fish-maidens, the two often indistinguishable, who come to earth for a time, and in every case something is stolen from them -- their robe of feathers, or a cap or some other garment -- and they cannot return to their own element until they have won it back. In the Faroe Islands it is said that every ninth night the seals all cast off their skins and become human beings, dancing the whole night along the beach; if anyone hides their skin, they must remain forever on dry land.
     There seems to be a special magic in dancing. Almost all primitive people have ritual dances intended to assure them of success in war or hunting, or used as a means of initiation into the tribe. And the unearthly creatures, whether seal or swan or mermaid, who come to earth apparently do so in order to perform some particular dance. In Japan, where the story is told in one of the Noh plays, the dance is intended as a symbolic interpretation of the changing phases of the moon, and here again the sea, the moon, and the mermaid or feather-maiden appear together.
     A Japanese fisherman was walking along the shore late one evening, carrying his nets, when he noticed a mantle of feathers hanging on the branch of a tree. He picked this up and was about to set off for home with it, when the spirit to whom it belonged appeared beside him. She begged him to let her have it, explaining that without her feather robe she could not return to her own land, the land of spirits. At first the fisherman refused, but finally he relented and agreed to return the robe if she would show him the magic dance that she had come to earth to dance. This she promised to do.
     "Learn then this dance that can turn the palace of the moon," the maiden told him, throwing the precious robe of feathers about her shoulders. "For the sorrows of the world I will leave this new dancing with you for sorrowing people." And she danced for him the ritual dance that is danced in heaven. The play ends as she fades gradually away in the mist, the chorus meanwhile explaining that the steps of her dance are the phases of the moon, and that the dancing of them is in itself a magic spell of great potency.
     German and Scandinavian folklore has many similar stories of mermaids who carelessly leave their feather plumage or seal robe on the shore while they dance. It is usually found by a mortal, and the water sprite is then compelled either to disclose some secret knowledge or else to stay on earth as his wife. In the Nibelungenlied Hagen manages to hide the garments of two mermaids he finds bathing in the Danube, and thus forces them to disclose his future; a grim enough secret since, if he crossed the river, his fate was to be murdered, with all his knights, in the land of the Huns.
     The marriage of a mermaid with a human being almost always ends in misfortune. Either the mermaid finds her robe again and deserts her husband for the palaces of the sea, or else her husband grows tired of her and sends her back; then she is likely, as in the story of Undine and a similar story of the Adirondack Indians, to return with other spirits of the flood and to destroy her husband or even the entire tribe or village to which he belongs.
     Yet the mermaid of recent centuries is in many ways a pathetic being. She is lonely and, if she hears music, will often appear in tropical waters and dance round the ship from which it comes; or she may take human form for a night and come on shore to join in the village dances, easily recognized because the hem of her dress is always wet. Her one great longing is to possess a human soul, and this is denied to her. Beautiful as she may be, and beautiful as her home under the green waters may be, she knows that without a soul she can have no other life and that when she dies she will have no hope of salvation. In the Middle Ages stories were often told of priests meeting these mermaids by the side of a river or lake and taunting them with threats of future damnation, only to find the gay song of the maidens suddenly dissolve into inconsolable tears; often the priest would then be so overcome with remorse that he would assure them they might still win a soul.
     Sometimes, indeed, mermaids were baptized and received into the Church. The most famous of these, who was originally the daughter of a king and was transformed into a mermaid when a great flood overwhelmed all her lands and all her family, was captured on the shore of Belfast Lough in the sixth century. She was carried up to the church in a tank full of water, and her prayers for a soul were answered when the saints gave her the choice of dying as soon as she was baptized and so going immediately to heaven, or of living on earth three hundred years and reaching heaven at the end of that time. She chose the former and was baptized with the name of Murgen, or "sea-born." After her death she even appeared in the calendar of saints, and was said to work miracles.
     But usually the only way for a mermaid to acquire a soul was to marry a human being who loved her. Hans Christian Andersen tells a sad story of the little mermaid who fell in love with a prince whom she had saved from shipwreck. She sold her beautiful voice to a witch of the lower seas in exchange for human legs, so that, although each step was painful, and she could no longer speak, she could live on land. If the prince married her, she would have not only his love but a soul; if not, she would die on the morning after his marriage to another. Alas, though the prince grew very fond of her and took her everywhere with him, he was already in love with the princess of a distant island kingdom. Before long, taking the little mermaid with him, he set off by sea to marry this princess and bring her home; thus the mermaid knew that she had lost her chance of a soul and that her life would soon be forfeit. On the night of the wedding her sisters rose from the sea and brought with them a magic knife, telling her that if she would stab the prince as he lay sleeping that night, she need not die. But this she could not bear to do. Instead, as the dawn came she threw herself into the sea that had once been her home and, because she had loved the prince enough to die rather than harm him, she suddenly found herself transformed into a spirit of the air; unlike the mermaids, these spirits can win an immortal soul at the end of three hundred years by their good deeds.
     The best known of European mermaids was Melusine (sometimes spelled Melusina), who founded the fortune of the great French house of Lusignan and who was so famous that several families, among them those of Luxembourg and Rohan, had their pedigrees altered so as to be able to claim descent from the water sprite. Melusine may have been originally a simple spirit of the fountain of Lusignan, a fresh-water rather than a salt-water mermaid. But according to the story she was the daughter of a fairy, and it was her fate to be transformed every Saturday into a fish-woman (or, some say, a water snake). This enchantment could not be broken, nor could she achieve the immortal soul she longed to have, unless she could marry a Christian, one who would never know her for a fairy and never see her in her mermaid form.
     Raymond, nephew of the Count of Poitiers, came upon Melusine one day as she sat by her fountain in the woods, and of course fell in love with her. He promised readily enough that if she would marry him, he would never see her on a Saturday and never, never ask what it was that she did on those days. For a time all went well. By following her advice, Raymond succeeded to the estates of his uncle and acquired far more in land and wealth than had been his uncle's. It was Melusine who built the castle fortress of Lusignan, the name of which is a corruption of hers, and which in turn gave its name to the family of Lusignan. (The best known of her descendants was Guy de Lusignan, who was King of Jerusalem and of Cyprus in the twelfth century; the Lusignans continued to rule over the latter for nearly three centuries.)
     But, whether it is Elsa who insists on knowing the name of Lohengrin, or Psyche who cannot resist the temptation to see the forbidden face of Cupid, the end of the story of a fairy wife or husband who exacts a promise of some kind at the time of their marriage is always the same. Curiosity is too strong, and the promise is broken. In this case Raymond, hearing his brothers gossip about the reason for Melusine's strange weekly disappearance, impetuously ran to his wife's apartments and, not finding her there, looked through the keyhole of her bathroom. There he saw Melusine bathing (it seems to have required a ritual bath of purification to restore the mermaid to human form), and saw that from the waist down she was fish.
     Astonished though he was, Raymond would have crept away and said nothing. But no sooner was Melusine aware of his presence than she gave an agonized cry and fled away through the window (it was said that for years afterwards the imprint of her foot could be seen on the stone she last touched, a surprising detail if it is true that she was then a mermaid). She left behind her two small children and, until they were grown, she used to return almost every night to watch over them; the nurses described her as a glimmering figure who hovered over each cradle in turn, human to the waist and with a fish's tail of blue and white scales, as smooth and shiny as though they were of enamel.
     Nor did Melusine forget the family of Lusignan. It was her wont to appear on the ramparts of the castle before the death of any member of the family, and there utter the most piercing cries. When at length the Lusignans died out completely, she transferred her mournful warnings to the kings of France, and it is said that as long as the monarchy ruled she still appeared to herald the death of every king. "Pousser des cris de Melusine" is still a French expression.
     The belief in mermaids lingers faintly, and there have been supposed mermaids even quite recently. Barnum showed a stuffed mermaid in his circus, and at Aden faded signs still advertise a "mermaid on view." It is said that the natives of Mauritius eat mermaids, which taste much like veal. There is a superstition among sailors that if a mermaid appears before a storm and is seen to be playing with small fish, it is a good omen if she throws them away from the ship, but if she tosses them towards the ship it means that some of the crew will be lost in the approaching storm; these mermaids not only have a tail but their long fingers are webbed together like the foot of a duck.
     Perhaps this control over the rising storm, the wind of which is their song, is the least echo of the mermaids' power. The great fish-gods and goddesses are forgotten. The sirens no longer sing, and the mermaidens no longer leave their robes and dance the dances of the moon on the shore by night, nor would there seem to be hope of one now marrying a mortal and so gaining a soul. Yet the charm of the mermaid is such that her legend is still not quite discredited.

Text excerpted from Peter Lum's Fabulous Beasts, copyright 1951.