The Evolution of Mermaids From Myth to Reality

It would be hard to find someone who's not heard of mermaids. They appear in stories from almost every ocean and every continent, but few seem to know what they are or where they came from. People from the earliest civilisation on earth claim to have known the creature, but over time it transformed almost beyond recognition. The internet is filled with... evidence of their existence, and even world famous explorers have documented seeing them at sea. But dig back far enough and the creature you think you know completely disappears. We're about to journey back to the earliest records to discover the origin of these beings. Welcome to the Mysteries of Mythology. Mermaids When I was about 11 and my family vacationed in the Mediterranean, I would drive my mother mad when we visited the beach. I loved diving underneath the waves for as long as I could. My mother would chase up and down the coast thinking I'd drowned, but I was enjoying the peace beneath the surface and the gentle lull of the tide. I felt like I belonged there. And it seems through time others have felt the same way, even believing that there were creatures, similar to us, that called the deep home. When we say the word mermaid, most of us picture the same thing. A human upper body and a tail of a fish. And this image turns up in far more places than people usually realise. In some stories these beings are divine, in others they're dangerous. The meanings change depending on the culture and the period, but the physical shape remains surprisingly consistent. Before we go any further, I want to define what we're actually talking about. This episode is not about every kind of water spirit in folklore. It's not about seal folk, river ghosts or shapeshifting beings. It's about one very specific image. A figure that's human up top and fish down below. So what are mermaids and where did they come from? To answer that, we need to begin in the ancient world. To find the oldest version of this image we need to go back a long way, further than medieval Europe, further even than ancient Greece. We need to go to Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in what's now Iraq. It's one of the earliest places on earth where people built cities, developed writing and started recording their beliefs. And it's where we find one of the first human fish beings in recorded history. His name is Oannes. Our main source of Oannes comes from a Babylonian priest named Berossus writing around 300 BCE. And even by his time the story of Oannes was already thousands of years old. He was writing down something that people had believed in for a very long time. Oannes didn't look like a typical mermaid. Berossus described him as a layered being. The outer body was a fish but underneath the fish head was a human head and beneath the fish tail were human feet. It's almost as if a man were wearing a fish-like suit or emerging from inside one. The story goes that each morning Oannes would rise up from the sea and teach the people a new skill. He taught humanity writing, mathematics, agriculture and law, the foundations of civilised life. Then at sunset he slipped back beneath the water. To Mesopotamians he was the source of knowledge. Wisdom from underwater rising each morning to share its knowledge. Oannes is also connected to a group of beings called the Apkallu, seven ancient Mesopotamian sage demigods sent by the god Enki. They also taught knowledge to humanity but Oannes is the one whose story survives in detail. Scholars are still debating whether these images represent actual mythic beings or priests wearing ceremonial costumes and if it's the latter imagine what that smelt like. But either way the message is the same. The fish form means wisdom, divine knowledge and something sacred. At this point in history the mermaid isn't dangerous or seductive, it teaches and brings order. West of Mesopotamia the image of the mermaid starts to look like something that we're more familiar with today. From Mesopotamia our trail leads us into ancient Syria where we encounter a goddess known as Atargatis. She was widely worshipped across the region especially at the city of Hierapolis in what is now southern Turkey near the Syrian border. Greek and Roman writers later absorbed her into their own mythology. Some of them called her Dercito, others compared her to Aphrodite or Venus. But she wasn't simply a local version of someone else's goddess, she had her own identity. Atargatis was associated with fertility and sacred water. Fish were closely linked to her worship. At her temples large pools were kept filled with fish and those fish were protected never to be eaten. The version of the story that most people know comes from later Greek and Roman writers particularly Diodorus Siculus and Lucian of Samosata. According to this story Atargatis was a goddess gifted with divine beauty and strength but these gifts would someday be her curse. She longed for love but was unable to find it amongst the other gods. Fate had it that she would fall in love with a mortal, a shepherd named Hadad. They loved each other intensely and one night in a moment of passion they chose to consummate their love. But that night, lost in ecstasy, Atargatis' divine strength overwhelmed the mortal body of Hadad and he tragically died. Filled with intense guilt over causing the death of her lover and loneliness over his loss, Atargatis wished to take her own life. She threw herself into the waters which slowly began to submerge her and as her tears met with the water she slowly began to realise that no matter how hard she tried she couldn't drown. In fact she was now able to breathe underwater. As she looked down she saw she no longer had two legs that had fused together and become the lower body of a fish. Not every early depiction of Atargatis shows her as fish-tailed. Some representations are fully human. The fish form seems to develop more in late interpretations and artistic traditions. But by the classical period, the idea of her as a goddess who became part fish was firmly attached to her story. What's different now, compared to Oannes, is that Atargatis is now bound to the sea and this starts feeding into the modern version of mermaids. This is one of the earliest examples of a half-woman, half-fish image attached to a named and worshipped goddess. Where Oannes and Apkallu were about wisdom, Atargatis was about transformation, fertility and divine power. As Greek culture expanded across the eastern Mediterranean, it encountered older Near Eastern imagery. Whether directly borrowed or gradually interpreted, the story of the sea begins to change. When we enter Greek mythology things become slightly more complicated. Modern audiences often assume that the sirens from Homer's Odyssey were mermaids. But they weren't. In fact, in Homer's early work there's no description of the sirens, only that they were creatures whose songs lured sailors to their deaths. Later, artists trying to portray the story gave the sirens a bird's body with a woman's head. So at this stage in Greek tradition, the dangerous singer by the sea is not a mermaid but an evil big bird. But during this time we do have mer-people. One of the clearest examples is Triton, the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. In art, Triton is typically shown with the upper body of a man and the tail of a fish. He carries a conch shell which he blows like a trumpet to calm or stir the waves. By the Hellenistic and later Roman periods, fish-tailed sea beings became far more common in mosaics, sculpture and decorative art. It's during these later periods and especially into the medieval world that another shift happens. The dangerous singing siren and the fish-tailed sea being begin to merge into popular imagination. The bird-bodied siren gradually gives way in art and storytelling to a fish-tailed temptress. By the Middle Ages, the word siren and the image of a mermaid are often treated as if describing the same creature. This is why modern audiences so easily assume that Homer's sirens had fish-tails. The confusion is actually an old one. It's also in the Roman world that we find something interesting. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, includes references to Nereids and other sea beings in his Naturalis Historia or Natural History. This was an encyclopedia before encyclopedias existed. In it he reports that bodies resembling mermaid-like sea nymphs had supposedly been seen or washed ashore. Whether he believed these accounts is difficult to say, but the fact that they appear in a work attempting to catalogue the natural world tells us something about how blurred the line could be between myth and reported observation. By this stage, the fish-tailed sea being is popular in art, in myth and in what some people treat as recorded sightings. But there's still more to come. By the medieval period in Europe, the fish-tailed figure is firmly established. She appears in manuscripts known as bestiaries, which are a collection of animals both real and imagined. These books are not simply catalogues of wildlife, but each creature was accompanied by a moral explanation. The natural world was treated as a kind of symbolic language through which religious lessons could be learned. In these bestiaries, the mermaid is usually shown holding a comb and a mirror. That detail becomes incredibly common. Medieval writers associated them with vanity and temptation. The mermaid, already linked to the dangerous sea, becomes a warning figure. She represents the kind of beauty that distracts, tempts and misleads. Shaped largely by male clerical writers with a fish fetish, the image easily folds into sermons about pride, desire and moral weakness. You find these carvings not only in books but in churches. Stone mermaids appear on mesery chords, the small calf supports beneath folding choir seats where monks rested during long services, and on pillars, even on the edges of fonts. In some medieval carvings and later heraldic designs, the mermaid is even shown with a split or double tail holding the two fins apart with her hands. This variation becomes especially popular in later European art and much, much later in a Seattle-based coffee company. By the 13th and 14th centuries, the mermaid was not a rare mythic being, she was part of the visual culture. It's in this period that the mermaid begins to move fully from divine myth into popular folklore. She's no longer a goddess like Atagatis and she's no longer a sage like Oannes. She's something closer to a living creature, something beautiful, sometimes dangerous, and sometimes both. By the 15th and 16th centuries, European ships were travelling further than ever before. Coastlines that had existed only on maps or speculation were now being charted in detail. New animals were being recorded, new plants were being described. The natural world was expanding in the European imagination. So it's not surprising that mermaids appear again, this time not in myths but in journals. One of the most famous examples comes from our old explorer Christopher Columbus, who found America. Thank goodness he did, as Native Americans were just lost without him. In January 1493, while sailing near what is now the Dominican Republic, he recorded seeing three mermaids rising out of the sea. He added that they were not as beautiful as they were painted and in some way resembled men's faces. Columbus was trying to make sense of something he believed he had seen. He wasn't the only famous traveller who claimed to have seen mermaids. In the 17th century, the English traveller Henry Hudson recorded in his ship's log that members of his crew reported seeing a mermaid in the waters near what is now Russia. The account describes a figure with a woman's upper body and a spotted tail like a porpoise. The most common explanation for these sightings is that sailors encountered marine mammals such as manatees, dugongs or seals. From a distance, particularly in poor light, their movements could appear vaguely human. Manatees rise vertically from the water to breathe, they have forward-facing eyes. A tired or hopeful sailor might have thought he genuinely saw a mermaid, and maybe he did. As natural history developed, many reports of sea creatures were gradually reclassified. In fact, the scientific name for the order that includes manatees is Sirenia, a direct reference to sirens. So, now you know that marine biologists named creatures with fish tails after creatures that actually had bird ones. What's interesting is that even in an age of expanding science, the human-fish hybrid remain part of the mental landscape of the sea. At the same time, similar fish-tailed beings appear in traditions far beyond Europe. And that's where we're heading next. In Thailand's royal epic, The Ramekin, a local retelling of a much older Indian Ramayana, we encounter a mermaid named Suvannamaka. I'm going to be crucified for that pronunciation. In the story, the hero Hanuman is attempting to build a bridge across the sea in order for his army to reach his enemy. Each night, however, the stones placed to build the bridge in the water mysteriously disappear. The reason for the rocks disappearing is Suvannamaka. Suvannamaka is a mermaid princess, often described as the daughter of the demon king. She commands an army of sea creatures, and she has been sent to sabotage the construction by carrying the stones away beneath the waves. Hanuman eventually confronts her underwater. Instead of a straightforward battle, the encounter becomes something more personal. In most versions of the story, the two fall in love. Suvannamaka agrees to stop interfering with the bridge, allowing it to stand. This is one of the largest stories in Thailand, and it stars a mermaid. Her fish-tail isn't monstrous or shameful, it's simply part of who she is. And the southeast isn't the only region in Asia where fish-tailed beings appear. In Japan, we find another sea being sometimes compared to a mermaid known as Ningyo. The Ningyo isn't usually portrayed as beautiful. In many descriptions, it has a human-like face and a fish body, and its appearance can be unsettling rather than alluring. In medieval Japanese chronicles, sightings of the Ningyo were sometimes treated as omens. Their appearance could signal misfortune or unusual events. There's also stories about eating the flesh of a Ningyo. One famous legend tells of a woman who unknowingly consumes Ningyo meat and gains an unnaturally long life as a result, living for centuries before eventually becoming a wandering nun. In nearby China, there's a slightly different figure known as Jiaren. In earlier versions, they are simply referred to as aquatic beings. But in later illustrations, the Jiaren is portrayed as a human from the waist up, and a fish from the waist down. Some traditions describe these beings as weeping pearls or precious gems. Others connect them to weaving and fine textiles beneath the sea. By this point, we've seen a human-fish hybrid as a teacher of civilisation, a transformed goddess, a moral warning, a sailor's rumour, a mermaid princess in an epic, an omen-bearing creature in Japanese folklore, and a pearl-weeping sea being in Chinese tradition. There is one or two more regions worth touching on briefly before we draw this together. In Western Central Africa, we meet a powerful water figure known as Mami Wata, which translates roughly into Mother of the Waters. Now, it's important to say from the beginning that Mami Wata is not confined to a single form. Traditions vary across regions and communities. In some versions, she appears fully human. In others, particularly in more recent visual traditions, she's shown as a woman with the tail of a fish. Mami Wata is often associated with wealth, healing, beauty, and danger. In some stories, she appears to individuals at the water's edge or in dreams. If she favours someone, she may grant prosperity or protection. If she's rejected or disrespected, she may bring misfortune. What makes Mami Wata particularly interesting is that her imagery evolved over time through cultural exchange. As European trade and expanded along the African coast, mermaid images entered local traditions. The result was the merging of older African water spirit traditions with the now familiar fish-tailed mermaid form. Across the Atlantic, similar figures appear again. In Brazil, fishermen speak of Lara, a river mermaid whose song draws men beneath the water. And in the Maori tradition, the story of tells of a seawoman taken back by the tide, forever separated from her human lover. Remember when I told you about diving under the waves when I was a kid, staying under until my mother panicked on the shore? I think I understand now why that felt like belonging somewhere. The sea is the one place where we're genuinely out of our depths, literally. We can't breathe in it. We can't see through it. We can't control it. And for all of human history, we've responded to that helplessness in the same way, by imagining something that could. Something like us, but built for the deep. To me that's what a mermaid is, not a fish or a fairy tale. A mirror held up to the thing we fear the most, and given our own face. What do you think of the mermaid? And are there any ones that I might have missed? Let me know in the comments.