On the Mythology of Mermaids & Plato’s Atlantis
© R. Blackhirst
Introduction
The mythology
of the mermaid (or of mermen or merpeople) is so widespread that we may safely
describe it as well-nigh universal. Tales of a race of creatures, half human
half fish, that live in oceans and waterways are found across the world and in
a wide range of cultures, even among people of inland regions who have little
commerce with the sea. But this mythology is in most cases residual and has
lost its integral, symbolic coherence. It has become disconnected from wider
and deeper symbolic understandings and it has thus slipped into the realm of
folklore, while among modernized people it has become grotesquely sentimental
and “saccharine” to use an appropriately industrial adjective. The most common
remnant of the mythology in popular culture comes to us through the tale of
Hans Christian Anderson called 'The Littlest Mermaid', a thoroughly debased
rendering that, like all of Anderson's stories, is symbolically unintelligent
and infantalized, or to use the exact term “puerile”. To Anderson, living in
the 1830s, the language of myth had already become nothing but quaint nonsense
from the infancy of mankind serving no higher purpose than the indulgence of
children. Profound myths, communicating a great and primordial heritage of gnosis and sophia, had by this time been reduced to “fairy tales.” Arguably,
no mythology suffered greater trivilization from Anderson than the mythology of
the mermaid. Then, nineteenth century science also played a hand. Among the
surreal delusions of Darwinism are theories of an “aquatic ape” of which
mermaid myths are supposed to be distant memories preserved, it is said, by our
ignorant forebears. The mermaid was posited as some form of “missing link” in
the evolutionary continuum from amoeba to man. This, as much as the
sentimentality of “fairy tales”, has made the mythology of mermaids
incomprehensible to the modern person. The modest purpose of this current
article, therefore, is to present the essential keys to an integral
understanding of mermaids in order that readers can re-situate mermaid
mythology within the greater mythology – and the primordial tradition - to
which it belongs, to restore to the reader the pertinent clues to what this
mythology is in fact about. Our starting point in this enterprise is Plato who,
while he does not mention mermaids himself, nevertheless gives us - in his own
mythological settings - the framework necessary for a proper understanding and
who is, of extant traditional sources, one of the most accessible.
Atlantis
The cosmology
of Plato is set out in an (apparently) unfinished ensemble of dialogues bearing
the names of Timaeus and Critias. This ensemble is connected to Plato's famous
Republic where Socrates provides a description of a communistic utopia, his
Ideal State governed by Philosopher Kings. In the Timaeus/Critias Socrates
tells his guests at their “feast of discourse” that he dearly wants to hear of
how his Ideal State will conduct itself in practice, and it is in response to
this request that both Timaeus and Critias deliver their respective speeches.
In the case of Critias, he relates (over two installments and via accounts
given by ancient Egyptian priests handed down through a chain of transmitters)
the extraordinary story of how, many thousand years before, a antediluvian
Athens, populated by the earth-born (autochthonous) children of the gods
(specifically the gods Athene, Gea and Hephaestus) defeated an imperialistic
power called 'Atlantis' which had once existed as a large continent beyond the
Pillars of Herakles in the Atlantic Ocean. This great power had long since sunk
into the watery depths, and only a distant memory of it remained. Nevertheless,
the Egyptians had preserved details of the Atlanteans and had communicated them
to Solon, the Athenian sage, who had at one time, we are told, intended to
compose an epic poem on the theme which would have made him a greater poet, so
Critias says, than even Homer.
There are some
unmistakable resonances between this story of the Atlantean continent and
Homer's sea-journey epic, the Odyssey, and it is clear from the narrative
construction that Plato presents this unwritten poem of Solon as a type of
counter-Homeric epic. The
mythological background to this narrative construction – and also the Ideal
State of Socrates with its Philosopher Kings – is the Athenian cult of
autochthony for which the Acropolis in Athens was centre. The setting for the
Timaeus/Critias dialogues is the “festival of the goddess”, namely the
Panathenaea, at which contests in epic poetry were held, and which celebrated
the birth of the Athenians as autochthons, aboriginals, from the native soils
of Attica.
Plato is our
original literary source for the story of the lost continent of Atlantis, and
we do not know from where Plato acquired it, but it is consonant with countless
tales from a wide range of sources, many much older than Plato, that give
similar accounts of a civilization that long ago sunk into the sea. Among
people on both sides of the Atlantic, and among people from nowhere near the
Atlantic, we find persistent tales of an ancient land that became submerged and
whose inhabitants – once a highly advanced people – were lost in a watery
cataclysm.
Accounts of an
aquatic race (mermen) are, in the first instance, closely related to this wider
mythology. Mermaids, in this context, are a remnant of a lost people from a
lost land which, long before living memory, was swallowed up in an ancient
catastrophe. The race of mermen are a survival from a previous age, just as, in
Greek (and in Biblical) mythology, giants and other monsters are the residue of
former times when the conditions of the world were different and when, for
instance, the sons of god mated with the daughters of men. The scientistic
mentality, conditioned by evolutionary theories, detects nothing in such
stories other than some “race memory” of mankind's origins in a primeval
aquatic soup, or else Jungians, conditioned by psychologistic reductions, will
try to explain how the submerged continent is an image of our “collective
unconscious” still populated by both neuroses and “archetypes” that
occasionally float to the surface. Regardless of such theories, it is
nevertheless plain that the mythology of mermaids (mermen) needs to be
considered in relation to and as part of a larger mythological frame and
specifically stories that tell of how some portion of humanity, long, long ago,
became creatures of the sea. Plato gives us the classic version. Once, we are
told, a whole civilization sunk into the ocean. Now we have tales of how
remnants of its inhabitants survive as distortions of the human form.
Accordingly,
in many mermaid stories, the merpeople have a fascination for land-dwelling
humans and have a “nostalgia' for human company. They are not indifferent to
human beings but regard them as a lost kin. Often, for example, mermaids are
attracted to and fall in love with and desire marriage with human males but
they “forget” that human males cannot live under water. It is as if mermaids
still think of themselves as the same as us and fail to remember than the
conditions of the world have changed. Tragically, as many sailor's stories
relate, they innocently embrace their human lovers and drag them into the sea
to drown. Often mermaids are depicted as yearning to be like human beings, or
else as uncomprehending as to why their human cousins cannot, like them, live
below the waves. One of the dangers of the mermaid, that is, is that she does
not appreciate the differences that have come about between her race and the
race of men. This is because mermaids have devolved from human beings. Once
human, they have now adapted to – or been deformed by – their aquatic abode,
and their interest in human beings who venture into their abode can thus be
deadly.
King Alexander
Some of the
more famous but opaque mermaid stories need to be understood in exactly this
way and as part of this Atlantean mythology. This is the first key to an
intelligent appreciation of mermaid myths. We must place these myths within the
context of larger myths that concern a portion of humanity that diverged from
the rest of the human race as a result of an ancient calamity. In fact, it is
the narrative constructions in Plato, rather than in parallel accounts from
other traditions, that most surely unlock what otherwise seem strange
curiosities in the mermaid mythos. The clues are best preserved in Plato and
can be extrapolated from an astute reading of the Platonic accounts. For
example, in ancient maritime lore, continuing through almost to modern times,
there are stories that when mermaids encountered ships they would ask the
question, “Is King Alexander alive?” meaning, of course, Alexander the Great.
In some versions of this story it is Alexander's own daughter, Thessalonike,
who becomes a mermaid and asks this question of sailors. The correct answer to
the mermaid's question is “He lives and reigns and conquers the world!” at
which the mermaid would calm the seas and assist the ship on its way. But if a
sailor was to give an incorrect answer to the question, the mermaid would be
enraged, would stir a tempest and the ship and its sailors would be carried to
their doom.
What is this
story about? Why is it important to mermaids that King Alexander lives and
reigns and conquers the world? Plato's 'Atlanticus' ensemble gives us the key.
As we stated above, the story of Atlantis in Plato is linked to Socrates'
account of the Ideal State and the rule of the Philosopher Kings. Like
antediluvian Athens, Atlantis too was once an “Ideal State' in the Socratic
manner, but it fell into decline and ruin and was finally punished by the gods.
The important thing to realise here is that King Alexander, in this mermaid
tale, is nothing other than the model of
the Philosopher King. This is why ancient accounts of his life present him
as a student of Aristotle (and so, by extension, a student of Plato) and why in
many traditions – even in the Islamic tradition – he is revered as the the
model of wise kingship, the paradigmatic philosopher ruler. So when the mermaid
asks “Is King Alexander alive?” the question is really, “Does the rule of the
philosopher kings prevail?” If the answer that is supplied is no, then the
mermaids brings down upon the hapless sailors the fate that befell Atlantis
when it finally lost all traces of the philosophical nature in her rulers and
surrendered to degenerate governance. The destruction of Atlantis came about,
Critias says, because the divine blood of the gods became too diluted in her
inhabitants, and the precious quality of the soul that Plato calls the
“philosophic nature” disappeared from her people. If “King Alexander” is no
longer alive in the world of men then the fate of Atlantis will revisit them.
Arabian Nights
The connection
with the Ideal State of Plato's Republic is plainer in other stories. Many
elements from Plato's treatment of these matters find their way into later
literature. Perhaps the plainest connection is found in a tale preserved in the
Arabian Nights. The story is called “Abdul the Fisherman” or “Abdul the Merman”
and is about a fisherman who attains the power of breathing under water. In the
sub-aquatic realm he encounters a race of mermen who take him to their sunken
city. This city, we learn, is not like the cities of the terrestrial world but
is instead ruled by Platonic communism, the wise rulers sharing all their
property in common. The tale – reconfigured in the imagination of the Arabian
storytellers who received it through the Islamic appropriation of the Hellenic
heritage – has a very obvious resemblance to Socrates' utopia, but now exists
far beneath the ocean and is populated by the race of mermen. This is an
Arabian version, a folk rendering, of the Atlantis myth and clearly shows that
we are to understand mermaids as remnants of the Atlanteans and their
underwater city as the lost city described by Plato in the two instalments of
Critias. Here it is the motif of communism that persists in the tale, rather
than the idea of the Philosopher King as in the case of the question about
Alexander, but the source is the same. We can best understand this tale, like
the tale of the mermaid's concern about Alexander, by reference to Plato. In
both cases, there is a clear identification to be drawn: the race of mermaids
are to be understood as having devolved from the Atlanteans and we are to
understand mermaid mythology in the broader context of that mythic land which
once sunk into the sea.
Details from
Plato's Critias confirm and amplify this identification. In particular, and
most obviously, the god from whom the Atlanteans were descended was Poseidon
(Neptune), god of the sea. That is, the Atlanteans were – even before their
land was submerged – children of the sea god, and thus too mermaids are always
portrayed in subsequent tales. In iconography, the mermaid is very often shown
with Poseidon, or Triton, who bears the trident, or sometimes, as in
Scandinavian mythology, the mermaid herself wields the Neptunian trident. In
popular representations such as the staggeringly inane Disney version of
Anderson's “littlest mermaid” we find – sure enough – that the mermaid (here a
precocious American teenager!)
lives in “Atlantis” with old Neptune as her “Dad”. The Platonic account
is a richer point of reference. In the Odyssey Homer presents Poseidon and
Athene as rivals. In his 'Atlanticus' ensemble – the epic poem that Solon would
have written, and which would have been greater than Homer's poems if he had
written it - Plato will not have this but instead presents the war between
Athens and Atlantis as a result of mortal failings when the influence of the
god's blood is so diminished that men lose the 'philosophic nature'. Plato
insists that while men might quarrel, gods do not. Athens and Atlantis are a
complimentary pair, just as Athene and Poseidon are complimentary (not rival)
guardians of the Acropolis in Plato's Athens. And just as the first Athenians
are autochthons, born from the Attic soil, and count Athene as their mother, so
the Atlanteans are the progeny of Poseidon and are also autochthons, born from
the soil and so are not born out of animal reproduction. The imprint of this is
revealed in the mermaid morphology. The primordial autochthon of Athens,
Erechtheus (sometimes Erechthonious) is usually depicted as half man, half
serpent – a human upper body and a serpentine lower body. In the mermaid, of
course, in a direct parallel, we find a human upper body and a piscatorial
lower half. It is vital to appreciate that autochthons are usually shown as
hybrid forms in this way. That is, to understand why mermaids have the form
they do we must realise that they are
autochthons. This is the second key to understanding this mythology.
Mermaids are part of a wider mythology that concerns autochthons, the earthborn
race of the primordial Golden Age. If we wish to understand mermaids we must
understand them as autochthonous – the autochthons of Poseidon - and as part of
the wider mythology of autochthony. The hybrid form, rather than signifying a
muted recollection of man's kinship with animals as Darwinian interpreters
would have it, signifies a hybridization of man and god from which animal reproduction
is a falling away. Serpents and fish are used in these forms because both were
regarded as reproducing asexually. These are not malformations. They signify
the semi-divine state prior to the descent into crude animal existence.
Athene and Poseidon
As an Athenian
Plato has a deep concern to show that Poseidon and Athene are not enemies.
Their complimentary partnership is integral to the city of Athens and its
institutions. At the Panathenaea a ship was draped with a large peplos for a
sail and then taken (dragged) in procession through the streets of the city up
to the Acropolis where the peplos was removed and used to cover the cult statue
of the goddess in the Parthenon. This is a very odd custom because, for a
start, Athens is an inland city and it is strange to find a ship central to her
most solemn festive rites. But the Panathenaeic ship represents the cooperation
of Poseidon and Athena, water and air deities respectively, and is emblematic
of their dual guardianship of the city. The mermaid represents a conjunction of
the same deities and is an extension of the same assembly of mythological
ideas, mutatus mutandis. It is not an
accident that the mermaid (rather than the merman) is the typical form. The
female top half of the mermaid is a motif suggestive of the goddess Athene,
while the fish tail of the lower half is a motif of Poseidon. There are no
hermaphroditic elements in this and they would not be relevant: the conjunction
is woman and fish, or the amphibious conjunction air-breathing form and
water-breathing form. It is, in any case, an expression of the Athene/Poseidon
mytho-type that, as we have said, is central to Plato's 'Atlanticus'
construction. On a deeper level, Plato has reason to chide Homer for presenting
these gods as rivals, for in Platonic metaphysics they are Essence and
Substance respectively (or even metaphysics and cosmology, per se, the virgin
goddess unsullied by manifestation and the earthshaking god of flux) and he
wants to preserve their proper relationship against Homeric misconstructions.
All of this symbolism is active in the practice of casting a mermaid as the
figurehead of ships. Aside from the sailor's belief in “luck” the mermaid
represents the harmony of air and water, the two elements vital to a ship, and
by extension the vertical axis of the mast and the horizontal axis of the hull,
the metaphysical axes Essence and Substance, compliments in a cruciform
relationship illustrated by this most basic ship symbolism.
That the upper
female half of the mermaid alludes back to the goddess Athene is made plain in
some important instances of medieval heraldry where the mermaid takes on the
otherwise unlikely role of defender of cities. There is no obvious sense in
which mermaids are defenders of cities and indeed this aspect of their
mythology is at odds with those elements in which mermaids are treacherous or
harbingers of doom. In Greek myth generally, but especially in Athens, Athene
is the goddess of defensive warfare and is represented bearing a shield. She is
not an aggressive goddess, but no male god is her match. During the Trojan war
it is to her that the Trojan women pray when their city is besieged. Sometimes,
in heraldry, mermaids are shown in this way, and often for the defense of
cities much further inland than Athens.
One of the most outstanding instances of this is the Polish city of
Warsaw which, though hundreds of miles inland, has the mermaid as her emblem.
In a symbolism dating back to at least the 1200s, both mermaids and the
trident-bearing Neptune are presented as guardians of Warsaw. To this day, a
mermaid holding sabre and shield (Mermaid as Athene, goddess of defense) is the
official emblem of the city and representations of this heraldry are
characteristic of insignia everywhere there. But how did this come about in a
city so far from the sea? Land-bound Athens appropriated a port, the Piraeus,
during her mercantile expansions, but it is decidedly odd to find a developed
mermaid mythology in a city like Warsaw. The Warsaw mermaid is one of the most
famous in the world, but the many and contradictory explanations of her history
and significance and how she defends the city - as they are given to tourists -
are unsatisfactory to say the least. Let us briefly explore this particularly
interesting case as a way of illustrating how Platonic doctrine illuminates and
clarifies this mythology and answers many riddles.
Time of the Autochthons
In passages
dotted throughout his works Plato is concerned with the question of why the
Golden Age must finally give way to the Silver Age, the Silver to the Bronze
and the Bronze to the Iron. Why do cosmic conditions decline? Socrates is
concerned with why his Ideal State – though ideal – will not endure. The
background to the Atlantis mythology in Plato addresses this issue. His answer
to this conundrum, found in several dialogues but especially in the Republic
and the Timaeus/Critias ensemble, is that, at length, men fall into
“unseasonable marriage” and the quality of souls declines as heaven and earth
fall out of kilter. The “divine blood” grows thin in men's veins. The Egyptian
priests who inform Solon that his people are “mere children” because they do
not remember the true meaning of their own myths informs him that many stories
known to the Greeks concerning cosmic decline and earthly catastrophes are
really about the wavering declination of heavenly bodies and shifts in
astronomical cycles. Sometimes elements of these doctrines appear in mermaid
myths and help us account for what are otherwise curious details of symbolism
and folklore. To make sense of these motifs it is once again doctrines
extracted from Plato that provides the relevant background. Plato has in mind
the calculations of the Great Year and the periodic destructions that divide
its various ages. The earthborn are the golden souls, but as the cosmos unwinds
inch by inch, the conditions of the world slowly decline until the dire
conditions of the Ferric Age are arrested by a catalysm and, at length, the
cycle begins again. The aurumic quality of souls – the philosophic nature –
slowly diminishes over astronomical measures of time. The story of Atlantis
appears, finally, as an elaborate allegory of cosmic decline whose real meaning
is in astronomical calculations of the Great Year through the solar procession
of the equinoxes. The only way to sustain the Ideal State is to perpetuate the
qualities of the golden souls by “seasonable marriage” and births. This is the
significance of the Panathenaea. The autochthons were born at this time. To be
born at this time is to partake of this autochthonous quality. The noble born
children of Athens born at this time were presented with a golden serpentine
necklace to signify their autochthonous heritage.
*
* *
* * *
The Mermaid of Warsaw
The mermaid of
Warsaw is part of a symbolic scheme that illustrates these astronomical cycles
. It is very obvious in many of the representations of her that her sword and
shield are, in fact, moon (in crescent) and sun. In this she represents the
same astronomical point as did the Panathenaic festival in Athens, namely the
first new moon after the summer solstice. The coat of arms of the city, in
fact, is nothing other than a graphical, symbolic illustration of that
astronomical configuration and the fact that that point is the “autochthony”
point in the year. The Athenians, as we have just noted, by manipulation of
their marriage festivals, calculated to have children born near this date, for
in this they might perpetuate the “golden” quality of incarnating souls. In the
crest of Warsaw we see the mermaid autochthon, her upper half representing
Athene, defender of cities, and her lower half her Poseidonian nature, air and
water. She recalls the man-serpent Erechtheus, autochthon of the Panathenaea,
born at this time of the year. Her weapons are aspects of Athene too, but more
importantly they are the full sun of the solstice (the round shield) and the
crescent of the new moon (the curved sabre). What she defends, in this sense,
is the 'aurumic' quality of souls against the dying of the age. There can be no
better defence than protecting and prolongating the qualities of the golden
age. There is no Panathenaea in Warsaw, of course, but there is a local
festival with unmistakably Panathenaic elements. At the midsummer the young
women (maidens) of Warsaw – Athene the Virgin - light candles and float them
down the Vistula river recalling similar candle-lighting rites in ancient
Athens and in the Egyptian rites that, according to Herodotus, were practiced
in the equivalent cultus in Egypt.
Confirming
this astronomical reading of the crest are important symbolical constructions
elsewhere on the same river. At Gdansk we find lion gates, and further up river
from Warsaw Kracow has a dragon as its emblem and insignia. The lion gates are
surely solar in symbolism and the symbolism of dragons concerns the moon's
nodal axis that “swallows” the sun in an eclipse. It appears then, that the
river is, in all of these cases, analogous to the path of the sun and that a
celestial, solar configuration has been imposed upon the river's landscape.
Gdansk, at the river's mouth, is – symbolically – at the “gates of the sun”
while Kracow is – symbolically – the lunar node, the place on the ecliptic
where sun and moon cross paths. And Warsaw is – symbolically – the lunation of
the summer solstice, or the summer solstice “corrected” to a soli-lunar
symbolism. But if we admit this, then how did it come about? Who imposed such
symbolisms upon the river's landscape and why? The answer to this is that a
wealthy trade in amber had developed in which high quality amber was
collected in the Baltic Sea, transported up the Visula River, then overland to
join other rivers flowing southwards to Byzantium where the Byzantine Greeks
paid handsomely for genuine northern amber. Amber, for our purposes, is
interchangeable with gold in its symbolism, and is certainly solar in nature,
and so when the amber trade developed along the Vistula it became the “golden
river” - analogous to the path of the sun – and the places along this “golden
river” acquired appropriately solar symbolisms of their own, symbolisms that
travelled “downstream”, so to speak, from Greek Byzantium. This is the whole
background to the mermaid of Warsaw. She is the autochthon – Athene protecting
the city and the amber route – of the summer solstice
(soli-lunar) where the Vistula is the golden path of the Sun. All of this is
surprisingly consistent with the astronomical and calendrical background of
Plato's cosmology, which cosmology the fable of Atlantis serves to illustrate.
In any case,
the mermaid of Warsaw represents the graphic combination of the elements:
air-breathing Athene, defender of cities, water-breathing Poseidon, crescent
moon as sabre, solar disk as shield. It is also relevant to note here that the
two elements water and air are the elements associated with birth, because, at
birth, the human baby moves from its aquatic womb and, at its first breath,
becomes a citizen of the air, and in Athens the Panathenaea is, as we said
already, a birth festival commemorating the birth of the Athenian autochthons.
Again, the whole image is a depiction of a particular point in the annual solar
cycle, the first lunation after the summer solstice, the time of the Panathenaea
in ancient Athens. We need to think of the Vistula as the path of the Sun.
Warsaw is midway from source to mouth. It is the solstilial zone. It is given
the iconography and mythos of the mermaid – even though it is so far inland –
because the mermaid is an image of the autochthon, and in this case, in fact,
an image of the autochthon along with visual codes indicating the time of the
festival of the autochthons, the first crescent after the full sun.
Conclusion
There is, that is to say, a very complex and developed doctrine, a doctrine about the mysteries of autochthony,– at once astronomical, mathematical and mythopoeic – of which the 'Atlanticus' of Plato is but one part, and in which expanded context the mermaid mythology that is our current subject needs to be seen in the end. The first key is to understand that mermaid mythology is connected to the Atlantis myths. This refers us to Plato and to the ensemble of cosmological dialogues that contain Plato's original and extensive account of the lost continent. The second key is to realise that mermaids are the autochthons of Atlantis – children of Poseidon - and are connected to a wider mythology concerning autochthony. This mythology is complex, but it is impossible to understand mermaids except in regards to the myths and iconography of autochthons. Their very form – upper human, lower fish – is characteristically autochthonous. The third key is to appreciate that the mysteries of autochthony are ultimately expressions of a vast cosmic context that makes mermaid mythology not only fascinating but also significant and profound. There are mythological perspectives that open up from the cultus of the ancient Acropolis, - the cultic pair, Athene and Poseidon – a mytho-cultus of air and water – all illuminated by the works of Plato, to which the mythology and symbolism of mermaids is intimately related. The purpose of this article, let us recall, is “to present the essential keys to an integral understanding of mermaids in order that readers can re-situate mermaid mythology within the greater mythology – and the primordial tradition - to which it belongs...” While bits and pieces of the integral understandings persist here and there – sometimes even in popular debasements – it need hardly be said that common ideas about mermaids today reduce them to a childish fantasy and nothing more, or else a “fringe science” spin-off from the modern evolution cult. Mermaids, in fact, are part of the Great Narrative, the story of the ages, of the golden souls and their decay over aeons, of the cycles of time and the cycles of the heavens, that Narrative of autochthony that Plato calls the 'Noble Lie' in the Republic. It is the Great Narrative of the four Ages that underpins such stories as the lost continent of Atlantis and a sub-aquatic race of autochtonoform mermen and deep sea civilizations of Socratically communistic city-states. The modern person needs a much broader frame of reference, and specifically this Platonic Narrative, in order to place mermaid mythology within what we might otherwise call the primordial tradition.
