The Secret of Mermaids

THE SECRET OF MERMAIDS

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.

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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.