ILLUSTRATES Icarus Yuji
Everywhere
The myth of the mermaid is universal: almost all peoples who depended on the sea for food or survival had some female representation that bewitched men until they drowned. According to Ari Berk, author ofThe Secret History of Mermaids and Creatures of the Deepthese legends served to personify aspects of the sea or the dangers it poses
Half to half
In 2000 BC, the Babylonians praised the god Ea, a mixture of man and fish. Then came the legend of Astagartis, a girl who hid in the ocean after killing another person, but the sea refused to hide her beauty, turning her only partially into a fish. In the 1st century, the Roman Pliny the Elder wrote about the Nereids, venerated as sea nymphs
Siren or mermaid?
Those who most collaborated with the Western imagination were the Greeks. In 1100 BC, they created not only mermaids but sirens: bird women who caused shipwrecks by distracting sailors with their voices. Unlike fishwomen, they never fell in love with humans. They were daughters of the river god Achelous, created to be friends with Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter.
Until Columbus!
False reports have been around for a long time. Christopher Columbus himself claimed to have seen them, in 1493, near Haiti. According to the navigator, they were not as beautiful as in the portraits. Scientists now think he may have seen a sea manatee, which comes to the surface to breathe, makes chirping sounds and has a flattened tail that resembles a mermaid’s tail.
Documentary
Many came to believe in this folklore after the documentariesMermaids: Body Found(2012) andSirens: The New Evidence(2013), from the Animal Planet channel. But they were fakes, with actors playing experts and fake scenes. This was explained in the credits and was told to the press. The channel wanted to test new program formats. However, it was not clear to the public
à la Padre Quevedo
The documentaries had a lot of fabricated evidence. One of them, from a spokesperson for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Agency of the USA), who stated that 65 researchers concluded that mermaids live peacefully around us. But NOAA itself released a statement later saying that there is no evidence of the existence of these beings.
(D) Special effects
The images of a mermaid recorded by a boy with a cell phone and others “caught” by researchers near the sea were produced in computer graphics. The “sereiologist” Marcus Plumkin, from the University of Florida, who claimed that these creatures inhabit the warm waters of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, never existed – he was just an actor
A thousand and one personalities
Versions of the legend elsewhere
Mami Wata
WHERE Africa
According to one of the legends, whoever finds his abandoned mirror will have his dreams captured. She only returns them after eternal sexual favors
Siren
WHERE Guam Islands
A young girl who loved to swim was cursed by her mother to become a fish. But the grandmother intervened and the transformation was only half done. The girl became protector of sailors
Melusine
WHERE France
It is the image that appears in the logo of the coffee chain Starbucks. When Melusina was a baby, her father spied her taking a bath and she took revenge on him. In retaliation, her mother condemned her to become half a snake (or fish) on Saturdays.
yara
WHERE Brazil
In one version, she was a beautiful Indian whose brothers wanted to murder her because they were jealous. She killed them before and was punished by her father, who threw her into the Solimões River.
ningyo
WHERE Japan
Its appearance is more demonic, with a head similar to that of an ape. It weeps pearls and its flesh, if consumed, grants eternal youth.
READ MORE
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SOURCES NOAA and websites ListVerse, G1HowStuffWorks and Scientific American
CONSULTANCY R. Michael Ballantyne, professor and secretary of the British Columbia Folklore Society, Ari Berk, author of The Secret History of Mermaids and Creatures of the DeepSimon Boxall, professor of Ocean and Earth Science at the University of Southampton (UK), and Alexandre Monteiro, professor at the Institute of Archeology and Paleosciences and Nova Lisboa University (Portugal)