Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."
This is the only statement I have ever seen that makes it clear that there were those in Pagan belief who deemed the Kingdom of Heaven was not only in the sky, or in the stars, or in the underworld, but was also in the sea. Given this understanding the figure of the Mermaid takes on many more shades of meaning. She was the angel of the water realm, the Oceanic valkyrie come to the shore, or the wreck, to take the dead and dying to their place in the afterlife. She was a promise of rebirth. She was perhaps the Peri, or Houri, of an under the Sea paradise as well.

I think such literal interpretation (to think that we go to the oceanic underworld upon death) of religious symbolism was mainly a mistake of the layman, and perhaps a comfort to simple folk, such as sailors. I think the symbolism of the mermaid suggested an under water heaven, but that this was not what was really intended to be understood from her. Much as an egg may symbolize the pre-cosmic bang universe, without meaning the universe hatched from an egg literally.

That the Celts believed in an oceanic underworld, or after life is suggested in the Lebor Gabala Erenn, when the bard Amergin refers to "the cattle of Tethra" which in the Tochmarch Emire, Cuchulain explains "the cattle of Tethra" as a kenning for fish, and the sea as the plain of Tethra. In Immacallam in Dá Thúarad, the poet , Nede, reffers to "the mighty men of Tethra." To me this seems to say that the fish and the mighty warriors are one and the same, the worthy dead, as are forever feasting in Odin's hall.
http://www.maryjones.us/jce/tethra.html

Obvious symbols for the soul are small, light, elusive creatures such as the wren, the mouse or bat, and likely we can include the fish now. So we see the fish is not only the Virgin Mother Goddess (virgin because fish are seemingly asexual), but also the soul she births into life.

The most famous literary version of Melusine tales, that of Jean d'Arras, compiled about 1382 - 1394 was worked into a collection of "spinning yarns" as told by ladies at their spinning.

The tale was translated into the English language c. 1500, and often printed in both the 15th century and the 16th century. (There is also a prose version called the Chronique de la princesse.)

It tells how Elynas, the King of Albany (a poetical euphemism for Scotland) went hunting one day and came across a beautiful lady in the forest. She was Pressyne, mother of Melusine. He persuaded her to marry him but she agreed, only on the promise — for there is often a hard and fatal condition attached to any pairing of fay and mortal — that he must not enter her chamber when she birthed or bathed her children. She gave birth to triplets. When he violated this taboo, Pressyne left the kingdom, together with her three daughters, and traveled to the lost Isle of Avalon.

The three girls — Melusine, Melior, and Palatyne — grew up in Avalon. On their fifteenth birthday, Melusine, the eldest, asked why they had been taken to Avalon. Upon hearing of their father's broken promise, Melusine sought revenge. She and her sisters captured Elynas and locked him, with his riches, in a mountain. Pressyne became enraged when she learned what the girls had done, and punished them for their disrespect to their father. Melusine was condemned to take the form of a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.

Raymond of Poitou came across Melusine in a forest in France, and proposed marriage. Just as her mother had done, she laid a condition, that he must never enter her chamber on a Saturday. He broke the promise and saw her in the form of a part-woman part-serpent. She forgave him. Only when, during a disagreement with her, he called her a "serpent" in front of his court, did she assume the form of a dragon, provide him with two magic rings and fly off, never to return.

In "The Wandering Unicorn" by Manuel Mujica Láinez, Melusine tells her tale of several centuries of existance from her original curse to the time of the crusades.[1]

Jason Isaacs as James Hook -

Ariel, the "little mermaid" in the Disney® film, is much more than a fairy tale for little girls. Rather, she is a powerful metaphor for the plight of the "Sacred Feminine" over the last several thousand years of western civilization. Since Mary Magdalene, the "Lost Bride" in the Christian story, is a "carrier" of the Sacred Feminine, (in fact, a composite of Aphrodite, Athene, and Demeter, not to mention similarities with Isis, Inanna and Astarte--and the Holy Sophia!), this discussion is relevant especially to her. She was to have been the Lady of the Age of Pisces as Christ was its Lord, forming together the sacred mandala of "hieros gamos" for the Age of the Fishes.

What happened to this "Goddess" of the ancient world--she who was "Queen of Heaven and Earth"? She has been systematically devalued and made diminutive, relegated into the watery depths of our unconscious (like Ariel, the seventh of seven sisters), controlled and patronized by the "benevolent" patriarchy (Ariel's father, King Triton, in the Disney movie). Ariel's face is dark, like that of the Bride in the Song of Songs (1:5), "swarthy" from her labor in her brothers' vineyards. And she has long wavy red hair, a commonly held attribute of Mary Magdalene.

And what is the dream and desire of Ariel, the littlest mermaid? Why, to walk upon the green earth, out in the sunlight. It is interesting to note that in the Disney film, it is not Ariel who needs to be saved, but rather it is the "handsome Prince" who is in deep trouble, shipwrecked and dying (the condition of the partriarchy at the dawn of Aquarius??) it is Ariel who is HIS redeemer, not the other way around!

In her cave under the ocean, Ariel collects artifacts from Spanish galleons shipwrecked at sea. She examines the commonplace items used by humans and wonders what they are for and what it would be like to be human. Among her treasures is a painting by Georges de la Tour called "Magdalen with the Smoking Flame." Mary is gazing at a candle burning on the table beside her. In the film, Ariel tries to pluck the flame out of the picture.

Of all the possible pictures available from art galleries around the world, it is incredibly significant that the directors of the Disney® film chose to place Mary Magdalene at the bottom of the sea, for it is SHE who represents the lost Bride and the archetype of the "Sacred Feminine" as partner in Christian mythology. She also represents the Church as Bride and was recognized as the model for "ekklesia" by the early Christian fathers -- the "beloved community" redeemed by Christ. In this connection, it is almost uncanny that the little mermaid is called Ariel, for Ariel is a synonym for Jerusalem, the Holy City besieged (see Isaiah 29:1-8). Either the use of these symbols was deliberate on the part of the directors of the film, or it rose spontaneously from the depths of their unconscious and was intuited to be appropriate!

And what is the condition of young Ariel? She, too, is besieged. She is chided and teased about her wish to be human. Her kindly father and the sea witch even conspire to prevent her from being joined with her beloved. Her voice is stolen and she is unable to speak her truth. In a similar way, Magdalene's voice was "stolen" when she was called prostitute (without any scriptural justification whatsoever!). Her story was desecrated, her robes and mantle of honor, like those of the Bride in the Canticle, were stripped from her by the "guardians of the walls" (5:7).

In the film, the little mermaid does not carry a book and a mirror by accident. These are icons readily identified in Medieval art. The mirror is not just a symbol for feminine vanity but represents the role of the material world (Mater, mother, matter) to manifest the Divine in "the flesh," as the moon mirrors the sun. The "Sophia" is called the "immaculate mirror" of Divine energy. The book represents all natural and spiritual law -- science and revelation -- and the Wisdom of seeking to know God's precepts. In Medieval times the adage "Nothing is without meaning" applied to every icon in every painting. I would love to ask the Disney® film director if these icons were used by holy accident -- or by design.

An interesting aside is that the Merovingian bloodline, identified as the "vine of Mary" in the heresy of the Holy Grail, is said to have had a mermaid as a progenitoress and to be descended from a king "Merovee" who was half man, half fish. Mermaids are prominent among the medieval watermarks related to the heresy of the bloodline, and some are rendered with the fleur-de-lis of the Merovingians entwined around their double tails. The connection of Mary Magdalene with the mermaid and the "Queen of the Sea" is very old.

What is the ultimate desire of the "devalued" Feminine archetype personified by "Ariel"? Of course, it is to be reunited with the "Divine Masculine" in sacred partnership -- not sublimated to his interests as her savior and mentor, but as his partner, his Beloved and his equal -- something women are barely able to imagine after centuries of being the "little sister," one of the poignant epithets of the Bride in the Song of Songs! (8:8)

Carl Jung speaks of the condition of the patriarchy at the end of the age when its energy has been spent and it is no longer able to uphold the "establishment" it has built over the millennia. The "masculine" suffers burnout. Jung calls it the "enantiodromia." At some point, the feminine rises and returns to lend her strength and for a period the two are reconciled and unite to forge a new cultural "thrust" for the next age. It is time now for the "sacred feminine" to reemerge to play her role in the waning hours of the Age of Pisces, for her "prince" can't be whole without her!

How interesting that the image of the little mermaid, with the MM's of Mary Magdalene formed at the ends of her two tails and in her crown, is posted at streetcorners worldwide in the form of the Starbucks® logo! She is the "siren" calling to us from our unconscious, hoping that we will hear her voice! She is intent on finding her way into our conscious lives as she rises to join her Beloved!

Ave Millennium -- MM!
by Margaret Starbird
© 1999

The name also conveniently brings up the idea of stardom and big bucks—both very appealing to the typical American consumer. On a more cynical note, Starbuck happens to be the name of the charismatic con man in "The Rainmaker"—a connection that makes one wonder, given that Starbucks originated in rainy Seattle. My more sinister reading—a more interesting one that connects the siren logo back to Mary—is to trace the name further back to the story of the Essex, the whaling ship on which Melville's Pequod was based. At the beginning of Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: the Epic True Story that Inspired Moby Dick, one finds these curious facts: "English Nantucketers resisted all attempts to establish a church on the island, partly because a woman by the name of Mary Coffin Starbuck forbade it. It was said that nothing of consequence was done on Nantucket without Mary's approval. Mary Coffin and Nathaniel Starbuck had been the first English couple to be married on the island . . ." That is, Mary was the first to "mate"; her last name is associated with death and also sounds like "coffee"; and her first name associates her directly with the sea and Mary Magdalene. (It's enough to make you think you're hearing the theme from X-Files.)

No wonder Starbucks has been so successful, and no wonder they have so many outlets in Barnes and Noble stores, which sell books—a source of wisdom. You may be reading this article while sipping a cup of Starbucks latte. The mermaid/siren may be a vestige of ancient myth and folklore, but its lure is as pervasive and as powerful as ever.

This simultaneous attraction to and fear of female sexuality as the underlying logic behind the mermaid is actually confirmed by other mythological half-humans. The male counterpart to the mermaid, the triton, lacks the mermaid's mystery and seductiveness; he is actually a sort of aquatic satyr (a kind of male nymphomaniac). Other prominent half-man and half-animal figures, including the Minotaur (with a bull's head) and the centaur (with a horse's body and so also its genitalia) all exaggerate masculine phallic power while the mermaid represents and amplifies what men fundamentally lack. It is only the holiest of masculine figures like Christ who are both born of the figurative mermaid and maintain a direct symbolic connection to their aquatic origins. (Even the Buddha shows such a connection, since he is the son of Maya, who is associated with the moon. Many representations of the Buddha include webbed fingers as one of his divine markings.)

The truth one learns from the mermaid/siren is that patriarchy, especially the Judeo-Christian variety, is a relative latecomer in human history. The new religions could not, and can not, ever overwrite the undercurrents of the more ancient traditions that preceded them, regardless of how concerted their efforts to do so.

And so the Starbucks logo is a brilliant piece of design, which, oddly enough, resonates with much of what I've discussed above. The original logo made quite explicit that Starbucks was using the lure of female sexuality to draw the customer to their coffee, but now you can see that the coffee is linked to the double lure of ultimate wisdom and the pleasures of the flesh. The name of the company, about which there is relatively little deep inquiry, actually makes the connection even more interesting. Apparently, the owners of Starbucks originally wanted to call their company "Moby's Coffee," referring to Moby Dick, the great white whale in Herman Melville's classic novel (which is read as a Christian allegory, the whale representing Christ). But bringing up the image of a giant whale was deemed potentially unattractive for coffee drinkers. And so a new logo was designed, but the name "Starbucks" maintains the connection to Moby Dick—Starbuck is the name of the coffee-drinking first mate from Nantucket, the only man who challenges the mad Ahab.

The word "mermaid" is usually read as "sea maid," but it is more properly glossed as "sea maiden" or "virgin of the sea." This is because of the many connections between the mermaid and the ancient Goddess, whose origin and power are associated with the sea. But if one happens to know French, the first syllable, "mer," takes on another significance, which is not merely an accident of etymology: mer is "sea," and it sounds much like mêre or "mother." Without going into the Indo-European origins for words that sound like "mare" or the prefix "mer" (ranging from the mother horse to the "mer" in "merry"), let it suffice to say that one of the underlying deep meanings of "mermaid" is "virgin mother," directly linking the term and the figure it names with the Virgin Mary.

There are three other bits of information worth bringing together here, all mentioned in The Woman's Dictionary, though gleaned from various sources ranging from the Oxford English Dictionary to Joseph Campbell's multivolume The Masks of God series. First, the mermaid and siren were terms and symbols that referred to prostitutes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Second, "The ancients insisted that women's sexual secretions smelled like fish, which is why the sign of the yoni came to be called vesica piscis. One of the Hindu titles of the Great Goddess was 'a virgin named Fishy Smell, whose real name was Truth'" (quoting from Joseph Campbell). And third, "Medieval books of alchemy described the mermaid as the Siren of the Philosophers, crowned and lactating the milk of enlightenment," something also attributed to the Virgin Mary (there are Medieval paintings in which St. Sebastian is suckling from Mary's breast to drink this divine milk).

Every culture has its mermaid figures, but those from Western traditions are especially relevant to my discussion here: the Celtic selkie, the morgens of Brittany, the German nixie, the Norwegian havfrau, the veen of Finland, the tritonids and nereids of Greece, the vedava of Eastern Europe. (The mermaids and water spirits of East Asia and Africa follow similar universal themes but play somewhat different roles in their cultures, in part due to differing attitudes toward sexuality.)

Scarlett deMason notes that the mermaid's "abundant, flowing hair, symbolizing an abundant love potential, was also an attribute of Venus in her role as fertility goddess. Her comb . . . carried sexual connotations for the Greeks, as their words for comb, kteis and pecten, also signified the female vulva. Thus the mermaid is the surviving aspect of the old goddesses . . . ." Regardless of where we begin our interpretation of the mermaid, or which analytic path we take, we are brought back, again and again, to the ancient Great Goddess, the archetype behind the figure of Mary, who in Christian culture is usually split into the virginal Madonna and the holy prostitute. The mermaid ultimately signifies the fundamental mystery of female sexuality, particularly for men who, because they cannot comprehend it, are simultaneously drawn to it and terrified by it. That is why the mermaid becomes so easily conflated with the siren and her irresistible call that leads men to their doom.

In contrast to Ariel, and yet reflective of the same underlying ideology, is the siren/mermaid featured in the recent horror film, She Creature. This mermaid, who can periodically become a legged woman, turns out to be the great Queen Mother of all mermaids. She seduces men and literally eats them, and her sexual power also influences the sexuality of other women. (The film does an excellent job of establishing "traditional" mermaid lore, but disintegrates into an imitation of Aliens by its conclusion, making an interesting connection even with its narrative shortcomings.)

The mercreature has appeared prominently in popular films (like Splash, which gives us another sanitized mermaid who saves a drowning man and leaves the sea for him), in television shows (Alyssa Milano recently turned into a mermaid in an episode of Charmed), commercials (most notably a European Levis commercial, too racy to show in the U.S.), and in music videos (including one by Madonna). In its siren form, it also appears in the film Dagon, a mediocre and yet interesting interpretation of H.P. Lovecraft's mythos. Dagon is a bit tedious in its depiction of the weird fishing village literally devolving back into the sea, but its mermaid presents a prime example of how the old mythos can be reconstituted even without systematically intending to do so.

The mermaid in Dagon appears in the dreams of the hapless protagonist, a young man destined to become her husband. She "calls" to him through a psychic connection, using her siren-like power; and when they finally meet, we discover that she is both the daughter of the Cthuluvian fish god and a sort of high priestess in the ancient religion that has destroyed and replaced the local Catholicism. She tries to seduce the protagonist, but as their passionate embrace begins, he discovers her split fish tail and runs away in disgust and horror.

The mermaid's ultimate purpose is to mate with the protagonist and spawn a new race. When he realizes he cannot resist her, upon learning that she is his own sister, the protagonist tries to kill himself with purifying fire. But that, too, fails, and in the final scene, we see the two of them swimming deep in the ocean, approaching a black pit at the center of a symbol that is both the Eye of God and the vesica piscis. The mermaid's split tail swishes gracefully behind her as they approach the Abyss.

Dagon and She Creature both emphasize the mermaid's irresistibility, her perverse sexuality, and her danger to both the man's body and soul. The major symbolic difference between the two films is that while She Creature concludes by privileging and demonizing female sexuality, linking that theme to men's doom, Dagon also uses the mermaid's sexuality to finally bring the man back to his "true" nature. Unfortunately, neither film is truly in control of its underlying theme; both of them construct their mermaid symbols without thinking through their ultimate meanings. (Dagon's mermaid is uncannily similar to the Starbucks siren, but that is probably just coincidence.)

The full article is here(you must copy and paste as well as unscramble it):
http://www. endicott-studio.com/jMA03Summer/theMermaid.html

Now that I've laid out this complex set of connections, let me return to the figure of the mermaid, which is at the center of these associations.

The most well-known mermaid in contemporary American culture is, of course, Ariel, the sanitized and disempowered representation who serves a heterosexual marriage plot typical of Disney films. Ariel is not only nice, she is, in many ways, an inversion of the mythic mermaid. She sacrifices her beautiful voice to gain the temporary legs that will allow her to woo her terrestrial love, Eric. While the traditional mermaids are said to seduce sailors with the sound of their beautiful singing, luring them into shipwreck and death in order to consume their souls (because they, themselves lack a soul), Ariel does exactly the reverse. She saves Eric from a shipwreck, and when she marries him to become a terrestrial princess, she figuratively becomes his soulmate. It's as if Disney set out systematically to obliterate the traditional mermaid mythos. There is nothing inherently attractive about Eric (except his appearance, in contrast to the purposely distorted images of his fellow sailors). For Ariel, he represents the epitome of things human, to which she has an irrational attraction.

In the wake of Ariel's romantic happy ending, we are left with the image of King Triton—a Neptune/Poseidon/Oannes figure—exchanging himself as hostage for his daughter (in an interesting reversal of what happens between father and daughter in "Beauty and the Beast"); and an inverted image of the great, nurturing Sea-mother as represented in Ursula, the Sea-witch. Oannes, the primal godlike fish-man is disempowered; the Great Goddess, associated with the sea, is turned into an evil witch. These inversions and disempowerments are actually parallel to how religions build on top of earlier ones—Christianity did precisely the same thing to earlier mythic traditions.

The full article is here(you must copy and paste as well as unscramble it):
http://www. endicott-studio.com/jMA03Summer/theMermaid.html

Sheila-na-gig is a general reference to female figures that prominently display their genitalia to signify the power of female sexuality and fertility. These images are also quite prominent in the decoration of sacred sites in general and are thought to be a legacy of the older Goddess religions whose holy sites were usually taken over by later religions. The shape of the genitalia in these squatting figures is also symbolic of the vesica piscis, the "vessel of the fish," which is also associated with Christ. The well-known Christian "fish" symbol (seen prominently on the backs of many cars these days) is the ICHTHYS, referring to the Greek acronym for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior."

We tend to associate the equation of Christ and fish with the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or the fact that some of the disciples were fishermen (Christ as the fisherman of souls), but the symbol has an older origin connected with a more ancient myth. The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects notes that "Ichthys was the name of a son of the ancient Sea-goddess, Atargatis, also known as Tirgata, Aphrodite, Derceto, Salacia, Pelagia, or Delphine, whose name meant both 'womb' and 'dolphin'; all appeared in mermaid form. In a way, however, Jesus could be called the same Ichthys as the son of Sea-mother Mari, whose blue robe, pearle necklace, and much-varied name referred to the world's oceans: Maria, Marina, Marian, Mariamne, Myrrhine, Myrrha, Mari-Yamm, Mari-El, and Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea."

The full article is here(you must copy and paste as well as unscramble it):
http://www. endicott-studio.com/jMA03Summer/theMermaid.html