19/10/2023
Sirens, esotericism and religion from Romanesque to symbolism (and beyond)
There is not much left to say about symbolist mermaids, but I suggest proposing a comparison with "The Mermaid with the Serpent" by Armand Point, a pastel on canvas from 1901. Here we are at the heart of the "purity-danger" couple that will be evoked much later ( 1966) by anthropologist Mary Douglas. The mermaid is dangerous because her embrace can lead to the abyss and kill but she also embodies the dream of a seductive and lost purity which the man of the Belle Époque no longer wants to give up, whatever risk he may take.
The mermaid of Armand Point is in fact a dangerous woman, Helga Weeke, Danish singer, widow of the Norwegian poet Sigbjørn Ostfelder and passionate about esotericism. Considered one of the most beautiful women of the century, her blue eyes have driven more than one artist crazy. Point marries her, but Helga leaves him after eight years of marriage and ends up dying in a mental hospital at 53.
The story of Helga Weeke and Armand Point also evokes the combination of mermaid/absolute and shocking beauty. In her style and even in her hairstyles, Helga was inspired by what for the previous generation of Pre-Raphaelites had been "the most beautiful woman in the world", Jane Morris. And Point makes an explicit reference, with the snake (which perhaps is not a snake, but a mythological animal) around Helga's neck depicted as a mermaid, to another candidate for the title of most attractive woman ever, Simonetta Vespucci, the Venus by Botticelli, and his famous portrait attributed to Piero di Cosimo (where the serpent could be the asp that killed Cleopatra).
Leaving the symbolism aside, I propose six stories of mermaids. The first is related to confusion. In English the Italian word “sirena” can be translated as both “mermaid” and “mermaid”. Look at two representations of Ulysses' ship risking shipwreck attracted by the lethal song of the sirens, one Greek and one Victorian by Herbert James Draper. Notice immediately that the "mermaids" of Ulysses are originally not "fish women" but "bird women", while starting from the Middle Ages the mermaid-mermaid merges with the mermaid-mermaid, who comes from Nordic mythology and is effects a fish woman.
My second story is about the submissive mermaid. In a good number of Romanesque churches the mermaids support the baptisteries or holy water fonts. This doesn't mean the Catholic Church loves mermaids; is the opposite. A bit like the devil holding the stoup in the famous "mystery church" of Rennes-le-Château, which made Dan Brown wrongly think of some allusion to Satanism, mermaids for the Christian Middle Ages are demonic creatures , lustful and animalistic women who seduce and kill, and who the Church has subjugated, "put under" the places of baptism and holy water as it did with the devils.
The Pre-Raphaelites thought that submissive mermaids were typical of English medieval country churches, but in reality they are also found in Italy, for example in the holy water stoup of the baptistery of Cremona. And so in the stoups of the parish churches of San Giorgio a Ganaceto (Modena) and Santa Maria Assunta a Rubbiano (Parma), which some art historians even attribute to one of the greatest sculptors of the Italian Middle Ages, Wiligelmo.
However, mermaids don't just sit back, and here's the third story: the political siren. When the Middle Ages came to an end, and magic and esotericism became fashionable for the educated classes, the mermaid was rediscovered as a symbol of the profound union between humans and nature, and also between water and eroticism. Some noble families include mermaids in their foundation myths, the best known of which concerns the great French house of Lusignan.
The ancestor of the Lusignans, Melusina, in successive versions of the story is from time to time a fairy, a shape-shifter, a dragon, a mermaid in the sense of bird-woman, and finally a mermaid as fish-woman. Raimondino, the founder of the house, finds her swimming in the Enchanted Fountain. Melusina marries him but on one condition: her husband must never look at her on Saturdays, when she bathes. It's the day Melusina reveals her mermaid tail. Raimondin breaks his vow after seven years and Melusina disappears, but in the meantime she has fathered him ten children who will make the Lusignan lineage numerous and powerful.
Bathing Melusina has never ceased to fascinate artists, from medieval miniatures to romantic painters such as Julius Hübner and the Art Nouveau of Heinrich Vogeler.
But returning to politics and the House of Lusignan, are these mythologies that have lost interest today? Not everywhere, as the fourth story shows, the African mermaid. In his 2011 doctoral thesis, the French ethnologist Thomas Mouzard describes the public and political funeral of a mermaid that took place in southern Madagascar in 2001-2002. The premise is the claim of royal houses and entire ethnic groups in Madagascar to be descended from mermaids. It could be said that the same mythologies are found in different cultures if it were not for the fact that from the French conquest to the end of the nineteenth century a pre-existing local folklore absorbed European elements in the representation of mermaids.
In January 2002, suddenly in the bazaar of Toliara, in the south-west of Madagascar, a rumor spread that some fishermen in nearby Port-Dauphin had captured a mermaid a few weeks earlier and brought her to the village elders who, impatient with the because she continued to drink their rum, they killed her. Before she died, she asked to be buried in Ankilibe, where her descendants live. Mouzard notes that most older Malagasy people believe that mermaids exist anyway, but in this case there are also bones placed in a funeral casket and transported from one village to another, which are about to arrive in Toliara.
There are thirteen kilometers between Toliara and Ankilibe but a funeral procession takes a longer route, because all the villages want to pay homage to the mermaid and place her in the coffin, after a night of prayers and after many have lined up to touch it, a report signed by the local political and military authorities and offers of money. Mouzard notes the unanimous participation of the villages in these rituals, including the Catholic nuns who reside there.
When television also arrives and the mermaid's funeral becomes a national event, the authoritarian regime in power, suspicious of any movement that it does not control, sends soldiers - led by a colonel who urges the crowd to "pray only to Jesus Christ" - to kidnap the mermaid's coffin (and the money it contains, now a considerable sum), together with a commission of four university professors who open the coffin.
And finally comes Starbucks. After the creators of the future global coffee giant chose a nautical name (Starbucks is the first mate on the Pequod ship in the novel “Moby Dick”), advertisers created a logo with a mermaid, which was modified several times. But what is today the most famous mermaid in the world remains in the logo, and attests that mermaids - to return to the duplicity studied by Mary Douglas between purity and danger - have finally freed themselves completely from danger. Only the purity remains, even if it is now that of coffee beans.
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- Misteriose Vie Dell'Esoterismo Antico -
"No io ..ma Dio."
Beato Carlo Acutis
