The Mermaid of Haarlem

The year 1430 was one of turmoil and strangeness. In France Joan of Arc was captured by Burgundian forces and burnt at the stake. Further to the north in the Lowlands, within the borders of what was then the Holy Roman Empire, terrible storms were raging. The gales were so strong that the dykes which protected West Friesland were breached, and the North Sea broke through and flooded the farmlands. But these storms were not all that visited the country. Among the many fish left stranded on the farmlands (if we believe the wondering [1]accounts written at the time) was a mermaid.

The mermaid painted by 19th-century English artist Annie Louisa Swynnerton. The artist was active in the Women’s Rights movement of the time, and her mermaid seems to embody those positive qualities of female empowerment, so different in approach to the winsome and youthfully-sweet mermaids painted by her Victorian male contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Herbert Draper. This mermaid knows who she is, where she is going, and how to get there.

A group of women gathering the stranded fish for an easy meal apparently discovered the unfortunate creature floundering in the shallow waters. Astonished (as well they might be), they somehow managed to carry the marvel to dry land, where she was eventually transported to the city of Edam (presumably by boat to the western coast of the Zuider Zee - see my map below), and from Edam to the city of Haarlem.

The mermaid’s journey. Following her capture in the flooded farmlands of Friesland, the mermaid was taken first to Edam and then to Haarlem. The coastlines are those of the 15th-century, before the extensive land reclamation from the sea of later centuries, with the names of the then-Lowlands provinces shown in green. The Zuider Zee is now a large lake known as the Ijsselmeer, and reclaimed polderlands have diminished its size still further.

The Mermaid of Haarlem, as she became known, was provided with good Christian clothes with which to suitably cover her heathen nakedness, and seems to have settled down to this new life away from her watery home. She also seems to have adapted her diet to one of cooked meat, and was taught to spin yarn, and to pray and to make the sign of the crucifix. In short: the mermaid was provided with the essentials for a life in the Christian community in which she now found herself.

This portrayal of Mary Magdalene reading by Rogier van der Weyden is contemporary with the mermaid’s story. In Mary’s resigned features and in her dress of the artist’s period and place we might glimpse a vision of how the mermaid could have appeared during her new life on land. Unable to read, the mermaid could only have looked wonderingly at the unfamiliar pictures in such scriptural texts. The inset shows a small personal crucifix of the type that would have been presented to the mermaid.

But these outward trappings of her surroundings do not seem to have erased her essential nature. Apparently she always retained a longing for her watery home, and every attempt to teach her even the essentials of human language resulted only in stubborn silence. How many years she spent as a half-reluctant member of her adopted community is not recorded, although we are told that on her death she was given a full Christian burial. Ah: if only we knew of her burial place! Would an exhumation reveal a marvel, or merely a prosaic disappointment?

Let us suppose (because it is what we would like to believe) that the story is true. Did the mermaid truly have some sense of Christian reverence when she crossed herself, or was she merely mimicking the actions of those around her? And how strangely alien and awkward the wearing of clothes must at first have seemed to her. And what apparently was her resistance to human speech might have been more to do with her inability to speak at all, for who knows the ways in which mermaids communicate with each other when swimming in their watery home?

Religions in Europe during the mid-15th-century. Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation was still a century in the future, as was the reign of Henry VIII in England, whose rejection of Papal authority would shrink the borders of Catholicism still further. The Lowlands, yet to become the nation of the Netherlands, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, whose defined borders are shown here. The Iberian Peninsula was divided up into its own kingdoms, but Islam in the shape of Moorish culture and belief still had a foothold in the south of Spain. At this time the areas of the Ottoman Empire shown on the map had a majority Christian population ruled by an Islamic minority. 

Now let us suppose (because we also need to embrace prosaic probability) that the mermaid’s story, although perhaps having some basis in fact, was not what it seemed. In a [2]previous post I mention the likelihood of stories originating from something, which confronts us with the possibility that the ‘mermaid’ existed – but that she was not actually a mermaid. Such stories do not grow out of a vacuum, and perhaps the ‘mermaid’ was in reality a feral human. Significantly, no mention is made of the woman actually having that distinguishing feature of her kind: a fish’s tail in the place of human legs. She was not found swimming at sea, but rather was rescued from the flooded farmland. Her wild and naked appearance would have been enough for the mindset of the time to see her floundering in the watery shallows and think: ‘mermaid!’ Stories of such feral humans in Europe and elsewhere have been [3]documented, so to my mind this scenario is certainly a likely possibility.

A feral girl as imagined by contemporary Belgian artist René Hausman. The painting echoes such cases as the life of 18th-century Marie-Angélique Memmie le Blanc, known as the Wild Child of Sogny. Born Native American, Memmie came to France as a young girl and became lost in the French forests when she was nine, only to be discovered by villagers ten years later in a state of feral wildness.

How we interact with these feral humans confronts us, not so much with their wildness, as with our own civilized selves. Our first impulse is to clothe them, to teach them the rules of modesty and [4]shame which have filtered down to us from Eden. We next seek to make them, in whatever ways are necessary, adopt our own standards, beliefs and moral codes. In short: what we recognize in the mermaid’s story is the desire, however [5]well-intentioned, to want to change someone to be like us.

We resist that otherness which makes someone special, which makes them the unique individual that they truly are. We want someone to share our own beliefs, because that is a way of confirming to ourselves that the things in which we believe must be ‘right’. We misguidedly imagine that we can improve someone by persuading them to believe what we believe, and to think as we think. But is such persuasion a form of conversion, or a form of coercion? We might excuse the actions of her captors towards the mermaid as belonging to the attitudes of 15th-century Catholic Europe, but such attitudes persist. [6]Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses who come [7]knocking on your door are in their intention no different from the goodwives of Haarlem who taught the mermaid how to make the sign of the cross.

A mermaid, as imagined in the 19th-century by Danish-Polish artist Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann. This mermaid seems sculpted from the very ocean. Serene and impassive, self-assured and yet detached from and seemingly-indifferent to us, her observers, she defies us to deny her existence.

Almost six centuries is a long time: long enough for us to wish that the story of the mermaid might just be true: long enough for us to hope that the story perhaps has a grain of substance. We seem to need mermaids and other fantastic creatures, but what also touches us about her story is the notion of exile. The mermaid of Haarlem was a stranger in a strange land. We need not ignore such differences in others. Strangers are not different from us, but are merely a different us. And it is a sad truth that, if ever we did discover a real stranded mermaid, it seems that the very last thing that we would do, the least likely thing that might occur to us, would simply be to promptly help her to return to her own ocean home.

Hawkwood

    

My grateful thanks to Emma for allowing me to borrow substantially from her own post on this subject. Emma’s blog Sophia's Mirror can be visited here.

Notes:

[1] This is the original story of the mermaid as described in a 19th-century journal, which itself is a copy of other earlier accounts. There is something unnerving about the account’s referring to the mermaid as ‘it’ instead of ‘she’: “So, also, the Mermaid reported by Johannes Hondius, as taken by some women in the meadows at Edam, in West Friesland, where it had been brought by the sea which entered through the broken dykes, during the great tempests in 1430. That Mermaid was taught to spin. Moreover, it was dressed in female attire, fed on cooked meat, had some notion of a deity, made its reverences when it passed a crucifix, lived some years at Haarlem (though it ever retained an inclination for the water), and was allowed at its death a christian burial; and yet all efforts to teach even that Mermaid to speak proved ineffectual. It is this Haarlem Mermaid only (though without her clothes) that is represented upon our signs and in our coat-armour.” ~ Abridged extract from: The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies, vol. XV, January to June, 1823. London.

[2] Please see my post Renaissance Snuff.

[3] Please see Michael Newton’s title below.

[4] Please see my post Shame.

[5] And "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" - a pearl of wisdom that apparently originated in the 12th-century, and was therefore even current in the mermaid's day.

[6] Formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is their  own preferred title, but which, it must surely be admitted, is not one which trips readily off the tongue. Hence: Mormons, after the father of the angel alleged to have appeared to their founder, Joseph Smith.

[7] Please see my Pocket Guide to Proselytizing.

Sources:

Michael Newton: Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Faber & Faber, 2002. Michael Newton’s commendable and sympathetic book documents various cases, and critically examines both the discoveries of such cases and the attitudes of those into whose care they are received. Spanning several centuries, the author demonstrates that social and scientific methods might change, but basic attitudes do not, with inter-departmental social welfare rivalries, the quest for scientific accolades, and academic concerns often-enough taking precedent over simple human compassion.

The painting by René Hausman appears on the flyleaf of the hardcover edition of the graphic novel Laïyna, written by Pierre Dubois and illustrated by René Hausman. Published by Dupois in France, 1987, and published in Belgian and Dutch editions the same year. The book was subsequently re-issued in the Netherlands under a different title, although only the first edition features this painting. Hausman’s loose watercolour style is unique in the genre, and positively crackles with life and energy.

The painting of Mary Magdalene by Rogier van der Weyden is in the National Gallery, London. The small 15th-century crucifix is in the collection of the Museum of London. All referenced graphic novels are in my collection.

I soon discovered that different maps of the period tended to conflict with each other, and a variety of different sources were used to create the two maps featured in this post. The map of Religions in Europe in particular needed a lot of deft rechecking, which is understandable when one considers the labile shifting political alliances of the time (and I swiftly jettisoned one map as reference which claimed a swathe of Europe for Protestantism a century before it happened!). Nevertheless I feel that my maps accurately depict what their titles claim. 

A Footnote: The title page of this 18th-century songbook (left) printed in Haarlem continues to get mileage out of portraying one of Haarlem’s most famous citizens, however fictitious she might prove to be. The translation is: “The entertaining OUTDOOR LIFE, or the Singing and Playing FARMER’S JOY, Enriched with the art of Singing, and for the ease of the Players tuned to the key of G.”

All Things Must Pass

The lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet of Ancient Egypt, mighty Odin of the Vikings, the amorous Zeus of Ancient Greece seeking mortal women to seduce: we now think of these gods and goddesses as the deities of mythology, and the surviving stories in which they feature as mythological tales. But all of these deities, and all of their stories, were once a part of living, breathing religions. All of these deities once were worshipped and believed in as surely, and with as much passion and conviction, as those deities of the religions which are with us today.

Zeus and Danae: Incarcerated in a tower of bronze, Danae is visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. The result of this encounter is the hero Perseus, whose story lives on, even though the once-great Zeus has become a figure of mythology.

It is only through the lens of time that we view these beliefs as ‘mythology’, because as vibrant religions they have with passing time, and for various reasons of history, become a spent force. This being so, then by logical extension it must follow that if the religions of the past have for us turned into mythology, then the religions of today must be the mythologies of the future. Does this thought make you howl in protest? Do you believe that your religion will be eternal? In history, there is no such thing. Ra, the creator sun god of dynastic Egypt, was worshipped as a principal deity for almost three thousand years before he too had his day.

A god also rises and sets.

Christianity has now been with us as a practicing religion for two thousand years. Will it still be here in that same form a thousand years from now, in the year 3013? How about 4013 – or even 8013? The year 8013 (for convenience and clarity I’m assuming the Common Era calendar) is more remote from our own time than our own time is from the building of ancient Babylon. I’m not making bets on anything six thousand years into the future – but I am prepared to make reasonable assumptions. And reasonable assumptions tell us that all things must pass.

The Roman Forum: The present contains the ruins of the past, and the future will contain the ruins of the present.

The historian Edward Gibbon sat down among the ruins of the once-great Forum in the city of Rome and, overwhelmed by the finality of this great truth, and surrounded by the echoing remains of temples and roofless columns, conceived his plan to write his multi-volume classic on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Empires are in a sense the secular versions of religions – although it is true enough that empires and religions are at times inextricably intertwined.  The Holy Roman Empire (which the ever-philosophical Voltaire dryly described as being neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) carried its religious convictions to the New World, there to lay waste the then-existing indigenous pre-Columbian cultures in a frenzy of conversion by conquest.

Burnt by the fires of a new faith: Of the thousands of Pre-Columbian sacred books that were destroyed during the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the New World, the damaged Codex Borgia is one of less than ten to survive.

The three great religions of today known as the Religions of the Book – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – are all monotheistic. From within those religions there is probably a tendency to view the belief in a single omnipotent deity as a progression beyond the primitive polytheistic religions of the past, with their head-spinning diversity of gods, goddesses and semi-divine heroes and heroines. Monotheism is therefore perhaps viewed as an evolution beyond such ancient mindsets, as being  ‘the way to go’. But Hinduism makes a nonsense of such an idea – and Hinduism, with its rich pantheon of gods and goddesses, is still well-and-truly with us after some four thousand years. And Taoism, dating from the same era as the beginnings of Judaism in the Near East, and with no gods to its name, has successfully put down new roots in the West – as has Buddhism. The message from history is clear: one supreme god, or many, or even none, have no bearing on the staying power of a belief.

Wise Ganesha: With his distinctive broken tusk, the Hindu elephant god is widely worshipped as the remover of obstacles from the paths of the faithful, and as the patron of the arts and sciences.

Voltaire (yes, Voltaire again!) said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Atheist cultures, which by default seem to be politically atheist, merely replace the gods of religion with gods of political and revolutionary heroism. Towering bronze and stone statues of ‘the great helmsman’ Mao and other communist luminaries, some as massive as the statue of Christ which watches over the city of Rio, and as sterile as the vast and soulless city squares in which they stand, serve as substitutes for the missing supernatural deities of other countries. Inspiring and consoling their subjects from the lofty heights of apotheosis, these mortals are revered in a way that is only nominally secular. 

Chairman Mao: New gods rush in to fill the vacuum left by those banished by politically atheist regimes.

But if, as it seems history wishes to demonstrate to us, all religions sooner or later pass into mythology, is there any belief anywhere which has gone the distance? Yes, there is. Cave art and other Paleolithic artifacts depict forms of fertility, hunting and other visionary rituals. Shamanism, and its practices and beliefs, stretches back some thirty five thousand years into our distant past. It has consistently been a part of the heritage of human spirituality, and is still with us today, both in indigenous communities and in a new urban renewal.

Ancient ceremonies: Hunting, fertility and other rituals strove to tip the balance of fortune in the favour of those who practiced them.

The names of the protagonists in these shamanic stories may shift with the telling, but their roles remain consistent. The hero (often-enough setting out on a quest of some kind), the heroine, the mischievous trickster, the spirits who need to be kept on the right side of:  such stories have been told for as many millennia as human culture has had language. And such stories can be instructive, or explanatory of the natural order of things, or just plain entertaining. Shamanism never actually passed into myth. It just kept right on going.

The year 8013: New rituals for a new world in which as-yet unborn heroes will create mythologies for a future even more remote from their own times, and our gods will have become their mythologies.

Given its staying-power, perhaps in our distant future a form of neo-shamanism will endure, and humans may themselves appear as creatures of myth: future Valkyries, harpies and sphinxes against which unknown heroes will pit themselves: new rituals for a new world which will have become unrecognisable to us. Or maybe – just maybe – the human species will have outgrown its need for religion as such, and spirituality and secularism will have blended seamlessly into one indistinguishable whole, and all that is around us will be infused with a startling new magic.

Hawkwood  

Images:

ZEUS & DANAE: Incarcerated in a bronze tower, the mortal woman Danae was visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. The result of this amorous encounter was the hero Perseus, who went on to slay the gorgon and rescue the fair princess Andromeda from a terrifying sea monster. If you would like to read and see more about the story of Perseus and Andromeda, you are welcome to visit the post on my other blog Beautiful, Naked and Chained to a Rock. Original artwork © David Bergen Studio, all rights reserved.

A GOD ALSO RISES AND SETS:  A pendant in gold, carnelian and lapis lazuli from the tomb of Tutankhamen. Enfolded by the wings of the rising sun, the scarab beetle pushes the sun’s disc into the heavens at dawn. Adapted from a photo at the online Global Egyptian Museum.

THE ROMAN FORUM: The overgrown ruins of the Forum as they appeared in the 1920’s, with the columns of the temples of Vesta and Castor. The forces of the Christian Visigoth King Alaric overran Rome to enter the Forum in 410 CE, putting a definitive end to over four centuries of Roman domination. The quote paraphrases that of the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki: “Only one thing is certain: the future will contain the ruins of the present.”

BURNT BY THE FIRES OF A NEW FAITH: Image adapted from the facsimile edition of the Codex Borgia restored by Gizele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, issued by Dover Publications. This particular page has been fire damaged as shown, and depicts the sun god Tonatiuh (lower left) and Tláloc, the god of rain and storms (lower right), with the central frieze showing signs for the various days. Although almost all such codices were burnt in huge bonfires by the Spanish priests who accompanied the conquistadores, a handful were kept for curiosity value. Please see my post The Stone from Satan's Crown for another story of the Conquest.

WISE GANESHA: The symbol on his forehead is known as a tilaka. Ganesha has a human body, and is sometimes depicted holding his broken-off tusk in one hand. Yes, I realise that this is actually an African, not an Indian elephant, but its broken tusk made an irresistible reference for my painting. Original photographer unknown.

CHAIRMAN MAO: The apparent need which the human mind has for a deity of some description is dramatically expressed in the statuary of Communist public places. If this need is abolished, it merely pops up in a disguised form. Statue of Mao Zedong adapted from a photo by Andreas Schreiber. In the background is the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China, with the title of Mao’s famed 'little red book’ of quotations superimposed.

ANCIENT CEREMONIES: A hunting ritual presided over by a shaman taking place in the famed cave of Lascaux, as imagined by that master of such scenes, Zdeněk Burian. The Lascaux cave paintings in the Dordogne region of France have been dated to some 17,300 years ago. Now closed to the public for conservation reasons, the climate of the cave – and the limited number of scientists who are allowed access – is strictly controlled.

8013: NEW RITUALS FOR A NEW WORLD: DNA and electron sequencing from the world of science combine with occult and other symbols in an imagined future in which these two worlds merge to become indistinguishable from each other. Original artwork © David Bergen Studio, all rights reserved.