I have said in the past that this newsletter does requests, but in two years I have never received one. I did receive a request recently, however, to give a Zoom presentation on mermaids, and decided that the subject was also appealing for the newsletter’s audience. The subject quickly expanded beyond the topic of mermaids, though. Mermaids are a variety of water-spirit, and water-spirits are a variety of elemental, the animated, half-humanized forms of the four traditional elements: earth, water, fire, and air. A past newsletter spoke of the intensity of the human desire to animate the world. Not just to personify, for a personification is merely a kind of abstraction, a walking idea, but relate to the objects of nature as sentient, as fellow creatures. We do not want to live in a world of dead objects but in a community of living things that are, as my students say, relatable. If this is a “primitive” impulse, we are all still primitives, or at least those of us who respond to the talking animals, plants, and other objects of cartoons.
Animals are easy: they are, as those of us who are pet-lovers know, actually human already, as we acknowledge when we talk to them. Walt Disney began with a mouse and a duck, but in the following century cartoons animated practically the entire animal kingdom, right up to Rocket, the “uplifted” raccoon of The Guardians of the Galaxy, whose life story in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3, turns out to be tragic and quite moving. Also a member of the Guardians is Groot, an animated tree, like Tolkien’s Ents only different. So far as talking goes, tree-spirits seem to run to extremes. Ents take a week to finish a sentence, while Groot’s linguistic prowess is confined to “I am Groot.” But the joke is that he can make that three-word sentence mean anything he has to say, and the other characters always understand what he intends. Greek mythology had its nature-spirits, including two types of tree-spirit, the Meliae and Dryads, the spirits of ash and oak respectively. There were also mountain-spirits, the Oreads, which begins the move down the chain of being from organisms to the inorganic. As we saw in an earlier newsletter, anything can be animated: there are any number of living jewels in myth and literature because jewels seem to pulse with a mysterious inward life.
Mermaids take their place in an enormous complex of imagery arising from the four traditional elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Some sources attribute this fourfold division to the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. It is true that the pre-Socratics were big on the four elements: in fact, there was a contest as to which of the four was the primary element out of which the universe arose. Thales voted for water, Anaximenes for air, Heraclitus for fire. Empedocles also voted for fire after a fashion, by jumping into a volcano in order to be deified. None of them animated the elements, however, even if they regarded them as primal substances out of which life arose. We have not left the scheme of four elements behind, or at least the imagination has not. It is still there organizing T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard has a quirky and fascinating series of books, each devoted to a single element, exploring what could be called the elemental associations of everyday life. Their titles alone make you want to read them: The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Air and Dreams, Water and Dreams, Earth and Reveries of Will, and Earth and Reveries of Repose. French has two words for “dream,” songes and reves. In the original French titles, Bachelard employs the first for the volume on air and the second for the volume on water, indicating that the dreams of air and water are not the same.
In truth, the Greeks did not invent the scheme of four elements, which is widespread, occurring in Africa, India, and elsewhere. Occasionally a fifth element gets added, sometimes called the quintessence and regarded as a kind of epitome of the four. In the 16th century, Paracelsus, a fascinating figure who was at once physician, philosopher, alchemist, and occultist at a time before these activities were separated, gave us the scheme which has, with many variations, come down to us today, in which the four elements were animated, each becoming a certain type of being, Water-spirits he called undines, a name that he coined from the Lithuanian word for water; air-spirits he called sylphs; earth-spirits gnomes (related to dwarves in some indeterminate way, but suffering a comedown in the modern age, reduced to a retirement career as lawn ornaments); and fire-spirits salamanders. The last is a bit disjunctive, since biological salamanders are animals, not humanoid. But the salamanders of Paracelsus are, despite appearances, mythological rather than zoological. They are connected with a curious bit of folklore in which salamanders were said to be able to live in fire. In a famous passage of his autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini tells of having seen a salamander emerge from the fire, whereupon his father whacked him painfully on the head so that he would remember the occasion. Mind you, Cellini’s relationship to the truth was, like that of certain contemporary politicians, flexible. The first part of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is called “The Hearth and the Salamander.” In it, the “firemen” whose job it is to burn forbidden books—which means all books—have taken the salamander as their insignia and wear it on their helmets.
The elemental spirits of Paracelsus were adopted by Cornelius Agrippa into what became the most influential handbook of Renaissance magic, De Occulta Philosophia, where they had a long career. Renaissance magic maintained that everything was animated: even the earth itself had a soul, the anima mundi, a concept that goes back to Plato’s Timaeus. There were two types of magician, black and white. Black magicians called upon demons and other damned spirits, but white magicians called upon the elemental spirits of nature. In Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, Prospero is a white magician, and his two magical servants are elementals. Caliban is half-fish, and associated with the heavy elements of earth and water. Ariel is associated with the intangible elements of air and fire. When Walt Disney studios made The Little Mermaid, they named the mermaid Ariel, because she did not have a name in Hans Christian Anderson’s literary fairy tale from which her story was adapted. It was a gesture towards what in fact the Disney version cut out of the original story, which is that the destiny of the little mermaid was not to marry a human prince but instead to become an air-spirit. In the 18th century, Alexander Pope’s mock epic in verse, The Rape of the Lock, replaces the battling deities of epic convention with minute elementals quarreling over a lock of hair. By his own account, Pope drew his information on elementals from a source that itself drew upon Paracelsus.
The elemental scheme of Paracelsus is additionally important because it is the ultimate source of the most famous mermaid of them all, Anderson’s and Disney’s, to whom we will return. But lore about water-spirits flows—to use the obvious word—in all directions in the mythological and literary traditions, many if not most of them having nothing to do with Paracelsus. Even a definition of “mermaid” is elusive. There are many types of water-spirit, and “mermaid” is most often used to specify the kind who are women from the waist up but with a fish tail below. That is in fact a rather narrow class within the broader category of water-spirits. Even what counts as a water-spirit can be questionable. During his Wanderings in the Odyssey, Odysseus passed the Sirens, supernatural women whose irresistible song lured sailors to wreck their boats on the rocks. The association with water and hypnotic song seems to suggest the Sirens as a source for, or at least an analogue of, the figure of the mermaid. Anderson’s mermaid can sing more beautifully than any other woman, making her eventual career in a musical inevitable. However, in Homer and elsewhere the Sirens were originally half woman and half bird. That in itself is suggestive, though. The union of bird and serpent, air and water, above and below, is an ancient mythological symbol, embodied in such a figure as the Central American Quetzalcoatl, the “plumed serpent.” We will return to this idea of the union of the two poles of the axis mundi or axis of the world.
There are so many varieties of water-spirit in mythology and literature that I make no promise that we will not drown in them. In addition to the Sirens, two types of water-spirit appear in Greek mythology. Naiads are spirits of fresh water, Nereids of sea water. Thetis, the mother of Achilles, is one of the 50 Nereids, who normally live with their father Nereus under the sea. Mélusine, or Melusina, is a European freshwater spirit who was a major influence on Paracelsus’s discussion of water spirits. She is not called a mermaid, yet she sports a fish’s tail, sometimes a double tail. Paracelsus cites a story in which she marries a knight on the condition that he never sees her on a Saturday, that being bath day. Why a water-spirit should need a bath is a question—possibly for rejuvenation rather than cleanliness. At any rate, Mélusine eventually becomes a dragon. Dragons are another form of the “plumed serpent” union of opposites—serpentine and yet winged like birds. Sir Walter Scott included a ballad on Mélusine in his pioneering collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803). Yet another mythological binary is the Lamia, with the body of a woman but a serpent’s tale, in some versions a seducer of young men. After reading about Lamia in his favorite book, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Keats wrote a strange and troubled narrative poem called “Lamia,” in which a young student falls in love with Lamia and dies of grief when she is exposed by a sage, Apollonius, whose name, suggestive of “Apollo,” indicates his role as the embodiment of a reductive rationalism. The young man, Lycius, allows himself to be disillusioned about Lamia, but is possible that if he had not given up on her, she may have been redeemed, rather along the lines of Beauty and the Beast. It is a parable of the conflict between the imagination, with its sexual, chthonic, and serpentine associations, and what claims to be the reality principle.
Mermaids also make an occasional appearance in the old ballads. They are associated with storms and shipwrecks. In some versions of the great ballad “Sir Patrick Spens,” #58 of the 305 Child traditional ballads, collected in the 19th century by Sir Francis Child, a mermaid appears to announce the sailors’ shipwreck and doom. In Child #289, actually titled “The Mermaid,” sailors see a mermaid with the glass (or mirror) and comb that are mermaids’ typical emblems, though it is not clear whether she has caused the storm that will sink the ship or is merely an omen. In Child #42, “Clerk Colvill,” the title character is seduced by a mermaid and dies of it. Columbus reported sighting mermaids in the Caribbean. Some scholars, eager to rationalize, speculate that what he saw were actually manatees. Well, if that is true, and you know what a manatee looks like, you may be inclined to think that maybe Columbus had been at sea and away from women a bit too long.
Mermaids belong to the category of water-spirits that are part human, part fish or serpent, but in the Celtic north they share the waters with another kind of water-spirit that is part human, part seal. Stories of selkies are most associated with the Orkney and Shetland Islands, two archipelagos in the sea north and east of Scotland, well on the way towards Norway. Isolated and beautiful, these chains of islands remind me a great deal of the geography of Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy realm of Earthsea, so much so that I wonder about actual influence. Unlike mermaids, selkies do not have a composite physical form: rather, they are shapeshifters, sentient seal-beings capable of taking on human form so effectively that they may mate with human women. That is another difference: there are mermen, but typically what we hear of is an alluring, tempting, yet inhuman woman. Contrastingly, the typical selkie seems to be male, as in another Child ballad, #113, often titled “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry,” in which a woman is told by a silkie or selkie that he is her child’s father, and prophesies that she will marry a gunner who will kill both him and the child. John Crowley, one of the great living fantasists, has worked a version of this story into his recent historical fantasy novel Flint and Mirror (2022), about 16th-century Irish history. “The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry” was part of the repertoire of both Joan Baez and Judy Collins early in their careers. Baez recorded it on Joan Baez, Volume 2 in 1961, Judy Collins on The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1962. In 1994, John Sayles based a lyrical and haunting movie on the legend of the selkie, The Secret of Roan Inish. Roan Inish is an uninhabited island off the coast of Ulster in the northwest of Ireland, where selkies are supposed to reside in their seal forms. The plot concerns a girl’s search for her brother, supposedly lost and raised by selkies.
But we must return to the subject of mermaids because we have not yet touched upon the most famous and influential of all mermaid stories. Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid” (1837), which has been of course made, twice, into a musical by Walt Disney. In both the Anderson and Disney versions, a young mermaid visits the surface world and falls in love with a prince whose life she saves in a storm. Wanting to be with him, she makes a deal with a sea-witch, giving up her beautiful singing voice as the price for gaining legs. In Anderson’s version, she dazzles the prince with her dancing, but every step she makes causes razorlike pains to shoot through her legs, a detail mercifully omitted in the Disney version. But the prince regards the mermaid only as a companion. The only woman he is willing to marry is the woman who saved him from the storm, whom he thinks is a woman from a nearby temple, not realizing it was actually the mermaid who saved him while he was unconscious. And in fact he does marry the other woman, and never loves the little mermaid at all. The sea-witch offers to return the mermaid to her proper form if she will kill the prince, but she refuses and dies instead—dissolves into foam, though that is not the end of her story. The mermaid has endured terrible pain in her extremities, the loss of her voice, and exile from her community all for a man who does not choose her.
Disney refashioned this tragedy into a watery rom-com. In the original 1989 version, the prince’s lack of proper romantic judgment is explained away: he has been deceived by the sea-witch, disguised as a rival lover named Vanessa, and is in addition under a magic spell. After many twists and turns, the evil plot is foiled and the sea-witch grows to monstrous size, like the female sea monster Tiamat in the Babylonian creation myth, but is killed by being impaled by the bowsprit of a wrecked ship. Triton, the ruler of the sea, changes Ariel into a human woman permanently, an example of the comic device of what Northrop Frye in his work on Shakespearean comedy and romance called an “irrational law” that keeps the happy ending from occurring until the very last moment, when the supposedly irrevokable law is reversed. Comedy is less solemn and dignified than tragedy, and happy endings are “as you like it.” Theodore Sturgeon’s delightful fantasy “A Touch of Strange” has a merman and mermaid act as matchmakers for a man and woman who have been obsessed with them. It turns out that what mer-people really enjoy is a good insult contest. Even less dignified is “The Mermaid,” a satiric song by Shel Silverstein, covered by the Newfoundland folk group Great Big Sea, in which a sailor laments that though he loved his mermaid with all his heart, “I did not like the tail.” But it’s all good: turns out the mermaid has a sister constructed in reverse: “The bottom half was a girl.” The sailor gets what he wants.
Romantic comedy is a social form moving towards marriage. We can call this sexist, but the idea is that young love’s purpose is a union resulting in new life, often signified by the renewal of the cycle of natural fertility in spring and summer. Any other fate is literally unnatural. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Duke Theseus decrees that either Hermia must marry a man she does not love or else spend her life in a convent, “Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.” This is not Shakespeare expressing an anti-religious opinion: it is the structure of comedy, which seeks renewal of life in this world. Shutting yourself up in a convent is from that point of view a fate worse than death, that fate being sterility. But occasionally an unorthodox comedy will feature a woman whose destiny is to rise vertically up the axis mundi, the axis of the world in mythical cosmology, like George Bernard Shaw’s version of Joan of Arc, who dies a virgin but rises like a phoenix from the pyre that burns her as a heretic. Anderson’s version of the little mermaid tale is in fact structured along the vertical axis mundi. To make her deal with the sea-witch, the mermaid has to make a descent journey to the bottom of the sea, where the witch dwells surrounded by strange alien-seeming “polyps.” At the end of the story, the mermaid’s mortal form dissolves, but she is reborn as an air-spirit. Her selflessness has given her a second chance: if she does good deeds for 300 years as an air-spirit, she will be given what she wanted all along—an immortal soul that will rise to the top of the axis, into heaven. For that was what the mermaid had always wanted: getting the prince to love her was always just a means to an end, the condition by which she would be granted immortality. What she sought was not romantic comedy but a divine comedy.
Once again we see a story whose central character has a double nature, but the narrative is a mythological ascent quest from a lower, physical order of being to a higher, essentially disembodied one: the mermaid undergoes a metamorphosis upward, from water-spirit to air-spirit, shedding her “lower” identity. Actually, this motif comes from a particular influence: Anderson borrowed the plot of a mermaid who seeks an immortal soul by marrying a human being from Undine, an 1811 romance by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. And, as the title suggests, Fouqué was influenced by Paracelsus, who coined the term. The question then becomes why Anderson chose to borrow what seems to us a strange plot pattern. Feminist criticism of the Disney version complains about the little mermaid as a bad role model, a girl who sacrifices everything for the sake of a man. The criticism is not just academic: celebrities like Keira Knightley and Mindy Kaling have refused to let their daughters view The Little Mermaid. But in Anderson’s version, the mermaid’s sacrifices are for herself, with the prince just a means to an end. What she wants is transcendence, escape from a world in which having a body that is not accepted as “normal” means isolation and alienation, a body that is the source of excruciating pain and ultimately death. Anderson’s mermaid is not looking to live in this world happily ever after in marriage. We are so conditioned—not just by Disney, and not even just by a sexist society—to think of that as the only normal and acceptable outcome that a character who spurns not just marriage but conditions of bodily existence itself in favor of some kind of disembodied transcendence seems weird, probably neurotic.
But although there are no specific Christian allusions in Anderson’s text, previous ages would have found its theme far more acceptable. And perhaps we can understand it better in a period that has begun to question heterosexual marriage as the one and only goal of human maturity. Anderson was bisexual or nonbinary or whatever the proper word would be for someone who never married but had Platonic infatuations with both men and women in the course of his lifetime. Fouqué’s story may have appealed to him because it hints that the body, with its physical limitations, including biological gender, is a prison. Disney’s mermaid is named Ariel, out of Shakespeare’s Tempest, a curious glancing reference to what of the original story has been left out. Shakespeare’s Ariel is described in the list of characters as “an airy spirit,” and what she—(or they—the role has sometimes been played by a woman)—has been promised by Prospero for being a faithful servant is ”freedom”—to be free as the wind. To be free is to be free of the body and gender altogether, and that entails (no pun intended) an ascent journey from the physical realm upward towards the spiritual. The words for “spirit” in all three Biblical languages are the words for “air”: ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, spiritus in Latin.
An argument could be made that Anderson is trying to reverse the usual psychological symbolism of mermaids, who are often symbols of the woman as “other,” as partly inhuman, her fish tail signifying that she comes from a mysterious lower world, an association that makes her both frightening and alluring. This is what Dorothy Dinnerstein was talking about in her classic book of feminist theory, The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976). Men and women see each other as only half human: women are mermaids and men are minotaurs. (The Beast in Beauty and the Beast probably counts as a minotaur type in this context). Mermaids have often been temptresses, luring men to a watery death: in a Jungian interpretation, they would be anima figures beckoning to the depths of the unconscious itself. But the tragedy of Anderson’s mermaid is that she is determined to reverse directions. First she ascends to the land, only to find that she is a fish out of water; then she rises into the air, descending only to do good deeds and help others. It is perhaps for her benevolent guardianship that a sculpture of her by Edvard Eriksen on the Copenhagen waterside has become famous. Installed in 1913, it is 100 years old this year, one third of the time fixed for the mermaid to earn an immortal soul by her service to others.
Despite widespread misunderstanding, mythology is not a fixed system acting as a vehicle for “universal truths.” It is a symbolic vocabulary that can be put to various uses, expressing human values and desires that are sometimes diametrically opposed. Not so long ago, I wrote a newsletter about Avatar: The Way of Water, focusing on the symbolism latent in the film’s subtitle. There are no actual mermaids or water-spirits in the movie, but rather a race of people who live their lives both in and underwater. They are air-breathers, though, and practice the techniques of what is called free diving, which includes cultivating the ability to hold your breath for a long time. As I noted, there are freedivers all over the world today, and some of them wear artificial mermaid tails. The mythology of the film, embodied in the people’s religion, involves a return, as much as possible, to the realm out of which all life arose and by which it is nurtured and sustained. Death is an absorption back into the matrix of life, and is not an evil. Down is good—whereas evil comes from above, in the form of spaceships landing with military people determined to conquer, exploit, and, failing that, exterminate all the “alien” life on the planet. The capitalists and military personnel are psychotic, possessed by a nihilistic will to power. The reversal of directions on the vertical axis signifies a reversal of values, from transcendent and otherworldly to immanent and this-worldly, though without being “secular.”
By what I now think of as “newsletter synchronicity,” I have just seen the latest Pixar feature—which is, of course, about the spirits of the four elements. Elemental is a romantic comedy asking that, ahem, burning question, “Can a fire spirit and a water spirit find true love together without the spark being quenched?” Ember Lumen and Wade Ripple fall in love in the age-old boy-girl way, and, to their surprise, find they are able to kiss without Wade being boiled away or Ember extinguished. How this union of opposites is possible is a mystery, to which the answer is only “don’t ask,” a miracle worthy of alchemy that would have been of interest to Paracelsus. That turns out to be the least of their obstacles, however, for the differences among the four elements turn out to be symbolic of racial and ethnic differences. The plot has a social as well as a personal level, on which its theme is the tensions and conflicts caused by difference and diversity. The fire-beings are the most recent immigrants to arrive in Element City, and are subject to prejudice because they are working class. Ember’s fiery temperament seems to be an ethnic as well as a personal trait, while Wade’s family is sentimentally weepy.
By common agreement, the movie’s greatest achievement is not its rather predictable plot but its worldbuilding, as a science fiction reader would call it. The environment and common activities of Element City are created in extraordinary and highly inventive detail. The architecture of Element City suggests a futuristic utopia of the kind common in American science fiction a century ago, and the tension between utopian aspirations and the bigotry of the inhabitants is clearly deliberate. The story on one level is informed by the experiences of director Peter Sohn’s Korean immigrant parents, who ran a grocery store in the Bronx beginning in the 1970’s.
Why tell that story in terms of the four elements? And the deeper question: why our fascination through the whole history of Western culture with the four elements? The elements are the basic building blocks of nature, not scientifically but in terms of our experience of the phenomenal world. The Creation myth that opens Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins with Chaos, out of which the elements are separated and ordered, and out of which the cosmos is then built. But the elements also interact dynamically. Empedocles said that earth, water, fire, and air are stirred into various combinations by Love and Strife, suggesting that the various reactions amongst them are somehow analogous to the interplay of human emotions. In 1809, Goethe wrote an experimental novel called Elective Affinities. The title is a phrase from the chemistry of his time, which said that certain elements reacted with certain others under the right circumstances, and the novel uses this theory to show that human relationships, which seem random and arbitrary, are actually playing out predetermined patterns. When we say that certain people have “chemistry” between them, we are saying much the same thing minus the philosophy. In some ways, we have free will, which means we can make choices. But the will is never absolutely free: the non-chemical meaning of “elemental” is basic, primal, rooted in a fundamental ground. We are individual, yet on the deepest level, as the alchemists knew, we are also elemental. And the names for our deepest energies, our trans-individual desires, are earth, water, fire, and air.
I've been meaning to send you this request for some time now, yet it always finds a way to slip my mind. If you haven't yet seen the movie As Above, So Below (2014), you MUST watch it. The comparisons to Donte's Inferno are STRIKING. At the risk of spoiling anything, I won't say anything else, but I think it would make for a wonderful Newsletter topic. (Disclaimer: As I'm sure you could assume, the films a horror.)