Everyone knows about Mermaids, sea creatures that are half human half fish, the tales of the merfolk have always been around especially when us humans started exploring the open waters, but there's a lot more to them then sitting pretty on a rock, brushing their hair and singing.
There are many different names for mermaids (mer meaning sea and maid is woman) it all depends on where you are in the world. The Irish is Merrow, Scottish go by Ceasg (although this is more for the fresh water folk) The Isle of Man calls them Ben-Varrey and the Philippine folklore goes by Sirena and Siyokay to name but a few.
Contrary to the belief mermaids aren't just for the big blue but also like fresh water bodies like lakes like in European folklore tell of the fresh water mermaids called Melusine, sometimes depicted with 2 fish tails or sometimes a serpents tail (this is where Star Bucks gets it logo). But they can also be found in the odd swamp or bog.
The first every written down record of the merfolk was the ancient Babylonian god Oannes. He was often depicted as having a beard and crown and supporting the half human half fish body, but it is said that he had both a human and fish body so that he could live and blend better in both worlds.
Mermen aren't as popular or as well known as their female counterparts but they sit have a foot hold in the lore.
It depend where you go or what time period the stories are from on how the mermen acted or looked like, mostly they where to be said to be very ugly with big beards, tempremental and staying away from humans as much as possible, they could also sink a ship by calling on huge storms, they could also attack humans (when the mood so took them) by singing just like the mermaids.
But in other places like Finland they where powerful and handsome, wise teachers and magic wielding they could also cure illness, lift curses and brew potions.
The most well know merman has to be Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphritrite, neither of them where merfolk themselves but both could live on land and in the sea. He was also known as the trumpeter of the sea for his use of a conch shell.
The first female story to appear was in Assyria 1000BC. It was the goddess Atargatis, mother of the Assyrian queen Semiramis. The goddess was in love with a human sheppard but when she unintentionally killed him she jumped into the lake in shame and tried to take on the form of a fish, the water wouldn't conseal her divine beauty and so she became a mermaid. Although the first renditions of her was of a fish with a human head and arms, similar to the Babylonian god Ea. The Greeks took her as Derketo.
Normally mermaids are roughly the same across the board with few differences.
In British folklore they are a bad omen (as they generally are across the world) both foretelling disaster and provoking it. They would lure ships over by singing them onto the rocks or in passing telling the ships crew that they would never see land again. They were also a warning for rough weather ahead. Some people said they where monstrous creatures some being as big as 2000 feet (610 meters).
China added on to say that their tears when shed would turn into pearls, and the Javanese people believe that the southern beach in Java is home to the mermaid queen Nyi Roro Kidul.
A popular Greek legend turned Alexander the Great's sister, Thessalonike, into a mermaid after her death, living in the Aegean. She would ask the sailors on any ship she would encounter only one question: "Is King Alexander alive?" it would end badly if she was told he was no longer king.
But there are places in Europe that they are seen as kind and helpful even trading with the villages along the coast.
The stories had to come from some where and not only from the Gods that many people worshiped (and still worship several modern religions, including Hinduism and Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian belief), worship mermaid goddesses to this day). There where many sightings of these very beautiful but dangerous creatures.
In 1493, sailing off the coast of Hispaniola, Columbus reported seeing three "female forms" which "rose high out of the sea, but were not as beautiful as they are represented". Another story, from 1830 in Scotland, said that a young boy killed a mermaid by throwing rocks at it; the creature looked like a child of about 3 or 4, but had a salmon's tail instead of legs. The villagers are said to have buried it in a coffin, though there seems to be no historical evidence of this fishy tale.
Even Blackbeard an English pirate, records that he instructed his crew on several voyages to steer away from charted waters which he called "enchanted" for fear of merfolk or mermaids, which Blackbeard himself and members of his crew reported seeing.
Modern mermaid reports are very rare, but they do occur; for example, news reports in 2009 claimed that a mermaid had seen sighted off the coast of Israel in the town of Kiryat Yam. They even set a reward for proof that there was one.
There was also a fake documentary called Mermaid on Animal Planet that sent everyone into a spin thinking it was real.
But where there are sightings there's going to be people who take advantage and make money from the masses. In the middle of the 17th century, John Tradescant the elder created a wunderkammer (called Tradescant's Ark) in which he displayed, among other things, a "mermaid's hand" and in the 19th century, P. T. Barnum displayed a taxidermal hoax called the Fiji mermaid in his museum.
There are mean explanations for what people may be seeing out there, could there really be creatures in the depths or just sea things that look kind of like what the merfolk are. Many people have speculated and the ones that don't believe that they are real have come up with things that explain it and put it down the early men's minds not understanding what they saw, like Sirenia is an order of fully aquatic, herbivorous mammals that inhabit rivers, estuaries, coastal marine waters, swamps and marine wetlands. Sirenians, including manatees and dugongs, possess major aquatic adaptations: arms used for steering, a paddle used for propulsion, and remnants of hind limbs (legs) in the form of two small bones floating deep in the muscle. mariners before the mid-nineteenth century referred to them as mermaids.
Sirenomelia, also called "mermaid syndrome", is a rare congenital disorder in which a child is born with his or her legs fused together and small genitalia. This condition is about as rare as conjoined twins, affecting one out of every 100,000 live births[5] and is usually fatal within a day or two of birth because of kidney and bladder complications. Four survivors were known as of July 2003
Due to their vaguely anthropomorphic shape, dried skates have long been described as mermaids. Often their appearance is deliberately modified to make them look even more human.
In some of the legends of the Pacific Islands, it is said that human beings are descended from the merfolk. Somewhere along the way we developed legs and lost our tails, maybe that's why we have such a fascination with the ocean and what in it.
But whether they are real or not the merfolk have a fascination of the mystical sea creatures with stories like Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, first published in 1837. In this version there isn't a happy ending (unlike the Disney adaptation). This sparked a huge interest and even got a world-famous statue of the Little Mermaid, in Copenhagen, Denmark since August 1913, with copies in 13 other locations around the world – almost half of them in North America.
Some places even believed that we are descended from the merfolk but at some point along the way lost our tails and the ability to live underwater, perhaps that's were our fascination with the ocean and the creatures that live in it came from.
