Mami Wata – a water deity sometimes known as La Sirène – revered in Haiti and many parts of Africa, is often depicted as a mermaid, with a mirror that allows the passage from one plane of reality to another. The Yoruba spirit Yemoja, who is represented as a mermaid, appears under other names as an ocean and river mother goddess – Yemaja, Yemanjá, Yemoyá, Yemayá – across half the world. In Assyrian mythology, the goddess Atargatis, who was venerated for thousands of years all over the Middle East, attains half-fish, half-human form after throwing herself into a lake. One of the earliest mer-myths dates back to sometime around 1,000 BC. Yet the legend of the mermaid – like other fairy tales – has been shared in many parts of the world for millennia. His tale of a mermaid who, falling in love with a prince, is forced to sacrifice her voice in order to become human, was primarily influenced by Undine, the 1811 German romantic novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, which in turn had been inspired by the 16th-century occultist Paracelsus, who coined the word “undine” to describe an elemental water spirit who can only gain a soul by marrying a human. That romanticised, Disneyfied vision seems fated to endure in this month’s live-action reboot (though the casting of the young black singer and actress Halle Bailey as Ariel has prompted as much racist backlash as it has celebration, upsetting the purists who insist that the mermaid of Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale was white).īut Andersen’s story had an older, stranger and more subversive source. Or perhaps you see Ariel in Disney’s 1989 cartoon of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, with her cherry-red hair and purple shell bikini.

What do you think when you hear the word “mermaid”? Chances are you’ll imagine a beautiful girl with a sparkling fishtail, naked breasts, flowing hair, gazing into a mirror: a scene straight from the pen of early-20th-century Golden Age illustrators Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac.

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