The Mermaids

These latest posts become more nacreous because now we are talking about the actual thing, or better yet, we are talking from the midst of the thing. The actual Work is not a matter of cauldrons and knives and bows and castles. The actual Work is the Work, lived everyday. The actual fruit of any spiritual practice is an open and loving life. The fruit of any true power is vitality and goodness in this life. This can scarcely be talked about. It is shone poetically, not prosaically, in beautiful pictures dancing through the head like light over water. This is the Castle Beneath the Waves, the enchanted desmaine of the merfolk which lies beneath the sea. And naturally the sea is all deep water, and not only deep physical waters, but the waters of the psyche, the creative waters in especial.

 They tell you that when you stop caring it’s insulation. I used to think that not feeling was the way to prevent all the horrible things that happened when you felt too much. So why did I drive ten minutes past New Union to that distant spot I always see, and walk onto the abandoned gravel beach and then sit on the pier—it was so fucking desolate—no one was there, just lonely sea gulls—and start taking pills and drinking my dad’s vodka until I felt sufficiently fucked up, and then, roll my ass into the water?

     I had the sense to fill by pockets up with rocks—Virginia Woolf style—and for a moment, under the choppy water, there was just this peace. I just felt icy with the water, and when I opened my mouth, the dirty lake water came into it, and after a while my nostrils gave way. For a moment there was panic, the shudder of this happening, and it being entirely too late to do anything about it. I was drowning. The water was too choppy and I was too fucked up to help myself.

     Then the dark water was like the water in movies. I mean, that undersea water that’s blue and green, and full of light. And it was still, and warm, and I thought, well, this is heaven. And then I saw the fish, and I saw the biggest fish I’d ever seen, and then. well, then I saw it was not a fish. It was her. Or one of them. I feel like I can’t ever describe her, or them. Even under the water I felt the tears coming to me. There she was, hair streaming, breast bared, face grave, and she lifted me up and up and then I was gagging on the ground, throwing up water, and I tried to turn over and look for her, but she was gone. It was just ordinary stormy water, and cold fall rain was coming down. I knew I’d be sick, and I was for three weeks, but that evening I just kept crying because I had sure that after everything that had happened to me, and that I had done, grace was gone. And now I knew that I wasn’t beyond it.

from- The Skin of Things, by Chris Lewis Gibson

As a child, in the sands, I pretend to be one of the sea folk. I feel myself connected to the sea folk everytime I make a pilgrimage back to the water and, of course, the water is ultimately where we all come from. She is our home.

The Mermaid is the Angel of the Water. But this is only an approximation, for the Angel cannot escape his watering down both by Christianity and the cute optimism of the New Age. But even Christianity and Judaism have not completely covered up the power of the Divine Water. The tribe of Levi from which the Jewish priesthood came, shares its name with Leviathan, the great Sea Monster God, and the Jewish word Kodesh, meaning holy, was the name for Asherah of the Sea, the Hebrew God the Mother, who in time became the Shekinah. These links survive in the names Mary, Miriam sacred to Jews and Christians, having to do with the salty waters. Indeed, if Miriam may have at one time been linked to the Goddess, the Blessed Virgin becomes her all over again, Maristella, Mary as the Star of the Sea.

      

                                    

The Little Mermaid is the Sea Lady who loses her sense of who she is and is off balance for a time. Melusine is another version of this, but she always remembers herself and returns to the sea when offended. She is always wild. The Scottish Selkies are the same. The Sea Woman is not only one of the oldest symbols of divinity, she is the sign of wild grace. beyond, before and after the grace offered by approved religion. She is love, but she is also lust. She is the siren. 

She is not unnatural, she is as wild and dangerous, as life giving and death dealing as nature itself. Her element is water, from which all things come.