The Further Adventures of St. Murgen the Mermaid

Running across Borges' curious bibliographical note on Sirens this morning has inspired me to do a little more digging into the tragically underrepresented field of folkloric cryptozoology in regards to mermaids. There's quite a lot, and one continuous--and rather inexplicable--theme is their natural piety: the wake-foam of the barque of Peter is absolutely awash with them.

Columbus met up with some which might have been manatees or dugongs, which suggests nothing so much as highly-imaginative or possibly intoxicated mariners despairing of the luxuriant pleasures of port-town female company. The Middle Ages, with its artistic love of the fantastic and the charmingly grotesque, chiseled down whole forests of mermaid-decorated misericords in churches and chapels, though these fishtail girls lack the symbolic import of such other chimerical hybrids such as the Christocentric gryphon or the tetramorph of the Evangelists.

And then there are the other eyewitness reports, for whatever they're worth. Some are surprisingly up-to-date. One sighting occurred in 1830 at Benbecula off the Scots coast (the preserved body later being subjected to great scrutiny during a study conducted in 1900), while the Manx (Island of Man) tourist board offered a reward for a siren's capture (alive, of course) as late as 1961. A Dutch zoological text of 1718 took the existence of the zee wyf as cold fact. Borges' reference to a siren found in 1403 at Haarlem seems to be identical to the account two hundred years later in English divine John Swan's 1635 Speculum Mundi of a mermaid stranded on the mud-flats at Edam, complete with the reverence of the cross:

She suffered herself to be clothed and fed...she learned to spin and perform other petty offices of women...she would kneel down...before the crucifix, she never spake, but lived dumb and continued alive (as some say) fifteen years.

They had to clean the "seamosse which did stick to her" off when they first hauled her out of the water. She was given Christian burial when she died. The Carmelite John Gerbrandus seems to have been a contemporary eyewitness to the event.

There's also Melusine, whose name is given in heraldry to the two-tailed sea-maiden on the Starbucks emblem; she seems to have been a half-snake or half-fish hybrid who married Count Raymond of Poitou sometime in the fourteenth century. The Lusignan family, the former rulers of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Little Armenia, later claimed descent from her, and through them, presumably most of the crowned heads of Europe can thus rightfully sue Starbucks for royalties.

Medieval texts, such as Bartholomaeus Angelicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum often made such creatures out to be marine succubae, lethal and seductive.

Another beautiful mermaid was known to frequent the coast off of the holy island of Iona, who fell in love with a saintly monk on shore and sorely desired to have a human soul. Mermaids and other longaevi seem to either be soulless though bodily immortal, or at the very least long-lived; Plutarch grants a lifespan of 9,720 years to nymphs, for example. Whatever the case, the hermit told her she must forsake the sea for her soul, and she despaired. Her tears formed the strange green-grey pebbles that are now only found on Iona.

In 1560, a team of Jesuits aided by the adjutant of the Portuguese Viceroy of Goa--a physician named Bosquez--dissected seven mermaids washed up on the coast of Ceylon and concluded in their report to the Society that they were anatomically identical to humans and had similar souls, which would have been a great comfort to the siren of Iona. The Church was eager to ascertain at the time exactly what these creatures were, whether they had souls or not, as if we encountered space aliens today, but no official ruling ever came down and the matter became something of a moot point.

Still, some missionaries were somewhat disturbed to hear of their parishioners dining on dugongs and manatees. In a non-religious context, in 1739, the Scots Magazine published the account of the sailors of the ship Halifax, noting from firsthand experience that mermaids tasted like veal.

And then there's St. Murgen of Inver Ollarba, who garners a mention in the seventeenth-century Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland. Her legend is possibly the most bizarre in hagiography, surpassing even St. Christopher of the Dog's Head, St. James the Cut to Pieces or St. George of Cappadocia with his four separate martyrdoms. Murgen began life as a girl named Liban, whose background is lost in a muddle of folkloric confusion. She seems to have been either of mortal or of Daoine Sidhe parentage, and swept into the sea in the year 90 with her dog, who was transformed into an otter. At some point during her first year underwater, she was turned into a merrow or muirruhgach, the Gaelic word for siren or mermaid. She spent three hundred years with the tail of a salmon, swimming the Irish sea with her pet otter.

Around 390 (or possibly 558), a ship destined for Rome took her in from the seas, having heard her angelic singing. The cleric Beoc, a vicar of Bishop St. Comgall of Bangor, was on board, and she pleaded him to take her ashore at Inver Ollarba up the coast. On his return from Rome, after reporting to Pope Gregory of Comgall's deeds in office, he fulfilled his promise and Liban was taken ashore in a boat half-filled with water by another fellow, Beorn.

Instantly, a dispute started over who had authority over her with Beoc, Beorn and St. Comgall all pressing their case. It fell to Beoc after they placed her in a tank of water on a chariot and the chariot stopped in front of Beoc's parish church. There, she was given the choice of being baptized, after which she would die immediately and go to heaven, or living another three hundred years--the number she had spent as a mermaid--and then going on to paradise. She chose the first, was baptized by St. Comgall with the name of Murgen, or, "sea-born," and died in the odor of sanctity. Of course, this was all in the days before canonizations became the exclusive and infallible province of Rome. That being said, the Teo-da-Beoc, or, church of Beoc, was the site of many miracles wrought in her name, and paintings of this singular saint still remain there to this day.

I wish I knew what to make of all this weirdness: the Bollandists would have a hernia over it. But, se non e vero, e ben trovato, and, suffice to say, I'd like to think that St. Comgall didn't just baptize some wayward manatee.