Returning to the Mermaids and Sirens
Mythic Water Bodies and Fluid Wisdoms
This post was written from my 2022 essay, D.Marinha - Water-centric forgotten Wisdom, parts of which are in The Sanctuary book.
In modernity, we tend to hijack all things as personal symbols. Sirens and Mermaids are no exception. But this is just the beginning of the eco-mythological invitation. The invitation doesn’t stop at archetypal imagery.
Sirens and Mermaids are not only psychological emissaries, but embodied, sovereign echoes of the living landscape, in currents, tides, fogs, birdcalls, seal songs, coastal rock acoustics, salty spray, shifting ecologies. Their beings emerge across dimensions, living ecologically in seasonal swell‑and‑ebb cycles, birds’ migrations, and marine mammal rhythms; carrying history in submerged shrines, animal‑shrine totems, ancestral fishing paths, and flood‑legends tied to local geography; singing weather through wind‑shaped acoustics in cliffs and reefs, generating complex sound‑worlds that shaped mythopoetic meaning.
To invite them through eco‑mythology is to listen beyond the personal psyche, to a polyvocal ecology that is relational, historically situated, and living. Mermaids are our shared watery field, speaking through atmospheric pressure, rock resonance, and marine life, resisting flattening into a single symbolic register.
Eco‑mythology asks us to follow their song outward, into water‑world landscapes that exceed our minds, in an expanded sensorial and relational attunement to place. In this approach, myth is meteorological, topographical, biological, and ancestral. A mirror and a mirror-bearing current that invites us to navigate not only inner terrain, but also relational ecologies. May we continue to move, psyche, and ecology, as one entwined wave.
Our bodies, wet vessels of dew, sweat, and tears, carry the memories of deep-time aquatic kinship. While our tongues speak salt and our dreams are tide-drawn.
Sirens and Mermaids are not just figures of folklore; they are eco-mythological intelligence, keepers of tidal wisdom, narrators of currents, and oracles of the liminal. To speak of them is an epistemic recovery and ontological remembrance. These mythic beings were once the primal embodiment of ecological rhythms and elemental sentience. However, the dominant land-centric, modern mind, which fears fluidity and venerates control, has long distorted and domesticated their songs.
The forgetting is ontological.
Modernity's linear epistemologies, framed through conquest, measurement, and mechanistic control, have severed relational imagination from ecological embodiment. The Mermaid became a monster to conquer, a seductress to silence, a hallucination to diagnose. Meanwhile, the deep relational field, where fog whispers truths, seals become mythic messengers, and coastal acoustics tune the psyche, was flattened into static data.
But what if, as relational beings, we choose to re-tune?
What if we understand that Siren songs are not distractions from “real” knowledge but invitations into fluid cognition, where water becomes a teacher of impermanence, reciprocity, and unfathomable depth? What if myths are not lies we outgrow, but truths we are asked to re-inhabit with nuance and accountability?
This is where Sea Ontologies, as described by scholars like Ingersoll, become vital. They remind us that knowing is not confined to logic of clarity or legibility. Knowing can be tidal, foggy, ecstatic, or entrancing. It can come through salt air, bird calls, or the sound of your own heartbeat aligned with the storm.
Mermaids, then, are not escapist fantasies. They are metaphorical ambassadors of water literacy, living reminders to recall the planetary metabolism in which we are entwined. Their song reminds us that the edge of knowing is not the end, but a threshold.
To return to the Mermaids is to risk remembering. To reenter their song is to break apart the anthropocentric rigidity that has colonized both mind and sea. It is to sing, again, into a field where narrative, ecological attunement, and mythic imagination are not separate disciplines but co-emergent flows.
May we not only write about the Sirens but with them. May we let them haunt our methodologies, our cosmologies, and our daily tides. May we listen in the fog and drift in uncertainty, remembering that, like water, wisdom finds its way through cracks. Because we do not need more clarity, we need coherence with life’s wet, wild, weeping relationality.
The recovery of Mermaids as sovereign and eco-mythological beings is not a gesture of nostalgic fantasy, but a radical act of ontological relocation. By returning them to the relational field from which they should never have been extracted, we open passages to ways of knowing and narrating the world that are not bound to the logic of control, certainty, or human centrality. These figures are not just symbols; they are sensitive webs of contextual wisdom, portals to ways of feeling the place with the whole body, with the damp bones of the depths. When we listen to the Sirens, we also hear the tears of the Earth, the flows of irreparable losses, the tragic beauty of what can no longer be saved. But instead of running away from pain, we anchor ourselves in it, allowing it to melt and reorient us, just like the tide that laps at ruins and fertilizes them anew. This is water literacy and aquatic consciousness... it does not promise us solutions, but it sustains us in intertwining. And perhaps it is precisely this song, salty, undulating, stormy, that allows us to breathe under the pressure of collapse without surrendering to separation.
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Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.