Water Beings
Mermaids, kelpies, rusalki, kappa, mami wata, and the strange beauty of the world's water spirits.
In this section
Kelpie of the Scottish Lochs
The water horse of the Highlands and Lowlands, the luring pony whose sticky hide drags the unwary rider to a drowning.
Mermaid Legends
Atargatis, the Greek sirens, the Lorelei, the Rusalka, the Mami Wata, the Selkie, the Melusine, and the long half-fish, half-human history of the mermaid.
The water beings are the green-people: the mermaids and mermen, the kelpies and nixies, the rusalki and vodyanoy, the Mami Wata and the Kappa, the undines and the sirens, the selkies and the Melusine. They live in the lochs, the rivers, the wells, the seas, the monsoon floods, and the deep Pacific. They are almost always beautiful. They are almost always dangerous. They are almost always the bringers of either love or drowning, and often of both at once.
The following pages collect two of the most important of the water beings in the European tradition: the mermaid, with her worldwide reach; and the Kelpie of the Scottish lochs, with his Highland smile. The water beings are a family within the larger bestiary of mythical creatures.
The shape of a water being
A water being is a creature whose natural element is the water, whose body is half-human and half-something-else, and whose relation to humans is a test. The body that is half-fish, half-human is the most common form, but it is not the only one. The Kelpie is a horse. The Selkie is a seal. The Rusalka is a young woman with no obvious non-human body-part, only the cold wet hair and the green eyes. The Kappa is a small green child with a tortoise-shell and a dish of water on its head. The Mami Wata is half-fish, half-woman, with a mirror and a comb. The Yacuruna of the Amazon is a fair-skinned man dressed in white, paddling a canoe on the flooded river at night.
The water being is a creature of the in-between. It is half-human, and it is half-elemental, and it lives in the medium that is between the air and the earth. The medium is the lake, the river, the sea, the monsoon flood, the well, the spring. The water being is therefore the medium’s voice, and the medium has been, in most of the world, a place of danger. The lake drowns. The river floods. The sea storms. The well is dark. The spring is cold. The water being, in the long human reckoning, is the warning.
The mermaid and the merman
The mermaid is the most travelled of the water beings, and the most consistently beautiful. The earliest known mermaid is the Syrian Atargatis of Hierapolis, the great mother goddess whose cult combined the worship of a fish, a dove, and a woman. Atargatis fell in love with a mortal shepherd, accidentally killed him, and was so ashamed that she threw herself into a lake and took the form of half a woman. Her cult was wide: it reached Phoenicia, Palestine, and the coast of Asia Minor, and her image was carried into the Greek world as the goddess Aphrodite Ourania and into the Roman world as Venus.
The mermaids of medieval Europe were a mixture of two traditions: the classical Siren, who was half-woman and half-bird and who sang sailors to their deaths; and the medieval Melusine, who was a serpent-woman in a forest fountain, who married a French knight (Raymond of Lusignan, in the genealogy of the house of Lusignan), and who was condemned to take the serpent form on Saturdays. The Melusine tradition crossed Europe: she appears in Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the Roman de Mélusine of Jean d’Arras (1393), in Czech legend, in Polish legend, in Ukrainian legend, in the image of the faše fountain of Trier, and in the crest of the house of Luxembourg.
The mermaids of the European Atlantic — the Selkie of the Hebrides, the merrow of Ireland, the moruadh of the Western Isles, the morgen of the Welsh coast — are a related but distinct tradition, and the Selkie in particular is closer to the seal-woman than to the fish-woman. The mermaids of the Caribbean and the African Atlantic — the sirene of the French Antilles, the Mami Wata of West Africa, the Yemanjá of the Yoruba and the Candomblé — are the syncretic descendants of the imported European mermaid and the indigenous water-divinity.
The Kelpie and the water horse
The Kelpie is the water horse of the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, and the most dangerous of the water beings of the British Isles. The Kelpie appears as a fine pony at a loch side, sometimes saddled, sometimes not. The unwary traveller, especially the unwary child, mounts the pony; the Kelpie’s skin becomes sticky as glue; the Kelpie plunges into the loch; the rider is dragged to a drowning. The Kelpie is also a shapeshifter: he may appear as a handsome young man, or as a wet man with seaweed in his hair, or as a black horse. The Kelpie is the subject of Robert Burns’s poem “Address to the Devil” (1785), of the Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–1799), and of dozens of local tales collected by the folklorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Kelpie is one of a family of water-horse beings across Northern Europe. The Nix of the Germanic tradition is a shapeshifting water-spirit, sometimes a beautiful man, sometimes a horse. The Nöck of Sweden, the Nøkken of Norway, the Strömkarl of Sweden, the Bäckahästen (“the brook horse”) of southern Sweden, the Nyk of Estonia, the Vodník of Czech legend, and the Vodyanoy of Russian legend are all members of the same family, and the Kelpie is the most familiar form in English. The Kelpie’s close cousin is the each-uisge, the water-horse of the western coast of Scotland, which is larger, more dangerous, and more strongly associated with the sea-lochs of Argyll.
The Rusalka and the vodyanoy
The Rusalka is the water spirit of the Slavic rivers, the lakes, and the bogs, and she is the most mournful of the water beings. She is, in the older Russian tradition, a young woman who died before her wedding and who returns to the riverbank in early summer to dance and to mourn. In the later Russian tradition she is a water nymph, fair-skinned, green-eyed, with long wet hair, who sits in the willows and sings, and who lures young men into the water. She is a figure of the in-between: not alive, not dead, and not divine. The Rusalka appears in the opera Rusalka of Antonín Dvořák (1901), in Pushkin’s “Rusalka” (1832), in Afanasyev’s Narodnye russkie skazki (1855–1867), and in the Slavic folklore of the modern rural tradition.
The Vodyanoy is her male counterpart, the old man of the water, a green-bearded, waterweed-covered, slimy figure of the deep river and the millpond. He is the keeper of the fish, and he is propitiated with bread, with salt, and with the first catch of the season. He is an ambivalent figure: he can drown the fisherman who crosses him, and he can give a good catch to the fisherman who respects him. He is the river’s voice.
The Mami Wata and the West African water beings
The Mami Wata of West and Central Africa is a half-fish, half-woman figure who holds a mirror and a comb, and who is associated with wealth, with foreign goods, with sexuality, and with the dangers of the river. The Mami Wata tradition is documented across the coastal regions of the Gulf of Guinea, the Niger Delta, the Cameroon coast, the Congo, and Angola, and it is exported into the syncretic Vodou of Haiti, the Candomblé of Brazil, the Espiritismo of Cuba, the Obeah of Jamaica, and the Hoodoo of the American South. The Mami Wata is also a creature of the modern art market: the Mami Wata paintings of the Ijo, the Igbo, and the Bamileke have been collected and exhibited by the Smithsonian and the British Museum, and the figure is a global icon of African-folkloric art.
The Mami Wata water spirits sit alongside the Mami Wata proper: the emu of the Igbo, the sirene of the Cape Verde islands, the agwé of the Haitian Vodou, the lembi of the Congo, and the mukisi mu nseke of Angola. They are the figures of the coast, the river-mouth, the trade, and the long voyage.
The Kappa and the East Asian water beings
The Kappa of Japan is a small, green, child-sized water-imp of the rivers and the ponds. The Kappa has a tortoise-shell on his back, a dish of water on his head (the source of his power, which drains when he is out of the water for too long), and a taste for cucumbers and for the blood of the unwary swimmer. The Kappa is the subject of a rich tradition of Edo-period pictures, of Shinto charms, of summer-festival practices (cucumber offerings, water-side prayers), and of a long popular literature. The Kappa is a creature of the threshold: he is part animal, part human, part water, part land.
The Chinese water beings are the Shuishen and the He Bo (the River Earl), the Qi Bo (the Count of the Qi), the Wushi (the Warrior-Body), the Yuan Shi (the Original Master), the four Dragon Kings of the four seas, and the great Kun, the fish that becomes the bird Peng. The Vietnamese Hà Bá, the Korean Mago Halmi, and the Tibetan Klu are all members of the same East Asian water-spirit family.
The Yacuruna and the Amazonian water beings
The Yacuruna of the Amazon basin is a fair-skinned man dressed in white, who appears at night on the flooded rivers, in a canoe with no bow and no stern, with no crew. He is the master of the underwater city of Yacuruna, the mirror-version of the river-village. He can kidnap a child, a lover, or a curandero, and he can give back the gift of underwater breathing. The Yacuruna appears in the folklore of the Tukano, the Bora, the Witoto, the Yagua, and the Ticuna, and in the folclore caboclo of the river-peoples of the lower Amazon.
The Curupira of the Brazilian forest has backward-pointing feet; the Boto of the Amazon is the pink river-dolphin who can become a beautiful man on festival nights; the Mapinguari of the same forest is the one-eyed sloth-creature. The water beings of the Amazon are an entire cosmology.
The water being as in-between
The water being is, finally, a being of the in-between. It is half-human, and it is half-elemental, and it lives in the medium that is between the air and the earth. The water being is the medium’s voice, and the medium is the place of death, the place of birth, the place of the flood, the place of the monsoon, the place of the long sea-voyage. The water being is the figure of the threshold, and the threshold is the moment at which the human world meets the world of the older powers.