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.
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 intelligences, keepers of tidal wisdom, narrators of currents, 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.
Your presence here, as a living witness, is already part of the story. You can also check out my online bookstore.
Honor hystera. Re-member. Response-ability. (Un)learn together.
