Mermaids

Astonishing legends. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scare It All the Time. I am your host, Chris Colari. I'm the other host ed Vacola eating goldfish. And this is Scared All the Times. Summer of Year, Episode three, Episode eighty of the show. Overall, I believe so who knows? And we have this summer so far drowned you in tsunamis covered you in ticks, and now we are going back to the water for something a little bit different. This week, we're going to talk about. The pretty t shirt con Hey, yeah, I'm. Terrified of being in a wet tea shirt contest. No one needs to see any of this or. A second episode recorded today. I'm in a wet tea shirt contest. It's getting hot in here this wedding. This week, we're going to talk about the prettiest thing in the ocean, or what you probably grew up thinking is the prettiest thing in the ocean, because the actual original pre Disney Mermaid is one of the most consistently terrifying things humans have ever come up with, and somehow we ended up putting one on lunchboxes and pajamas. Because if you grew up in the last forty years, you have a very specific picture of what a mermaid is, and that picture is a lie the thing. And let's be very clear, mermaids are things. The modern mermaid evolved from has been trying to hunt, drown, and otherwise curse innocent men and women for thousands of years. We feared them, celebrated them, and sold them to each other for almost as long. And the only thing that's never changed is how dangerous they are. What are we screwed? When are we all the time? Now? Which is time for time? Fine scandal? All right? So before we get into anything else, we gotta address the elephant in the room, or at least the top hat physics. An elephant in the bottom half is a fish. Which is her age? I don't know her age, No, not the age of Ariel, but Ariel in general. You cannot have a discussion of mermaids in the present day without starting with Ariel from The Little Mermaid. I think Ariel from The Little Mermaid is a good place to start. The Little Mermaid came out in nineteen eighty nine, which feels like such a long time ago. Now I remember, I have the Clamshell upstairs, the infamous clamshell, which is the cover that has a clearly has a dick. Yes, I guess that's we should mention that too. There is a famous urban legend, or not even legend, there is a there is a portion of the art on the Little Mermaid box cover, well, on the poster that became the box cover. Yeah, that looks a lot like dis. No, there's one specifically is clearly a dick. I don't know these architecture of Atlantis that puts that many veins on a building. There's also a priest at the end of the movie. He has a mary, he has a bone who people claim he has a boner. It's it's it's part of a run of little myths and legends, some of them true, some of them kind of squint if you see it, like when Uline. Yeah, things that the animators may or may not have hid, and Little Murmy definitely falls into that. I believe the origin of that little rumor, well, the rumor that animators hid yeah, dirty things in cartoons, I believe, And I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that in the original Rescuers down Under, not down Under, just the Rescuers from like nineteen sixty seven, I think an animator there's a scene where the I forget the bird's name, but they're flying on the back of the bird like past some apartment buildings, and an animator played a prank in the original print of that movie where he cut out a still frame from a porno and put it in one of the windows that they flew past. And I believe that that is real, and that the film was recalled, like prints that had that were recalled, And I think ever since then, it's become this sort of legend that there's all these other things you can find a dizzy movies. Sometimes legend feels overly generous. In the case of the Dix on the Little Mermaid post just the one, they're pretty clearly dix somebody thought they were having a good time. I mean Roger Rabbit, which was on purpose stuff. They're not trying to sneak that past sentens for the most part, I guess. But the the train, the end tune in town when they knocked down the m It's all like I think every car is depicting a different murder. It's like animated, but still that's what's happening. Yeah, but uh yeah, I Little Mermaid, Ariel, great songs, great songs, Alan Mankin, the Goat, the Goat, undisputed undername Judy Benson, something dumping Benson. I think so Judy or Julie played Ariel. Ariel in the original. I think of her name right now, something Benson. I think it was. That animated film was based on the Hans Christian Anderson story from eighteen thirty seven, which also infamously is way more depressing than the cartoon. It's much more of oh yeah, there's no song was about thingham aboves and. Yeah it's a dark old fairy tale where I believe she dies at the end In the original Hans Christian. Anderson, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if you got legs, now use them. I don't know what that's. I just don't know how well you do in the water. I don't remember, I never I don't know how the original story at all. So the Ursula's scary versus scrivels people up the eels and all that shit. We'll talk about Ursula in a second, but the film The Little Mermaid basically established the modern image of what a mermaid is. Even if you go to like pretty much since the movie came out in eighty nine, so let's say, since nineteen ninety. If you went to a five and dime store and got a coloring book about mermaids, the mermaid on the cover was basically aerial, but her bra was you know, yellow seashells instead of purple, Like she became the only mermaid. No, Tody Benson, Jody Benson. There you go, red hair, seashell bra, fishtail sings, the seagulls wants to marry a prince. That's Mermaids as we think about it. And really it's about as accurate to the original idea of Mermaids as if you like, remade Saving Private Ryan and made the Nazis into smurfs or something. It's very far off from how Mermaids began. Yeah, but they they they killed it. It's like a character design rules in that movie. Everything's really good. Yeah, The Killer. I saw the cassette tape, the white cassette tape for the like the soundtrack. I saw a film print of it at what's the theater that Disney own's on Hollywood Bulevard there El Capitan copy Tan. I saw a print of it there, and seeing it on the big screen, you could really see. That it's probably see the boner. Well, you can really see the hand drawn animation. You can see the lines, oh yeah, you know, moving and like, I don't think I'd ever seen a two D or animated film projected that. Yeah, I don't think they would do for any kind of CGS stuff until Beauty and the Beast with the with the dancing in the ballroom. That was the first big one. I want to say that they like tested the technology in an earlier film with like one shot or something, but yes, basically the ballroom and Beauty and. The Beast was the first was like, hey, we're doing this now. Do you remember that? It was either a meme I probably talked about in the show before. It makes me laugh, the idea that her bottom half is fish, and so there was like it used to be like a meme or something that was like is Ariel's poop just that like long fish string that like you know how when fish poops? Like that a long string that feels like something the family guy would have done. Yeah, well, I don't know if they did it in a thing. I'm just saying it was like a meme or something. At the time I had seen and I was. Like, well that really it's pretty funny image. It's a pretty funny image. But here's the thing. The giant family of wet things that look kind of like a woman and want to kill you exists, and basically every culture that has ever lived near a body of water, the Greeks, Japanese, Slavs, West Africans, Caribbeans, Brazilian Scots, Irish, Filipinos, Inuits, on and on and on. Every single one of those creatures is terrifying in their own special way. But Ariel was not like a siren. She has a beautiful singing voice, but it's not she doesn't want to kill anyone. She wants She wants to. Dance, for sure, Well she wants to sing, I guess she wants to dance. She wants to fall in love. But that's part of what I wanted to dive in to in this episode, is how we got from these terrifying creatures that your parents basically told you about so that you wouldn't go swimming alone at night or whatever. No money in that, No money in that. So today we are going to do a tour of some of the original, pre sanitized Mermaids of a bunch of different cultures, and then in the back half of the episode, we're gonna look at the insanity of how people in the West have been faking, hoaxing, and otherwise stitching together mermaids for like two hundred years. Now. I saw one of them. So when we get to that one, I can put up a picture of it onlines. I took that pictures with the illegal about it. What picture did you take the Fiji Mermaid? Oh yeah, the museum. Good, well, we'll get to the Fiji Mermaid. I made him into a sticker. You did make him into a sticker. You did coming soon, A scared all the time sticker pack. Keep your eyes peeled. So ed besides taking surreptitious photos of a Fiji mermaid. Not had a really good photo of video. It's not the original. I have a really good video of back in the day, Ariel from the movie Little Mermaid HM used to be on street in Disneyland in a window at a store and she was an animatronic small it was only like twelve fourteen inches and she maybe is combing her hair, It's unclear, but she rocks back and forth in whoever it was the worst. I don't know if they had to rush it or if they only got to look at a picture varial for like a minute and then from memory had to do it. You had to do it because you add the rocking. It looked like an ad about like don't do drugs, massed out. Her hair was all like fuck nodded and like her, like her, like her kind of face was sunken in a little bit and she was rocking back and forth and just looked like dirty in the window. This is Disneyland, This isn't right, This isn't a this is weird party. Yeah, there's like imagineers here and that's working on shit. And I have a great video from years and years ago that it just really conveys that this is just like a drug add oled aerial in a window. And that's probably my first great Mermaid photo. My second I was obviously getting. The Fiji Mermaid phizby Mermaid, not the Fiji Murmaid. Fuck me right, But Uh, yeah, I do think about like they've since changed it, which means they've received my letters or they've heard about me talk about this. This truly horrifying, Like this is supposed to be main Street Disney, not fucking Kensington. Well, we will look like this. We will post that video to promote and find it if you can find it. So I guess that was probably Have you ever been scared of any other mermaids or just the meth one in the in the window? I think I wasn't scared of the meth one, but I was like, oh, look, what's become of aarial uh huh spent enough time. I'm older now, she's older. Now. Yeah, we both took different paths and she ended up addicted to fucking seaweed or something. But no, I wasn't afraid of it. I'm not afraid of mermaids at all. I'm not in the water ever. Right, Yeah, it's it's We've we've discussed other water fears on this show a number of times, and most of those keep us far enoughway from the water that we will never cross paths with the mermaid. Yeah. I will never see the bottom half of a mermaid. I know I probably wouldn't see the top half. I'd be so far away from the water. I'm just saying, even if I'm near the water and like a lady, hey, what's up, I'd be like, please, I'm just walking by right right. There's nothing you can do or say. That's wait for the next guy. So when I was a kid, my Mermaid fear is that I was actually terrified of the ending of The Little Mermaid. Well with the shipwreck, stuck with the shipwreck, stuck at the end. I don't think this is a spoiler for anybody who has eyes and ears years. At the end, Prince Eric defeats Ursula by by steering the broken bow of his ship into her and it basically impales her. Although I don't think super graphically on screen, but it's made very clear that she has run through with the point the end of this ship. Did you see the live action one? No, neither, but I wonder if it's still the same. Yeah, that's a little more graphic live action. Maybe just see a lady getting a boat. It's really it's a really aggres I mean, even without seeing it, there's there's the lighting in the storm and it's like loud It's very intense and aggressive for the end of a Disney movie, and I think I was trying to think about this as I was writing the episode. It's gotta be one of the more violent Disney villain deaths, like Scar gets eaten by Hyena's off screen does, but the joke is that everyone else falls, and I think most of them do. I couldn't think of any other Disney villain that's really eaten it in an aggressively violent way. Yeah, I don't think Jafar got that. I don't remember what happened to Jafar, but I don't He wasn't beheaded with a scimitar or something like. Did you see that thing? And then we're gonna stop sangining Did you see the thing just recently of a guy explaining how, like fucking Aladdin doesn't actually get any wishes? No, but it was very about like dissecting everything he says. He never actually like gets anything he asks for. It never actually like wishes. It's like kind of crazy. Well because he has to. I would say if anyone ever asked me to write a movie about a friendly genie who gives you the wishes that you asked for, as a screenwriter, that's kind of hard because you want your characters to go on a journey that is hard for them and not just solved by making wishes for things. Yeah, it was something where I forgot exactually the top one now, but it was about like he's like, oh, I want to be a prince or whatever, and I do like a whole song and dance and blah blah blah, and after he's like, oh, she needs to see the real me. I forgot what it was, but they never turned him into well. He marries a princess at the end. Yeah, I don't know. If I find it, I'll post it somewhere. It just made me laugh of like, oh, yeah, you're right, he doesn't doesn't do any of those things. I also will say the flip side to being terrified of the Little Mermaid is that it did introduce me to my first redheaded crush, because I thought Ariel was probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life. That's why I opened it saying, I do not know how old to that point that you don't bring this up at all at any point, but here we are at that point in one half for one half of the movie. Yeah, that's true. Also, when you're when you're three years old, you're really not thinking about the bottom. I was thinking about the top part. If anything, a lady who pooped big long strings would be like the perfect lady three to five years old. It's hilarious. Unlike other cartoon crushes though, Like we've talked about other embarrassing cartoon crushes people have had on this show. Yeah, mine's from Mine was a mouse. Was a lot of wrench wheel gadgets. Yeah, gidget, gadget gadget. I am not the first person to say this, but that whole run of Disney princesses in the early nineties Bell was a baddie jasmine, Like forget about it, like they were. Look, I'm not Zimba's girlfriend, Zimma's girlfriend. Anyway, while we're on the topic of myrrhmdia, I do have to shout out Cabin in the Woods for probably the most accurate scary MIRR person ever put to film. It's slimy and crawling and mostly mouthed. So if you want to get a real good look at a real merrhman and you're listening to the show and haven't seen Cabin in the Woods. Please go watch it immediately. It's incredible. Yes, it is a good movie, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't seen it. I felt like it had its moment and then it very much disappeared it shouldn't. I saw it in theaters and I joyed it, but I never revisited it. So I love it. I think it's brilliant. But the question that we want to answer on this episode is how did we get from the flesh eating monstrosity portrayed in Cabin in the Woods two characters that wouldn't look out of place and often nowadays are found on anime body pillows. The first thing we have to understand is that the modern Mermaid is actually a combination of two different legends fish people in one bucket, maybe a literal bucket. You could have gone them and with them in a real bucket. Yeah, and sirens. You might be as surprised as I was to learn that these two are not actually one and the same, or they weren't. They sort of became one and the same. But according to Mermaids of Earth dot com oh finally, which I checked, there is no Mermaids of Mars. I was curious to see Quote. The first known mentioned human history of a human figure with a fish tail is from about five thousand BC, where Babylonian mythology of the god Aya described is having the body of both a man and a fish. Iow was later known by the Greeks as Oanis and by some Semitic tribes as Dagon. I also think is a villain in Lovecraft. Oh, but that kind of makes sense, I guess, because Lovecraft was infamously anti Semitic, So maybe he just stole the name and turned it into a villain. Anyway, over time, these early fish human deities evolved from symbolic sacred figures into beings more recognizable as mermaids. The Assyrians and later the Greeks Quote dramatically expanded and refined the concept of mermaids, introducing se nymphs, ocean gods, sirens, and fishtailed beings that would deeply influence later Western depictions. Strangely, the other creature most influential to the modern mermaid was also Greek, but had very little to do with the world of King Triton. No, it's sirens, sirens. I thought, We're just going, like, what else is half a. Thing in Homer's The Odyssey. Yeah, we all know the sirens call coming soon to a theater near you. Oh fuck, is that what he's made? Nolan? Chris Nolan, Yeah, he made the Odyssey. It looks terrible. I want I really have no beef with Chris Nolan. I don't love all shot trailer for Odyssey looks rough. It does. I was shocked to see that it was the first complete movie shot in Imaxcuse everything's always like shot in Imax, shot four imax. Right, but it's always ten minutes of it. Yeah, I guess this is the first one begining, and he's long enough. Probably the only way to see it, certainly, don't want to be watching it, I guess on airplane. Yeah, anyway. In the Odyssey, the Real Odyssey, Homer, the poet who wrote it, mentions a dangerous creature that Odysseus crosses paths with, something called a siren. He's first told about sirens by a sorceress named Circe, who warns him about these creatures in book twelve of the Odyssey, saying quote, whoever encounters them unawares and listens to their voices will never joy at reaching home his wife. This whole thing is like, I gotta get home. Yeah, and and CIRs is telling him, you cross these sirens, you will never reach home, where your wife and children will never greet you. Instead, the sirens tempt him with their limpid song as they sit there in the meadow with a vast heap of moldering corpses bones on which hangs the shriveled skin. The voice of the siren, or as you just mentioned, the siren song, is one of these signature traits of what we now call a mermaid. And actually I'd never really thought about this before, but kind of a brilliant thing to turn into an animated movie musical also singing aspect, and make it fun. It's also why she wants it, Ursula. That's true. Hour Yeah, yeah, maybe I might be. This is how dumb we are on this show. I'm just realizing this. And then my second thought was like, oh, I think maybe everybody else in the world already put two and two together on that, but I never really thought about it. It's funny she does give up. It's a bad deal. It's really bad, Like she gave up the super powerful thing to get legs that you can barely use Yeah, and the three days three days is not enough time to figure out love sh Yeah, enough time to figure out all the bottom half, Especially when. You're used to your poop coming out in a big, long string and a sudden yeah, you've got human poop. You don't want to be part of. That world that is something like what just pooping while walking because you're so used to doing it while swimming? Yeah, that date ends poorly. M hmm, first date right down the drain. I don't know. Men are dumb for all we know. It was fun, okay. But part of the reason, in my defense, part of the reason that I probably never put two and two together on this, is that the ancient Greek sirens are not fish people at all. They're bird people. From the waist up, they look like women, but from the waist down they look like birds. That's that goose foot from the Christmas episode for al perkta Bertha. Shirt's no longer available. According to National Geographic That is because birds in ancient Greece were closely associated with death sirens. Bird legs and wings show that they are liminal creatures who dwell betwixted between their connection with the sea, which the ancient Greeks considered profoundly dangerous, and their wings situate them somewhere between earth and air. And in the original text, the song itself, it turns out, is not even seduction, which is something I learned researching this episode, and it kind of blew my mind. The modern implication of the siren song is romantic. That's what I always imagined, if not like explicitly sexual. Yeah, but for all we know, it's like, come on down and get chicken wings. Yeah, they were saying, you can call me al. I love that. I really love that song growing up. I love it now. Emily Wilson, who's a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman who published a complete English translation of the Odyssey, points out that what the sirens are actually offering Odysseus is not sex. They are offering knowledge. They tell him they will sing him every secret of the Trojan War, every glory of every Greek hero, everything that ever happened, and everything that's ever going to happen, which I think if you fall prey to that is a much nerdier death than falling prey to wanting to be laid. Isn't he a He was like a he was like in charge of the army. Yes, well, and so for him, it's like he wants to learn about like fucking tactics and whatever. Also, is you don't want a trip on the way home, So if I can learn the best route to take the fastest route home, that's also maybe fuck these birds. I mean that's like a win win win win win. That's true, that's true. I guess I was imagining. Knowledge is more like I could be tempted if if a bird woman was like, I'll tell you what color feathers your favorite dinosaur had, and I'd be like, I'm listening. Also, that's not even knowledge. It's just that's like a mentalist who could tell you something you already knew. Well, we don't know what color feathers dinosaur has had. I thought it, just thought. I thought you said that they could tell you your favorite colored dinosaur. No, no, no, no no, I was saying. And there's like, no one's gonna guess purple. If they got that, then they too have the pot they've watched Barney. Oh fuck yeah, I never him. So National Geographic tells us that quote sirens retained their bird bodies into the time of the Roman Empire and well beyond. Pliny the Elder includes them in The Fabulous Birds, a section of his Natural History written around seventy seven AD, claiming they lull men to sleep with their song and tear them to pieces, though in Pliny's defense, he is skeptical that they actually exist. Sure, but I had a page count that I agreed to. Yeah, I had a due date in a page count. Yeah, fucking sirens are going the birds yep. Around the time the Middle Ages, though there is a shift. A seventh or eighth century text called the Libre Monstroum describes a siren with a fishtail. There's a Romanesque stone carving at Durham Castle Chapel from around ten to seventy eight that shows a fishtailed mermaid in a Christian context. When did we get more into boats? I'm just a great question. I don't know. Like the bird thing might be people were walking a lot more prior to that, and then they look up and see a bird and they think, man, well. The Greeks were sailing around. I mean, yeah, they all lived on islands and shit. I'm just wondering, if you know more people are on the water top of mind. Well, there's there's a couple there's a couple of reasons for some of this, But before they really combined, there is a to me like potentially very funny few hundred years where both versions kind of coexisted at the same time. So you had some people who were like bird siren people and some people who were fish siren people. Yeah, they're like these fish fuckers that are coming to our house. Yeah yeah, yeah, they get out of here. If only they'd had the Internet. The debates that could have been had. Oh my god, every one of them ended in a. Duel, but in the end the fish people won. Quote. That shift is probably thanks in part to the strong Greek and Roman tradition of unrelated sea gods like Triton, as well as the sirens association with water, but it's also thanks in no small part to the influence of Celtic folklore traditions. According to Marie Claire Bouleau, an associate professor of classical studies at Tufts University, this fusion represents a fascinating syncretism of cultures. She highlights a fourteenth century legend regarding the early Irish Christian saint Brendan the Navigator, whose voyages mirror those of Odysseus. I said, voyage is funny because in my mind I heard voyages of the Navigator. But really the movie is Flight of the Navigator. Oh, I heard voyage of the Memi, my brand, Voyage of the Memi. She highlights a fourteenth century legend regarding the early Irish Christian saint Brendan the Navigator, whose voyages mirror those of Odysseus. In his own odyssey, Brendan meets a siren that modern viewers would instantly recognize as a mermaid. Sure, the story's nuts, though. She's a fish woman who is harpooned by his men, and then he revives her. It offers her the Eucharist before she accepts Christ's to comes to her wounds, and goes to heaven. Oh so he didn't save her, No, I mean in many ways he did. He did. In his mind he did. In his mind he did. But I think she would have enjoyed swimming a bit more. She probably was not psyched about getting harpooned and pulled upon a board a boat. Hey, you think the other mermaids in heaven. He's like, I have no idea. You're gonna find out about to find it ten minutes. I also wonder if boat people, if sailors and stuff water stuff seems like kind of like foo fighters and like the war in World War two where they had like goblins on plane, like pilots saw weird shit. I feel there's only two people who were coming back and being like, you wouldn't believe what I saw. And by the way, you can't verify any of it because you're not in the sky, You're just a person doesn't fly. And then sailors, you're like gone for months at a time at sea, don't even see the land or anything, come back with all these crazy stories. Probably saw a glowing jelly fish, thought it was a ghost. Yeah. Then they come back like we saw sirens or they were probably seals, and they get like drunk on rum and then they like now these like big tall sea shanty tails and then everyone's like, no, I did I did see a mermaid? And then everyone on land and who was like, what the fuck are you talking about? We've never seen anything like anything like that. They're like, well, and so that's why we have a cooler job than you. Yeah, so maybe I could see how a lot of like lore can come from people who are at seas. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I think I think the reason that so many seed dwelling or seafaring I guess not dwelling seafaring cultures came up with mermaid stories is, you know, we see what's what's the term paradoila or whatever. Yeah, when you see faces and stuff. Yeah, we see human form in many, many things. And so I think, you know, it's not surprising to me that every culture would have some version of Yeah, you wouldn't believe what I saw out there. And speaking of cultures, you're only on a boat to like probably do some sort of trade. Yeah, and so hey, what stories get swapped? Yeah, like you're meeting totally different cultures. Yeah, people who look like birds you want to fuck? Yeah. Well, however, the story is spread. By the nineteenth century, the link between sirens, mermaids, and the temptations they offered solidified, as artists turned repeatedly to depicting these creatures with flowing hair and pale skin. A definitive example of the look of these nineteenth century mermaids is a painting called the Siren, which you've probably seen before. It's I think it's a fairly well known Victorian era painting in which this beautiful young woman is kind of looking down upon shipwrecked sailors who appears, you know, kind of like entranced but also scared of what he's seeing. But not all cultures. That's a very European way still of looking at mermaids. Not all cultures viewed mermaids the same way. The rest of the world has their own descriptions of fish people with their own powers and tricks and cruelties waiting to be visited upon humans. So we do a lot of like Greek and Roman stuff. I figured we try to mix it up a little bit on this episode. So so many cultures have myrr people, and we'll start in Japan with the nan or human fish is literally what that translates to. It's important to distinguish the ningo from the nime ghen, which is a well known newer Japanese cryptid described as a massive sixty to ninety foot aquatic humanoid that's like pale, pasty white and found in the freezing waters of the southern and Subantarctic oceans that cryptid was I believe, invented on a website called two chan and sort of like slender Man, sort of spread around. Okay, so there's no sea shanties about this, No, but there are. Presumably four the ningo according to the description of the ningo that gets repeated in Japanese sources, and I'm pulling here from Matthew Meyer's site Yokai dot com, which is the same resource on Japanese folklore that brought us tales of the little asset in kappas and a haunted Japanese doll. I think in our episode, the ningo has golden scales, a small monkey like mouth full of sharp teeth, no fingers, and a voice like a flute, which I think is kind of interesting that it's another voice based, pleasant voice kind of thing. Dam without fingers, can't play a flute, No, definitely not. So you're not singing It'm doing. It, not playing guitar, not playing flute, not playing nothing. The ningo, in myth and legend are bad news. Catching one brings storms. A n ingo washing up on a beach is an omen of war. Basically, Japanese legend says, if you see a n inggo the correct response is to not tell anyone, do not capture it, throw it back, go home, forget about it. But interestingly, there is also a tradition that says if you actually eat the flesh of a ningo, you become immortal, which brings us to the story of Yao Bikuni. Yao Bikuni means roughly the eight hundred year old nun, and her story takes place in Wakasa Province, which is part of Japan on the Sea of Japan, around modern day Obama City, which is the actual name of the city and has nothing to do with President Obama. I don't know why it would. Yo kite yo kid dot com tells the story like this. Long ago in Wakasa Province, there lived a young woman, the daughter of a poor fisherman. One day, her father was invited to a banquet at the home of a wealthy man in town. He was led into the kitchen and shown the most unusual fish he'd ever seen. Its body was that of a fish, but its face was clearly that of a human being, just the face somehow worse. Also, the legend calls it a human being and not ash pointy tooth monkey man, but you know, we'll go with it. Yeah, they said the mouth is a little monkey as mouth. The fisherman was horrified, but his host insisted that the meat would grant whoever ate it eternal youth and long life, which is completely bullshit. Beyind like, why wouldn't you be the rich guy? Yeah? Out of I think maybe the rich guy wanted to find out what would happen if you ate it, Like the cup the chalice at the Endine Last Crusade. He didn't want to be the first one to take a bite, but out of curiosity, the fisherman secretly wrapped up a piece of this ningo to take home and study. When he returned home, he'd forgotten all about it. Somehow. That's ridiculous. The immortal fish meat that you brought with you. You stole that you stole You were like, oh, yeah, where did I put. That into that? I just have such a burning desire to always be stealing. But I actually forgot about it. But his daughter, only sixteen years old, found the package and ate the meat before he could stop her. I will say, in this case, they are a culture who enjoys raw fish meat. Yeah, but I'm not sure how you caught a fish so that it's okay to eat that way. So I don't know if they cooked it or if she just like took it from his pocket and ate it. I think she just took it from his pocket or wherever it was hidden and ate it. And turns out this rich guy was right on the money. It works. She lives eight hundred years forever. Her dad eventually dies, her husband dies, everyone around her dies. Does she grow old? No, so she just stays a little kid. She keeps living and living and living, she. Says, a little kid. Yeah. It just a beautiful letter. The letter in the nunnery. Well, yeah, so one of the nuns here is a child. No, I don't think that's weird. I mean married christ. I think back then sixteen was probably considered. You know, you were a young woman making her way in the world. You know, people were dying at thirty, so when you were middle aged, I don't know. If anyone was ever dying at thirty in Japan. Well, the part of the story that is really scary and touches on something we've talked about on this show before. Although yes, the human headed fish is very gross, the horror is that the gift of immortality becomes isolation. She watches every single person she loves die, and then every person they love dies, and eventually the world kind of stops making sense because every cultural reference point you grew up with goes away and you just keep living. So Yao Bikuni lives for eight hundred years. She becomes a Buddhist nun. She wanders Japan does good works, because what else are you going to do? At this point, I guess she didn't marry christ I take it back. Yeah, well, yeah, that's also true. You were thinking, you were thinking, like wearing no different kind of none, And she kind of left this trail of legends behind her. There's towns all across Japan that have their own Yao Bikuni story, a local site where she stopped, a temple that has a relic of hers. The story ends like this. After hundreds of years, Yao Bikuni grew weary of the world. I would not have taken hundreds of years to grow weary of the world. I'm about to turn forty, and I am very weary of the world. So she has a stronger spine than I do. She retired in Wakasa Province and took up residence in a cave. There, she prayed day and night to be free of her curse. She never moved from the cave, and eventually she sat for so long that she turned into stone. It is said that in one of the caves around Wakasa, there stands a stone that looks just like a beautiful young woman. Okay, how much like dangerously like yeah, like I want to I want to make sure. Well, look, there's a reason no one's given directions to the cave, all right. I just meant that I want to see it and make sure it's not just rock shaped. Yeah, And then everyone's like, you see it like a rock? Yeah? I want to if I see a lady who looks like a terra cotta pot whatever the hell that th Littlectta soldiers all different, you know, country. But I'm saying, you look at that and you're like, that's a man. Yeah. But if it's just like a you know, a paradoila ass rock, yeah. So that's the Japanese Mermaid story. I thought they'd have more. Honestly, well that, I mean, there's there are to me, that's the most interesting twist on the Mermaid story. I guess in Japanese culture, the n NGO have lots of legends in myth, but I like the there there aren't any other mermaids stories that I'm aware of that eating their flesh grants you immortality, So I thought that was a particularly But also. By the way, had no interaction with anyone. This guy's like, hey, I found this fit. Yeah, well it's kind of Actually when I read it, it reminded me a little bit of Gremlins. It's like a dad, you know, a kind of blue collar dad takes something he probably I mean he buys it in Gremlins, but he probably shouldn't take gives it to the kid. In this case, she steals, you. Know what I'm saying. Even the rich guys, I don't know where he got that fit. We know nothing about this fish. There was no moment where it was like let me live in a grunts you and then they kill it. Yeah. It was just like, hey, look I got a got a fucking weird fish. I want to eat it. This could be something you eat a little bit of. Yeah, you know what I mean. It was just like where'd you get that fish? Like if you tell me all that shit about fucking ningos or whatever. I never would have well, it is. It is an ingo in the story, although I guess I do find it kind of interesting that the dad wasn't like gasp, but that's he's just like, yikes, what happened to that fish? Why does it have a human head. With a monkey mouth? The monkey mouth? The meat is very tender. Don't worry about that monkey see monkey ski? Do there might be something in that the jet ski? Yeah? Water based, I don't know. This is the second podcast we're recording today. So from Japan, we're gonna swing down to West Africa to meet Mammy Wata. Mammy Wata is complicated. She is the water deity of basically the entire West and Central African coast, which includes a lot of land and a lot of countries. Don't think I met her when I was in Ghana. You may have. Her name is some people say pigeon English, which Mami Wata meaning mother water. And that alone tells you something important about where she comes from, which is that kind of collision zone of African beliefs in European trade contact and the Transatlantic slave trade. She's depicted as a mermaid or as a beautiful woman holding a giant snake, or sometimes both. Sometimes her bottom half is fish, sometimes her bottom half is snake. Some people say her name is indicative of pigeon English, but some say that derives actually from the Egyptian words Mama meaning truth or wisdom and uatur meaning ocean. Okay, according to an article I found about Mama Wata on ebsco, which is just like a research site, she quote embodies duality, serving as both a symbol of fortune and a potential harbinger of misfortune. Part of why these rays or so all over the place is that Mammy Wata is not just one lady, It's a whole family of water spirits. This is a tradition that stretches back to ancient African civilizations from around forty five hundred BC, and when the slave trade forcibly moved people across the ocean, Mammi Wata went with them, creating this African diaspora that carried water spirits to the Caribbean and South America. So in the classic myths, Mammi Wata is basically a kidnapper. Okay. She snatches people, men, women, kids, doesn't really matter who get too close to the water. Okay, I didn't even want to sing, No, no singing at all. Now this one has fingers and they're grabbing you with them. Yeah, exactly, exactly. She's she's she's warming up to play flute and she's ready to snatch. Yeah. Yeah yeah. Sometimes when she's grabbing humans off the land, she's looking for a consort, dragging a man down to her underwater kingdom or a spirit plane to see if he's worthy of her oh wow. Other times she's just passing judgment. Sometimes you just grabbed a person to be like, hey, are you cool enough to hang? And if she decided you're worthy of her favor, you might get sent back to the surface with any number of gifts, from spiritual enlightenment to wealth or a higher social status. And it was often said that you returned to the surface more beautiful than when you were pulled beneath the waves. Oh little glow up, nice little glow up, a nice little bonus. But if you weren't judged positively, you were drowned and eaten. Okay, well you stayed there forever, whether she devoured you whole or whatever, you were fucked. But there was this flip side of the coin. Now, there is no Little Mermaid siren song singing association with Mami Wata, but there is something else that I thought was kind of interesting that does have sort of a little Mermaid aerial connection. Whether or not the people who made little were made we're at all aware of this, I don't know. But two of the objects commonly associated with Mommy Wata are combs and mirrors. Hey, and you know. Ariel has a collection of stuff. She has the dingle hopper, which is the fork that she uses as a. Cume just think, which is like a wine opener or whatever. Yeah, she is, and what's its galore? And I guess my point is just that it's interesting that, like, trinkets are part of Mammy Watta's whole thing, and Ariel has a collections arinket, a grotto of. Yeah, grottos. Now, Mommy Watsas were usually just these combs and mirrors that she would use sort of as a trap. In some tales, she'll be sitting by the water basically just brushing her hair and looking in the mirror, but if someone approaches, she jumps back into the water and leaves the objects behind. If this person was a thief, and picked them up and took them away. She would start to haunt that person's dreams. That's entrapment. It really, there was no one here. If I find I'm sorry if I find anything on a beach, especially if there's no one around and it's not in a backpack finders keepers, it's just loose items. Yeah, it feels, it feels a little intensely. This is like Old Testament intensely judgmental spirit being to be like, oh, you want to take my shit? Might be picking up bring it to loss and found. Yeah, well she knew she would know where it ended up, because if you took it home, she would haunt your dreams trying to get it back, just your dreams. Well, she doesn't come on land like a sea hag. Well, careful you're calling a hag, buddy, Mammy Wanta will not take kindly. It is well, I mean, yeah, see which whatever. This was also. Another way though, of working deals, which is something that Mommy Watsa seems to. Do a lot interest into bartering. There's a there's if not bartering, there's at least the good version there. You get. It's like that, it's like a resident evil game there's the good ending and the bad ending, right, like, if you play things right, you'll get rewarded. So while she's haunting your dreams, she wants her things back, but she wants a deal. If you give back her treasure and promise to be faithful to her, you get unbelievable luck and treasure. What is faithful me? And I need to see the contract? Yes, I mean, I don't know what I have to pray to you. I gotta go in there and do other weird shit in the water. I think it is more of a prayerful faithfulness, a belief in her, a trusting in her. I don't know that you necessarily have to give her anything else. Maybe she starts asking for bodies at some point. That wasn't in any of the literature blackmails. I'm gonna tell everybody you fucking steal combs, your comb stealing piece of shit, unless you give me a bunch of more combs. But if you refuse to return her property, or you don't show her there's my. Comb now, the respect idiot she's owed. If you don't show her the respect she's owed as a water goddess, she will rain punishments upon you. So you know again, I think not only is it a little bit entrapmant to leave your stuff on the beach and be like, what are you doing my stuff? Also that being a way for her to then come to you and be like, hey, give my stuff back. It's like she's forcing a deal that you never really even want it. Really, it's it's it's toxic traits. It is, it is. It's a little mafia and yeah, it's a very black man. Be ashamed of something happened to your place here kind of a thing. I would hold up that mirror I just found on the beach to her and be like, I'm gonna show you someone's being unreasonable. I hold it up to her face. Besides these elements of her myth that you don't find in a lot of other Mermaid tales, one of the other things that I really think is fascinating about Mommy Wata and probably makes her one of one of the most powerful, at least living Mermaid traditions on Earth in sense not in the sense that she is literally alive, but that the myth continues. Is because of this traveling through the diaspora, she has shown up in different cultures as different beings, I mean all rooted back to the same thing. So when Haiti, she became La Serene, who shows up in voodoo ceremonies. In Cuba, she got fused with Yamaya, the Santa Ria ocean goddess. In Brazil she became Le Manja, who is still honored on New Year's Eve when millions of people in white go to the beach and float candles and flowers out into the surf. What about that see which the Spanish one or the Mexican one that we talked about that one time where like she like calls little kids into the water. Well, there's Liarona, That's probably what I'm thinking of. But that that's not a mermaid she no, although. She it's like a weeping woman who check her out. Li Yourona is sort of like a between sort of a water being in a ghost story. It's it's always the story of a woman whose children drowned or sometimes she drowned with them. Think a woman in the water. Yeah, it's like a little trickster. I don't want to and one other, you know what I mean, leave their shit there, don't check up on them, do not. There's a there was actually a Slavic woman water spirit that I ended up leaving out because they didn't feel she was traditionally enough a mermaid for this episode. But in some cases in Slavic tradition, she was portrayed as a literal fish person. They had a variety of different skin colors, like like green and blue and stuff, and she would actually sort of like tickle her victims to death because her hair would like wrap around them and then they would drown because they were like being tickled. So there was there's lots of but I felt like she was more of like a water spirit than a mermaid. I think there's a bit of a difference. What's Slavic? What are those? What countries are those in the former Soviet Union, like or Baltic Baltic basically Croatia and water, isn't it? Yeah, it's the Russalka is or the Russalki is the water nymph. And there's actually I forget which country it is. One of the countries that she has a history in. They have a festival where they like drown a tree every year in her honor. They like dress up a tree. It sounded very midsummar. We gotta go and they throw the tree in the water. The country is it. We gotta go. Hold on, let's see, I'll does I'll do some live producing here. Let's see. We'll go. Don't let us in, we won't get midsommar. Yeah. Green Week Slavic cultures, so any of the sort of like different Russian cultures who celebrate Rusalka week or Green Week falls in early June. Bathing in open bodies of water during this week is strictly forbidden. Oh perfect. The tree ritual is that during the festivities, a young birch tree is decorated with ribbons and garlands. Young women sing ants and leave offerings like bread and hard boiled eggs, and then at the end of the week, the villagers would ceremonially banish the spirits by cutting down or drowning the decorated tree. We gotta go, we gotta go. Don't go dress like trees want to Yah, we're not. I know how to say water, I know how to say fish and Russian. Will be fine, it'll be great. That's how you say fish. Very fun word. What is it? Whatba? It's like it's like an ad, It's like a riba, but it's it's this riba like there's no, okay, it's no on the beginning, it's like a rolled and then water is vada. It's very simple. It's the derivative of vodka is a derivative of water. That's how we get that. The things this man knows, I don't know top of the dome, but I don't know. He doesn't research for this show. No, but I don't know how to get to this party. We'll find out. Back to Mammi Wata. The detail that stuck out to me the most though, that I think is just indicative of this this very from all corners of the world kind of create the myth of mammy Wata. Well, the slave trade went a lot of places. Well yeah, yeah, you were saying, and it's nice to have a water entity with you because they were moved on ships, so it could literally travel along these ships with you. Yeah. I mean this the slave trade definitely is is how this myth spread. But I guess I think I might have definitely met one because I went to Cape Coast, which is like the birthplace of the American slave trade in Ghana, and I felt very uncomfortable. Yeah, and then people were like don't feel uncomfortable. This is our history, not yours. And I was like interesting. They were like, hey man, about you absolved of this feeling. But yeah, so that means that. But it's right on the water, it's like right where the you know where people yea. And so it was like if I was ever going to see when it would have been there. Yeah. So to return to Mammy Wata for for just a moment. One of the details about her story that just strikes me is so indicative of the way this this deity, this legend, this myth means so much to so many different people and wears so many different pieces of different cultures. Is that the traditional, the image of Mami Wata that we call traditional that gets worshiped today is this long haired snake charming mermaid, right, Okay, yeah, but that image and the uh, what's not legacy the way you trace this back through histel lineage. The lineage of this story is a little all over the place, and there's slightly different versions of the story. But basically this image of her that has become the image of Mami Wata isn't even the initially West African image of her. That image traces back to a German chromo lithograph from the eighteen eighties of an Indian snake charmer named Nala Damashanti who performed in Hamburg. The image got reprinted on a night teen fifties Indian calendar that circulated through trade networks in West Africa, and when Africans saw the image, they recognized it as Mammy Wata Wow and adopted it as. Her visit official portrait. Okay they call it. So the most powerful African water goddess on the planet is iconographically descended from a poster of a German snake charming act that traveled through Bombay. Thats really that's the global economy. Yeah, and we some of this I pulled from a Smithsonian piece that was about an art exhibit. The Smithsonian piece is about an art exhibit that was about Mammi Wata in two thousand and nine. And the curator of this museum piece was Henry John Drul who is a UCLA art historian and basically the world's authority on this stuff. And he sort of this is I think, his version of how this legend came to be. But he has a great line about why Mommy Wata to works the way she does. He says, people who worship her often also worship Christian or Muslim or other gods. The way he sees the reason they worship her is they see it as multiple insurance policies. So that's the story of Mammy Wata we want to all right, So the last place that I want to stop on our worldwide tour of Mermaids, although again we are just scratching the surface really of all the different mermaid type creatures that are out there, but one I wanted to touch on, even though I know I was just saying earlier, I was trying to focus more on sort of like creatures that we're seeing as sort of flesh and blood monsters or creatures and less water spirits. Okay, but there is one in the Arctic, which is a place we rarely go on this show. We don't spend a lot of time looking at things that take that are from the Arctic. Cold snow blindness too, cold snowblindness. We haven't done an episode on polar bears. If we ever do, I'm sure we'll spend some more time there. But I want to go up to the Arctic to talk about the Inuit deity named Sedna. She is worshiped from northern Alaska, across Canada and into Greenland, and she is basically the mother of the sea. Every seal, every walrus, every narwhale, every whale, every fish that swims north of somewhere about the sixtieth parallel or so. All of those animals are her. They are Sedna in the sense that they came from her body. Oh, although not like a baby would come from your body. That just peel them off almost literally. Yes, the way in which Sedna's body created all of these animals that swim around in the Great White North is really pretty horrific and fits well with the tone of scaret all the dime. OK. So I'm pulling here from a version of her story posted on Guide to Greenland, which was written by a Danish anthropologist named Christina Gamborg Holmea. This version of the story goes that Sedna was a beautiful young woman and a skilled hunter who refused every marriage proposal that her father sent her way. Her father, fed up eventually banished her to an abandoned island until she would accept somebody. This is the beginning of Sedna's father treating her in ways that I feel categorize him as a bad father. Okay, it was different time, I understand. Different time, and we ostensibly are to believe that. You know, Sedna's father cared enough about her that he wanted her to be set up with a great life, but didn't care so much that she loved the man who would be her partner. So he sends her to this island. She lives there alone for a while, and then one day a handsome hunter shows up out of nowhere, a real ed vocolas he shows up, and he promises her a life which she'll never want for anything, and convinces her to leave with him. This is me, This is a you. Oh no, man, this is a you. You are You're going to fulfilled that promise. You are, well, I don't know. If you make the promise, then you'll figure out a way to fulfill it. Ed. No, it's called having a kid, and that's only you're doing that. So Sedna, the woman who accepted no man, runs off with this handsome hunter, and after their marriage, word gets back to Sedna's father that something was wrong. Now I don't know how that, I don't know how words spread. I don't know if This is a guy who came to her island. This is a guy who came to her island situation, yeah, and said, I'm here, I will make your life wonderful. Word travels. I don't know if it's through the animal kingdom or just dreams or what. But Sedna's father hears that there is something off about this handsome hunter, not just the fact that he's so handsome. I mean reason that he gives a shit. At all, based on him locking his daughter, of trapping her on an island until she agreed to get married. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like if she's agreed, then hands are clean of this. Yeah, well, I'll worry about it. He does worry. Interesting, he hears. That this handsome hunter is actually is actually not hunting food at all. He's not catching anything. He hears that Sedna is starving and maybe it is and that they and that the handsome hunter is treating her terribly. Not me, that's not you, that's a different that's not you at all. That's a that's a me that could provide. So the father packs up the rest of Sedna's family and decides to go rescue his daughter. They get to the to where Sedna is living. They rescue her from the Handsome Hunter. They get her into the boat and they start rowing away. Unclear at this point if Sedna is saying, I love this man. He'll do better next time. In the book, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much agency she has here. And you think this was on the island, I'm not sure where this. He took her to another place, or if it's they might have gone somewhere else from from the island, because the story does say that the hunter convinced Sedna to leave with him, So I don't know where they went. Yeah, sure, yeap somewhere you can get there on a rowboat. So they they risk said no way. And this is when the Handsome Hunter reveals that he is not a human being. He is a shape shifter and his true form is that of a giant eagle. Here's the thing. If you're if you find this out, is it a situation where you're like, well you just stay in handsome form? Like this is working, right? This is Are you in pain to maintain it? Do you have to be an eagle? Or like, I don't want to I don't want to put you out. But if it's not too much trouble for you. Let's just stay handsome and we'll never talk about the big bird thing again. Yea, yeah that was Look we could it's water under the bridge. It happened. Yeah, here's the thing. I'm curious. We've talked about eagles on the show before because we talked about how people were, people were from what scrubs never watched it. Okay, we talked about how was it not Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Franklin didn't like the idea of the. Eagle as Oh yeah, yeah, because they were they weren't patriot that they weren't patriot they were, they weren't. They were considered cowardly or scouted. There was something that he was anti eagle. So I don't know if that has something to do with why. I guess, oh, they weren't like godly or something. It was some weird thing where it's like, how do you put that on a bird? Well, it's interesting because when I think of an eagle, probably because we grew up with it as this national symbol, you think of a very heroic seeming bird that you know, when you see photos of eagles, they're usually pulling fish out of the water, and so you. Never let them talk though, like the woman in this rowboat never let an eagle talk because they got dumb voices in real life. What I was going to say is I don't know that. I guess I assumed. Wait what am I trying to say? I think you're trying to say that back then, these people who wrote this maybe had the same view of eagles as Benjamin Franklin. Yes, because what I was going to say is we think of them as these majestic hunters, but we forget that. I think the reason someone like Benjamin Franklin looked down on them is they're really they're scavengers. They scavenge food. They don't I mean, they do catch fish and stuff, but more often than not they'll pick at carcasses and whatever. And if I'm not mistaken Ben Franklin, I'm not saying he was a good person. I have done zero research. I'm just saying that I do think he talked to Native Americans, Indians or do you want to call him at the time, because he brought up I think like years before our constitution. He brought up like, hey, these guys got a constitution almost the same they've got like a Bill of rights ass looking thing. It's super sick we should use this that everyone scoffed at them, because it's like, we're not going to use these beasts, you know. Uh. Turns out they were they were turns out yeah yeah, but they had something very similar would ultimately end up being like some major document. I'm not saying it's a constitution, but some major document I've forgotten now was basically years earlier. Ben Franklin was like, ih, sock these guys. Oh you're saying you think it was maybe the Bill of Rights or something. Oh, it could be anything, could be anything, because I remember now the Bible. Well no, no, it was like a you know, an American important documents. The script for John Wick it was too. It was a trip or ballerina. But what I'm saying is that, yeah, like he was talking to those people, for all we know, they were telling him about eagles and shit too. My point is just that perhaps what's going on here is that that is why this man is not a good hunter is because he is an eagle that in reality is not a very good hunting bird. Necessarily, it seems a scavenger bird. Also, maybe he's still getting used to all the parts of a human being. He doesn't know how to pull the bow back and stuff. She's watched, she's starving in their little in their little hut or cabin. She's watching him try to hunt. And he keeps just like leaping on the back of a deer with his feet, what. Are you smashing his head into the water, and like trying to pull up fish with his mouth because he doesn't know any better. But he also doesn't want to reveal he's a bird, right all right? Well, in any case, said this fleeing the man turns into an eagle. He goes after the boat. And remember he's a giant eagle. So he's flapping his wings so violently that he creates a massive storm that starts to sink the boat. Sedna falls overboard. She manages to grab on with both hands hang onto the boat. The eagle keeps flapping and the storm keeps growing. It looks like everyone is going to die. Instead of doing what you would think a father might do and pulling his daughter onto the boat and bounding his family together and saying we are going to fight for survival. Instead to quote the story directly, Sedna's father quote took his ulu knife and in one desperate sleigh cut off all of his daughter's fingers. Oh so why because she was shaking the boat? Okay, So she slips below the waves and the eagle is satisfied. I guess that if he can't have her, no one can. Okay, kind of an abusive relationship thing, and he flies off. So Sedna now sinks to the bottom of the ocean with no fingers, bleedings or cut cut all the fingers, and as she sinks, the blood from her hands transforms into little silver fish, and the legend tells us that those are the first fish in the ocean. By the time she hits the bottom of the sea, she's surrounded by them, and she realizes she can breathe underwater. She's become the mother of the sea. But there's a new problem because down at the bottom of the ocean, and I like how practical this story gets, Sedna has no fingers, which means she cannot comb her own hair, and over time her hair gets matted and tangled and disgusting, and it traps every single animal in the Arctic in it. Okay, so every animal that was birthed from her bleeding fingers stuck in her hair, gets stuck in her hat nest, and now all of the Inuit start to starve because they can't hunt. The animals. Get these animals because they're all trapped animals they've just heard about by the way she's just. Made that, I guess, yeah. But they were really tasty. It was a huge they popped off. So the village. I don't know if Sedna's father is involved in this. I don't know if anyone's curious about where she went. But the village summons the Inuit shaman known as the Anga Cook, who goes into a trance, leaves his body and swims to the bottom of the ocean, where he finds Sedna, and she is not happy to see him. Frightens himself over there. Not happy to be disturbed, she actually attacks him and they wrestle. We're told it's hard to wrestle without fingers. It is a grapple, but. Maybe a headlock with your with the crook of your arm, or he got stuck in her hair, or he got stuck in her hair too. But eventually the shaman convinces Sedna that he's actually there to help. He finds a comb and combs her hair for her, pulling out all of the trash that humans have tossed into the ocean. And as the last knots. Think about the animals that we're getting there. As the last knots come out, ten giant animals comes swimming out of her hair, one for each of her severed fingers. There's the bearded seals, the hooded seal, the narwhal, the reindeer, the polar bear, the ringed seal, the musk ox, harp seals, and birds. Just all birds. I guess he as all birds except eagles, because fuck eagles. We hate eagles now, Yeah, And so that that constitutes the ecosystem being saved. And then Sedna is able to rest. Rests in the sense that until she needs her combing. Again, until she needs her fingers back. Until she just die. Then she finally can die. I think it's more of a it's less of a death, and I think more of a return to a not mad anymore. Yeah, just a resting state. If you can turn into some sort of shaman ghost every month or so, and Papa comb over this, Yeah, keep the situation going. Another reason that I told her story besides the fact that it's so weirdly horrific that her father is like. Her father is a tough character to pin down because he traps her on an island until she gets married and then cares enough to try to rescue her when he hears it's no good, but then as soon as his life's in danger, cuts her fingers off. I think, what, I think we're missing an important page. It like it's stuck together with another page, maybe, which is the no good he's talking about air quotes for the non viewer. I think the dowry didn't come in or something like that. He's like, whoa, whoa, your check bounced. I'm gonna get her back. That's true. That that okay. So now if that is the pitch there, then now his character is making a lot more sense. He's more like like, it's more consistent for him, consistent, And he gets all the brothers together, like we gotta go beat a guy up because he didn't pay us the dowry. And they get there and it was like, oh no, he's a bird, yeah, a big giant bird. And then you know, hey, we're not gonna die over her nonsense. So cut her fingers off. Yeah, I do find it interesting. Oh that's what I was just say. One of the other reasons I chose this story is a Sedna is a much more kind and helpful spirit water mermaid creature in a way than most of these creatures that we've talked about. Does anybody pray to her? Yeah, there there's I mean, I don't in the modern day. I don't know if there's really any at the time. At the time, Yeah, there were people who worshiped said Na. Cool. What I was saying is I find it interesting that we have another water spirit mermaid type creature with more comb imagery, like a well and like Ariel, but like Mommy watsa who we just talked about, who had her comb that she would leave on trick people. But it's just interesting. I mean, I don't know if it has comb stuff. I don't know if it has something to do with the fact that many of these spirits are are women, and so women are associated with you know, hairdoos and combs throughout history. But it's also interesting. I can't think of it, and I'm not doing a lot of thinking on it, but I can't think of another animal in the sea that has hair. It's a good point. I've never seen a fish with the beautiful head of hair, a beautiful long main. Yeah, that's a good point. I don't I'm sure someone's. Gonna write it and be like, oh, well, the rude to octopus or something, but I mean like, well, yeah, I mean, I guess, like seals, there's no use for combs down there other than Mermaid or like or later with just Mermaid. Just Mermaid or is the only people who need cobs. Yeah, and think them aboves. You're right, No, you're right. I mean, I all I can think of our creatures that would have fur but not really hair like you seals would have, and. It's and it's very dense and very matted. I guess a walrus maybe has whiskers. Yeah, but that's not hair. Yeah. No, you're right, you're right. I don't want to see more fish with hair, not in light I mean like the like the filler fish tail, like yeah, with Martin Scorse big eyebrows. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I'll photoshop some of that in for the Button of the month. Anyway. That's the last stop on our global Mermaid tour. Greek bird People, Japanese monkey fish, West African snake mermaids, and an Inuit amputee at. The bottom of the Arctic Ocean. These are the kinds of stories that were being told about mermaids when a guy named Christopher Columbus picked up a quick bill in fourteen ninety three and decided to bring the whole European mermaid tradition to a brand new continent. Okay, did he write it? Then? He did. On January ninth, fourteen ninety three, Christopher Columbus was sailing off the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic, and he wrote in his ship's log that the day before, on January eighth, fourteen ninety three, he had personally seen three mermaids. National Geographic has the exact quote pulled from his journal. On the previous day, when the Admiral went to the Rio del Oro, he said, he quite distinctly saw three mermaids which rose well out of the sea. But they are not so beautiful as they are said to be. As they are said to be, for their. Faces had some masculine traits. Oh okay, that's the reason. That's why they are not as beautiful as they are said to be. Okay. I thought was gonna be like horrific, no, and you're just like, nah, it's kind of like under this light that might have had an Adams affway. It is so funny to me that Christopher Columbus, although granted he documented this, it sounds more like the admiral saw the mermaids than he saw the mermaids. But either way, he is apparently recording the existence of living mermaids, and the only thing he has to say about them is. Like, kind of man, yeah, yeah, gross, it is funny, like a little bit of queer fear. But also that's just a funny way to be, Like if I want to, if I was interested in that, I'd be fucking everyone in the ship every day. And it's a magical creacher. You think you'd be like, holy shit, mermaids are real. We've seen them, and not so critical. I think it's like, hey, I've seen them, and I've seen enough exactly. I don't need to see them ever again. Of course, these mermaids that he saw were almost certainly manates. Stop it, manatees and dogongs. I don't even see it any regardless of gender. I don't look at manatee and see even humanity in there. I know people love manatees, but I don't. I wouldn't see that and think I think that's a person. Well, the thing is, when you're out on the ocean and you're dealing with tricks of the light and you're dealing with hunger and you're dealing with thirst. Manatees have the kind of like stubby flipper arms that if you saw them lift it out of the water at a distance, maybe yeah, you might kind of convince yourself you were seeing the arms of a person, you know, the outline of a head depending on how it comes up out of the water or if they I don't know if they really travel in and. People love manatees. Jesse Wilson shout out, Jesse Wilson loves vanatees, and I think you can go on little tours where you can swim with manates and like boop them on the nose and stuff. Yes, so maybe they would have, if that's what they've become, maybe they would have been friendly enough to go up to big ships and stuff. Well. Also, something else I learned from National Geographic while I was researching this episode is that manatees nurse their young by holding them up to their check with one flipper. So from a distance it does look like a woman holding a baby. Yeah, a manish woman who looks sort of like a weird hippopotamus fish. But you know, but they look so this this is such a piece of mermaid history, the idea that sailors mistook manatees for mermaids. How they got their names? No, their scientific name, though, is the scientific order that they belong to is Serenia, which is named after sirens, the legend of the Sirens. Are there other things in that order? Are there other Serenian creatures? I think it's just manates and do goongs like that. The fuck's a do go It's basically a manate I think it's smaller manatee. But it's the same idea, Okay, the same if you've been to a if you've been to an aquarium, they've probably had dou goongs. I would have remembered a name like that. So yeah, science itself basically officially conceded when they named the order of manatees and dogongs that they've spent their whole history being mistaken for monstrous women. So sorry about that. Manatees and do goongs. Columbus's sighting is really important to mermaid history, not because of the scientific aspect, but it's because it is where the European mermaid tradition that we talked about earlier in the show starts to collide with the New World. And as soon as traditions starts to collide with the New World, people start trying to make money and the trade in mermaid objects starts to pick up. Huh. And this is where the episode really starts to get weird. Now, this is a question that you might not be able to answer because this is not for sale. But we had you get like ladies on the fronts of boats sometimes they're mermaids now, but that has nothing to do with this. Like a lady on the front of a boat that like you know how it's physically part of that, Like. Yeah, from the bow of the ship. Yeah, I'm not sure when that started. I mean it does, Yes, some of those when I think about that. Have have mermaids, have mermaids. I don't know that. We'll do a whole other bonus episode about it. The mermaid trade that I wanted to discuss is a lot weirder and a lot closer to the mummy trade. Almost we're going to be grinding them up, put them on as man tea makeup. Almost The earliest documented version of the fake mermaid trade is something I had seen but had no idea that it was a thing that people made and sold for centuries, and I had no idea that it had a name. Is it still out? Can we get it now? Sort of? So ed you may have seen these, I'm going to show you on the computer screen. Hopefully you can pop this up. Oh my god, is that so what you were looking at? It's adorable? Can you before I tell you what this is called, can you try to describe to the listener what you're looking at. I'm looking at an alien with little skinny legs that kind of looks like a rabbit that if it had big floppy ears, came down to like its lower back. Its mouth and eyes are adorable. I don't even it's like a little monkey. But it's also like this. You clean this up a little bit. This You could sell this alongside grogu or some shit and like the Disney Plus. Because if I if it wasn't like a dead I looking, by the way, I'm looking at a dead dried version. Yes, But well if this thing wasn't dead and dried, I think it's probably a little cute ski. So the only term, the only versions of these things that exist are dead and dried. So what they that looks small? It is small? Okay. These are called Jenny Hannovers. So the name, it's a name, a Jenny Hannover j E N N Y space h A n i v e R name. These are called Jenny Hannovers. It's like a basically, it's a doll. A Jenny Hannover is what you get when a sixteenth century sailor at the Antwerp docks catches a skate or a ray, dries it out, carves it up, twists the fins into arms, and then varnishes the whole thing and sells it to a tourist as a mermaid. So that is what a Jenny Hannover is. So Ed's description of a floppy eared rabbit monkey thing is is a little hard to picture. If you've ever seen the underside of a manta. Ray or a skate, they have little faces. They have little faces, and that's where this really began. If you can imagine taking one of those manta rays or a skate, propping it up, propping it out, drying it out, desiccating it, building a face out of the you know, making the face more prominent, and then twisting its fins and stuff into arms. That's more what you can imagine. Also, I don't know why you'd spend all this time imagining it. Just look it up. Look up at Jenny Hannover. They're weird looking. Sometimes they would be oldest mermaids, sometimes sea devils, sometimes basilisks. Well, the fact that they're small kind of feels like, you know, hey, what did you bring me from your Hey, daddy, what did you bring me from c h say, hey, I got you this doll? Yes, it's it smells weird and it's it's brittle. The name Jenny Hanover is apparently a Cockney corruption of the French phrase June Denevere, which means young girl of Antwerp, which kind of suggests to me that there was a barbie doll. Yeah, like my seaman dad brought me a Barbie doll. Yeah, kind of. Or they were trying to make you think this thing was sexy, you know, a young girl of Antwerp. No, I think it's not. I When I looked at that, I instantly got like baby doll, like Barbie vibes. It just felt like a toy. So you don't think you don't think they think a Young. Girl of Antwerp is to say it like, it's kind of the clients, hell, the clientele, what's the word we're like the we're like who you're marketing. It to the customer? Yeah, it almost it feels it feels like a little girl's toy. Interesting to me when I first looked at it. Yeah, and not that this thing like like the way that a little girl has a baby doll toy, like a cabbage badge interesting, which would also be a baby girl. It's like a toy for a baby girl. Sometimes it's just itself. Yes, I get I get that. I mean, I guess I always know the mothering fucked up shit about it too, But. I always I guess always, by always, I mean, since I learned about this two weeks ago or whatever, I I guess I assumed that the that the Jenny Hannover the Young Girl of Antwerp was more of almost like they're trying to brand this is like a sexy mermaid and then they sell you a desiccated fish thing I see. I think it's origin probably comes from being branded as like a Barbie doll maybe, and not like, hey, you want to you want to hold a fucked up thing that you wish you could fuck, Like, I don't know what that. I think this thing looks more like something Merchant Marine would bring home to their kid. Sure, and you got to bring something home you're going for like eight months at a time. Yeah, especially back in the sixteenth century. It's a toy. You saw your kids twice. Yeah, here's a toy of something I for sure didn't fuck because it's not real. Right. Well, in any case, the first published reference to these things comes from the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, who put a reference to the Jenny Hannivers in his fifteen fifty eight Encyclopedia Historia and Amalium. And he basically was doing the sixteenth century version of like a Snopes articles here, saying, guys, it's a fish. Stop buying the fish. It's just a fish. You're not buying a mermaid or a baslisk or a sea dragon. But my kids love them. Yeah, they were. It was like a beanie baby and. The only other thing if it's not a gift for your kid, which it looks like it would be. Yeah, the only reason I could see anyone purchasing it all it has some sort of charm aspect to it, right where it's like, oh, it brings you good luck or you have like a mermaid's hair for a day, right right right, And then you can see how the even how would you sell out the tourist. Other was the Nino that we talked about earlier. There was like the monkey faced fish creature. You know, these these also kind I mean, they don't have monkey faces per se, but you could sort of see how these might have picked up some ninio steam too on the other side of the world, especially with the rumor of it being if you eat it you get immortality or whatever. This looks like something that, yeah, if you ate it, you would expect something. I don't think're gonna eat. It's covered in varnish, like, Yeah, I could see how they were like, hey, by one of these gets the luck of the sea, become a great fisherman. Yeah, I could see that. I found no reference to that in the research, but I could see that I. Could see that being a way to sell it otherwise, I don't see them. I don't see it being anything you said. Well, they were very popular. People bought them for the next three hundred years. After this guy put out his article being like guid some scholars even argued that they were real species and propose naming them Satanicus aucus or the devilfish. Things got so heated around the debate around these creatures that Carl Lenaeus, the founder of modern biological classification, the guy who literally invented genus and species. He was traveling through Hamburg and he got pulled aside by the proud owners of a Jenny Hannover. They called it a hydra, but it was the same thing. They brought it out to show him, presumably hoping to get the most respected scientists in Europe to authenticate it. We're gonna put this in the book, right. Yeah. He looked at it for about two seconds and told the owners, no, this is this is a fake. It's not a real creature. This is an animal that is in my book. And someone twisted up. Yeah, exactly. And instead of being and this is the most modern thing imaginable humans have always been the same. Instead of saying, oh my god, we were h we got the old ropid dope. Thank you for telling us the truth. These people got so mad that they threatened to prosecute him and he had to flee Hamburg. Yeah, I mean this was we accept this as dowry for one of our kids to bring up dowries again. The dowry you got, the dowry on the mind. These Jenny Hannovers were all just the precursor though, to the most famous fake fish fiend of them. All, Fiji Mermaid. The Fiji Mermaid. Oh, I've seen a person have a picture of it. Well, you've seen a Fiji murmury. It's the only one I've accepted as dowry. The real Fiji Mermaid no longer exists, and by real I mean the original. And that one's got a little like little man face though that's Columbus would have been proud. Yes, So there's again, As I said, we don't have the original Fiji Mermaid. There are many around. The go to right now, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See when that's what I. Saw it, I will pull up the one here from Coney Island. Is the little glasses on. No, it does speckled. So this is p. T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid from me see with my hands, Coney Island. It's almost like shicken pretal what I saw there. It is, Oh my god, this is actually way better than putting it up on the screen. So it looks like a desiccated fish if you're if you're not watching the show. I think the one I saw was also a pet Barnum number. Well. P. T. Barnum is the guy who invented. It. Looks basically like a desicated, dried out monkey head attached to some sort of a weird fish body. It's all dried out. It's probably about how big would you say? It is a two feet long? Yeah, that's about what I saw on the screen. I mean what I saw in person, Yeah, and screen. So the Fiji Mermaid does not look particularly real. It looked like an old man to me when I saw mine, but mine was a little thinner and it had some more going on in that one. Yeah, it does. The dried out monkey head look has a bit of an old man. Yeah, but we can't talk about the Fiji Mermaid without talking about P. T. Barnum. Unfortunately, every time I bring this guy up, it's always horrific. Frechport, Connecticut's own. Yeah, it's shocking. I mean, then the amount of controversies that PT Barnum had in his life. Those whales that burned up as something else. He he was not a great guy, I am. I mean, look whatever, I don't really care, but I am kind of shocked that The Greatest Showman is as popular as it is. They put all the controversy in it, the songs they didn't. I mean, look, this is we now live in a world where the Michael Jackson biopic made five. But it's just weird to me that he's not He's not a I feel like, if you've ever heard of P. T. Barnum, you know that he was kind of a huckster at best and like a bad guy. Yeah at worst. Yeah, he's a charlatan. He's a charlatan. He's a man who and I learned this for the first time in my research, literally bought an elderly black woman named Joyce Heath and exhibited her on stage as the one hundred and sixty one year old nursing and this is the term that was used the nursing Mammy of George Washington. He exhibited her on stage until she died, and then he paid a surgeon to perform her autopsy in front of fifteen hundred spectators in New York City's saloon at fifty cents per person, So just in a bar, just in a bar. To be like, what are the one hundred and sixty one year old organs look like? And then, as if all of that wasn't bad enough, the real sort of pissy cherry on this miserable cake is that when the surgeon who performed the autopsy declared that this age claim Barnum had made that she's one hundred sixty one years old was a fraud, Barnum gets up in front of everybody and insists that the autopsy victim is actually another person, and that Joyce Heath, the woman whose body had just been carved up, was actually alive and on a tour in Europe. And that's why you'd. Think this is a guy who would have been like, hey, no matter what you find, and here's eight bucks to say it's an old person. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure why the surgeon felt the need to publicize I. Think he just found a backpone. It's like it's like one of those fighters who paid to go get paid to go down, and then decide that this is the moment they're going to actually win for them. Or maybe this was a surgeon who just halfway through the autopsy, the weight of the horrificness of what he was doing really landed on his shoulders and he said, I didn't kill a lady. No, but still, I mean it is it is exploitative to a degree that is unbelievable, even for the eighteen hundreds. I also wonder if you're a surgeon, an actual surgeon at any time period, not just a person he found in a gutter and gave knives to which I wouldn't put past it. No, if you're it also would be like, hey, man, aren't you that guy said that that old person was old? And it definitely was. And I don't know if it would affect his personal career to continue being a surgeon, right right? That might make a decision for him to be like, uh, right, I'm not like an idiot. Just what everyone knows that you're so come to me for surgery. I have, I have no morals, but I am no, I am no idiots. I'm not gonna be told I'm a fucking dummy up here either. So anyway, p T. Barnum is a very complicated figure, and not even really complex. We have a bunch more it's Pizza Barnum. I'm glad he does exist, so that when we have Pett barnamass fucking people people that exist, we can still have like a a like, oh, this guy's the Pezza Barnum of this or this lady's Pezzy Barnum of of pharmaceuticals. But perhaps one of the things he's most famous for, other than the circus that for so long carried his name, is the Fiji Mermaid, which is probably one of the greatest con jobs of all time. I mean, when you're a person who's so inscrupulous as to be like, hey, gluem not even the Fiji Mermaid, but I could totally see him being like, hey, one of my horses died, cut off its legs and glue the legs onto another horse and say that we've got like the first eight legged or yeah, and it's like and when that one dies, I want more legs. And it was like, right when the ticket sales are drying up for the eight legged horse, we get a fucking twelve legged horse. Yeah, and at the certain point you don't even know where the horse begins and ends. There's so many legs hanging off of it. And that's why that in some ways crafty and horse nightmare. Yeah, and it's always like moving slow, it's so weighed down by horse legs. Yeah, that it's just Hey, come see the magnificent twenty four legged horse. That's always kind of lying down. So yeah, it's when you're that on scoop. You wouldn't believe how fast this thing was running when we caught it in the wild. Yeah, we've had to sedate it so that it. Can't get away. Yeah, exactly. It's gotten lazy from fame. So in the summer of eighteen forty two, Barnum acquired on loan from his friend Moses Kimball, who ran the Boston Museum. That's probably why the Fiji burmaid's in Boston right now, the one that I saw. Yeah, possibly it's at Harvard by the way. Oh yeah, this probably is they put it. They put it at Harvard because P. T. Barnum was a Harvard level savant of cons Yeah, bad and bad business. So Barnum got this object. It was about three feet long, and according to Barnum, it was a mermaid. He called it the Fiji Mermaid spelled fee j ee either because he didn't know sued. Yeah, he didn't want to get sued by the people of Fiji. I think maybe he just didn't know how to spell Fiji, or perhaps at the time it was sort of a colloquial. Also, everybody, I don't know how literate the area was, like, yeah, two ease was easy to understand. I don't want people saying phi fi all the. Time, right, right fi gi phi gi? Right? No that actually you might more phonetic. You might be correct. Yeah, he may have just spelled it phonetically. But the way Barnum sold this thing is really where the brilliance of the con comes in. Live Science has a great write up on this, which is what I'm mostly pulling from here. And there's a little bit I found from P. T. Barnum's own autobiography that I'm using here as well, because in that book he describes this whole scheme step by step, so proud of it. He thinks the publicity campaign for the Fiji Mermaid is one of the most elegant pieces of work of his career. No, it's his magnum opus. Here's what he did. First, he got another associate of his, a guy named Levi Lyman, to impersonate a British scientist. Well, his name is Limn. I'm gonna be lying about what man I am. Yeah, you know what I mean. You should have known that when I came in. He invented a fake credential, doctor J. Griffin of the Lyceum of Natural History. Even that lie in it? Yeah, the lie? What I guess that was a Russe Limbaugh book, Lying Liars and the Liars You Tell Them or something like that. Or it's or is that a al Franken book. Or oh maybe maybe maybe I think it might have been that. I remember hearing about it on the radio when I was in middle school, so I assume it is either pro or anti Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, anyway, there was no doctor J. Griffin. There was arguably a Lyceum of Natural History in London, but he had nothing to do with it. Lyman put on a fancy outfit and started calling himself doctor Griffin. And then Barnum sat down and wrote three identical and non anonymous, three identical anonymous letters describing the arrival of the remarkable Doctor Griffin with his Fiji Island mermaid. You do hear this on the doll up and stuff a bunch like where these letters of introduction that people bring with them that there's just no way to verify until two years ago. Basically yes, that people show up and it was like this is from the King of school down like places doesn't exist. And then also you could change your identity with a razor blade and some tape. Yeah. So well, So he not only wrote these three letters, he traveled around the country, mailed one from Montgomery, Alabama, mailed one one from Charleston, South Carolina, and mailed one from Washington, DC to three different New York newspapers. The letters arrived at the newspapers within days of each other, and each newspaper thinking it had a scoop because back then the announcement of the arrival of Doctor Griffin with his would theapper would be in the newspaper. So they all ran three different cities, ran the same story about this guy arriving to drum up the impression that this guy was super famous from overseas. And what strikes me is so incredible about that, even though there's nothing highly technical or whatever. It sounds a lot like a modern social media campaign. It sounds like basically there was a there was a debate or a small controversy over a band called Geese. I think it was Geese or They're They're They're like an indie art rock band from from New York and they blew up. This was probably like six months ago as of the recording of this. They got huge in on what would have been like the. Blog music scene. When we were growing up, you know, on short yeah, but this version was on TikTok, on inst. I'm saying what we would have been. And people were kind of like, wow, where did this band come from? And then at some point somebody from someone who had worked on the social media campaign for the band was like, yeah, I mean we just invented them basically, I mean the band. Existed, we invented the hype. We invented Yeah, we invented the hype. We put the stories out in ways that we figured would catch on and kind of sat back and waited to see what happened. And really they're, you know, they were I'm not saying they were inventing people to rave about how great the band was, but essentially they were at least encouraging people on different platforms to talk about Geese to be like, oh my god, these guys are the best. And then all of a sudden, the consensus is just, holy shit, everyone's heard of this band. And that's what Barnum did here. I don't know if he invented this idea, but he certainly perfected it with the Fiji Mermaid. I mean, it's not at all surprising that all the tactics that we're seeing today in late stage capitalism have roots in huxt in huckstery. So then so now the Eastern seaboards talking about the arrival of doctor. Isn't that what his name did? Fucking Colonel Tom whatever, Elvis and Elvis manager. When people started fucking hating on Elvis, he started selling the like I hate Elvis shit and like Elvis Hater's fan club, and all the people who love Elvis were paying, all the people who hated Elvis were paying. We got to get in on that. Nobody hates us, not yet, but this episode we can start. We'll find a way. So Barnum creates this whole spectacle and then having created the appearance of this upswell of public interest, starts giving newspapers free promotional woodcuts of beautiful naked, bear breasted mermaids, and the papers run them. Then he pretends that the mysterious Doctor Griffin was refusing to display the mermaid to the public because the doctor was too modest, too scientific, and too proper to show the public this dible creature. It would be too scandalous, it would overturn the scientific or upturn the scientific community. That comes very much from his like freak show background where it's like for a nickel, you can see the scariest thing behind this curtain he was. But you know, we couldn't possibly just have it for all the kids to see. How he was stoking the demand. Yeah, like, you guys have all heard of this thing, right, Well, actually, now we can't show it to you. I'll show it to you. By the time the Fiji Mermaid actually went on display at Barnum's American Museum in late July eighteen forty two, Lower Manhattan was insane with anticipation. People were lined up around the block. Newspapers were running editorials. Everyone wanted to see this beautiful naked aquatic woman from the Fiji islands, because remember. You don't find out she's dry. No, all you see are the woodcuts of this beautiful woman. And uh yeah, So I'll put it this way. This is what he was advertising. This is one of the woodcuts that he sent to the newspapers. It's for those of you not watching. It is a beautiful black and white woodcut of a mermaid looking like a babe by the water. A couple of babe friends there, a couple of babe friends suggesting if you come see this mermaid, there might be more than one hit out here. And then if you saw that ad and you said I can't wait, just a reminder, this is what you got. This is well you get. This is what you got. Mister Burns there waiting for a massage. Oh that's a spelled Fiji here. Though, Well that's the one on Coney Island. Yeah, and that when I guess they change the again, this is not the actual. I wonder if I saw that. I was in Cony Allen recently, look a he or two ago. I wonder if I saw it what by it? Didn't even know? Now we don't know. Maybe the original was a little bit sexier. I doubt it. The three foot long thing that he leased from Moses Kimball, which I'm not even sure that part of the story is true, that he leased that he leased the object from his friend. I suspect that either Moses Kimball doesn't exist, or if he did, he always wants. Some sort of fallback in case people hate it. I mean, well, that was from Moses. I would never that's true. He swindled me. The belief is that the original Fiji Mermaid was lost in the fire that consumed Kimball's Boston museum sometime around eighteen eighty. The Fiji Mermaid at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Yes, that was donated by Kimball's family, but it doesn't match the description of Barnum's original. Or like I said, it had a little bit more going on. Yeah, it's like it's like it's twisty and big. It's not laying there like an asshole. So there's multiple Fiji Mermaids in museum. And I will say this, When I saw the Fiji Mermaid at the Peabody, yeah, with my friend Kiki. Yeah, shout out Kiki. When I saw it. At no point upon seeing it, even when reading the word mermaid. Yeah, that I think that was a woman. I mean, this is so I had. I looked at it for a while. I took a picture. I walked around, and I was like, that was an old man. You're ish, I look, I gotta check you. I gotta check you. Ed. You start to sound a little bit like Chris for Columbus. Yeah, you're starting to criticize the look of the mythical creature instead of appreciating that. I can see where how he got there. Yes, if this was the same thing he saw, which it wasn't. This was an orangutank or something stapled to a fish. So I don't know what the hell I was looking at, but it certainly looked like mister Burns or something. The point is P. T. Barnum knew exactly what he was doing. He describes the Mermaid in his own eighteen fifty five autobiography as quote an ugly, dried up, black looking, and diminutive specimen about three feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over, and its arms thrown up, giving the appearance of having died in Great Aggaon. It's arms are thrown up the one I saw. Yeah, it's arms are like whoa, It's like I got caught in like a flash bulb, like a picture of it getting taken. So anyway, this is the same man though, who was advertising it with woodcuts of topless babes, and he knew exactly what this thing was and he made a fortune off of it. Now, the mystery that remains, though we've hinted at one of the answers, is what actually was the Fiji mermaid, Because the story that got repeated for a long time is that it was the upper half of a juvenile monkey sewn to the lower half of a fish with some paper mache filler and maybe like doll hair on top or something. Yeah, And I suspect that some of the fakes of the fake that are around the world probably are that now, because that was the story for so long of how you make a Fiji mermaid. But there was a whole trade of Nino's actually that were often the stitched up monkey fish combos as well. They were manufactured in Japan in the seventeen hundreds and all the way up to the eighteen hundreds, and Western traders would buy them in Asian ports and bring them to Europe in America, so that may have been where Barnum got his this idea. This radiculous question I've never thought about. So right now, there's no no Native American monkeys, right, not Native American meaning Indian. I mean like there are no monkeys native to North America. Correct, I mean, well unless you count sasquatch. Yeah, But then I'm thinking about like Japan because I think of the little monkeys that you would use to like stitch up to these small two foot things. Mm hm. That always feels really like Southeast Asian to me, and not Japan necessarily. So where are people getting monkeys? It's such surplus that they're that they're slapping them on fish. I couldn't tell you, but I bet I'll tell you what. I bet a monkey's worth a lot more dead and slapped to a fish, and it is alive, So. I wouldn't know that's not true, as I'll watch that movie with Harvey Kaitel where he teaches a monkey to steal. So in many ways that living monkey made more money. But ed, here's the kicker that sort of answers your question. Okay. In twenty eighteen, the Horneman Museum in London, which has one of these Japanese mermaid mummies in its collection, decided to X ray and see T scan. It told you, I love that job, just to see what was in there. Yeah, there was a bunch of coins and tickets like that, like mummy. There was no monkey. According to this article I found on a website called Hyperallergic, the author Allison rights that the Horneman scientists found that the body was mostly fish parts, wood, paper, machet, and bundles of fiber wrapped to look like a torso with some fish jaws stuck in to make the face. Okay, so yeah they have they have not enough monkeys, just like us. There was no primate skeleton at all. And the sort of maybe not the cosmic joke here, but the punchline to all of this is that the actual construction of the mermaid forgery was actually cheaper than the legend, you know, the legend of the Yeah, it was just like, no, it's just some bullshit paper machet and jawfish bones, yep. So, and they had a lot of fish in Japan. They fish part. They've got plenty exactly enough to make mandibles out of whatever. Not mandibles, I don't know what it's. It can make lips. I don't know how you fish lips? Fish lips? Whose old fish lips? I don't know. So mermaid hoaxes are nothing new, but I want to end this episode on a modern mermaid hoax that actually might have done more damage to society than the rest of these hoaxes combined. In May twenty twelve, Animal Planet, the cable channel that brought you Meerkat Manor and Crocodile Hunter, aired a two hour special called Mermaids The Body Found. Do you remember this? No? So, this documentary was framed as a serious scientific documentary about Noah or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We've talked about them before on the show, discovering and then covering up the existence of aquatic humanoids. The reason to cover that up for Mermaids. There was in it. There's a South African actor named Andre Weedman who plays the fictional scientist doctor Paul Robertson of Noah. Wait, it's a documentary. How is anyone fictional on screen? It's not a documentary. It's presented as a document. It was presented as a documentary. So they cast this guy to play doctor Paul Robertson of Noah, and he tells the story of how they found the Mermaids and why they covered it up, and the way the show is made. If you were a busy mom in the Midwest and you've got the TV on or your kids said there was a mermaid thing and you want to turn on, and you're up up, up by, it's just convincing enough that you would maybe think that this was real. Sure, the only way you'd know it was fake they put a disclaimer in the closing credits, but it's in like the last three seconds of the credit, so you'd have to watch the whole way. Yeah, day doing that, and it was a hit. The premiere of Mermaids The Body Discovered or Uncovered The Body Found drew one point nine million viewers, which at the time, according to The Washington Post, was Animal Planet's biggest audience since the Steve Erwin Memorial in two thousand and six. Wow. Over the next few weeks, three point four million more people watched the show. And then people started to call the actual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they started emailing Congress asking for answers about why the existence of Mermaids was being covered up, so I can't believe this happened. But in July twenty twelve, the real Noah put up a page on their official Noah dot gov website titled are Mermaids Reel? And that page is still up. There's a link in the show notes you can go look at it. It is Oceanservice dot Noah dot gov slash facts slash Mermaids dot html, and it is a federal government document that says, quote mermaids, those half human, half fish sirens of the sea are legendary sea creatures chronicled in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic poet Homer wrote of them in the Odyssey. In the ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea dragons and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and the emperors on land. The Aboriginal people of Australia we didn't get to these, but they call me maids yok yawks, a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs. The belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species, But are mermaids real? No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why then, do they occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples. Of nearly all people who email us. That's a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists. Now I think they were being a little cheeky posting this, but still the US government. I mean, well know what's who knows if the website still works? Now, yeah, it does, you can go. I went to it when I was researching this show. You know, the US government caught enough heat for a TV special that they had nothing to do with that. Some probably in turn, was hunched over a keyboard in the basement somewhere being like, I can't believe I have to write this and post this. But they're also happy to have the traffic the SEO for the first time ever. They show up first. That's true. That's true. Noah's feel big about that. They probably would prefer to end up there for I don't know scientific facts about title one. Maybe you can find out about tides. Yeah, maybe come for the Mermaids, stay for the Tides. I suspect that if you are a person furious at Noah because you believe that they've been covering up the existence of Mermaids, You're probably not sticking around to learn about, Uh, the way that the moon shifts. That's not on them, that's not it's not on them, that's that own person's personal madness. Anyway, once wasn't enough. In May twenty thirteen, Animal Planet ran a sequel, Mermaids The New Evidence, this time drawing in three point six million viewers and becoming at the time the most watched program in the entire history of Animal Planet, beating their previous record holder, a special called Dragons, a Fantasy made reel, which was another fake documentary. Now they've got they have a taste for it now. The executive producer of both specials, Charlie Foley, when asked if he was worried that millions of people thought it was real, just said that he was quote very flattered. And the reason which I will say, if I'd produced it and someone asked me the same question, I probably would have said the same thing. You did a good you know, you did a. Good enough job that people we should work and there's a propaganda arm up something after this. But the reason I wanted to end on this story is not just because it's kind of a ridiculous, laughable story. There's a Slate piece by a marine biologist named Andrew Taylor that does a pretty good job illustrating the consequences of Mermaids the body found and Mermaids the new evidence, and those consequences turned out to be more depressing than what maybe they even appeared to be initially. Taylor tells a story about being on a plane in twenty fourteen, two years after the documentary, and getting into a conversation with a fifth grade teacher who genuinely believed in the cover up, and the school teacher told him, quote, if Noah is lying to us about the existence of mermaids, then they're definitely lying to us about climate change. Wait, hold on, why would you compare a thing that they've covered up with the thing that they're saying is not covered up. And then, also, as person's an idiot, because you can go to Noa's website and see it's not real climate change. No, no, no, the mermaid the artists fell. You can go to the article and see that they themselves said murmurs aren't real. Right. But the point, the point that this science writer is making in Slate is that the fact that this documentary. This fake documentary came out and convinced some people that the government is lying about mermaids. Makes it very easy for them to then dismiss other things that they want to think the government is lying about, like how to climate change. I don't know how to tell it to the science teacher, but they are in for a doucy in the following decade. They well, they certainly are, you know. And obviously this is just one story. It is just as anecdotal could be, nothing could be, could have never happened. But I think in a world where we have a looser and looser grip on any sort of consensus reality every day, it's interesting that you can trace back across some of this stuff. Oh this is how you know, one person might have started to fall this way, or might have started to believe this other thing. And it's stuff that individually across the years, in the decades. Sure is putting out mermaids, the dead body or whatever. Really the end of the world. No, But you start to mess with people enough and the bigger picture starts to add up to a world where people don't believe the things that are real. Again, all these even the people animal planet weren't even prepared for what the following decade would bring, and now we have AI and everything. Forget it. If people don't want to. Look up and animals or a planet. So if people don't want to look it up, they don't want to look it up, nothing we can do about that, not on this show, for sure. Well that's a great that's a great positive place to end. I mean, is this more positive that I was gonna be? I thought you were like, man, I'm getting to how fucked up it is, how this thing fucked up the world. I thought you were gonna say for real that people watch that documentary and then it was like four out of five women who just take a dip at the beach have been pulled up in nets. Like I thought people were like that. People thought they were so real. They're like, we got one and like all these regular ass ladies were getting snatched at fucking the beach. Well that's not what happened. I think school teacher who may or may not have existed, held a belief. Well sure, and maybe that on its own is not as bad as women getting snatched up at the beach, which I think is probably happening. But for different reasons and reasons. Yeah, but I thought you're gonna be like Galveston, a ghost down as women are afraid to be confused for mermaids. My point, I guess is that it's a It's an interesting place to end because the original sirens of mythology saying sailors to their death by promising false knowledge, and three thousand years later, Animal Planet Lord three point six million viewers to the death of their trust in science by promising knowledge and knowledge. Maybe there's maybe there's a point there, and maybe there's not. I don't know, I'll never know. All I know is that it's pretty low on the fear tier for me. Where and that brings us to the fear tier? Where are you going to put mermaids on the fear tier two? I'm gonna put mermaids at A one. I'm going to because I don't know. I've followed ladies to a second location for less so out on Oh by the way, like they invited me, they invited followed yeah yeah, shadows, Yeah yeah, yeah, I met like I'm easily convinced to go to places like a mermaid, like a siren's call, like their whole thing. Yes, yeah, not the other thing your brain could have gone to. Well, Ed, you're putting mermaids at a two, I'm putting mermaids at a one. I do think mermaids might be the least scary thing we've ever covered on this show. And hey, you know what that happens. That's why we have a scale. You've got ones, and you've got tens, and sometimes there's gonna be ones. If everything on the fear tier is a five and above, that would really limit the topics that we can cover. So Yep, mermaids are a solid one. I hope if you see one at the beach this summer, you stay far away and you take a great picture to show the world that mermaids are real and nursing manatee and we can all see that you have bad eyesight and it's a nursing manatee. Yeah. That's Scared all the Time for this week. Until next time. I'm Chris Calari and I'm Edvacola, and we will see you soon. Bye bye bye. Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari and Edvacola, written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is test Fiful. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual. Stew and mister Disclaimer is and just a. Reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon. You can get all kinds of cool shit in return, depending on the tear you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for a Patreon and Scared All the Time podcast dot com. Don't worry full Steady Cat's welcome. 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