Mermaids:- Real or Imagination
A
mermaid is a legendary aquatic creature with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish.
Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Africa and Asia. The first stories appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess A targatis
transformed herself into a mermaid out of shame for accidentally
killing her human lover. Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous
events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks and drownings. In other folk
traditions (or sometimes within the same tradition), they can be
benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with
humans.
Mermaids are associated with the mythological Greek sirens as well as with
sirenia, a biological order comprising dugongs and manatees. Some of the historical sightings by sailors may have been misunderstood encounters with these aquatic mammals. Christopher Columbus
reported seeing mermaids while exploring the Caribbean, and supposed
sightings have been reported in the 20th and 21st centuries in Canada,
Israel, and Zimbabwe.
In mythology, mermaids — or mermaid like creatures — have existed for thousands of years.
The first myths of mermaids may have originated around 1000 B.C. —
stories tell the tale of a Syrian goddess who jumped into a lake to turn
into a fish, but her great beauty could not be changed and only her
bottom half transformed.
Since then, many other mermaid stories have appeared in folklore from
various cultures around the world. For instance, the African water
spirit Mami Wata is mermaid in form, as is the water spirit Lasirn, who
is popular in folklore in the Caribbean Islands.
Throughout history, various explorers have reported sightings of mermaids, the most famous of which was Christopher Columbus.
Columbus claimed to have spotted mermaids near Haiti in 1493, which he
described as being "not as pretty as they are depicted, for somehow in
the face they look like men," according to the American Museum of
Natural History.
Captain John Smith is described in Edward Rowe Snow's "Incredible
Mysteries and Legends of the Sea" (Dodd Mead, January 1967) as seeing a
big-eyed, green-haired mermaid in 1614 off the coast of Newfoundland;
apparently Smith felt "love" for her until he realized she was a fish
from the waist down.
Experts believe Columbus, Smith and other mermaid-spotting explorers
really caught glimpses of human-sized marine mammals called manatees and
dugongs.
Indeed, despite past and recent "sightings" of the mythical sea
creatures, mermaids, like the Lock Ness Monster, may just be a case of
mistaken identity.
With nearly three-quarters of the Earth covered by water, it's little
wonder that, centuries ago, the oceans were believed to contain many
mysterious creatures, including sea serpents and mermaids. Merfolk
(mermaids and mermen) are, of course, only the marine version of
half-human, half-animal legends that have captured human imagination for
ages.C.J.S. Thompson, a former curator at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, noted in his book "The Mystery and Lore of Monsters"
(Kessinger, 2010), "Traditions concerning creatures half-human and
half-fish in form have existed for thousands of years, and the
Babylonian deity Era or Oannes, the Fish-god, is represented on seals
and in sculpture, as being in this shape over 2,000 years B.C. He is
usually depicted as having a bearded head with a crown and a body like a
man, but from the waist downwards, he has the shape of a fish covered
with scales and a tail."
Greek mythology contains stories of the god Triton, the merman messenger
of the sea, and several modern religions, including Hinduism and
Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian belief), worship mermaid goddesses to this
day. In folklore, mermaids were often associated with bad luck and
misfortune. They lured errant sailors off course and even onto rocky
shoals, much like their cousins, the sirens — beautiful, alluring
half-bird, half-women who dwelled near rocky cliffs and sung to passing
sailors. The sirens would enchant men to steer their ships toward the
singing — and the dangerous rocks that were sure to sink them. Homer's
"Odyssey," written around 800 B.C., tells tales of the brave Ulysses,
whose naked ears were tortured by the sweet sounds of the sirens. In
other legends — from Scotland and Wales, for example — mermaids
befriended, and even married, humans.
Scientific Proof
In 1997, the Bloop was
heard on hydrophones across the Pacific. It was a loud, ultra-low
frequency sound that was heard at listening stations underwater over
5,000km apart, and one of many mysterious noises picked up by the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Several articles in
the years that followed popularised one suggestion that the Bloop might
have been the sound of an unknown animal due to the "organic" nature of
the noise, a theory that elevated the Bloop to the level of a great
unsolved mystery.
However, the NOAA is pretty sure that it wasn't an animal, but the sound
of a relatively common event -- the cracking of an ice shelf as it
breaks up from Antarctica. Several people have linked to the NOAA's website over
the past week excitedly claiming that the mystery of the Bloop has been
"solved", but as the information on the NOAA website was undated and
without a source, Wired.co.uk spoke to NOAA and Oregon State University
seismologist Robert Dziak
by email to check it out. He confirmed that the Bloop really was just
an icequake -- and it turns out that's kind of what they always thought
it was. The theory of a giant animal making noises loud enough to be
heard across the Pacific was more fantasy than science.
In Next Blog will show some real proofs to explain this mystery more deeply.
