This week, the readings gave us a deeper dive into the 19th century Mermaid phenomenon and how the populations of Britain and the United States reacted to these “mythical beings.” A trend I took note of, specifically when reading Penguins “The Feejee Mermaid Hoax” and A Human History: Freakshows and Fantasies, is the desperate level of connection humans crave to have with nature, the other, the unknown. The obscene is a reflection upon human knowledge, desire to gain more of it, no matter the cost. Humans want to understand what they are bred and taught to not. “As they had since Medieval times, merpeople continued to strike varying measures of skepticism and credulity, fear and wonder, among Westerners.” (A Human History)  The question I want to dig upon is not the idea of how humans do this but the why? Why do these creatures promote skepticism, wariness, imagination, and creativity? Why are mermaids a phenomenon the human psyche is fixated upon? 

Are they seen as a connection to what we once were, what we could have been? Do they allow us to see a part of ourselves at one with nature in a way in which man can never be again, roots we have long forgotten? Are they to be seen as a warning – a sign of consequence from the removal of oneself from faith and society? All of these questions have surrounded humans since the dawn of the first “mermaid sighting,” another world meant for us to remain separate from. Is this why they remain hidden from us? Are we too unwilling and cruel to the environment and its gifts to behold such a beauty it has created, no communication ever being able to be established with us humans, so far lost from our origin? 

Why is there so much fear surrounding all unknown species? Why are humans so desperate to conceal what we believe we cannot understand? How do we know we won’t understand until it arrives right in front of us? Why is knowledge used as such a weapon of destruction among human kind? Perhaps the mermaid is only one part of our journey – the path towards enlightenment beyond human conception, the world around us we have exploited and refused to truly gaze upon.