Are Mermaids Fairies? July 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Medieval, Modern
Chris starts our new podcast episode (Mermaid 101) with this question (see title) and I answer ‘yes’. Mermaids (which have featured for over a decade on this site) are social supernatural beings who happen to live in the water rather than on land. They are essentially marine fairies. But there is an important difference in how fairies and mermaids are understood by moderns and, indeed, were understood by the Victorians.
Fairies are not imagined in the modern world as physical creatures. True there was the warbling at the end of the nineteenth century about fairies being a historical, long extinct race. There was also, in the fiction of Buchan and Machen attempts to terrify us with actual pygmy tribes living in the British countryside. But for small limey sasquatches (i.e. living beings) you need wilderness and it just wasn’t that convincing in the mean lanes of Sussex.
Mermaids on the other hand are physical. Why? Whereas fairies got handed off to the theosophists, then the neo-pagans and new agers, mermaids became the purview of cryptozoologists. We see this very clearly already in the 1800s. Note the way that when middle class Britons say that fairies and mermaids exist they meant so in two different ways. Mermaids were an undiscovered species. Fairies were flower essence: Edward Bach on crack; ‘an effusion from the mystic’ etc. etc.
However, if you talked to rural Britons in ‘backward’ coastal areas in the nineteenth century this seems not to have been the case. If they believed in mermaids and fairies they did so in the same way. Mermaids and fairies were both magical beings.
One of the transitions from prior to modern folklore is the spiritualisation of the supernatural. Supernatural beings are generally, in modern imagination, things that can hurt you but that you can put your hand through: the ghost on the stairs not Grendel ripping your head off. We have lost the physicality of the supernatural: consider the slow demise of Britain’s zombies through the middle ages. Mermaids (and Big Foot and co) kept their special status by being annexed by the cryptozoologists. By talking about ‘habitat’, ‘mating populations’ and by slamming fuzzy photographs on the table the cryptos have kept the ancient dignity of the sirens alive.
If you are a supernatural being you better pray to whatever divinity doesn’t approve of you that the cryptos not the spiritually-inclined get you.
Any other thoughts on the physicality of the supernatural: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com
Early Modern Fairy Sex Spell June 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s podcast is on sex and the supernatural. The most extraordinary text I ran across in preparing for our hour ride is the following spell from an early modern English text, edited by Frederika Bain in her ‘The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells’, Preternature 2 (2012), 323-354. It describes the ritual you should […]
Karl Banse: The Man Who Made the Case for Mermaids May 1, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Just a quick post as we move towards the summer. The podcast goes on with me and Chris recently talking about fairy artifacts, the Philip experiment (‘how to invent a ghost’) and this month ‘spectral evidence: the supernatural in court’. I, meanwhile, am diving into mermaid-lore, a love that started many years ago on this […]
The Wood Diva February 5, 2024
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
***I’ve been absent for a couple of months because I was locked out of the account! Just to let you know that Chris and I continue to do our podcasts and there has been an episode on medieval x-files and now bird spirits. This is a fragment of an article on Fairy Census 2 I’ve […]
The Dancing Fairies of Sennen Cove: December 12, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month Chris and I have been enjoying, on the Boggart and Banshee podcast, a fascinating fairy encounter at Sennen Cove, a hamlet, in Cornwall. In 1888 two young women go out to the well at midnight, up on the hill behind their house. I’ve put on this Victorian OS map a red line for […]
The Modern Western Ghost and Its Zombie Origins November 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee podcast is on ghosts and shrouds (Shrouded in Mystery: The Origins of the Iconic Sheeted Ghost). As often with Chris’s choices I didn’t at first get the point: I can only get so excited about textiles… But my attention picked up as I realised (ever the slow learner) that the […]
Horse Spirits: Colt-Pixy or Pixy-Colt? October 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
The latest episode of Boggart and Banshee is on horse spirits and Chris and I disagree on, well, just about everything… There is also a fun accompanying book with seventeen different tales of horse spirits (UK, US). However, you can listen to the podcast for that. I’ve, instead, been caught up with one very simple […]
The When of Levitation in the West September 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Fun and games on the latest Boggart and Banshee podcast with almost an hour given over to questions of levitation and teleportation. As always when I talk to Chris there were revelations, things I’d not realised before. The point that really blew me away was the chronology of levitation. I had assumed that people had […]
The Fairy Census: End Game August 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite
In 2014 (inspired by Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, which I had just edited) I started the Fairy Census. The aim was to gather together first-hand encounters with fairies; or unusual supernatural experiences that could be understood in fairy terms. It took me to 2017 to get to 500 encounters, which were then published freely online. […]
Immortals and Itinerants July 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
This month’s Boggart and Banshee Podcast concerns the immortals in our midst: the men and (in some rare cases) the women who are supposed to live for ever. I’ve long been interested in the most famous of these, the Wandering Jew: the individual cursed by Christ who traipsed from place-to-place imparting wisdom or (in some […]
Devil at the Wedding (Ritual) June 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Chris twisted my arm this month to do a podcast on wedding superstitions. I was rather pessimistic about how interesting this would be (dresses, jilting…), but after a couple of weeks of reading I’d changed my mind. As one folklorist explained things to me ‘it’s all about sex and death’. Here just to give you […]
The Voodoo Soldiers of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh May 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
In 1836 some children discovered a hidden niche on the edge of Arthur’s Seat. In this niche were three shelves, two with eight and one with one miniature coffin and body. Each ‘unit’ had four elements: a coffin, a coffin lid, a doll and clothes. These coffins are the subject of this month’s Boggart and […]
Zombies and Shapechangers in Medieval Yorkshire April 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval
There are twelve medieval supernatural tales in Byland collection, which I’ve just published in a booklet for Pwca press (UK, US)* and which Chris and I discuss on this month’s podcast. And there are four important questions to ask about their author and how they came to be written: the ‘Where’, ‘Who’, ‘When’, and ‘Why’ […]
Pitchforks and Witchcraft in Nineteenth-Century Warwickshire March 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
In this month’s podcast we are looking at the last of the American witches. We also talked a good deal though about their British cousins and particularly witch killings. Here is an especially nasty nineteenth-century witch attack where an individual took it upon himself to do away with a neighbour because she had overlooked his […]
Early New Fairy Wing Reference February 1, 2023
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
Regular readers will know that I have long had an interest in fairy wings. There have been several posts and even an article in 2019. I have tried to defend a position that fairies get wings i) in Britain; and ii) that this happens in the late eighteenth century. Certainly, when I did my research […]
