Speaker 1: Astonishing legends.
Speaker 2: Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language
Speaker 2: and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but
Speaker 2: in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another
Speaker 2: call from me.
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, welcome back to Scare It All the Time.
Speaker 3: I am your host, Chris Colari.
Speaker 1: I'm the other host ed Vacola eating goldfish.
Speaker 3: And this is Scared All the Times. Summer of Year,
Speaker 3: Episode three, Episode eighty of the show.
Speaker 1: Overall, I believe so who knows?
Speaker 3: And we have this summer so far drowned you in
Speaker 3: tsunamis covered you in ticks, and now we are going
Speaker 3: back to the water for something a little bit different.
Speaker 3: This week, we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1: The pretty t shirt con Hey, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 3: Terrified of being in a wet tea shirt contest. No
Speaker 3: one needs to see any of this or.
Speaker 1: A second episode recorded today. I'm in a wet tea
Speaker 1: shirt contest.
Speaker 3: It's getting hot in here this wedding. This week, we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about the prettiest thing in the ocean,
Speaker 3: or what you probably grew up thinking is the prettiest
Speaker 3: thing in the ocean, because the actual original pre Disney
Speaker 3: Mermaid is one of the most consistently terrifying things humans
Speaker 3: have ever come up with, and somehow we ended up
Speaker 3: putting one on lunchboxes and pajamas. Because if you grew
Speaker 3: up in the last forty years, you have a very
Speaker 3: specific picture of what a mermaid is, and that picture
Speaker 3: is a lie the thing. And let's be very clear,
Speaker 3: mermaids are things. The modern mermaid evolved from has been
Speaker 3: trying to hunt, drown, and otherwise curse innocent men and
Speaker 3: women for thousands of years. We feared them, celebrated them,
Speaker 3: and sold them to each other for almost as long.
Speaker 3: And the only thing that's never changed is how dangerous
Speaker 3: they are.
Speaker 1: What are we screwed? When are we all the time? Now?
Speaker 1: Which is time for time?
Speaker 3: Fine scandal? All right? So before we get into anything else,
Speaker 3: we gotta address the elephant in the room, or at
Speaker 3: least the top hat physics. An elephant in the bottom
Speaker 3: half is a fish.
Speaker 1: Which is her age?
Speaker 3: I don't know her age, No, not the age of Ariel,
Speaker 3: but Ariel in general. You cannot have a discussion of
Speaker 3: mermaids in the present day without starting with Ariel from
Speaker 3: The Little Mermaid.
Speaker 1: I think Ariel from The Little Mermaid is a good
Speaker 1: place to start.
Speaker 3: The Little Mermaid came out in nineteen eighty nine, which
Speaker 3: feels like such a long time ago.
Speaker 1: Now I remember, I have the Clamshell upstairs, the infamous clamshell,
Speaker 1: which is the cover that has a clearly has a dick.
Speaker 3: Yes, I guess that's we should mention that too. There
Speaker 3: is a famous urban legend, or not even legend, there
Speaker 3: is a there is a portion of the art on
Speaker 3: the Little Mermaid box cover, well, on the poster that
Speaker 3: became the box cover. Yeah, that looks a lot like dis.
Speaker 1: No, there's one specifically is clearly a dick. I don't
Speaker 1: know these architecture of Atlantis that puts that many veins
Speaker 1: on a building.
Speaker 3: There's also a priest at the end of the movie.
Speaker 3: He has a mary, he has a bone who people
Speaker 3: claim he has a boner. It's it's it's part of
Speaker 3: a run of little myths and legends, some of them true,
Speaker 3: some of them kind of squint if you see it,
Speaker 3: like when Uline. Yeah, things that the animators may or
Speaker 3: may not have hid, and Little Murmy definitely falls into that.
Speaker 3: I believe the origin of that little rumor, well, the
Speaker 3: rumor that animators hid yeah, dirty things in cartoons, I believe,
Speaker 3: And I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty
Speaker 3: sure that in the original Rescuers down Under, not down Under,
Speaker 3: just the Rescuers from like nineteen sixty seven, I think
Speaker 3: an animator there's a scene where the I forget the
Speaker 3: bird's name, but they're flying on the back of the
Speaker 3: bird like past some apartment buildings, and an animator played
Speaker 3: a prank in the original print of that movie where
Speaker 3: he cut out a still frame from a porno and
Speaker 3: put it in one of the windows that they flew past.
Speaker 3: And I believe that that is real, and that the
Speaker 3: film was recalled, like prints that had that were recalled,
Speaker 3: And I think ever since then, it's become this sort
Speaker 3: of legend that there's all these other things you can
Speaker 3: find a dizzy movies. Sometimes legend feels overly generous. In
Speaker 3: the case of the Dix on the Little Mermaid post
Speaker 3: just the one, they're pretty clearly dix somebody thought they
Speaker 3: were having a good time.
Speaker 1: I mean Roger Rabbit, which was on purpose stuff. They're
Speaker 1: not trying to sneak that past sentens for the most part,
Speaker 1: I guess. But the the train, the end tune in
Speaker 1: town when they knocked down the m It's all like
Speaker 1: I think every car is depicting a different murder. It's
Speaker 1: like animated, but still that's what's happening. Yeah, but uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I Little Mermaid, Ariel, great songs, great songs, Alan Mankin,
Speaker 1: the Goat, the Goat, undisputed undername Judy Benson, something dumping Benson.
Speaker 3: I think so Judy or Julie played Ariel.
Speaker 1: Ariel in the original. I think of her name right now,
Speaker 1: something Benson. I think it was.
Speaker 3: That animated film was based on the Hans Christian Anderson
Speaker 3: story from eighteen thirty seven, which also infamously is way
Speaker 3: more depressing than the cartoon.
Speaker 1: It's much more of oh yeah, there's no song was
Speaker 1: about thingham aboves and.
Speaker 3: Yeah it's a dark old fairy tale where I believe
Speaker 3: she dies at the end In the original Hans Christian.
Speaker 1: Anderson, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you got legs, now use them.
Speaker 3: I don't know what that's.
Speaker 1: I just don't know how well you do in the water.
Speaker 1: I don't remember, I never I don't know how the
Speaker 1: original story at all. So the Ursula's scary versus scrivels
Speaker 1: people up the eels and all that shit.
Speaker 3: We'll talk about Ursula in a second, but the film
Speaker 3: The Little Mermaid basically established the modern image of what
Speaker 3: a mermaid is. Even if you go to like pretty
Speaker 3: much since the movie came out in eighty nine, so
Speaker 3: let's say, since nineteen ninety. If you went to a
Speaker 3: five and dime store and got a coloring book about mermaids,
Speaker 3: the mermaid on the cover was basically aerial, but her
Speaker 3: bra was you know, yellow seashells instead of purple, Like
Speaker 3: she became the only mermaid.
Speaker 1: No, Tody Benson, Jody Benson.
Speaker 3: There you go, red hair, seashell bra, fishtail sings, the
Speaker 3: seagulls wants to marry a prince. That's Mermaids as we
Speaker 3: think about it. And really it's about as accurate to
Speaker 3: the original idea of Mermaids as if you like, remade
Speaker 3: Saving Private Ryan and made the Nazis into smurfs or something.
Speaker 3: It's very far off from how Mermaids began.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they they they killed it. It's like a
Speaker 1: character design rules in that movie. Everything's really good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The Killer. I saw the cassette tape, the white cassette
Speaker 1: tape for the like the soundtrack.
Speaker 3: I saw a film print of it at what's the
Speaker 3: theater that Disney own's on Hollywood Bulevard there El Capitan
Speaker 3: copy Tan. I saw a print of it there, and
Speaker 3: seeing it on the big screen, you could really see.
Speaker 1: That it's probably see the boner.
Speaker 3: Well, you can really see the hand drawn animation. You
Speaker 3: can see the lines, oh yeah, you know, moving and like,
Speaker 3: I don't think I'd ever seen a two D or
Speaker 3: animated film projected that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think they would do for any kind
Speaker 1: of CGS stuff until Beauty and the Beast with the
Speaker 1: with the dancing in the ballroom.
Speaker 3: That was the first big one. I want to say
Speaker 3: that they like tested the technology in an earlier film
Speaker 3: with like one shot or something, but yes, basically the
Speaker 3: ballroom and Beauty and.
Speaker 1: The Beast was the first was like, hey, we're doing
Speaker 1: this now. Do you remember that? It was either a
Speaker 1: meme I probably talked about in the show before. It
Speaker 1: makes me laugh, the idea that her bottom half is fish,
Speaker 1: and so there was like it used to be like
Speaker 1: a meme or something that was like is Ariel's poop
Speaker 1: just that like long fish string that like you know
Speaker 1: how when fish poops?
Speaker 3: Like that a long string that feels like something the
Speaker 3: family guy would have done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I don't know if they did it in
Speaker 1: a thing. I'm just saying it was like a meme
Speaker 1: or something. At the time I had seen and I was.
Speaker 3: Like, well that really it's pretty funny image.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty funny image. But here's the thing.
Speaker 3: The giant family of wet things that look kind of
Speaker 3: like a woman and want to kill you exists, and
Speaker 3: basically every culture that has ever lived near a body
Speaker 3: of water, the Greeks, Japanese, Slavs, West Africans, Caribbeans, Brazilian Scots, Irish, Filipinos, Inuits,
Speaker 3: on and on and on. Every single one of those
Speaker 3: creatures is terrifying in their own special way.
Speaker 1: But Ariel was not like a siren. She has a
Speaker 1: beautiful singing voice, but it's not she doesn't want to
Speaker 1: kill anyone. She wants She wants to.
Speaker 3: Dance, for sure, Well she wants to sing, I guess
Speaker 3: she wants to dance. She wants to fall in love.
Speaker 3: But that's part of what I wanted to dive in
Speaker 3: to in this episode, is how we got from these
Speaker 3: terrifying creatures that your parents basically told you about so
Speaker 3: that you wouldn't go swimming alone at night or whatever.
Speaker 1: No money in that, No money in that.
Speaker 3: So today we are going to do a tour of
Speaker 3: some of the original, pre sanitized Mermaids of a bunch
Speaker 3: of different cultures, and then in the back half of
Speaker 3: the episode, we're gonna look at the insanity of how
Speaker 3: people in the West have been faking, hoaxing, and otherwise
Speaker 3: stitching together mermaids for like two hundred years.
Speaker 1: Now. I saw one of them. So when we get
Speaker 1: to that one, I can put up a picture of
Speaker 1: it onlines. I took that pictures with the illegal about it.
Speaker 1: What picture did you take the Fiji Mermaid? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the museum.
Speaker 3: Good, well, we'll get to the Fiji Mermaid.
Speaker 1: I made him into a sticker.
Speaker 3: You did make him into a sticker. You did coming soon,
Speaker 3: A scared all the time sticker pack. Keep your eyes peeled.
Speaker 3: So ed besides taking surreptitious photos of a Fiji mermaid.
Speaker 1: Not had a really good photo of video.
Speaker 3: It's not the original.
Speaker 1: I have a really good video of back in the day,
Speaker 1: Ariel from the movie Little Mermaid HM used to be
Speaker 1: on street in Disneyland in a window at a store
Speaker 1: and she was an animatronic small it was only like
Speaker 1: twelve fourteen inches and she maybe is combing her hair,
Speaker 1: It's unclear, but she rocks back and forth in whoever
Speaker 1: it was the worst. I don't know if they had
Speaker 1: to rush it or if they only got to look
Speaker 1: at a picture varial for like a minute and then
Speaker 1: from memory had to do it. You had to do
Speaker 1: it because you add the rocking. It looked like an
Speaker 1: ad about like don't do drugs, massed out. Her hair
Speaker 1: was all like fuck nodded and like her, like her,
Speaker 1: like her kind of face was sunken in a little
Speaker 1: bit and she was rocking back and forth and just
Speaker 1: looked like dirty in the window. This is Disneyland, This
Speaker 1: isn't right, This isn't a this is weird party. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like imagineers here and that's working on shit. And
Speaker 1: I have a great video from years and years ago
Speaker 1: that it just really conveys that this is just like
Speaker 1: a drug add oled aerial in a window. And that's
Speaker 1: probably my first great Mermaid photo. My second I was
Speaker 1: obviously getting.
Speaker 3: The Fiji Mermaid phizby Mermaid, not the Fiji Murmaid.
Speaker 1: Fuck me right, But Uh, yeah, I do think about
Speaker 1: like they've since changed it, which means they've received my
Speaker 1: letters or they've heard about me talk about this. This
Speaker 1: truly horrifying, Like this is supposed to be main Street Disney,
Speaker 1: not fucking Kensington. Well, we will look like this.
Speaker 3: We will post that video to promote and find it
Speaker 3: if you can find it. So I guess that was
Speaker 3: probably Have you ever been scared of any other mermaids
Speaker 3: or just the meth one in the in the window?
Speaker 1: I think I wasn't scared of the meth one, but
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, look, what's become of aarial uh
Speaker 1: huh spent enough time. I'm older now, she's older. Now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we both took different paths and she ended up addicted
Speaker 1: to fucking seaweed or something. But no, I wasn't afraid
Speaker 1: of it. I'm not afraid of mermaids at all. I'm
Speaker 1: not in the water ever.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it's it's We've we've discussed other water fears
Speaker 3: on this show a number of times, and most of
Speaker 3: those keep us far enoughway from the water that we
Speaker 3: will never cross paths with the mermaid.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I will never see the bottom half of a mermaid.
Speaker 3: I know I probably wouldn't see the top half. I'd
Speaker 3: be so far away from the water.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, even if I'm near the water and
Speaker 1: like a lady, hey, what's up, I'd be like, please,
Speaker 1: I'm just walking by right right. There's nothing you can
Speaker 1: do or say. That's wait for the next guy.
Speaker 3: So when I was a kid, my Mermaid fear is
Speaker 3: that I was actually terrified of the ending of The
Speaker 3: Little Mermaid.
Speaker 1: Well with the shipwreck, stuck with the shipwreck, stuck at
Speaker 1: the end.
Speaker 3: I don't think this is a spoiler for anybody who
Speaker 3: has eyes and ears years. At the end, Prince Eric
Speaker 3: defeats Ursula by by steering the broken bow of his
Speaker 3: ship into her and it basically impales her. Although I
Speaker 3: don't think super graphically on screen, but it's made very
Speaker 3: clear that she has run through with the point the
Speaker 3: end of this ship.
Speaker 1: Did you see the live action one? No, neither, but
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's still the same. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: little more graphic live action. Maybe just see a lady
Speaker 1: getting a boat.
Speaker 3: It's really it's a really aggres I mean, even without
Speaker 3: seeing it, there's there's the lighting in the storm and
Speaker 3: it's like loud It's very intense and aggressive for the
Speaker 3: end of a Disney movie, and I think I was
Speaker 3: trying to think about this as I was writing the episode.
Speaker 3: It's gotta be one of the more violent Disney villain deaths,
Speaker 3: like Scar gets eaten by Hyena's off screen does, but
Speaker 3: the joke is that everyone else falls, and I think
Speaker 3: most of them do. I couldn't think of any other
Speaker 3: Disney villain that's really eaten it in an aggressively violent way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think Jafar got that.
Speaker 3: I don't remember what happened to Jafar, but I don't
Speaker 3: He wasn't beheaded with a scimitar or something like.
Speaker 1: Did you see that thing? And then we're gonna stop
Speaker 1: sangining Did you see the thing just recently of a
Speaker 1: guy explaining how, like fucking Aladdin doesn't actually get any wishes? No,
Speaker 1: but it was very about like dissecting everything he says.
Speaker 1: He never actually like gets anything he asks for. It
Speaker 1: never actually like wishes. It's like kind of crazy.
Speaker 3: Well because he has to. I would say if anyone
Speaker 3: ever asked me to write a movie about a friendly
Speaker 3: genie who gives you the wishes that you asked for,
Speaker 3: as a screenwriter, that's kind of hard because you want
Speaker 3: your characters to go on a journey that is hard
Speaker 3: for them and not just solved by making wishes for things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was something where I forgot exactually the top
Speaker 1: one now, but it was about like he's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I want to be a prince or whatever, and I
Speaker 1: do like a whole song and dance and blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and after he's like, oh, she needs to see the
Speaker 1: real me. I forgot what it was, but they never
Speaker 1: turned him into well.
Speaker 3: He marries a princess at the end.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. If I find it, I'll post
Speaker 1: it somewhere. It just made me laugh of like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, he doesn't doesn't do any of those things.
Speaker 3: I also will say the flip side to being terrified
Speaker 3: of the Little Mermaid is that it did introduce me
Speaker 3: to my first redheaded crush, because I thought Ariel was
Speaker 3: probably the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1: That's why I opened it saying, I do not know
Speaker 1: how old to that point that you don't bring this
Speaker 1: up at all at any point, but here we are
Speaker 1: at that point in one half for one half of
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true. Also, when you're when you're three years old,
Speaker 3: you're really not thinking about the bottom. I was thinking
Speaker 3: about the top part.
Speaker 1: If anything, a lady who pooped big long strings would
Speaker 1: be like the perfect lady three to five years old.
Speaker 1: It's hilarious.
Speaker 3: Unlike other cartoon crushes though, Like we've talked about other
Speaker 3: embarrassing cartoon crushes people have had on this show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mine's from Mine was a mouse. Was a lot
Speaker 1: of wrench wheel gadgets. Yeah, gidget, gadget gadget.
Speaker 3: I am not the first person to say this, but
Speaker 3: that whole run of Disney princesses in the early nineties
Speaker 3: Bell was a baddie jasmine, Like forget about it, like
Speaker 3: they were. Look, I'm not Zimba's girlfriend, Zimma's girlfriend. Anyway,
Speaker 3: while we're on the topic of myrrhmdia, I do have
Speaker 3: to shout out Cabin in the Woods for probably the
Speaker 3: most accurate scary MIRR person ever put to film. It's
Speaker 3: slimy and crawling and mostly mouthed. So if you want
Speaker 3: to get a real good look at a real merrhman
Speaker 3: and you're listening to the show and haven't seen Cabin
Speaker 3: in the Woods. Please go watch it immediately. It's incredible.
Speaker 1: Yes, it is a good movie, but I wouldn't be
Speaker 1: surprised if they hadn't seen it. I felt like it
Speaker 1: had its moment and then it very much disappeared it shouldn't.
Speaker 1: I saw it in theaters and I joyed it, but
Speaker 1: I never revisited it. So I love it.
Speaker 3: I think it's brilliant. But the question that we want
Speaker 3: to answer on this episode is how did we get
Speaker 3: from the flesh eating monstrosity portrayed in Cabin in the
Speaker 3: Woods two characters that wouldn't look out of place and
Speaker 3: often nowadays are found on anime body pillows. The first
Speaker 3: thing we have to understand is that the modern Mermaid
Speaker 3: is actually a combination of two different legends fish people
Speaker 3: in one bucket, maybe a literal bucket. You could have
Speaker 3: gone them and with them in a real bucket. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and sirens. You might be as surprised as I was
Speaker 3: to learn that these two are not actually one and
Speaker 3: the same, or they weren't. They sort of became one
Speaker 3: and the same. But according to Mermaids of Earth dot
Speaker 3: com oh finally, which I checked, there is no Mermaids
Speaker 3: of Mars. I was curious to see Quote. The first
Speaker 3: known mentioned human history of a human figure with a
Speaker 3: fish tail is from about five thousand BC, where Babylonian
Speaker 3: mythology of the god Aya described is having the body
Speaker 3: of both a man and a fish. Iow was later
Speaker 3: known by the Greeks as Oanis and by some Semitic
Speaker 3: tribes as Dagon. I also think is a villain in Lovecraft. Oh,
Speaker 3: but that kind of makes sense, I guess, because Lovecraft
Speaker 3: was infamously anti Semitic, So maybe he just stole the
Speaker 3: name and turned it into a villain. Anyway, over time,
Speaker 3: these early fish human deities evolved from symbolic sacred figures
Speaker 3: into beings more recognizable as mermaids. The Assyrians and later
Speaker 3: the Greeks Quote dramatically expanded and refined the concept of mermaids,
Speaker 3: introducing se nymphs, ocean gods, sirens, and fishtailed beings that
Speaker 3: would deeply influence later Western depictions. Strangely, the other creature
Speaker 3: most influential to the modern mermaid was also Greek, but
Speaker 3: had very little to do with the world of King Triton. No,
Speaker 3: it's sirens, sirens.
Speaker 1: I thought, We're just going, like, what else is half a.
Speaker 3: Thing in Homer's The Odyssey. Yeah, we all know the
Speaker 3: sirens call coming soon to a theater near you.
Speaker 1: Oh fuck, is that what he's made? Nolan?
Speaker 3: Chris Nolan, Yeah, he made the Odyssey.
Speaker 1: It looks terrible.
Speaker 3: I want I really have no beef with Chris Nolan.
Speaker 3: I don't love all shot trailer for Odyssey looks rough.
Speaker 1: It does. I was shocked to see that it was
Speaker 1: the first complete movie shot in Imaxcuse everything's always like
Speaker 1: shot in Imax, shot four imax.
Speaker 3: Right, but it's always ten minutes of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess this is the first one begining, and
Speaker 1: he's long enough.
Speaker 3: Probably the only way to see it, certainly, don't want
Speaker 3: to be watching it, I guess on airplane. Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 3: In the Odyssey, the Real Odyssey, Homer, the poet who
Speaker 3: wrote it, mentions a dangerous creature that Odysseus crosses paths with,
Speaker 3: something called a siren. He's first told about sirens by
Speaker 3: a sorceress named Circe, who warns him about these creatures
Speaker 3: in book twelve of the Odyssey, saying quote, whoever encounters
Speaker 3: them unawares and listens to their voices will never joy
Speaker 3: at reaching home his wife.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is like, I gotta get home.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and CIRs is telling him, you cross these sirens,
Speaker 3: you will never reach home, where your wife and children
Speaker 3: will never greet you. Instead, the sirens tempt him with
Speaker 3: their limpid song as they sit there in the meadow
Speaker 3: with a vast heap of moldering corpses bones on which
Speaker 3: hangs the shriveled skin. The voice of the siren, or
Speaker 3: as you just mentioned, the siren song, is one of
Speaker 3: these signature traits of what we now call a mermaid.
Speaker 3: And actually I'd never really thought about this before, but
Speaker 3: kind of a brilliant thing to turn into an animated
Speaker 3: movie musical also singing aspect, and make it fun.
Speaker 1: It's also why she wants it, Ursula.
Speaker 3: That's true. Hour Yeah, yeah, maybe I might be. This
Speaker 3: is how dumb we are on this show. I'm just
Speaker 3: realizing this. And then my second thought was like, oh,
Speaker 3: I think maybe everybody else in the world already put
Speaker 3: two and two together on that, but I never really
Speaker 3: thought about it.
Speaker 1: It's funny she does give up. It's a bad deal.
Speaker 1: It's really bad, Like she gave up the super powerful
Speaker 1: thing to get legs that you can barely use Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the three days three days is not enough time
Speaker 1: to figure out love sh Yeah, enough time to figure
Speaker 1: out all the bottom half, Especially when.
Speaker 3: You're used to your poop coming out in a big,
Speaker 3: long string and a sudden yeah, you've got human poop.
Speaker 3: You don't want to be part of.
Speaker 1: That world that is something like what just pooping while
Speaker 1: walking because you're so used to doing it while swimming? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that date ends poorly.
Speaker 3: M hmm, first date right down the drain.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Men are dumb for all we know.
Speaker 3: It was fun, okay. But part of the reason, in
Speaker 3: my defense, part of the reason that I probably never
Speaker 3: put two and two together on this, is that the
Speaker 3: ancient Greek sirens are not fish people at all. They're
Speaker 3: bird people. From the waist up, they look like women,
Speaker 3: but from the waist down they look like birds.
Speaker 1: That's that goose foot from the Christmas episode for al
Speaker 1: perkta Bertha. Shirt's no longer available.
Speaker 3: According to National Geographic That is because birds in ancient
Speaker 3: Greece were closely associated with death sirens. Bird legs and
Speaker 3: wings show that they are liminal creatures who dwell betwixted
Speaker 3: between their connection with the sea, which the ancient Greeks
Speaker 3: considered profoundly dangerous, and their wings situate them somewhere between
Speaker 3: earth and air. And in the original text, the song itself,
Speaker 3: it turns out, is not even seduction, which is something
Speaker 3: I learned researching this episode, and it kind of blew
Speaker 3: my mind. The modern implication of the siren song is romantic.
Speaker 1: That's what I always imagined, if not like explicitly sexual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but for all we know, it's like, come on down
Speaker 1: and get chicken wings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were saying, you can call me al.
Speaker 1: I love that.
Speaker 3: I really love that song growing up.
Speaker 1: I love it now.
Speaker 3: Emily Wilson, who's a classicist at the University of Pennsylvania
Speaker 3: and the first woman who published a complete English translation
Speaker 3: of the Odyssey, points out that what the sirens are
Speaker 3: actually offering Odysseus is not sex. They are offering knowledge.
Speaker 3: They tell him they will sing him every secret of
Speaker 3: the Trojan War, every glory of every Greek hero, everything
Speaker 3: that ever happened, and everything that's ever going to happen,
Speaker 3: which I think if you fall prey to that is
Speaker 3: a much nerdier death than falling prey to wanting to
Speaker 3: be laid.
Speaker 1: Isn't he a He was like a he was like
Speaker 1: in charge of the army. Yes, well, and so for him,
Speaker 1: it's like he wants to learn about like fucking tactics
Speaker 1: and whatever. Also, is you don't want a trip on
Speaker 1: the way home, So if I can learn the best
Speaker 1: route to take the fastest route home, that's also maybe
Speaker 1: fuck these birds. I mean that's like a win win
Speaker 1: win win win.
Speaker 3: That's true, that's true. I guess I was imagining. Knowledge
Speaker 3: is more like I could be tempted if if a
Speaker 3: bird woman was like, I'll tell you what color feathers
Speaker 3: your favorite dinosaur had, and I'd be like, I'm listening.
Speaker 1: Also, that's not even knowledge. It's just that's like a
Speaker 1: mentalist who could tell you something you already knew.
Speaker 3: Well, we don't know what color feathers dinosaur has had.
Speaker 1: I thought it, just thought. I thought you said that
Speaker 1: they could tell you your favorite colored dinosaur.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no no, I was saying.
Speaker 1: And there's like, no one's gonna guess purple. If they
Speaker 1: got that, then they too have the pot they've watched Barney.
Speaker 1: Oh fuck yeah, I never him.
Speaker 3: So National Geographic tells us that quote sirens retained their
Speaker 3: bird bodies into the time of the Roman Empire and
Speaker 3: well beyond. Pliny the Elder includes them in The Fabulous Birds,
Speaker 3: a section of his Natural History written around seventy seven AD,
Speaker 3: claiming they lull men to sleep with their song and
Speaker 3: tear them to pieces, though in Pliny's defense, he is
Speaker 3: skeptical that they actually exist.
Speaker 1: Sure, but I had a page count that I agreed to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a due date in a page count. Yeah,
Speaker 3: fucking sirens are going the birds yep. Around the time
Speaker 3: the Middle Ages, though there is a shift. A seventh
Speaker 3: or eighth century text called the Libre Monstroum describes a
Speaker 3: siren with a fishtail. There's a Romanesque stone carving at
Speaker 3: Durham Castle Chapel from around ten to seventy eight that
Speaker 3: shows a fishtailed mermaid in a Christian context.
Speaker 1: When did we get more into boats?
Speaker 3: I'm just a great question.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Like the bird thing might be people
Speaker 1: were walking a lot more prior to that, and then
Speaker 1: they look up and see a bird and they think, man, well.
Speaker 3: The Greeks were sailing around.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, they all lived on islands and shit.
Speaker 1: I'm just wondering, if you know more people are on
Speaker 1: the water top of mind.
Speaker 3: Well, there's there's a couple there's a couple of reasons
Speaker 3: for some of this, But before they really combined, there
Speaker 3: is a to me like potentially very funny few hundred
Speaker 3: years where both versions kind of coexisted at the same time.
Speaker 3: So you had some people who were like bird siren
Speaker 3: people and some people who were fish siren people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're like these fish fuckers that are coming to
Speaker 1: our house. Yeah yeah, yeah, they get out of here.
Speaker 3: If only they'd had the Internet. The debates that could
Speaker 3: have been had.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, every one of them ended in a.
Speaker 3: Duel, but in the end the fish people won.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 3: That shift is probably thanks in part to the strong
Speaker 3: Greek and Roman tradition of unrelated sea gods like Triton,
Speaker 3: as well as the sirens association with water, but it's
Speaker 3: also thanks in no small part to the influence of
Speaker 3: Celtic folklore traditions. According to Marie Claire Bouleau, an associate
Speaker 3: professor of classical studies at Tufts University, this fusion represents
Speaker 3: a fascinating syncretism of cultures. She highlights a fourteenth century
Speaker 3: legend regarding the early Irish Christian saint Brendan the Navigator,
Speaker 3: whose voyages mirror those of Odysseus. I said, voyage is
Speaker 3: funny because in my mind I heard voyages of the Navigator.
Speaker 3: But really the movie is Flight of the Navigator.
Speaker 1: Oh, I heard voyage of the Memi, my brand, Voyage
Speaker 1: of the Memi.
Speaker 3: She highlights a fourteenth century legend regarding the early Irish
Speaker 3: Christian saint Brendan the Navigator, whose voyages mirror those of Odysseus.
Speaker 3: In his own odyssey, Brendan meets a siren that modern
Speaker 3: viewers would instantly recognize as a mermaid. Sure, the story's nuts, though.
Speaker 3: She's a fish woman who is harpooned by his men,
Speaker 3: and then he revives her. It offers her the Eucharist
Speaker 3: before she accepts Christ's to comes to her wounds, and
Speaker 3: goes to heaven.
Speaker 1: Oh so he didn't save her, No, I mean in
Speaker 1: many ways he did.
Speaker 3: He did.
Speaker 1: In his mind he did. In his mind he did.
Speaker 1: But I think she would have enjoyed swimming a bit more.
Speaker 3: She probably was not psyched about getting harpooned and pulled
Speaker 3: upon a board a boat.
Speaker 1: Hey, you think the other mermaids in heaven. He's like,
Speaker 1: I have no idea.
Speaker 3: You're gonna find out about to find it ten minutes.
Speaker 1: I also wonder if boat people, if sailors and stuff
Speaker 1: water stuff seems like kind of like foo fighters and
Speaker 1: like the war in World War two where they had
Speaker 1: like goblins on plane, like pilots saw weird shit. I
Speaker 1: feel there's only two people who were coming back and
Speaker 1: being like, you wouldn't believe what I saw. And by
Speaker 1: the way, you can't verify any of it because you're
Speaker 1: not in the sky, You're just a person doesn't fly.
Speaker 1: And then sailors, you're like gone for months at a
Speaker 1: time at sea, don't even see the land or anything,
Speaker 1: come back with all these crazy stories. Probably saw a
Speaker 1: glowing jelly fish, thought it was a ghost. Yeah. Then
Speaker 1: they come back like we saw sirens or they were
Speaker 1: probably seals, and they get like drunk on rum and
Speaker 1: then they like now these like big tall sea shanty
Speaker 1: tails and then everyone's like, no, I did I did
Speaker 1: see a mermaid? And then everyone on land and who
Speaker 1: was like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 3: We've never seen anything like anything like that. They're like, well,
Speaker 3: and so that's why we have a cooler job than you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so maybe I could see how a lot of
Speaker 1: like lore can come from people who are at seas. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I mean I think I think the reason that
Speaker 3: so many seed dwelling or seafaring I guess not dwelling
Speaker 3: seafaring cultures came up with mermaid stories is, you know,
Speaker 3: we see what's what's the term paradoila or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you see faces and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we see human form in many, many things. And
Speaker 3: so I think, you know, it's not surprising to me
Speaker 3: that every culture would have some version of Yeah, you
Speaker 3: wouldn't believe what I saw out there.
Speaker 1: And speaking of cultures, you're only on a boat to
Speaker 1: like probably do some sort of trade. Yeah, and so hey,
Speaker 1: what stories get swapped? Yeah, like you're meeting totally different cultures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people who look like birds you want to fuck? Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, however, the story is spread. By the nineteenth century,
Speaker 3: the link between sirens, mermaids, and the temptations they offered solidified,
Speaker 3: as artists turned repeatedly to depicting these creatures with flowing
Speaker 3: hair and pale skin. A definitive example of the look
Speaker 3: of these nineteenth century mermaids is a painting called the Siren,
Speaker 3: which you've probably seen before. It's I think it's a
Speaker 3: fairly well known Victorian era painting in which this beautiful
Speaker 3: young woman is kind of looking down upon shipwrecked sailors
Speaker 3: who appears, you know, kind of like entranced but also
Speaker 3: scared of what he's seeing. But not all cultures. That's
Speaker 3: a very European way still of looking at mermaids. Not
Speaker 3: all cultures viewed mermaids the same way. The rest of
Speaker 3: the world has their own descriptions of fish people with
Speaker 3: their own powers and tricks and cruelties waiting to be
Speaker 3: visited upon humans. So we do a lot of like
Speaker 3: Greek and Roman stuff. I figured we try to mix
Speaker 3: it up a little bit on this episode. So so
Speaker 3: many cultures have myrr people, and we'll start in Japan
Speaker 3: with the nan or human fish is literally what that
Speaker 3: translates to. It's important to distinguish the ningo from the
Speaker 3: nime ghen, which is a well known newer Japanese cryptid
Speaker 3: described as a massive sixty to ninety foot aquatic humanoid
Speaker 3: that's like pale, pasty white and found in the freezing
Speaker 3: waters of the southern and Subantarctic oceans that cryptid was
Speaker 3: I believe, invented on a website called two chan and
Speaker 3: sort of like slender Man, sort of spread around.
Speaker 1: Okay, so there's no sea shanties about this, No, but
Speaker 1: there are.
Speaker 3: Presumably four the ningo according to the description of the
Speaker 3: ningo that gets repeated in Japanese sources, and I'm pulling
Speaker 3: here from Matthew Meyer's site Yokai dot com, which is
Speaker 3: the same resource on Japanese folklore that brought us tales
Speaker 3: of the little asset in kappas and a haunted Japanese doll.
Speaker 3: I think in our episode, the ningo has golden scales,
Speaker 3: a small monkey like mouth full of sharp teeth, no fingers,
Speaker 3: and a voice like a flute, which I think is
Speaker 3: kind of interesting that it's another voice based, pleasant voice
Speaker 3: kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Dam without fingers, can't play a flute, No, definitely not.
Speaker 1: So you're not singing It'm doing.
Speaker 3: It, not playing guitar, not playing flute, not playing nothing.
Speaker 3: The ningo, in myth and legend are bad news. Catching
Speaker 3: one brings storms. A n ingo washing up on a
Speaker 3: beach is an omen of war. Basically, Japanese legend says,
Speaker 3: if you see a n inggo the correct response is
Speaker 3: to not tell anyone, do not capture it, throw it back,
Speaker 3: go home, forget about it. But interestingly, there is also
Speaker 3: a tradition that says if you actually eat the flesh
Speaker 3: of a ningo, you become immortal, which brings us to
Speaker 3: the story of Yao Bikuni. Yao Bikuni means roughly the
Speaker 3: eight hundred year old nun, and her story takes place
Speaker 3: in Wakasa Province, which is part of Japan on the
Speaker 3: Sea of Japan, around modern day Obama City, which is
Speaker 3: the actual name of the city and has nothing to
Speaker 3: do with President Obama.
Speaker 1: I don't know why it would.
Speaker 3: Yo kite yo kid dot com tells the story like this.
Speaker 3: Long ago in Wakasa Province, there lived a young woman,
Speaker 3: the daughter of a poor fisherman. One day, her father
Speaker 3: was invited to a banquet at the home of a
Speaker 3: wealthy man in town. He was led into the kitchen
Speaker 3: and shown the most unusual fish he'd ever seen. Its
Speaker 3: body was that of a fish, but its face was
Speaker 3: clearly that of a human being, just the face somehow worse. Also,
Speaker 3: the legend calls it a human being and not ash
Speaker 3: pointy tooth monkey man, but you know, we'll go with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they said the mouth is a little monkey as mouth.
Speaker 3: The fisherman was horrified, but his host insisted that the
Speaker 3: meat would grant whoever ate it eternal youth and long life,
Speaker 3: which is completely bullshit.
Speaker 1: Beyind like, why wouldn't you be the rich guy? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Out of I think maybe the rich guy wanted to
Speaker 3: find out what would happen if you ate it, Like
Speaker 3: the cup the chalice at the Endine Last Crusade. He
Speaker 3: didn't want to be the first one to take a bite,
Speaker 3: but out of curiosity, the fisherman secretly wrapped up a
Speaker 3: piece of this ningo to take home and study. When
Speaker 3: he returned home, he'd forgotten all about it. Somehow.
Speaker 1: That's ridiculous.
Speaker 3: The immortal fish meat that you brought with you. You
Speaker 3: stole that you stole You were like, oh, yeah, where
Speaker 3: did I put.
Speaker 1: That into that? I just have such a burning desire
Speaker 1: to always be stealing. But I actually forgot about it.
Speaker 3: But his daughter, only sixteen years old, found the package
Speaker 3: and ate the meat before he could stop her.
Speaker 1: I will say, in this case, they are a culture
Speaker 1: who enjoys raw fish meat. Yeah, but I'm not sure
Speaker 1: how you caught a fish so that it's okay to
Speaker 1: eat that way. So I don't know if they cooked
Speaker 1: it or if she just like took it from his
Speaker 1: pocket and ate it.
Speaker 3: I think she just took it from his pocket or
Speaker 3: wherever it was hidden and ate it. And turns out
Speaker 3: this rich guy was right on the money.
Speaker 1: It works. She lives eight hundred years forever.
Speaker 3: Her dad eventually dies, her husband dies, everyone around her dies.
Speaker 1: Does she grow old? No, so she just stays a
Speaker 1: little kid.
Speaker 3: She keeps living and living and living, she.
Speaker 1: Says, a little kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It just a beautiful letter.
Speaker 1: The letter in the nunnery. Well, yeah, so one of
Speaker 1: the nuns here is a child. No, I don't think
Speaker 1: that's weird. I mean married christ.
Speaker 3: I think back then sixteen was probably considered. You know,
Speaker 3: you were a young woman making her way in the world.
Speaker 3: You know, people were dying at thirty, so when you
Speaker 3: were middle aged, I don't know.
Speaker 1: If anyone was ever dying at thirty in Japan.
Speaker 3: Well, the part of the story that is really scary
Speaker 3: and touches on something we've talked about on this show before.
Speaker 3: Although yes, the human headed fish is very gross, the
Speaker 3: horror is that the gift of immortality becomes isolation. She
Speaker 3: watches every single person she loves die, and then every
Speaker 3: person they love dies, and eventually the world kind of
Speaker 3: stops making sense because every cultural reference point you grew
Speaker 3: up with goes away and you just keep living. So
Speaker 3: Yao Bikuni lives for eight hundred years. She becomes a
Speaker 3: Buddhist nun. She wanders Japan does good works, because what
Speaker 3: else are you going to do?
Speaker 1: At this point, I guess she didn't marry christ I
Speaker 1: take it back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yeah, that's also true. You were thinking, you
Speaker 3: were thinking, like wearing no different kind of none, And
Speaker 3: she kind of left this trail of legends behind her.
Speaker 3: There's towns all across Japan that have their own Yao
Speaker 3: Bikuni story, a local site where she stopped, a temple
Speaker 3: that has a relic of hers. The story ends like this.
Speaker 3: After hundreds of years, Yao Bikuni grew weary of the world.
Speaker 3: I would not have taken hundreds of years to grow
Speaker 3: weary of the world. I'm about to turn forty, and
Speaker 3: I am very weary of the world. So she has
Speaker 3: a stronger spine than I do. She retired in Wakasa
Speaker 3: Province and took up residence in a cave. There, she
Speaker 3: prayed day and night to be free of her curse.
Speaker 3: She never moved from the cave, and eventually she sat
Speaker 3: for so long that she turned into stone. It is
Speaker 3: said that in one of the caves around Wakasa, there
Speaker 3: stands a stone that looks just like a beautiful young woman.
Speaker 1: Okay, how much like dangerously like yeah, like I want
Speaker 1: to I want to make sure.
Speaker 3: Well, look, there's a reason no one's given directions to
Speaker 3: the cave, all right.
Speaker 1: I just meant that I want to see it and
Speaker 1: make sure it's not just rock shaped. Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: everyone's like, you see it like a rock? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: want to if I see a lady who looks like
Speaker 1: a terra cotta pot whatever the hell that th Littlectta
Speaker 1: soldiers all different, you know, country. But I'm saying, you
Speaker 1: look at that and you're like, that's a man.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But if it's just like a you know, a paradoila
Speaker 1: ass rock, yeah.
Speaker 3: So that's the Japanese Mermaid story.
Speaker 1: I thought they'd have more.
Speaker 3: Honestly, well that, I mean, there's there are to me,
Speaker 3: that's the most interesting twist on the Mermaid story. I
Speaker 3: guess in Japanese culture, the n NGO have lots of
Speaker 3: legends in myth, but I like the there there aren't
Speaker 3: any other mermaids stories that I'm aware of that eating
Speaker 3: their flesh grants you immortality, So I thought that was
Speaker 3: a particularly But also.
Speaker 1: By the way, had no interaction with anyone. This guy's like, hey,
Speaker 1: I found this fit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well it's kind of Actually when I read it, it
Speaker 3: reminded me a little bit of Gremlins. It's like a dad,
Speaker 3: you know, a kind of blue collar dad takes something
Speaker 3: he probably I mean he buys it in Gremlins, but
Speaker 3: he probably shouldn't take gives it to the kid. In
Speaker 3: this case, she steals, you.
Speaker 1: Know what I'm saying. Even the rich guys, I don't
Speaker 1: know where he got that fit. We know nothing about
Speaker 1: this fish. There was no moment where it was like
Speaker 1: let me live in a grunts you and then they
Speaker 1: kill it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was just like, hey, look I got a got
Speaker 1: a fucking weird fish. I want to eat it. This
Speaker 1: could be something you eat a little bit of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It was just like where'd
Speaker 1: you get that fish? Like if you tell me all
Speaker 1: that shit about fucking ningos or whatever. I never would
Speaker 1: have well, it is.
Speaker 3: It is an ingo in the story, although I guess
Speaker 3: I do find it kind of interesting that the dad
Speaker 3: wasn't like gasp, but that's he's just like, yikes, what
Speaker 3: happened to that fish? Why does it have a human head.
Speaker 1: With a monkey mouth?
Speaker 3: The monkey mouth?
Speaker 1: The meat is very tender. Don't worry about that monkey
Speaker 1: see monkey ski? Do there might be something in that
Speaker 1: the jet ski? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Water based, I don't know. This is the second podcast
Speaker 3: we're recording today. So from Japan, we're gonna swing down
Speaker 3: to West Africa to meet Mammy Wata. Mammy Wata is complicated.
Speaker 3: She is the water deity of basically the entire West
Speaker 3: and Central African coast, which includes a lot of land
Speaker 3: and a lot of countries.
Speaker 1: Don't think I met her when I was in Ghana.
Speaker 1: You may have.
Speaker 3: Her name is some people say pigeon English, which Mami
Speaker 3: Wata meaning mother water. And that alone tells you something
Speaker 3: important about where she comes from, which is that kind
Speaker 3: of collision zone of African beliefs in European trade contact
Speaker 3: and the Transatlantic slave trade. She's depicted as a mermaid
Speaker 3: or as a beautiful woman holding a giant snake, or
Speaker 3: sometimes both. Sometimes her bottom half is fish, sometimes her
Speaker 3: bottom half is snake. Some people say her name is
Speaker 3: indicative of pigeon English, but some say that derives actually
Speaker 3: from the Egyptian words Mama meaning truth or wisdom and
Speaker 3: uatur meaning ocean. Okay, according to an article I found
Speaker 3: about Mama Wata on ebsco, which is just like a
Speaker 3: research site, she quote embodies duality, serving as both a
Speaker 3: symbol of fortune and a potential harbinger of misfortune. Part
Speaker 3: of why these rays or so all over the place
Speaker 3: is that Mammy Wata is not just one lady, It's
Speaker 3: a whole family of water spirits. This is a tradition
Speaker 3: that stretches back to ancient African civilizations from around forty
Speaker 3: five hundred BC, and when the slave trade forcibly moved
Speaker 3: people across the ocean, Mammi Wata went with them, creating
Speaker 3: this African diaspora that carried water spirits to the Caribbean
Speaker 3: and South America. So in the classic myths, Mammi Wata
Speaker 3: is basically a kidnapper.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: She snatches people, men, women, kids, doesn't really matter who
Speaker 3: get too close to the water.
Speaker 1: Okay, I didn't even want to sing, No, no singing
Speaker 1: at all. Now this one has fingers and they're grabbing
Speaker 1: you with them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, exactly. She's she's she's warming up to play
Speaker 3: flute and she's ready to snatch.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Sometimes when she's grabbing humans off the land, she's looking
Speaker 3: for a consort, dragging a man down to her underwater
Speaker 3: kingdom or a spirit plane to see if he's worthy
Speaker 3: of her oh wow. Other times she's just passing judgment.
Speaker 3: Sometimes you just grabbed a person to be like, hey,
Speaker 3: are you cool enough to hang? And if she decided
Speaker 3: you're worthy of her favor, you might get sent back
Speaker 3: to the surface with any number of gifts, from spiritual
Speaker 3: enlightenment to wealth or a higher social status. And it
Speaker 3: was often said that you returned to the surface more
Speaker 3: beautiful than when you were pulled beneath the waves. Oh
Speaker 3: little glow up, nice little glow up, a nice little bonus.
Speaker 3: But if you weren't judged positively, you were drowned and eaten. Okay,
Speaker 3: well you stayed there forever, whether she devoured you whole
Speaker 3: or whatever, you were fucked. But there was this flip
Speaker 3: side of the coin. Now, there is no Little Mermaid
Speaker 3: siren song singing association with Mami Wata, but there is
Speaker 3: something else that I thought was kind of interesting that
Speaker 3: does have sort of a little Mermaid aerial connection. Whether
Speaker 3: or not the people who made little were made we're
Speaker 3: at all aware of this, I don't know. But two
Speaker 3: of the objects commonly associated with Mommy Wata are combs
Speaker 3: and mirrors.
Speaker 1: Hey, and you know.
Speaker 3: Ariel has a collection of stuff. She has the dingle hopper,
Speaker 3: which is the fork that she uses as a.
Speaker 1: Cume just think, which is like a wine opener or whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she is, and what's its galore? And I guess
Speaker 3: my point is just that it's interesting that, like, trinkets
Speaker 3: are part of Mammy Watta's whole thing, and Ariel has
Speaker 3: a collections arinket, a grotto of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, grottos.
Speaker 3: Now, Mommy Watsas were usually just these combs and mirrors
Speaker 3: that she would use sort of as a trap. In
Speaker 3: some tales, she'll be sitting by the water basically just
Speaker 3: brushing her hair and looking in the mirror, but if
Speaker 3: someone approaches, she jumps back into the water and leaves
Speaker 3: the objects behind. If this person was a thief, and
Speaker 3: picked them up and took them away. She would start
Speaker 3: to haunt that person's dreams.
Speaker 1: That's entrapment. It really, there was no one here.
Speaker 3: If I find I'm sorry if I find anything on
Speaker 3: a beach, especially if there's no one around and it's
Speaker 3: not in a backpack finders keepers, it's just loose items. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it feels, it feels a little intensely. This is like
Speaker 3: Old Testament intensely judgmental spirit being to be like, oh,
Speaker 3: you want to take my shit?
Speaker 1: Might be picking up bring it to loss and found.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well she knew she would know where it ended up,
Speaker 3: because if you took it home, she would haunt your
Speaker 3: dreams trying to get it back, just your dreams.
Speaker 1: Well, she doesn't come on land like a sea hag.
Speaker 3: Well, careful you're calling a hag, buddy, Mammy Wanta will
Speaker 3: not take kindly.
Speaker 1: It is well, I mean, yeah, see which whatever. This
Speaker 1: was also.
Speaker 3: Another way though, of working deals, which is something that
Speaker 3: Mommy Watsa seems to.
Speaker 1: Do a lot interest into bartering.
Speaker 3: There's a there's if not bartering, there's at least the
Speaker 3: good version there.
Speaker 1: You get.
Speaker 3: It's like that, it's like a resident evil game there's
Speaker 3: the good ending and the bad ending, right, like, if
Speaker 3: you play things right, you'll get rewarded. So while she's
Speaker 3: haunting your dreams, she wants her things back, but she
Speaker 3: wants a deal. If you give back her treasure and
Speaker 3: promise to be faithful to her, you get unbelievable luck
Speaker 3: and treasure.
Speaker 1: What is faithful me? And I need to see the contract? Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know what I have to pray
Speaker 1: to you. I gotta go in there and do other
Speaker 1: weird shit in the water.
Speaker 3: I think it is more of a prayerful faithfulness, a
Speaker 3: belief in her, a trusting in her. I don't know
Speaker 3: that you necessarily have to give her anything else. Maybe
Speaker 3: she starts asking for bodies at some point. That wasn't
Speaker 3: in any of the literature blackmails.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell everybody you fucking steal combs, your comb
Speaker 1: stealing piece of shit, unless you give me a bunch
Speaker 1: of more combs.
Speaker 3: But if you refuse to return her property, or you
Speaker 3: don't show her there's my.
Speaker 1: Comb now, the respect idiot she's owed.
Speaker 3: If you don't show her the respect she's owed as
Speaker 3: a water goddess, she will rain punishments upon you. So
Speaker 3: you know again, I think not only is it a
Speaker 3: little bit entrapmant to leave your stuff on the beach
Speaker 3: and be like, what are you doing my stuff? Also
Speaker 3: that being a way for her to then come to
Speaker 3: you and be like, hey, give my stuff back. It's
Speaker 3: like she's forcing a deal that you never really even
Speaker 3: want it.
Speaker 1: Really, it's it's it's toxic traits. It is, it is.
Speaker 1: It's a little mafia and yeah, it's a very black man.
Speaker 3: Be ashamed of something happened to your place here kind
Speaker 3: of a thing.
Speaker 1: I would hold up that mirror I just found on
Speaker 1: the beach to her and be like, I'm gonna show
Speaker 1: you someone's being unreasonable. I hold it up to her face.
Speaker 3: Besides these elements of her myth that you don't find
Speaker 3: in a lot of other Mermaid tales, one of the
Speaker 3: other things that I really think is fascinating about Mommy
Speaker 3: Wata and probably makes her one of one of the
Speaker 3: most powerful, at least living Mermaid traditions on Earth in
Speaker 3: sense not in the sense that she is literally alive,
Speaker 3: but that the myth continues. Is because of this traveling
Speaker 3: through the diaspora, she has shown up in different cultures
Speaker 3: as different beings, I mean all rooted back to the
Speaker 3: same thing. So when Haiti, she became La Serene, who
Speaker 3: shows up in voodoo ceremonies. In Cuba, she got fused
Speaker 3: with Yamaya, the Santa Ria ocean goddess. In Brazil she
Speaker 3: became Le Manja, who is still honored on New Year's
Speaker 3: Eve when millions of people in white go to the
Speaker 3: beach and float candles and flowers out into the surf.
Speaker 1: What about that see which the Spanish one or the
Speaker 1: Mexican one that we talked about that one time where
Speaker 1: like she like calls little kids into the water. Well,
Speaker 1: there's Liarona, That's probably what I'm thinking of.
Speaker 3: But that that's not a mermaid she no, although.
Speaker 1: She it's like a weeping woman who check her out.
Speaker 3: Li Yourona is sort of like a between sort of
Speaker 3: a water being in a ghost story. It's it's always
Speaker 3: the story of a woman whose children drowned or sometimes
Speaker 3: she drowned with them.
Speaker 1: Think a woman in the water. Yeah, it's like a
Speaker 1: little trickster. I don't want to and one other, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, leave their shit there, don't check
Speaker 1: up on them, do not.
Speaker 3: There's a there was actually a Slavic woman water spirit
Speaker 3: that I ended up leaving out because they didn't feel
Speaker 3: she was traditionally enough a mermaid for this episode. But
Speaker 3: in some cases in Slavic tradition, she was portrayed as
Speaker 3: a literal fish person. They had a variety of different
Speaker 3: skin colors, like like green and blue and stuff, and
Speaker 3: she would actually sort of like tickle her victims to
Speaker 3: death because her hair would like wrap around them and
Speaker 3: then they would drown because they were like being tickled.
Speaker 3: So there was there's lots of but I felt like
Speaker 3: she was more of like a water spirit than a mermaid.
Speaker 3: I think there's a bit of a difference.
Speaker 1: What's Slavic? What are those? What countries are those in
Speaker 1: the former Soviet Union, like or Baltic Baltic basically Croatia
Speaker 1: and water, isn't it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the Russalka is or the Russalki is the
Speaker 3: water nymph. And there's actually I forget which country it is.
Speaker 3: One of the countries that she has a history in.
Speaker 3: They have a festival where they like drown a tree
Speaker 3: every year in her honor. They like dress up a tree.
Speaker 3: It sounded very midsummar. We gotta go and they throw
Speaker 3: the tree in the water.
Speaker 1: The country is it. We gotta go.
Speaker 3: Hold on, let's see, I'll does I'll do some live
Speaker 3: producing here. Let's see.
Speaker 1: We'll go. Don't let us in, we won't get midsommar. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Green Week Slavic cultures, so any of the sort of
Speaker 3: like different Russian cultures who celebrate Rusalka week or Green
Speaker 3: Week falls in early June. Bathing in open bodies of
Speaker 3: water during this week is strictly forbidden.
Speaker 1: Oh perfect.
Speaker 3: The tree ritual is that during the festivities, a young
Speaker 3: birch tree is decorated with ribbons and garlands. Young women
Speaker 3: sing ants and leave offerings like bread and hard boiled eggs,
Speaker 3: and then at the end of the week, the villagers
Speaker 3: would ceremonially banish the spirits by cutting down or drowning
Speaker 3: the decorated tree.
Speaker 1: We gotta go, we gotta go. Don't go dress like
Speaker 1: trees want to Yah, we're not. I know how to
Speaker 1: say water, I know how to say fish and Russian.
Speaker 1: Will be fine, it'll be great. That's how you say fish.
Speaker 1: Very fun word. What is it?
Speaker 3: Whatba?
Speaker 1: It's like it's like an ad, It's like a riba,
Speaker 1: but it's it's this riba like there's no, okay, it's
Speaker 1: no on the beginning, it's like a rolled and then
Speaker 1: water is vada. It's very simple. It's the derivative of
Speaker 1: vodka is a derivative of water. That's how we get that.
Speaker 3: The things this man knows, I don't know top of
Speaker 3: the dome, but I don't know. He doesn't research for
Speaker 3: this show.
Speaker 1: No, but I don't know how to get to this party.
Speaker 3: We'll find out. Back to Mammi Wata. The detail that
Speaker 3: stuck out to me the most though, that I think
Speaker 3: is just indicative of this this very from all corners
Speaker 3: of the world kind of create the myth of mammy Wata.
Speaker 1: Well, the slave trade went a lot of places. Well yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you were saying, and it's nice to have a water
Speaker 1: entity with you because they were moved on ships, so
Speaker 1: it could literally travel along these ships with you. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean this the slave trade definitely is is how
Speaker 3: this myth spread.
Speaker 1: But I guess I think I might have definitely met
Speaker 1: one because I went to Cape Coast, which is like
Speaker 1: the birthplace of the American slave trade in Ghana, and
Speaker 1: I felt very uncomfortable. Yeah, and then people were like
Speaker 1: don't feel uncomfortable. This is our history, not yours. And
Speaker 1: I was like interesting. They were like, hey man, about
Speaker 1: you absolved of this feeling. But yeah, so that means that.
Speaker 1: But it's right on the water, it's like right where
Speaker 1: the you know where people yea. And so it was
Speaker 1: like if I was ever going to see when it
Speaker 1: would have been there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So to return to Mammy Wata for for just
Speaker 3: a moment. One of the details about her story that
Speaker 3: just strikes me is so indicative of the way this
Speaker 3: this deity, this legend, this myth means so much to
Speaker 3: so many different people and wears so many different pieces
Speaker 3: of different cultures. Is that the traditional, the image of
Speaker 3: Mami Wata that we call traditional that gets worshiped today
Speaker 3: is this long haired snake charming mermaid, right, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: but that image and the uh, what's not legacy the
Speaker 3: way you trace this back through histel lineage. The lineage
Speaker 3: of this story is a little all over the place,
Speaker 3: and there's slightly different versions of the story. But basically
Speaker 3: this image of her that has become the image of
Speaker 3: Mami Wata isn't even the initially West African image of her.
Speaker 3: That image traces back to a German chromo lithograph from
Speaker 3: the eighteen eighties of an Indian snake charmer named Nala
Speaker 3: Damashanti who performed in Hamburg. The image got reprinted on
Speaker 3: a night teen fifties Indian calendar that circulated through trade
Speaker 3: networks in West Africa, and when Africans saw the image,
Speaker 3: they recognized it as Mammy Wata Wow and adopted it as.
Speaker 1: Her visit official portrait. Okay they call it.
Speaker 3: So the most powerful African water goddess on the planet
Speaker 3: is iconographically descended from a poster of a German snake
Speaker 3: charming act that traveled through Bombay.
Speaker 1: Thats really that's the global economy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we some of this I pulled from a
Speaker 3: Smithsonian piece that was about an art exhibit. The Smithsonian
Speaker 3: piece is about an art exhibit that was about Mammi
Speaker 3: Wata in two thousand and nine. And the curator of
Speaker 3: this museum piece was Henry John Drul who is a
Speaker 3: UCLA art historian and basically the world's authority on this stuff.
Speaker 3: And he sort of this is I think, his version
Speaker 3: of how this legend came to be. But he has
Speaker 3: a great line about why Mommy Wata to works the
Speaker 3: way she does. He says, people who worship her often
Speaker 3: also worship Christian or Muslim or other gods. The way
Speaker 3: he sees the reason they worship her is they see
Speaker 3: it as multiple insurance policies. So that's the story of
Speaker 3: Mammy Wata we want to all right, So the last
Speaker 3: place that I want to stop on our worldwide tour
Speaker 3: of Mermaids, although again we are just scratching the surface
Speaker 3: really of all the different mermaid type creatures that are
Speaker 3: out there, but one I wanted to touch on, even
Speaker 3: though I know I was just saying earlier, I was
Speaker 3: trying to focus more on sort of like creatures that
Speaker 3: we're seeing as sort of flesh and blood monsters or
Speaker 3: creatures and less water spirits. Okay, but there is one
Speaker 3: in the Arctic, which is a place we rarely go
Speaker 3: on this show. We don't spend a lot of time
Speaker 3: looking at things that take that are from the Arctic.
Speaker 3: Cold snow blindness too, cold snowblindness. We haven't done an
Speaker 3: episode on polar bears. If we ever do, I'm sure
Speaker 3: we'll spend some more time there. But I want to
Speaker 3: go up to the Arctic to talk about the Inuit
Speaker 3: deity named Sedna. She is worshiped from northern Alaska, across
Speaker 3: Canada and into Greenland, and she is basically the mother
Speaker 3: of the sea. Every seal, every walrus, every narwhale, every whale,
Speaker 3: every fish that swims north of somewhere about the sixtieth
Speaker 3: parallel or so. All of those animals are her. They
Speaker 3: are Sedna in the sense that they came from her body. Oh,
Speaker 3: although not like a baby would come from your body.
Speaker 1: That just peel them off almost literally.
Speaker 3: Yes, the way in which Sedna's body created all of
Speaker 3: these animals that swim around in the Great White North
Speaker 3: is really pretty horrific and fits well with the tone
Speaker 3: of scaret all the dime.
Speaker 1: OK.
Speaker 3: So I'm pulling here from a version of her story
Speaker 3: posted on Guide to Greenland, which was written by a
Speaker 3: Danish anthropologist named Christina Gamborg Holmea. This version of the
Speaker 3: story goes that Sedna was a beautiful young woman and
Speaker 3: a skilled hunter who refused every marriage proposal that her
Speaker 3: father sent her way. Her father, fed up eventually banished
Speaker 3: her to an abandoned island until she would accept somebody.
Speaker 3: This is the beginning of Sedna's father treating her in
Speaker 3: ways that I feel categorize him as a bad father.
Speaker 1: Okay, it was different time, I understand.
Speaker 3: Different time, and we ostensibly are to believe that. You know,
Speaker 3: Sedna's father cared enough about her that he wanted her
Speaker 3: to be set up with a great life, but didn't
Speaker 3: care so much that she loved the man who would
Speaker 3: be her partner. So he sends her to this island.
Speaker 3: She lives there alone for a while, and then one
Speaker 3: day a handsome hunter shows up out of nowhere, a
Speaker 3: real ed vocolas he shows up, and he promises her
Speaker 3: a life which she'll never want for anything, and convinces
Speaker 3: her to leave with him.
Speaker 1: This is me, This is a you. Oh no, man,
Speaker 1: this is a you. You are You're going to fulfilled
Speaker 1: that promise.
Speaker 3: You are, well, I don't know. If you make the promise,
Speaker 3: then you'll figure out a way to fulfill it.
Speaker 1: Ed. No, it's called having a kid, and that's only
Speaker 1: you're doing that.
Speaker 3: So Sedna, the woman who accepted no man, runs off
Speaker 3: with this handsome hunter, and after their marriage, word gets
Speaker 3: back to Sedna's father that something was wrong. Now I
Speaker 3: don't know how that, I don't know how words spread.
Speaker 1: I don't know if This is a guy who came
Speaker 1: to her island.
Speaker 3: This is a guy who came to her island situation, yeah,
Speaker 3: and said, I'm here, I will make your life wonderful.
Speaker 3: Word travels. I don't know if it's through the animal
Speaker 3: kingdom or just dreams or what. But Sedna's father hears
Speaker 3: that there is something off about this handsome hunter, not
Speaker 3: just the fact that he's so handsome.
Speaker 1: I mean reason that he gives a shit.
Speaker 3: At all, based on him locking his daughter, of trapping
Speaker 3: her on an island until she agreed to get married.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it seems like if she's agreed, then hands
Speaker 1: are clean of this. Yeah, well, I'll worry about it.
Speaker 1: He does worry. Interesting, he hears.
Speaker 3: That this handsome hunter is actually is actually not hunting
Speaker 3: food at all. He's not catching anything. He hears that
Speaker 3: Sedna is starving and maybe it is and that they
Speaker 3: and that the handsome hunter is treating her terribly.
Speaker 1: Not me, that's not you, that's a different that's not
Speaker 1: you at all. That's a that's a me that could provide.
Speaker 3: So the father packs up the rest of Sedna's family
Speaker 3: and decides to go rescue his daughter. They get to
Speaker 3: the to where Sedna is living. They rescue her from
Speaker 3: the Handsome Hunter. They get her into the boat and
Speaker 3: they start rowing away. Unclear at this point if Sedna
Speaker 3: is saying, I love this man. He'll do better next time.
Speaker 1: In the book, Yeah, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: how much agency she has here. And you think this
Speaker 1: was on the island, I'm not sure where this.
Speaker 3: He took her to another place, or if it's they
Speaker 3: might have gone somewhere else from from the island, because
Speaker 3: the story does say that the hunter convinced Sedna to
Speaker 3: leave with him, So I don't know where they went.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, yeap somewhere you can get there on a rowboat.
Speaker 3: So they they risk said no way. And this is
Speaker 3: when the Handsome Hunter reveals that he is not a
Speaker 3: human being. He is a shape shifter and his true
Speaker 3: form is that of a giant eagle.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing. If you're if you find this out,
Speaker 1: is it a situation where you're like, well you just
Speaker 1: stay in handsome form? Like this is working, right? This
Speaker 1: is Are you in pain to maintain it? Do you
Speaker 1: have to be an eagle? Or like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to I don't want to put you out. But if
Speaker 1: it's not too much trouble for you. Let's just stay
Speaker 1: handsome and we'll never talk about the big bird thing again. Yea,
Speaker 1: yeah that was Look we could it's water under the bridge.
Speaker 3: It happened. Yeah, here's the thing. I'm curious. We've talked
Speaker 3: about eagles on the show before because we talked about
Speaker 3: how people were, people were from what scrubs never watched it. Okay,
Speaker 3: we talked about how was it not Thomas Jefferson Benjamin
Speaker 3: Franklin didn't like the idea of the.
Speaker 1: Eagle as Oh yeah, yeah, because they were they weren't
Speaker 1: patriot that they weren't patriot they were, they weren't.
Speaker 3: They were considered cowardly or scouted.
Speaker 1: There was something that he was anti eagle.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if that has something to do
Speaker 3: with why.
Speaker 1: I guess, oh, they weren't like godly or something. It
Speaker 1: was some weird thing where it's like, how do you
Speaker 1: put that on a bird?
Speaker 3: Well, it's interesting because when I think of an eagle,
Speaker 3: probably because we grew up with it as this national symbol,
Speaker 3: you think of a very heroic seeming bird that you know,
Speaker 3: when you see photos of eagles, they're usually pulling fish
Speaker 3: out of the water, and so you.
Speaker 1: Never let them talk though, like the woman in this
Speaker 1: rowboat never let an eagle talk because they got dumb
Speaker 1: voices in real life.
Speaker 3: What I was going to say is I don't know that.
Speaker 3: I guess I assumed.
Speaker 1: Wait what am I trying to say? I think you're
Speaker 1: trying to say that back then, these people who wrote
Speaker 1: this maybe had the same view of eagles as Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 3: Yes, because what I was going to say is we
Speaker 3: think of them as these majestic hunters, but we forget that.
Speaker 3: I think the reason someone like Benjamin Franklin looked down
Speaker 3: on them is they're really they're scavengers. They scavenge food.
Speaker 3: They don't I mean, they do catch fish and stuff,
Speaker 3: but more often than not they'll pick at carcasses and whatever.
Speaker 1: And if I'm not mistaken Ben Franklin, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: he was a good person. I have done zero research.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that I do think he talked to
Speaker 1: Native Americans, Indians or do you want to call him
Speaker 1: at the time, because he brought up I think like
Speaker 1: years before our constitution. He brought up like, hey, these
Speaker 1: guys got a constitution almost the same they've got like
Speaker 1: a Bill of rights ass looking thing. It's super sick
Speaker 1: we should use this that everyone scoffed at them, because
Speaker 1: it's like, we're not going to use these beasts, you know. Uh.
Speaker 1: Turns out they were they were turns out yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: but they had something very similar would ultimately end up
Speaker 1: being like some major document. I'm not saying it's a constitution,
Speaker 1: but some major document I've forgotten now was basically years earlier.
Speaker 1: Ben Franklin was like, ih, sock these guys. Oh you're
Speaker 1: saying you think it was maybe the Bill of Rights
Speaker 1: or something. Oh, it could be anything, could be anything,
Speaker 1: because I remember now the Bible. Well no, no, it was
Speaker 1: like a you know, an American important documents. The script
Speaker 1: for John Wick it was too. It was a trip
Speaker 1: or ballerina. But what I'm saying is that, yeah, like
Speaker 1: he was talking to those people, for all we know,
Speaker 1: they were telling him about eagles and shit too.
Speaker 3: My point is just that perhaps what's going on here
Speaker 3: is that that is why this man is not a
Speaker 3: good hunter is because he is an eagle that in
Speaker 3: reality is not a very good hunting bird.
Speaker 1: Necessarily, it seems a scavenger bird. Also, maybe he's still
Speaker 1: getting used to all the parts of a human being.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know how to pull the bow back and stuff.
Speaker 3: She's watched, she's starving in their little in their little
Speaker 3: hut or cabin. She's watching him try to hunt. And
Speaker 3: he keeps just like leaping on the back of a
Speaker 3: deer with his feet, what.
Speaker 1: Are you smashing his head into the water, and like
Speaker 1: trying to pull up fish with his mouth because he
Speaker 1: doesn't know any better. But he also doesn't want to
Speaker 1: reveal he's a bird, right all right?
Speaker 3: Well, in any case, said this fleeing the man turns
Speaker 3: into an eagle. He goes after the boat. And remember
Speaker 3: he's a giant eagle. So he's flapping his wings so
Speaker 3: violently that he creates a massive storm that starts to
Speaker 3: sink the boat. Sedna falls overboard. She manages to grab
Speaker 3: on with both hands hang onto the boat. The eagle
Speaker 3: keeps flapping and the storm keeps growing. It looks like
Speaker 3: everyone is going to die. Instead of doing what you
Speaker 3: would think a father might do and pulling his daughter
Speaker 3: onto the boat and bounding his family together and saying
Speaker 3: we are going to fight for survival. Instead to quote
Speaker 3: the story directly, Sedna's father quote took his ulu knife
Speaker 3: and in one desperate sleigh cut off all of his
Speaker 3: daughter's fingers. Oh so why because she was shaking the boat? Okay,
Speaker 3: So she slips below the waves and the eagle is satisfied.
Speaker 3: I guess that if he can't have her, no one can. Okay,
Speaker 3: kind of an abusive relationship thing, and he flies off.
Speaker 3: So Sedna now sinks to the bottom of the ocean
Speaker 3: with no fingers, bleedings or cut cut all the fingers,
Speaker 3: and as she sinks, the blood from her hands transforms
Speaker 3: into little silver fish, and the legend tells us that
Speaker 3: those are the first fish in the ocean. By the
Speaker 3: time she hits the bottom of the sea, she's surrounded
Speaker 3: by them, and she realizes she can breathe underwater. She's
Speaker 3: become the mother of the sea. But there's a new
Speaker 3: problem because down at the bottom of the ocean, and
Speaker 3: I like how practical this story gets, Sedna has no fingers,
Speaker 3: which means she cannot comb her own hair, and over
Speaker 3: time her hair gets matted and tangled and disgusting, and
Speaker 3: it traps every single animal in the Arctic in it. Okay,
Speaker 3: so every animal that was birthed from her bleeding fingers
Speaker 3: stuck in her hair, gets stuck in her hat nest,
Speaker 3: and now all of the Inuit start to starve because
Speaker 3: they can't hunt.
Speaker 1: The animals. Get these animals because they're all trapped animals
Speaker 1: they've just heard about by the way she's just.
Speaker 3: Made that, I guess, yeah. But they were really tasty.
Speaker 3: It was a huge they popped off. So the village.
Speaker 3: I don't know if Sedna's father is involved in this.
Speaker 3: I don't know if anyone's curious about where she went.
Speaker 3: But the village summons the Inuit shaman known as the
Speaker 3: Anga Cook, who goes into a trance, leaves his body
Speaker 3: and swims to the bottom of the ocean, where he
Speaker 3: finds Sedna, and she is not happy to see him.
Speaker 1: Frightens himself over there.
Speaker 3: Not happy to be disturbed, she actually attacks him and
Speaker 3: they wrestle.
Speaker 1: We're told it's hard to wrestle without fingers. It is
Speaker 1: a grapple, but.
Speaker 3: Maybe a headlock with your with the crook of your arm,
Speaker 3: or he got stuck in her hair, or he got
Speaker 3: stuck in her hair too. But eventually the shaman convinces
Speaker 3: Sedna that he's actually there to help. He finds a
Speaker 3: comb and combs her hair for her, pulling out all
Speaker 3: of the trash that humans have tossed into the ocean.
Speaker 3: And as the last knots.
Speaker 1: Think about the animals that we're getting there.
Speaker 3: As the last knots come out, ten giant animals comes
Speaker 3: swimming out of her hair, one for each of her
Speaker 3: severed fingers. There's the bearded seals, the hooded seal, the narwhal,
Speaker 3: the reindeer, the polar bear, the ringed seal, the musk ox,
Speaker 3: harp seals, and birds.
Speaker 1: Just all birds.
Speaker 3: I guess he as all birds except eagles, because fuck eagles.
Speaker 3: We hate eagles now, Yeah, And so that that constitutes
Speaker 3: the ecosystem being saved. And then Sedna is able to rest.
Speaker 1: Rests in the sense that until she needs her combing.
Speaker 3: Again, until she needs her fingers back.
Speaker 1: Until she just die. Then she finally can die.
Speaker 3: I think it's more of a it's less of a death,
Speaker 3: and I think more of a return to a not
Speaker 3: mad anymore. Yeah, just a resting state.
Speaker 1: If you can turn into some sort of shaman ghost
Speaker 1: every month or so, and Papa comb over this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: keep the situation going.
Speaker 3: Another reason that I told her story besides the fact
Speaker 3: that it's so weirdly horrific that her father is like.
Speaker 3: Her father is a tough character to pin down because
Speaker 3: he traps her on an island until she gets married
Speaker 3: and then cares enough to try to rescue her when
Speaker 3: he hears it's no good, but then as soon as
Speaker 3: his life's in danger, cuts her fingers off.
Speaker 1: I think, what, I think we're missing an important page.
Speaker 1: It like it's stuck together with another page, maybe, which
Speaker 1: is the no good he's talking about air quotes for
Speaker 1: the non viewer. I think the dowry didn't come in
Speaker 1: or something like that. He's like, whoa, whoa, your check bounced.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get her back.
Speaker 3: That's true. That that okay. So now if that is
Speaker 3: the pitch there, then now his character is making a
Speaker 3: lot more sense.
Speaker 1: He's more like like, it's more consistent for him, consistent,
Speaker 1: And he gets all the brothers together, like we gotta
Speaker 1: go beat a guy up because he didn't pay us
Speaker 1: the dowry. And they get there and it was like,
Speaker 1: oh no, he's a bird, yeah, a big giant bird.
Speaker 1: And then you know, hey, we're not gonna die over
Speaker 1: her nonsense. So cut her fingers off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I do find it interesting. Oh that's what I
Speaker 3: was just say. One of the other reasons I chose
Speaker 3: this story is a Sedna is a much more kind
Speaker 3: and helpful spirit water mermaid creature in a way than
Speaker 3: most of these creatures that we've talked about.
Speaker 1: Does anybody pray to her?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there there's I mean, I don't in the modern day.
Speaker 3: I don't know if there's really any at the time.
Speaker 3: At the time, Yeah, there were people who worshiped said Na.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 3: What I was saying is I find it interesting that
Speaker 3: we have another water spirit mermaid type creature with more
Speaker 3: comb imagery, like a well and like Ariel, but like
Speaker 3: Mommy watsa who we just talked about, who had her
Speaker 3: comb that she would leave on trick people. But it's
Speaker 3: just interesting. I mean, I don't know if it has
Speaker 3: comb stuff. I don't know if it has something to
Speaker 3: do with the fact that many of these spirits are
Speaker 3: are women, and so women are associated with you know,
Speaker 3: hairdoos and combs throughout history.
Speaker 1: But it's also interesting. I can't think of it, and
Speaker 1: I'm not doing a lot of thinking on it, but
Speaker 1: I can't think of another animal in the sea that
Speaker 1: has hair. It's a good point. I've never seen a
Speaker 1: fish with the beautiful head of hair, a beautiful long main.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good point. I don't I'm sure someone's.
Speaker 1: Gonna write it and be like, oh, well, the rude
Speaker 1: to octopus or something, but I mean like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess, like seals, there's no use for
Speaker 1: combs down there other than Mermaid or like or later
Speaker 1: with just Mermaid. Just Mermaid or is the only people
Speaker 1: who need cobs. Yeah, and think them aboves. You're right, No,
Speaker 1: you're right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I all I can think of our creatures
Speaker 3: that would have fur but not really hair like you
Speaker 3: seals would have, and.
Speaker 1: It's and it's very dense and very matted.
Speaker 3: I guess a walrus maybe has whiskers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's not hair. Yeah. No, you're right, you're right.
Speaker 1: I don't want to see more fish with hair, not
Speaker 1: in light I mean like the like the filler fish tail,
Speaker 1: like yeah, with Martin Scorse big eyebrows. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess I'll photoshop some of that in for the Button
Speaker 1: of the month. Anyway.
Speaker 3: That's the last stop on our global Mermaid tour. Greek
Speaker 3: bird People, Japanese monkey fish, West African snake mermaids, and
Speaker 3: an Inuit amputee at.
Speaker 1: The bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
Speaker 3: These are the kinds of stories that were being told
Speaker 3: about mermaids when a guy named Christopher Columbus picked up
Speaker 3: a quick bill in fourteen ninety three and decided to
Speaker 3: bring the whole European mermaid tradition to a brand new continent.
Speaker 1: Okay, did he write it? Then? He did.
Speaker 3: On January ninth, fourteen ninety three, Christopher Columbus was sailing
Speaker 3: off the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic,
Speaker 3: and he wrote in his ship's log that the day before,
Speaker 3: on January eighth, fourteen ninety three, he had personally seen
Speaker 3: three mermaids. National Geographic has the exact quote pulled from
Speaker 3: his journal. On the previous day, when the Admiral went
Speaker 3: to the Rio del Oro, he said, he quite distinctly
Speaker 3: saw three mermaids which rose well out of the sea.
Speaker 3: But they are not so beautiful as they are said
Speaker 3: to be.
Speaker 1: As they are said to be, for their.
Speaker 3: Faces had some masculine traits.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's the reason.
Speaker 3: That's why they are not as beautiful as they are
Speaker 3: said to be.
Speaker 1: Okay. I thought was gonna be like horrific, no, and
Speaker 1: you're just like, nah, it's kind of like under this
Speaker 1: light that might have had an Adams affway.
Speaker 3: It is so funny to me that Christopher Columbus, although
Speaker 3: granted he documented this, it sounds more like the admiral
Speaker 3: saw the mermaids than he saw the mermaids. But either way,
Speaker 3: he is apparently recording the existence of living mermaids, and
Speaker 3: the only thing he has to say about them is.
Speaker 1: Like, kind of man, yeah, yeah, gross, it is funny,
Speaker 1: like a little bit of queer fear. But also that's
Speaker 1: just a funny way to be, Like if I want to,
Speaker 1: if I was interested in that, I'd be fucking everyone
Speaker 1: in the ship every day.
Speaker 3: And it's a magical creacher. You think you'd be like,
Speaker 3: holy shit, mermaids are real. We've seen them, and not
Speaker 3: so critical.
Speaker 1: I think it's like, hey, I've seen them, and I've
Speaker 1: seen enough exactly.
Speaker 3: I don't need to see them ever again. Of course,
Speaker 3: these mermaids that he saw were almost certainly manates. Stop it,
Speaker 3: manatees and dogongs.
Speaker 1: I don't even see it any regardless of gender. I
Speaker 1: don't look at manatee and see even humanity in there.
Speaker 1: I know people love manatees, but I don't. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: see that and think I think that's a person.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is, when you're out on the ocean
Speaker 3: and you're dealing with tricks of the light and you're
Speaker 3: dealing with hunger and you're dealing with thirst. Manatees have
Speaker 3: the kind of like stubby flipper arms that if you
Speaker 3: saw them lift it out of the water at a distance,
Speaker 3: maybe yeah, you might kind of convince yourself you were
Speaker 3: seeing the arms of a person, you know, the outline
Speaker 3: of a head depending on how it comes up out
Speaker 3: of the water or if they I don't know if
Speaker 3: they really travel in and.
Speaker 1: People love manatees. Jesse Wilson shout out, Jesse Wilson loves vanatees,
Speaker 1: and I think you can go on little tours where
Speaker 1: you can swim with manates and like boop them on
Speaker 1: the nose and stuff. Yes, so maybe they would have,
Speaker 1: if that's what they've become, maybe they would have been
Speaker 1: friendly enough to go up to big ships and stuff. Well.
Speaker 3: Also, something else I learned from National Geographic while I
Speaker 3: was researching this episode is that manatees nurse their young
Speaker 3: by holding them up to their check with one flipper.
Speaker 3: So from a distance it does look like a woman
Speaker 3: holding a baby. Yeah, a manish woman who looks sort
Speaker 3: of like a weird hippopotamus fish. But you know, but
Speaker 3: they look so this this is such a piece of
Speaker 3: mermaid history, the idea that sailors mistook manatees for mermaids.
Speaker 1: How they got their names?
Speaker 3: No, their scientific name, though, is the scientific order that
Speaker 3: they belong to is Serenia, which is named after sirens,
Speaker 3: the legend of the Sirens.
Speaker 1: Are there other things in that order? Are there other
Speaker 1: Serenian creatures?
Speaker 3: I think it's just manates and do goongs like that.
Speaker 3: The fuck's a do go It's basically a manate I
Speaker 3: think it's smaller manatee. But it's the same idea, Okay,
Speaker 3: the same if you've been to a if you've been
Speaker 3: to an aquarium, they've probably had dou goongs.
Speaker 1: I would have remembered a name like that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, science itself basically officially conceded when they named
Speaker 3: the order of manatees and dogongs that they've spent their
Speaker 3: whole history being mistaken for monstrous women. So sorry about that.
Speaker 3: Manatees and do goongs. Columbus's sighting is really important to
Speaker 3: mermaid history, not because of the scientific aspect, but it's
Speaker 3: because it is where the European mermaid tradition that we
Speaker 3: talked about earlier in the show starts to collide with
Speaker 3: the New World. And as soon as traditions starts to
Speaker 3: collide with the New World, people start trying to make
Speaker 3: money and the trade in mermaid objects starts to pick up.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: And this is where the episode really starts to get weird.
Speaker 1: Now, this is a question that you might not be
Speaker 1: able to answer because this is not for sale. But
Speaker 1: we had you get like ladies on the fronts of
Speaker 1: boats sometimes they're mermaids now, but that has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with this. Like a lady on the front of
Speaker 1: a boat that like you know how it's physically part
Speaker 1: of that, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, from the bow of the ship. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 3: sure when that started. I mean it does, Yes, some
Speaker 3: of those when I think about that.
Speaker 1: Have have mermaids, have mermaids.
Speaker 3: I don't know that.
Speaker 1: We'll do a whole other bonus episode about it.
Speaker 3: The mermaid trade that I wanted to discuss is a
Speaker 3: lot weirder and a lot closer to the mummy trade.
Speaker 1: Almost we're going to be grinding them up, put them
Speaker 1: on as man tea makeup.
Speaker 3: Almost The earliest documented version of the fake mermaid trade
Speaker 3: is something I had seen but had no idea that
Speaker 3: it was a thing that people made and sold for centuries,
Speaker 3: and I had no idea that it had a name.
Speaker 1: Is it still out? Can we get it now?
Speaker 3: Sort of? So ed you may have seen these, I'm
Speaker 3: going to show you on the computer screen. Hopefully you
Speaker 3: can pop this up.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, is that so what you were looking at?
Speaker 1: It's adorable?
Speaker 3: Can you before I tell you what this is called,
Speaker 3: can you try to describe to the listener what you're
Speaker 3: looking at.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at an alien with little skinny legs that
Speaker 1: kind of looks like a rabbit that if it had
Speaker 1: big floppy ears, came down to like its lower back.
Speaker 1: Its mouth and eyes are adorable. I don't even it's
Speaker 1: like a little monkey. But it's also like this. You
Speaker 1: clean this up a little bit. This You could sell
Speaker 1: this alongside grogu or some shit and like the Disney Plus.
Speaker 1: Because if I if it wasn't like a dead I looking,
Speaker 1: by the way, I'm looking at a dead dried version. Yes,
Speaker 1: But well if this thing wasn't dead and dried, I
Speaker 1: think it's probably a little cute ski.
Speaker 3: So the only term, the only versions of these things
Speaker 3: that exist are dead and dried.
Speaker 1: So what they that looks small?
Speaker 3: It is small?
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: These are called Jenny Hannovers. So the name, it's a name,
Speaker 3: a Jenny Hannover j E N N Y space h
Speaker 3: A n i v e R name. These are called
Speaker 3: Jenny Hannovers. It's like a basically, it's a doll. A
Speaker 3: Jenny Hannover is what you get when a sixteenth century
Speaker 3: sailor at the Antwerp docks catches a skate or a ray,
Speaker 3: dries it out, carves it up, twists the fins into arms,
Speaker 3: and then varnishes the whole thing and sells it to
Speaker 3: a tourist as a mermaid. So that is what a
Speaker 3: Jenny Hannover is. So Ed's description of a floppy eared
Speaker 3: rabbit monkey thing is is a little hard to picture.
Speaker 3: If you've ever seen the underside of a manta.
Speaker 1: Ray or a skate, they have little faces.
Speaker 3: They have little faces, and that's where this really began.
Speaker 3: If you can imagine taking one of those manta rays
Speaker 3: or a skate, propping it up, propping it out, drying
Speaker 3: it out, desiccating it, building a face out of the
Speaker 3: you know, making the face more prominent, and then twisting
Speaker 3: its fins and stuff into arms. That's more what you
Speaker 3: can imagine. Also, I don't know why you'd spend all
Speaker 3: this time imagining it. Just look it up. Look up
Speaker 3: at Jenny Hannover. They're weird looking. Sometimes they would be
Speaker 3: oldest mermaids, sometimes sea devils, sometimes basilisks.
Speaker 1: Well, the fact that they're small kind of feels like,
Speaker 1: you know, hey, what did you bring me from your Hey, daddy,
Speaker 1: what did you bring me from c h say, hey,
Speaker 1: I got you this doll? Yes, it's it smells weird
Speaker 1: and it's it's brittle.
Speaker 3: The name Jenny Hanover is apparently a Cockney corruption of
Speaker 3: the French phrase June Denevere, which means young girl of Antwerp,
Speaker 3: which kind of suggests to me that there was a
Speaker 3: barbie doll.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like my seaman dad brought me a Barbie doll.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of. Or they were trying to make you
Speaker 3: think this thing was sexy, you know, a young girl
Speaker 3: of Antwerp.
Speaker 1: No, I think it's not. I When I looked at that,
Speaker 1: I instantly got like baby doll, like Barbie vibes. It
Speaker 1: just felt like a toy.
Speaker 3: So you don't think you don't think they think a Young.
Speaker 1: Girl of Antwerp is to say it like, it's kind
Speaker 1: of the clients, hell, the clientele, what's the word we're
Speaker 1: like the we're like who you're marketing.
Speaker 3: It to the customer?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it almost it feels it feels like a little
Speaker 1: girl's toy. Interesting to me when I first looked at it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and not that this thing like like the way that
Speaker 1: a little girl has a baby doll toy, like a
Speaker 1: cabbage badge interesting, which would also be a baby girl.
Speaker 1: It's like a toy for a baby girl. Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: just itself. Yes, I get I get that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I always know the mothering fucked up shit
Speaker 1: about it too, But.
Speaker 3: I always I guess always, by always, I mean, since
Speaker 3: I learned about this two weeks ago or whatever, I
Speaker 3: I guess I assumed that the that the Jenny Hannover
Speaker 3: the Young Girl of Antwerp was more of almost like
Speaker 3: they're trying to brand this is like a sexy mermaid
Speaker 3: and then they sell you a desiccated fish thing I see.
Speaker 1: I think it's origin probably comes from being branded as
Speaker 1: like a Barbie doll maybe, and not like, hey, you
Speaker 1: want to you want to hold a fucked up thing
Speaker 1: that you wish you could fuck, Like, I don't know
Speaker 1: what that. I think this thing looks more like something
Speaker 1: Merchant Marine would bring home to their kid. Sure, and
Speaker 1: you got to bring something home you're going for like
Speaker 1: eight months at a time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, especially back in the sixteenth century.
Speaker 1: It's a toy. You saw your kids twice. Yeah, here's
Speaker 1: a toy of something I for sure didn't fuck because
Speaker 1: it's not real.
Speaker 3: Right. Well, in any case, the first published reference to
Speaker 3: these things comes from the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner, who
Speaker 3: put a reference to the Jenny Hannivers in his fifteen
Speaker 3: fifty eight Encyclopedia Historia and Amalium. And he basically was
Speaker 3: doing the sixteenth century version of like a Snopes articles here, saying, guys,
Speaker 3: it's a fish.
Speaker 1: Stop buying the fish. It's just a fish.
Speaker 3: You're not buying a mermaid or a baslisk or a
Speaker 3: sea dragon.
Speaker 1: But my kids love them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they were. It was like a beanie baby and.
Speaker 1: The only other thing if it's not a gift for
Speaker 1: your kid, which it looks like it would be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the only reason I could see anyone purchasing it all
Speaker 1: it has some sort of charm aspect to it, right
Speaker 1: where it's like, oh, it brings you good luck or
Speaker 1: you have like a mermaid's hair for a day, right
Speaker 1: right right, And then you can see how the even
Speaker 1: how would you sell out the tourist.
Speaker 3: Other was the Nino that we talked about earlier. There
Speaker 3: was like the monkey faced fish creature. You know, these
Speaker 3: these also kind I mean, they don't have monkey faces
Speaker 3: per se, but you could sort of see how these
Speaker 3: might have picked up some ninio steam too on the
Speaker 3: other side of the world, especially with the rumor of
Speaker 3: it being if you eat it you get immortality or whatever.
Speaker 3: This looks like something that, yeah, if you ate it,
Speaker 3: you would expect something.
Speaker 1: I don't think're gonna eat. It's covered in varnish, like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see how they were like, hey, by one
Speaker 1: of these gets the luck of the sea, become a
Speaker 1: great fisherman.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I could see that. I found no reference to
Speaker 3: that in the research, but I could see that I.
Speaker 1: Could see that being a way to sell it otherwise,
Speaker 1: I don't see them. I don't see it being anything
Speaker 1: you said.
Speaker 3: Well, they were very popular. People bought them for the
Speaker 3: next three hundred years. After this guy put out his
Speaker 3: article being like guid some scholars even argued that they
Speaker 3: were real species and propose naming them Satanicus aucus or
Speaker 3: the devilfish. Things got so heated around the debate around
Speaker 3: these creatures that Carl Lenaeus, the founder of modern biological classification,
Speaker 3: the guy who literally invented genus and species. He was
Speaker 3: traveling through Hamburg and he got pulled aside by the
Speaker 3: proud owners of a Jenny Hannover. They called it a hydra,
Speaker 3: but it was the same thing. They brought it out
Speaker 3: to show him, presumably hoping to get the most respected
Speaker 3: scientists in Europe to authenticate it.
Speaker 1: We're gonna put this in the book, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He looked at it for about two seconds and told
Speaker 3: the owners, no, this is this is a fake. It's
Speaker 3: not a real creature.
Speaker 1: This is an animal that is in my book. And
Speaker 1: someone twisted up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And instead of being and this is the
Speaker 3: most modern thing imaginable humans have always been the same.
Speaker 3: Instead of saying, oh my god, we were h we
Speaker 3: got the old ropid dope. Thank you for telling us
Speaker 3: the truth. These people got so mad that they threatened
Speaker 3: to prosecute him and he had to flee Hamburg.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this was we accept this as dowry
Speaker 1: for one of our kids to bring up dowries again.
Speaker 3: The dowry you got, the dowry on the mind. These
Speaker 3: Jenny Hannovers were all just the precursor though, to the
Speaker 3: most famous fake fish fiend of them.
Speaker 1: All, Fiji Mermaid.
Speaker 3: The Fiji Mermaid.
Speaker 1: Oh, I've seen a person have a picture of it.
Speaker 3: Well, you've seen a Fiji murmury.
Speaker 1: It's the only one I've accepted as dowry.
Speaker 3: The real Fiji Mermaid no longer exists, and by real
Speaker 3: I mean the original.
Speaker 1: And that one's got a little like little man face
Speaker 1: though that's Columbus would have been proud.
Speaker 3: Yes, So there's again, As I said, we don't have
Speaker 3: the original Fiji Mermaid. There are many around.
Speaker 1: The go to right now, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See when that's
Speaker 1: what I.
Speaker 3: Saw it, I will pull up the one here from
Speaker 3: Coney Island.
Speaker 1: Is the little glasses on. No, it does speckled. So
Speaker 1: this is p. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum's Fiji Mermaid from me see with my hands, Coney Island.
Speaker 1: It's almost like shicken pretal what I saw there. It is,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this is actually way better than putting
Speaker 1: it up on the screen.
Speaker 3: So it looks like a desiccated fish if you're if
Speaker 3: you're not watching the show.
Speaker 1: I think the one I saw was also a pet
Speaker 1: Barnum number. Well. P. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum is the guy who invented.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 3: Looks basically like a desicated, dried out monkey head attached
Speaker 3: to some sort of a weird fish body. It's all
Speaker 3: dried out. It's probably about how big would you say?
Speaker 3: It is a two feet long?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's about what I saw on the screen. I
Speaker 1: mean what I saw in person, Yeah, and screen.
Speaker 3: So the Fiji Mermaid does not look particularly real.
Speaker 1: It looked like an old man to me when I
Speaker 1: saw mine, but mine was a little thinner and it
Speaker 1: had some more going on in that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does. The dried out monkey head look has
Speaker 3: a bit of an old man. Yeah, but we can't
Speaker 3: talk about the Fiji Mermaid without talking about P. T. Barnum.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, every time I bring this guy up, it's always horrific. Frechport,
Speaker 1: Connecticut's own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's shocking. I mean, then the amount of controversies
Speaker 3: that PT Barnum had in his life.
Speaker 1: Those whales that burned up as something else.
Speaker 3: He he was not a great guy, I am. I mean,
Speaker 3: look whatever, I don't really care, but I am kind
Speaker 3: of shocked that The Greatest Showman is as popular as
Speaker 3: it is.
Speaker 1: They put all the controversy in it, the songs they didn't.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, this is we now live in a
Speaker 3: world where the Michael Jackson biopic made five. But it's
Speaker 3: just weird to me that he's not He's not a
Speaker 3: I feel like, if you've ever heard of P. T. Barnum,
Speaker 3: you know that he was kind of a huckster at
Speaker 3: best and like a bad guy. Yeah at worst.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a charlatan.
Speaker 3: He's a charlatan. He's a man who and I learned
Speaker 3: this for the first time in my research, literally bought
Speaker 3: an elderly black woman named Joyce Heath and exhibited her
Speaker 3: on stage as the one hundred and sixty one year
Speaker 3: old nursing and this is the term that was used
Speaker 3: the nursing Mammy of George Washington. He exhibited her on
Speaker 3: stage until she died, and then he paid a surgeon
Speaker 3: to perform her autopsy in front of fifteen hundred spectators
Speaker 3: in New York City's saloon at fifty cents per person,
Speaker 3: So just in a bar, just in a bar.
Speaker 1: To be like, what are the one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: one year old organs look like?
Speaker 3: And then, as if all of that wasn't bad enough,
Speaker 3: the real sort of pissy cherry on this miserable cake
Speaker 3: is that when the surgeon who performed the autopsy declared
Speaker 3: that this age claim Barnum had made that she's one
Speaker 3: hundred sixty one years old was a fraud, Barnum gets
Speaker 3: up in front of everybody and insists that the autopsy
Speaker 3: victim is actually another person, and that Joyce Heath, the
Speaker 3: woman whose body had just been carved up, was actually
Speaker 3: alive and on a tour in Europe. And that's why you'd.
Speaker 1: Think this is a guy who would have been like, hey,
Speaker 1: no matter what you find, and here's eight bucks to
Speaker 1: say it's an old person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure why the surgeon
Speaker 3: felt the need to publicize I.
Speaker 1: Think he just found a backpone. It's like it's like
Speaker 1: one of those fighters who paid to go get paid
Speaker 1: to go down, and then decide that this is the
Speaker 1: moment they're going to actually win for them.
Speaker 3: Or maybe this was a surgeon who just halfway through
Speaker 3: the autopsy, the weight of the horrificness of what he
Speaker 3: was doing really landed on his shoulders and he said,
Speaker 3: I didn't kill a lady. No, but still, I mean
Speaker 3: it is it is exploitative to a degree that is unbelievable,
Speaker 3: even for the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: I also wonder if you're a surgeon, an actual surgeon
Speaker 1: at any time period, not just a person he found
Speaker 1: in a gutter and gave knives to which I wouldn't
Speaker 1: put past it. No, if you're it also would be like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: aren't you that guy said that that old person was old?
Speaker 1: And it definitely was. And I don't know if it
Speaker 1: would affect his personal career to continue being a surgeon,
Speaker 1: right right? That might make a decision for him to
Speaker 1: be like, uh, right, I'm not like an idiot. Just
Speaker 1: what everyone knows that you're so come to me for surgery.
Speaker 3: I have, I have no morals, but I am no,
Speaker 3: I am no idiots.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be told I'm a fucking dummy up
Speaker 1: here either. So anyway, p T.
Speaker 3: Barnum is a very complicated figure, and not even really complex.
Speaker 1: We have a bunch more it's Pizza Barnum. I'm glad
Speaker 1: he does exist, so that when we have Pett barnamass
Speaker 1: fucking people people that exist, we can still have like
Speaker 1: a a like, oh, this guy's the Pezza Barnum of
Speaker 1: this or this lady's Pezzy Barnum of of pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 3: But perhaps one of the things he's most famous for,
Speaker 3: other than the circus that for so long carried his name,
Speaker 3: is the Fiji Mermaid, which is probably one of the
Speaker 3: greatest con jobs of all time.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you're a person who's so inscrupulous as
Speaker 1: to be like, hey, gluem not even the Fiji Mermaid,
Speaker 1: but I could totally see him being like, hey, one
Speaker 1: of my horses died, cut off its legs and glue
Speaker 1: the legs onto another horse and say that we've got
Speaker 1: like the first eight legged or yeah, and it's like
Speaker 1: and when that one dies, I want more legs. And
Speaker 1: it was like, right when the ticket sales are drying
Speaker 1: up for the eight legged horse, we get a fucking
Speaker 1: twelve legged horse. Yeah, and at the certain point you
Speaker 1: don't even know where the horse begins and ends. There's
Speaker 1: so many legs hanging off of it. And that's why
Speaker 1: that in some ways crafty and horse nightmare. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's always like moving slow, it's so weighed down by
Speaker 1: horse legs. Yeah, that it's just Hey, come see the
Speaker 1: magnificent twenty four legged horse. That's always kind of lying down.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's when you're that on scoop.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't believe how fast this thing was running when
Speaker 3: we caught it in the wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've had to sedate it so that it.
Speaker 3: Can't get away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. It's gotten lazy from fame.
Speaker 3: So in the summer of eighteen forty two, Barnum acquired
Speaker 3: on loan from his friend Moses Kimball, who ran the
Speaker 3: Boston Museum.
Speaker 1: That's probably why the Fiji burmaid's in Boston right now,
Speaker 1: the one that I saw.
Speaker 3: Yeah, possibly it's at Harvard by the way. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: this probably is they put it. They put it at
Speaker 3: Harvard because P. T. Barnum was a Harvard level savant
Speaker 3: of cons Yeah, bad and bad business. So Barnum got
Speaker 3: this object. It was about three feet long, and according
Speaker 3: to Barnum, it was a mermaid. He called it the
Speaker 3: Fiji Mermaid spelled fee j ee either because he didn't
Speaker 3: know sued. Yeah, he didn't want to get sued by
Speaker 3: the people of Fiji. I think maybe he just didn't
Speaker 3: know how to spell Fiji, or perhaps at the time
Speaker 3: it was sort of a colloquial.
Speaker 1: Also, everybody, I don't know how literate the area was, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: two ease was easy to understand. I don't want people
Speaker 1: saying phi fi all the.
Speaker 3: Time, right, right fi gi phi gi?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: No that actually you might more phonetic. You might be correct. Yeah,
Speaker 3: he may have just spelled it phonetically. But the way
Speaker 3: Barnum sold this thing is really where the brilliance of
Speaker 3: the con comes in. Live Science has a great write
Speaker 3: up on this, which is what I'm mostly pulling from here.
Speaker 3: And there's a little bit I found from P. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum's own autobiography that I'm using here as well, because
Speaker 3: in that book he describes this whole scheme step by step,
Speaker 3: so proud of it. He thinks the publicity campaign for
Speaker 3: the Fiji Mermaid is one of the most elegant pieces
Speaker 3: of work of his career.
Speaker 1: No, it's his magnum opus.
Speaker 3: Here's what he did. First, he got another associate of his,
Speaker 3: a guy named Levi Lyman, to impersonate a British scientist. Well,
Speaker 3: his name is Limn.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be lying about what man I am. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. You should have known that
Speaker 1: when I came in.
Speaker 3: He invented a fake credential, doctor J. Griffin of the
Speaker 3: Lyceum of Natural History.
Speaker 1: Even that lie in it? Yeah, the lie?
Speaker 3: What I guess that was a Russe Limbaugh book, Lying
Speaker 3: Liars and the Liars You Tell Them or something like that.
Speaker 1: Or it's or is that a al Franken book.
Speaker 3: Or oh maybe maybe maybe I think it might have
Speaker 3: been that. I remember hearing about it on the radio
Speaker 3: when I was in middle school, so I assume it
Speaker 3: is either pro or anti Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, anyway, there
Speaker 3: was no doctor J. Griffin. There was arguably a Lyceum
Speaker 3: of Natural History in London, but he had nothing to
Speaker 3: do with it. Lyman put on a fancy outfit and
Speaker 3: started calling himself doctor Griffin. And then Barnum sat down
Speaker 3: and wrote three identical and non anonymous, three identical anonymous
Speaker 3: letters describing the arrival of the remarkable Doctor Griffin with
Speaker 3: his Fiji Island mermaid.
Speaker 1: You do hear this on the doll up and stuff
Speaker 1: a bunch like where these letters of introduction that people
Speaker 1: bring with them that there's just no way to verify
Speaker 1: until two years ago. Basically yes, that people show up
Speaker 1: and it was like this is from the King of
Speaker 1: school down like places doesn't exist. And then also you
Speaker 1: could change your identity with a razor blade and some tape. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So well, So he not only wrote these three letters,
Speaker 3: he traveled around the country, mailed one from Montgomery, Alabama,
Speaker 3: mailed one one from Charleston, South Carolina, and mailed one
Speaker 3: from Washington, DC to three different New York newspapers. The
Speaker 3: letters arrived at the newspapers within days of each other,
Speaker 3: and each newspaper thinking it had a scoop because back
Speaker 3: then the announcement of the arrival of Doctor Griffin with
Speaker 3: his would theapper would be in the newspaper. So they
Speaker 3: all ran three different cities, ran the same story about
Speaker 3: this guy arriving to drum up the impression that this
Speaker 3: guy was super famous from overseas. And what strikes me
Speaker 3: is so incredible about that, even though there's nothing highly
Speaker 3: technical or whatever. It sounds a lot like a modern
Speaker 3: social media campaign. It sounds like basically there was a
Speaker 3: there was a debate or a small controversy over a
Speaker 3: band called Geese. I think it was Geese or They're
Speaker 3: They're They're like an indie art rock band from from
Speaker 3: New York and they blew up. This was probably like
Speaker 3: six months ago as of the recording of this. They
Speaker 3: got huge in on what would have been like the.
Speaker 1: Blog music scene.
Speaker 3: When we were growing up, you know, on short yeah,
Speaker 3: but this version was on TikTok, on inst.
Speaker 1: I'm saying what we would have been.
Speaker 3: And people were kind of like, wow, where did this
Speaker 3: band come from? And then at some point somebody from
Speaker 3: someone who had worked on the social media campaign for
Speaker 3: the band was like, yeah, I mean we just invented
Speaker 3: them basically, I mean the band.
Speaker 1: Existed, we invented the hype.
Speaker 3: We invented Yeah, we invented the hype. We put the
Speaker 3: stories out in ways that we figured would catch on
Speaker 3: and kind of sat back and waited to see what happened.
Speaker 3: And really they're, you know, they were I'm not saying
Speaker 3: they were inventing people to rave about how great the
Speaker 3: band was, but essentially they were at least encouraging people
Speaker 3: on different platforms to talk about Geese to be like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, these guys are the best. And then
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, the consensus is just, holy shit,
Speaker 3: everyone's heard of this band. And that's what Barnum did here.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he invented this idea, but he
Speaker 3: certainly perfected it with the Fiji Mermaid.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not at all surprising that all the
Speaker 1: tactics that we're seeing today in late stage capitalism have
Speaker 1: roots in huxt in huckstery.
Speaker 3: So then so now the Eastern seaboards talking about the
Speaker 3: arrival of doctor.
Speaker 1: Isn't that what his name did? Fucking Colonel Tom whatever,
Speaker 1: Elvis and Elvis manager. When people started fucking hating on Elvis,
Speaker 1: he started selling the like I hate Elvis shit and
Speaker 1: like Elvis Hater's fan club, and all the people who
Speaker 1: love Elvis were paying, all the people who hated Elvis
Speaker 1: were paying.
Speaker 3: We got to get in on that.
Speaker 1: Nobody hates us, not yet, but this episode we can start.
Speaker 3: We'll find a way. So Barnum creates this whole spectacle
Speaker 3: and then having created the appearance of this upswell of
Speaker 3: public interest, starts giving newspapers free promotional woodcuts of beautiful naked,
Speaker 3: bear breasted mermaids, and the papers run them. Then he
Speaker 3: pretends that the mysterious Doctor Griffin was refusing to display
Speaker 3: the mermaid to the public because the doctor was too modest,
Speaker 3: too scientific, and too proper to show the public this
Speaker 3: dible creature. It would be too scandalous, it would overturn
Speaker 3: the scientific or upturn the scientific community.
Speaker 1: That comes very much from his like freak show background
Speaker 1: where it's like for a nickel, you can see the
Speaker 1: scariest thing behind this curtain he was. But you know,
Speaker 1: we couldn't possibly just have it for all the kids
Speaker 1: to see.
Speaker 3: How he was stoking the demand. Yeah, like, you guys
Speaker 3: have all heard of this thing, right, Well, actually, now
Speaker 3: we can't show it to you.
Speaker 1: I'll show it to you.
Speaker 3: By the time the Fiji Mermaid actually went on display
Speaker 3: at Barnum's American Museum in late July eighteen forty two,
Speaker 3: Lower Manhattan was insane with anticipation. People were lined up
Speaker 3: around the block. Newspapers were running editorials. Everyone wanted to
Speaker 3: see this beautiful naked aquatic woman from the Fiji islands,
Speaker 3: because remember.
Speaker 1: You don't find out she's dry.
Speaker 3: No, all you see are the woodcuts of this beautiful woman.
Speaker 3: And uh yeah, So I'll put it this way. This
Speaker 3: is what he was advertising. This is one of the
Speaker 3: woodcuts that he sent to the newspapers. It's for those
Speaker 3: of you not watching. It is a beautiful black and
Speaker 3: white woodcut of a mermaid looking like a babe by
Speaker 3: the water. A couple of babe friends there, a couple
Speaker 3: of babe friends suggesting if you come see this mermaid,
Speaker 3: there might be more than one hit out here. And
Speaker 3: then if you saw that ad and you said I
Speaker 3: can't wait, just a reminder, this is what you got.
Speaker 1: This is well you get.
Speaker 3: This is what you got.
Speaker 1: Mister Burns there waiting for a massage. Oh that's a
Speaker 1: spelled Fiji here.
Speaker 3: Though, Well that's the one on Coney Island. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: that when I guess they change the again, this is
Speaker 3: not the actual.
Speaker 1: I wonder if I saw that. I was in Cony
Speaker 1: Allen recently, look a he or two ago. I wonder
Speaker 1: if I saw it what by it? Didn't even know?
Speaker 3: Now we don't know. Maybe the original was a little
Speaker 3: bit sexier.
Speaker 1: I doubt it.
Speaker 3: The three foot long thing that he leased from Moses Kimball,
Speaker 3: which I'm not even sure that part of the story
Speaker 3: is true, that he leased that he leased the object
Speaker 3: from his friend. I suspect that either Moses Kimball doesn't exist,
Speaker 3: or if he did, he always wants.
Speaker 1: Some sort of fallback in case people hate it. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: that was from Moses.
Speaker 3: I would never that's true.
Speaker 1: He swindled me.
Speaker 3: The belief is that the original Fiji Mermaid was lost
Speaker 3: in the fire that consumed Kimball's Boston museum sometime around
Speaker 3: eighteen eighty. The Fiji Mermaid at the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Yes,
Speaker 3: that was donated by Kimball's family, but it doesn't match
Speaker 3: the description of Barnum's original.
Speaker 1: Or like I said, it had a little bit more
Speaker 1: going on. Yeah, it's like it's like it's twisty and big.
Speaker 1: It's not laying there like an asshole.
Speaker 3: So there's multiple Fiji Mermaids in museum.
Speaker 1: And I will say this, When I saw the Fiji
Speaker 1: Mermaid at the Peabody, yeah, with my friend Kiki.
Speaker 3: Yeah, shout out Kiki.
Speaker 1: When I saw it. At no point upon seeing it,
Speaker 1: even when reading the word mermaid. Yeah, that I think
Speaker 1: that was a woman. I mean, this is so I had.
Speaker 1: I looked at it for a while. I took a picture.
Speaker 1: I walked around, and I was like, that was an
Speaker 1: old man.
Speaker 3: You're ish, I look, I gotta check you. I gotta
Speaker 3: check you.
Speaker 1: Ed.
Speaker 3: You start to sound a little bit like Chris for Columbus. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you're starting to criticize the look of the mythical creature
Speaker 3: instead of appreciating that.
Speaker 1: I can see where how he got there. Yes, if
Speaker 1: this was the same thing he saw, which it wasn't.
Speaker 1: This was an orangutank or something stapled to a fish.
Speaker 1: So I don't know what the hell I was looking at,
Speaker 1: but it certainly looked like mister Burns or something. The
Speaker 1: point is P. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum knew exactly what he was doing. He describes the
Speaker 3: Mermaid in his own eighteen fifty five autobiography as quote
Speaker 3: an ugly, dried up, black looking, and diminutive specimen about
Speaker 3: three feet long. Its mouth was open, its tail turned over,
Speaker 3: and its arms thrown up, giving the appearance of having
Speaker 3: died in Great Aggaon.
Speaker 1: It's arms are thrown up the one I saw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's arms are like whoa, It's like I got caught
Speaker 1: in like a flash bulb, like a picture of it
Speaker 1: getting taken.
Speaker 3: So anyway, this is the same man though, who was
Speaker 3: advertising it with woodcuts of topless babes, and he knew
Speaker 3: exactly what this thing was and he made a fortune
Speaker 3: off of it. Now, the mystery that remains, though we've
Speaker 3: hinted at one of the answers, is what actually was
Speaker 3: the Fiji mermaid, Because the story that got repeated for
Speaker 3: a long time is that it was the upper half
Speaker 3: of a juvenile monkey sewn to the lower half of
Speaker 3: a fish with some paper mache filler and maybe like
Speaker 3: doll hair on top or something. Yeah, And I suspect
Speaker 3: that some of the fakes of the fake that are
Speaker 3: around the world probably are that now, because that was
Speaker 3: the story for so long of how you make a
Speaker 3: Fiji mermaid. But there was a whole trade of Nino's
Speaker 3: actually that were often the stitched up monkey fish combos
Speaker 3: as well. They were manufactured in Japan in the seventeen
Speaker 3: hundreds and all the way up to the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: and Western traders would buy them in Asian ports and
Speaker 3: bring them to Europe in America, so that may have
Speaker 3: been where Barnum got his this idea.
Speaker 1: This radiculous question I've never thought about. So right now,
Speaker 1: there's no no Native American monkeys, right, not Native American
Speaker 1: meaning Indian. I mean like there are no monkeys native
Speaker 1: to North America.
Speaker 3: Correct, I mean, well unless you count sasquatch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But then I'm thinking about like Japan because I
Speaker 1: think of the little monkeys that you would use to
Speaker 1: like stitch up to these small two foot things. Mm hm.
Speaker 1: That always feels really like Southeast Asian to me, and
Speaker 1: not Japan necessarily. So where are people getting monkeys? It's
Speaker 1: such surplus that they're that they're slapping them on fish.
Speaker 3: I couldn't tell you, but I bet I'll tell you what.
Speaker 3: I bet a monkey's worth a lot more dead and
Speaker 3: slapped to a fish, and it is alive, So.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't know that's not true, as I'll watch that
Speaker 1: movie with Harvey Kaitel where he teaches a monkey to steal.
Speaker 1: So in many ways that living monkey made more money.
Speaker 3: But ed, here's the kicker that sort of answers your question.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 3: In twenty eighteen, the Horneman Museum in London, which has
Speaker 3: one of these Japanese mermaid mummies in its collection, decided
Speaker 3: to X ray and see T scan. It told you,
Speaker 3: I love that job, just to see what was in there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there was a bunch of coins and tickets like that,
Speaker 3: like mummy.
Speaker 1: There was no monkey.
Speaker 3: According to this article I found on a website called Hyperallergic,
Speaker 3: the author Allison rights that the Horneman scientists found that
Speaker 3: the body was mostly fish parts, wood, paper, machet, and
Speaker 3: bundles of fiber wrapped to look like a torso with
Speaker 3: some fish jaws stuck in to make the face.
Speaker 1: Okay, so yeah they have they have not enough monkeys,
Speaker 1: just like us.
Speaker 3: There was no primate skeleton at all. And the sort
Speaker 3: of maybe not the cosmic joke here, but the punchline
Speaker 3: to all of this is that the actual construction of
Speaker 3: the mermaid forgery was actually cheaper than the legend, you know,
Speaker 3: the legend of the Yeah, it was just like, no,
Speaker 3: it's just some bullshit paper machet and jawfish bones, yep.
Speaker 1: So, and they had a lot of fish in Japan.
Speaker 1: They fish part. They've got plenty exactly enough to make
Speaker 1: mandibles out of whatever. Not mandibles, I don't know what it's.
Speaker 1: It can make lips. I don't know how you fish lips?
Speaker 1: Fish lips? Whose old fish lips? I don't know.
Speaker 3: So mermaid hoaxes are nothing new, but I want to
Speaker 3: end this episode on a modern mermaid hoax that actually
Speaker 3: might have done more damage to society than the rest
Speaker 3: of these hoaxes combined. In May twenty twelve, Animal Planet,
Speaker 3: the cable channel that brought you Meerkat Manor and Crocodile Hunter,
Speaker 3: aired a two hour special called Mermaids The Body Found.
Speaker 3: Do you remember this?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 3: So, this documentary was framed as a serious scientific documentary
Speaker 3: about Noah or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We've
Speaker 3: talked about them before on the show, discovering and then
Speaker 3: covering up the existence of aquatic humanoids.
Speaker 1: The reason to cover that up for Mermaids.
Speaker 3: There was in it. There's a South African actor named
Speaker 3: Andre Weedman who plays the fictional scientist doctor Paul Robertson
Speaker 3: of Noah.
Speaker 1: Wait, it's a documentary. How is anyone fictional on screen?
Speaker 1: It's not a documentary. It's presented as a document.
Speaker 3: It was presented as a documentary. So they cast this
Speaker 3: guy to play doctor Paul Robertson of Noah, and he
Speaker 3: tells the story of how they found the Mermaids and
Speaker 3: why they covered it up, and the way the show
Speaker 3: is made. If you were a busy mom in the
Speaker 3: Midwest and you've got the TV on or your kids
Speaker 3: said there was a mermaid thing and you want to
Speaker 3: turn on, and you're up up, up by, it's just
Speaker 3: convincing enough that you would maybe think that this was real. Sure,
Speaker 3: the only way you'd know it was fake they put
Speaker 3: a disclaimer in the closing credits, but it's in like
Speaker 3: the last three seconds of the credit, so you'd have
Speaker 3: to watch the whole way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, day doing that, and it was a hit.
Speaker 3: The premiere of Mermaids The Body Discovered or Uncovered The
Speaker 3: Body Found drew one point nine million viewers, which at
Speaker 3: the time, according to The Washington Post, was Animal Planet's
Speaker 3: biggest audience since the Steve Erwin Memorial in two thousand
Speaker 3: and six.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Over the next few weeks, three point four million more
Speaker 3: people watched the show. And then people started to call
Speaker 3: the actual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and they started
Speaker 3: emailing Congress asking for answers about why the existence of
Speaker 3: Mermaids was being covered up, so I can't believe this happened.
Speaker 3: But in July twenty twelve, the real Noah put up
Speaker 3: a page on their official Noah dot gov website titled
Speaker 3: are Mermaids Reel? And that page is still up. There's
Speaker 3: a link in the show notes you can go look
Speaker 3: at it. It is Oceanservice dot Noah dot gov slash
Speaker 3: facts slash Mermaids dot html, and it is a federal
Speaker 3: government document that says, quote mermaids, those half human, half
Speaker 3: fish sirens of the sea are legendary sea creatures chronicled
Speaker 3: in maritime cultures since time immemorial. The ancient Greek epic
Speaker 3: poet Homer wrote of them in the Odyssey. In the
Speaker 3: ancient Far East, mermaids were the wives of powerful sea
Speaker 3: dragons and served as trusted messengers between their spouses and
Speaker 3: the emperors on land. The Aboriginal people of Australia we
Speaker 3: didn't get to these, but they call me maids yok yawks,
Speaker 3: a name that may refer to their mesmerizing songs. The
Speaker 3: belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn
Speaker 3: of our species, But are mermaids real? No evidence of
Speaker 3: aquatic humanoids has ever been found. Why then, do they
Speaker 3: occupy the collective unconscious of nearly all seafaring peoples.
Speaker 1: Of nearly all people who email us.
Speaker 3: That's a question best left to historians, philosophers, and anthropologists.
Speaker 3: Now I think they were being a little cheeky posting this,
Speaker 3: but still the US government.
Speaker 1: I mean, well know what's who knows if the website
Speaker 1: still works?
Speaker 3: Now, yeah, it does, you can go. I went to
Speaker 3: it when I was researching this show. You know, the
Speaker 3: US government caught enough heat for a TV special that
Speaker 3: they had nothing to do with that. Some probably in turn,
Speaker 3: was hunched over a keyboard in the basement somewhere being like,
Speaker 3: I can't believe I have to write this and post this.
Speaker 1: But they're also happy to have the traffic the SEO
Speaker 1: for the first time ever. They show up first.
Speaker 3: That's true. That's true. Noah's feel big about that. They
Speaker 3: probably would prefer to end up there for I don't
Speaker 3: know scientific facts about title one.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can find out about tides.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe come for the Mermaids, stay for the Tides.
Speaker 3: I suspect that if you are a person furious at
Speaker 3: Noah because you believe that they've been covering up the
Speaker 3: existence of Mermaids, You're probably not sticking around to learn about, Uh,
Speaker 3: the way that the moon shifts.
Speaker 1: That's not on them, that's not it's not on them,
Speaker 1: that's that own person's personal madness.
Speaker 3: Anyway, once wasn't enough. In May twenty thirteen, Animal Planet
Speaker 3: ran a sequel, Mermaids The New Evidence, this time drawing
Speaker 3: in three point six million viewers and becoming at the
Speaker 3: time the most watched program in the entire history of
Speaker 3: Animal Planet, beating their previous record holder, a special called Dragons,
Speaker 3: a Fantasy made reel, which was another fake documentary.
Speaker 1: Now they've got they have a taste for it now.
Speaker 3: The executive producer of both specials, Charlie Foley, when asked
Speaker 3: if he was worried that millions of people thought it
Speaker 3: was real, just said that he was quote very flattered.
Speaker 3: And the reason which I will say, if I'd produced
Speaker 3: it and someone asked me the same question, I probably
Speaker 3: would have said the same thing. You did a good
Speaker 3: you know, you did a.
Speaker 1: Good enough job that people we should work and there's
Speaker 1: a propaganda arm up something after this.
Speaker 3: But the reason I wanted to end on this story
Speaker 3: is not just because it's kind of a ridiculous, laughable story.
Speaker 3: There's a Slate piece by a marine biologist named Andrew
Speaker 3: Taylor that does a pretty good job illustrating the consequences
Speaker 3: of Mermaids the body found and Mermaids the new evidence,
Speaker 3: and those consequences turned out to be more depressing than
Speaker 3: what maybe they even appeared to be initially. Taylor tells
Speaker 3: a story about being on a plane in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: two years after the documentary, and getting into a conversation
Speaker 3: with a fifth grade teacher who genuinely believed in the
Speaker 3: cover up, and the school teacher told him, quote, if
Speaker 3: Noah is lying to us about the existence of mermaids,
Speaker 3: then they're definitely lying to us about climate change.
Speaker 1: Wait, hold on, why would you compare a thing that
Speaker 1: they've covered up with the thing that they're saying is
Speaker 1: not covered up. And then, also, as person's an idiot,
Speaker 1: because you can go to Noa's website and see it's
Speaker 1: not real climate change. No, no, no, the mermaid the
Speaker 1: artists fell. You can go to the article and see
Speaker 1: that they themselves said murmurs aren't real. Right.
Speaker 3: But the point, the point that this science writer is
Speaker 3: making in Slate is that the fact that this documentary.
Speaker 3: This fake documentary came out and convinced some people that
Speaker 3: the government is lying about mermaids. Makes it very easy
Speaker 3: for them to then dismiss other things that they want
Speaker 3: to think the government is lying about, like how to
Speaker 3: climate change.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to tell it to the science teacher,
Speaker 1: but they are in for a doucy in the following decade.
Speaker 3: They well, they certainly are, you know. And obviously this
Speaker 3: is just one story.
Speaker 1: It is just as anecdotal could be, nothing could be,
Speaker 1: could have never happened.
Speaker 3: But I think in a world where we have a
Speaker 3: looser and looser grip on any sort of consensus reality
Speaker 3: every day, it's interesting that you can trace back across
Speaker 3: some of this stuff. Oh this is how you know,
Speaker 3: one person might have started to fall this way, or
Speaker 3: might have started to believe this other thing. And it's
Speaker 3: stuff that individually across the years, in the decades. Sure
Speaker 3: is putting out mermaids, the dead body or whatever. Really
Speaker 3: the end of the world. No, But you start to
Speaker 3: mess with people enough and the bigger picture starts to
Speaker 3: add up to a world where people don't believe the
Speaker 3: things that are real.
Speaker 1: Again, all these even the people animal planet weren't even
Speaker 1: prepared for what the following decade would bring, and now
Speaker 1: we have AI and everything. Forget it. If people don't
Speaker 1: want to.
Speaker 3: Look up and animals or a planet.
Speaker 1: So if people don't want to look it up, they
Speaker 1: don't want to look it up, nothing we can do
Speaker 1: about that, not on this show, for sure.
Speaker 3: Well that's a great that's a great positive place to end.
Speaker 1: I mean, is this more positive that I was gonna be?
Speaker 1: I thought you were like, man, I'm getting to how
Speaker 1: fucked up it is, how this thing fucked up the world.
Speaker 1: I thought you were gonna say for real that people
Speaker 1: watch that documentary and then it was like four out
Speaker 1: of five women who just take a dip at the
Speaker 1: beach have been pulled up in nets. Like I thought
Speaker 1: people were like that. People thought they were so real.
Speaker 1: They're like, we got one and like all these regular
Speaker 1: ass ladies were getting snatched at fucking the beach. Well
Speaker 1: that's not what happened. I think school teacher who may
Speaker 1: or may not have existed, held a belief.
Speaker 3: Well sure, and maybe that on its own is not
Speaker 3: as bad as women getting snatched up at the beach,
Speaker 3: which I think is probably happening.
Speaker 1: But for different reasons and reasons. Yeah, but I thought
Speaker 1: you're gonna be like Galveston, a ghost down as women
Speaker 1: are afraid to be confused for mermaids.
Speaker 3: My point, I guess is that it's a It's an
Speaker 3: interesting place to end because the original sirens of mythology
Speaker 3: saying sailors to their death by promising false knowledge, and
Speaker 3: three thousand years later, Animal Planet Lord three point six
Speaker 3: million viewers to the death of their trust in science
Speaker 3: by promising knowledge and knowledge. Maybe there's maybe there's a
Speaker 3: point there, and maybe there's not.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'll never know. All I know is
Speaker 1: that it's pretty low on the fear tier for me.
Speaker 3: Where and that brings us to the fear tier? Where
Speaker 3: are you going to put mermaids on the fear tier two?
Speaker 3: I'm gonna put mermaids at A one.
Speaker 1: I'm going to because I don't know. I've followed ladies
Speaker 1: to a second location for less so out on Oh
Speaker 1: by the way, like they invited me, they invited followed
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, shadows, Yeah yeah, yeah, I met like I'm
Speaker 1: easily convinced to go to places like a mermaid, like
Speaker 1: a siren's call, like their whole thing. Yes, yeah, not
Speaker 1: the other thing your brain could have gone to.
Speaker 3: Well, Ed, you're putting mermaids at a two, I'm putting
Speaker 3: mermaids at a one. I do think mermaids might be
Speaker 3: the least scary thing we've ever covered on this show.
Speaker 3: And hey, you know what that happens. That's why we
Speaker 3: have a scale. You've got ones, and you've got tens,
Speaker 3: and sometimes there's gonna be ones. If everything on the
Speaker 3: fear tier is a five and above, that would really
Speaker 3: limit the topics that we can cover. So Yep, mermaids
Speaker 3: are a solid one. I hope if you see one
Speaker 3: at the beach this summer, you stay far away and
Speaker 3: you take a great picture to show the world that
Speaker 3: mermaids are real and nursing manatee and we can all
Speaker 3: see that you have bad eyesight and it's a nursing manatee.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: That's Scared all the Time for this week. Until next time.
Speaker 3: I'm Chris Calari and I'm Edvacola, and we will see
Speaker 3: you soon. Bye bye bye.
Speaker 1: Scared All the Time is co produced by Chris Calari
Speaker 1: and Edvacola, written by Chris Calari, edited by Edvacola.
Speaker 3: Additional support and keeper of sanity is test Fiful.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual.
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