Mermaid (Jalpari) is a aquatic creature with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish.
A mermaid (Jalpari) is a legendary aquatic creature with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids-Jalpari appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Africa and Asia. The first stories appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess Atargatis transformed herself into a mermaid-Jalpari out of shame for accidentally killing her human lover. Mermaids-Jalpari are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks and drownings. In other folk traditions, they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans.
Mermaids-Jalpari are associated with the mythological Greek sirens as well as with sirenia, a biological order comprising dugongs and manatees. Some of the historical sightings by sailors may have been misunderstood encounters with these aquatic mammals. Christopher Columbus reported seeing mermaids while exploring the Caribbean, and sightings have been reported in the 20th and 21st centuries in Canada, Israel and Zimbabwe. Mermaids-Jalpari have been a popular subject of art and literature in recent centuries, such as in Hans Christian Andersen's well-known fairy tale.
The word mermaid-Jalpari is a compound of the Old English sea, and a girl or young woman. Sirenia is an order of fully aquatic, herbivorous mammals that inhabit rivers, estuaries, coastal marine waters, swamps and marine wetlands. Sirenians, including manatees and dugongs, possess major aquatic adaptations: arms used for steering, a paddle used for propulsion, and remnants of hind limbs (legs) in the form of two small bones floating deep in the muscle. They look ponderous and clumsy but are actually fusiform, hydrodynamic and highly muscular, and mariners before the mid-nineteenth century referred to them as mermaids-Jalpari
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A popular Greek legend turned Alexander the Great's sister, Thessalonike, into a mermaid-Jalpari after her death, living in the Aegean. She would ask the sailors on any ship she would encounter only one question: "Is King Alexander alive?" to which the correct answer was: "He lives and reigns and conquers the world" This answer would please her, and she would accordingly calm the waters and bid the ship farewell. Any other answer would enrage her, and she would stir up a terrible storm, dooming the ship and every sailor on board.
Lucian of Samosata in Syria (2nd century A.D.), in De Dea Syria (About the Syrian Goddess) wrote of the Syrian temples he had visited:
"Among them – Now that is the traditional story among them concerning the temple. But other men swear that Semiramis of Babylonia, whose deeds are many in Asia, also founded this site, and not for Hera Atargatis but for her own mother, whose name was Derketo."
"I saw Derketo's likeness in Phoenicia, a strange marvel. It is woman (Jalpari) for half its length; but the other half, from thighs to feet, stretched out in a fish's tail. But the image in the Holy City is entirely a woman, and the grounds for their account are not very clear. They consider fish to be sacred, and they never eat them; and though they eat all other fowls they do not eat the dove, for they believe it is holy. And these things are done, they believe, because of Derketo and Semiramis, the first because Derketo has the shape of a fish, and the other because ultimately Semiramis turned into a dove. Well, I may grant that the temple was a work of Semiramis perhaps;
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The One Thousand and One Nights collection includes several tales featuring "sea people", such as "Djullanar the Sea-girl" Jalpari. Unlike depictions of mermaids-Jalpari in other mythologies, these are anatomically identical to land-bound humans, differing only in their ability to breathe and live underwater. They can interbreed with land humans, and the children of such unions have the ability to live underwater. In the tale "Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman", the protagonist Abdullah the Fisherman gains the ability to breathe underwater and discovers an underwater society that is portrayed as an inverted reflection of society on land. The underwater society follows a form of primitive communism where concepts like money and clothing do not exist. In "The Adventures of Bulukiya", the protagonist Bulukiya's quest for the herb of immortality leads him to explore the seas, where he encounters societies of mermaids-Jalpari.
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The Norman chapel in Durham Castle, built around 1078 by Saxon stonemasons, has what is probably the earliest artistic depiction of a mermaid in England. It can be seen on a south-facing capital above one of the original Norman stone pillars.
Mermaids-Jalpari appear in British folklore as unlucky omens, both foretelling disaster and provoking it. Several variants of the ballad Sir Patrick Spens depict a mermaid-Jalpari speaking to the doomed ships. In some versions, she tells them they will never see land again; in others, she claims they are near shore, which they are wise enough to know means the same thing. Mermaids-Jalpari can also be a sign of approaching rough weather,and some have been described as monstrous in size, up to 2,000 feet (610 m).
Mermaids-Jalpari have also been described as able to swim up rivers to freshwater lakes. In one story, the Laird of Lorntie went to aid a woman he thought was drowning in a lake near his house; a servant of his pulled him back, warning that it was a mermaid(Jalpari), and the mermaid screamed at them that she would have killed him if it were not for his servant. But mermaids(Jalpari) could occasionally be more beneficent;
According to legend, a mermaid (Jalpari) came to the Cornish village of Zennor where she used to listen to the singing of a chorister, Matthew Trewhella. The two fell in love, and Matthew went with the mermaid to her home at Pendour Cove. On summer nights, the lovers can be heard singing together. At the Church of Saint Senara in Zennor, there is a famous chair decorated by a mermaid-Jalpari carving which is probably six hundred years old.
Mermaids(Jalpari) from the Isle of Man, known as ben-varrey, are considered more favorable toward humans than those of other regions, with various accounts of assistance, gifts and rewards. One story tells of a fisherman who carried a stranded mermaid back into the sea and was rewarded with the location of treasure. Another recounts the tale of a baby mermaid who stole a doll from a human little girl, but was rebuked by her mother and sent back to the girl with a gift of a pearl necklace to atone for the theft. A third story tells of a fishing family that made regular gifts of apples to a mermaid (Jalpari) and was rewarded with prosperity.
In May 2012, a Mermaids-Jalpari The Body Found, a television docufiction aired on Animal Planet which centered around the experiences of former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, showing a CGI recreation of amateur sound and video of a beached mermaid and discussing scientific theories involving the existence of mermaids.
In the middle of the 17th century, John Tradescant the elder created a wunderkammer in which he displayed, among other things, a "mermaid's hand". In the 19th century, P. T. Barnum displayed a taxidermal hoax called the Fiji mermaid in his museum. Others have perpetrated similar hoaxes, which are usually papier-mâché fabrications or parts of deceased creatures, In the wake of the 2004 tsunami, pictures of Fiji "mermaids" circulated on the Internet as supposed examples of items that had washed up amid the devastation,
According to Dorothy Dinnerstein’s book The Mermaid (Jalpari) and the Minotaur, human-animal hybrids such as mermaids and minotaurs convey the emergent understanding of the ancients that human beings were both one with and different from animals:
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