Merfolk, Mercreatures, Mermen or Merpeople are legendary water-dwelling, human-like beings. They are attested in folklore and mythology throughout the ages in various parts of the world. Merfolk, Merpeople, or simply Mer refers to humanoid creatures that live in deep waters like Mermaids, Sirens, Cecaelia etc.
In English, female merfolk are called mermaids, although in a strict sense, mermaids are confined to beings who are half-woman and half-fish in appearance; male merfolk are called mermen. Depending on the story, they can be described as either ugly or beautiful.
Chinese rényú (人魚) stands for "merfolk", but in ancient geographical or natural historical tracts, the term referred to "human-fish" or "man-fish" purported to inhabit rivers or lakes in certain parts of China. The Japanese analogue ningyo (人魚) likewise translates to "human-fish" while, at the same time, having also applied to various human-like fish recorded in writings from medieval times into the Edo Period.
Certain fantastical types of "fish", generically referred to as renyu ( 人 魚 , "human-fish") are alleged to occur in various parts of China according to the Shan Hai Jing ( Classic of Mountains and Seas , 4th century BC). It is mentioned in the Bei Shan Jing ("Classic of the Northern mountains"), Zhong Shan Jing (Central Mountains), and Xi Shan Jing (Western Mountains) sections of this work. [1] [2]
This work and others also mention several additional types of "anthropomorphic fish" [3] with limbs in other regions such as the chiru ( 赤 鱬 ; "red ru fish" [4] ) and lingyu ( 陵魚; "hill-fish"), considered to be in the same category of creatures. Certain tribes or races of humans were also described being part-fish, namely the Di people . [5] [1]
It is recorded that the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor was illuminated with lamps fueled by the oil of the human-fish (renyu), whose flames were meant to last a very long time. [6] [7]
In the Chinese Song Dynasty's supernatural tale collection Yijian Zhi (夷堅志), there are stories of sea sirens similar to those in other folklore. One tale describes a beautiful female demon living on a cliff of an island. A man sailed to the island, married a woman there, and she taught him how to recognize plants and avoid dangers, protecting him from wild beasts. They had two sons together. However, when a fellow townsman arrived on the island and took the man back by boat, the woman cursed him, throwing their sons into the water in a fit of rage and yelling at him to leave. The man stayed silent after boarding the ship. [8]
Another tale from Guangzhou tells of a merchant who, upon reaching an island, was captured by two women and taken into the mountains. They fed him daily, but he couldn't tell if he was still alive. After about a year, he overheard the women discussing magic, and he begged them to take him to the place where it was performed. When they did, he sought help, causing the women to flee by flying away. Though he was revived, his food gradually dwindled, and he died two months later. [8]
The renyu (人魚; human-fish) is described in the Bei Shan Jing ("Classic of the North Mountains") section as dwelling on Mt. Longhou (龍侯山, "Dragon-Marquis Mountain") in the waters of the Jueshui (決水, "Bursting River"), which flows eastward into the Yellow River. [12] It is said to "resemble the tiyu" [13] [14] (translated as "resemble catfish" [15] [11] [16] ) [17] [c] [21] possess four legs, with a voice like baby crying. [22]
Eating the fish purportedly cured idiocy [15] or dementia. [23] [24] This fish as a cure was also quoted in the Compendium of Materia Medica or Bencao Gangmu (1596) under its entry for Tiyu (Chinese :䱱魚) [22]
The Bencao Gangmu categorized the tiyu ( 䱱魚) as one of two types of "human-fish" (renyu). The human-fish were also known as "child-fish" or haieryu ( 孩 兒魚; 孩儿鱼). [22] [30]
The other type, called the niyu ( 鯢魚) is elaborated in a separate section. [33] It has been noted by Li Shizhen that the character for the Niyu (Ni鯢 fish) consists of the "fish" indexing component (魚) and "child" (兒) radical. [32]
Translators of the Bencao Gangmu attempt to match entries with actual taxa of animals, forbs, etc., where possible, and the tiyu type is glossed as "newts" while the niyu type is "Chinese giant salamander". [27]
The chiru (赤鱬; "red ru fish". [4] Wade-Giles: ch'ih-ju; "red ju" [35] ) is described in the Nan Shan Jing ("Classic of the Southern Mountains") as a human-headed fish. It is said to be found in the Qingqushan (青丘山 "Green-Hills Mountains") in the Pool-of-Yi (Yì zhī zé 翼之澤; "Carp-Wings Lake"). It is described as basically fish-form but having a human face, and issuing sounds like the mandarin duck. Eating it purportedly prevented scabies or itchy skin. [36] [4]
The illustration of the chiru from China may have influenced the legless, human-faced fish visualization of some of the ningyo in Japan, according to the hypothesis of Morihiko Fujisawa . [37]
The jiaoren (蛟 人 "flood dragon people" or 鮫 人 "shark people") [39] [e] that appear in medieval writings are considered to be references to merfolk. [3] [41] [42]
This mythical southern mermaid or merman is recorded in Ren Fang 's Shuyi ji "Records of Strange Things" (early 6th century CE). [44] [45]
In the midst of the South Sea are the houses of the kău (Chinese :鮫; pinyin :jiao; Wade–Giles :chiao [46] ) people who dwell in the water like fish, but have not given up weaving at the loom. Their eyes have the power to weep, but what they bring forth is pearls. [47]
Similar passages appear in other texts such as the Bowuzhi (博物志, "Treatise of Manifold " c. 290 CE) as "weep[ing] tears that became pearls". [48] [49] [50] [f]
These aquatic people supposedly spun a type of raw silk called jiaoxiao 蛟 綃 "mermaid silk" or jiaonujuan 蛟 女 絹 "mermaid woman's silk". Schafer equates this with sea silk, the rare fabric woven from byssus filaments produced by Pinna "pen shell" mollusks. [51] [g]
Loting (盧亭) is a mysterious ethnic group residing in Hong Kong's Myths. [53] They are legendary merfolk half human and half fish, also known as Lo Yu, Lu Heng, or Lo Ting Fish Man. [54] They have lived on Tai O' Lantau Island in Hong Kong since the local civil uprising in the Eastern Jin Dynasty of China. [55] It is said that Loting has fish scales on his fish-like human body, a face that resembles humans, and he enjoys sucking chicken blood. [56] They could use their catch to fish from Tai O and trade chickens with the local human inhabitants to survive.
The ningyo (人魚 "human-fish") of Japan has its own history in the country's literary record. The earliest references (in the Nihon shoki , entry for year 619, reign of Empress Suiko) do not specifically use the term ningyo, and the "thing" appeared in fresh water (a river in Ōmi Province, canal Settsu Province), and may presumed to be a giant salamander. [57] Later accounts claim that Empress Suiko's regent Prince Shōtoku knew the creature to be a ningyo when one was presented to him by representatives of Ōmi. [58] The appearance of the human-fish was strongly associated with ill omen in later treatments of the Prince's encounter with the human-fish. [59]
During the Kamakura Period, ningyo of the marine sort were frequently reported as washing ashore, and these were taken to be ominous signs usually prefiguring bloody battles. [60]
The ningyo, or rather renyu (人魚) and the like found in Chinese sources (chiru, tiyu etc., etc., discussed above) were also discussed in Japanese literature, for example, works of scholars of herbal and traditional medicine, such as Kaibara Ekiken (d. 1714) and Ono Ranzan (d. 1810). These Japanese scholars were also aware of European discussions on "sirens", "anthropomorphic fish", "peixe muller (fish-woman)", etc. [61] [62]
In folklore, a mermaid is an aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide, including Europe, Asia, and Africa.
A merman, the male counterpart of the mythical female mermaid, is a legendary creature which is human from the waist up and fish-like from the waist down, but may assume normal human shape. Sometimes mermen are described as hideous and other times as handsome.
The Bencao gangmu, known in English as the Compendium of Materia Medica or Great Pharmacopoeia, is an encyclopedic gathering of medicine, natural history, and Chinese herbology compiled and edited by Li Shizhen and published in the late 16th century, during the Ming dynasty. Its first draft was completed in 1578 and printed in Nanjing in 1596. The Compendium lists the materia medica of traditional Chinese medicine known at the time, including plants, animals, and minerals that were believed to have medicinal properties.
The Penghou is a tree spirit from Chinese mythology and folklore. Two Chinese classics record similar versions of the Penghou myth.
Jiaolong or jiao is a dragon in Chinese mythology, often defined as a "scaled dragon"; it is hornless according to certain scholars and said to be aquatic or river-dwelling. It may have referred to a species of crocodile.
Ningyo, as the name suggests, is a creature with both human and fish-like features, described in various pieces of Japanese literature.
Bashe was a python-like Chinese mythological giant snake that ate elephants.
A shōjō is the Japanese reading of Chinese xing-xing (猩猩) or its older form sheng sheng, which is a mythical primate, though it has been tentatively identified with an orangutan species.
A shuihu or shui hu, is a legendary creature said to have inhabited river systems in what is now Hubei Province in China.
Zouyu, also called zouwu or zouya, is a legendary creature mentioned in old Chinese literature. The earliest known appearance of the characters 騶虞 is in the Book of Songs, but J.J.L. Duyvendak describes that the interpretation of that little poem as referring to an animal of that name is "very doubtful".
Fengli is a legendary or mythified flying mammal of China, whose descriptions from various sources were collated in the Taiping Yulan encyclopedia and the Bencao gangmu compendium of materia medica.
In Chinese mythology, the xiao is the name of several creatures, including the xiao "a long-armed ape" or "a four-winged bird" and shanxiao "mischievous, one-legged mountain spirit". Furthermore, some Western sources misspell and misconstrue the older romanization hsiao as "hsigo" [sic] "a flying monkey".
Monkeys are one of the smartest animals amongst the animal kingdom according to the Chinese culture.
"Agnete og Havmanden" (Danish) or "Agneta och havsmannen" (Swedish) is a ballad. It is also found in Norway and as a prose folktale published by Just Mathias Thiele in his 1818 Danske Folkesagn, though Thomas Bredsdorff has argued that this prose version is of literary rather than folkloric origin. The ballad too is generally thought to be relatively late in its composition, perhaps from the eighteenth century.
The (1406) Jiuhuang bencao, written by the Ming dynasty prince Zhu Su (朱橚), was the first illustrated botanical manual for famine foods—wild food plants suitable for survival during times of famine.
Li Shizhen's (1597) Bencao gangmu, the classic materia medica of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), included 35 human drugs, including organs, bodily fluids, and excreta. Crude drugs derived from the human body were commonplace in the early history of medicine. Some of these TCM human drug usages are familiar from alternative medicine, such as medicinal breast milk and urine therapy. Others are uncommon, such as the "mellified man", which was a western nostrum allegedly prepared from the mummy of a holy man who only ate honey during his last days and whose corpse had been immersed in honey for 100 years. Li condemned the usage of most items listed in the section.
For over two millennia, texts in Chinese herbology and traditional Chinese medicine have recorded medicinal plants that are also hallucinogens and psychedelics. Some are familiar psychoactive plants in Western herbal medicine, but several Chinese plants have not been noted as hallucinogens in modern works. Chinese herbals are an important resource for the history of botany, for instance, Zhang Hua's c. 290 Bowuzhi is the earliest record of the psilocybin mushroom xiàojùn 笑菌.
The Xinxiu bencao, also known as the Tang bencao, is a Chinese pharmacopoeia written in the Tang dynasty by a team of officials and physicians headed by editor-in-chief Su Jing. It borrowed heavily from—and expanded upon—the earlier Bencao jing jizhu by Tao Hongjing. The text was first published in 659; although it is now considered lost in China, at least one copy exists in Japan, where the text had been transmitted to in 721.
A hairen is a sea-dwelling human or humanoid in Chinese lore, also called kaijin (海人) by Japanese sources.
The huoshu or huo shu (火鼠), meaning fire rat or fire mouse is a fantastical beast in Chinese tradition.
Citations
又東北二百里曰龍侯之山無草木多金玉決決之水出焉〈音訣〉而東流注于河其中多人魚其狀如䱱魚四足其音如嬰兒〈䱱見中山經或曰人魚即鯢也似鮎而四足聲如小兒啼今亦呼鮎為䱱音蹄〉食之無癡疾
Jiaoren (鮫人 mythical fish-human, mermaid, merman). website
南海外有鮫人,水居如魚,不廢織績,其眼能泣珠。
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