Diary of a Radical Mermaid (27 page)

Landers: Gullible with a capital Gull.

Famous Mers. Now, look, if I out every major Mer singer, actor, aristocrat, politician, and business tycoon in the world, the Council will fine me for blabbing and, worse, Elton John will never invite me to another of his Tinseltown Oscar bashes again. But I can name-drop a few names. I’m not saying the following were or currently are hiding a set of webbed toes, I’m just, hmmm, saying that they, hmmm, could be. That is, they fit the typical Mer profile: gorgeous, rich, talented, charismatic, etc. If you believe some celebrities are born able to tread water even in a hurricane, doesn’t it explain a lot?

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Barbara Streisand, Grace Kelly, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Clark Gable, Gwynneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Bill Gates, Tyra Banks, Diana Ross, Beyonce, Puff Daddy, Keanu Reeves, Princess Diana, Amelia Earhart, Tiger Woods, Merlin (of King Arthur fame), Cleopatra, Shakespeare, and the entire cast of that 1960s fave TV show of Mer kids everywhere: Flipper.

I could name dozens more. But not without a Mer lawyer to fend off the complaints.

Science versus Mythology; Facts of Ancient Mer History

by Acarathena Bonavendier, PhD

Founder, Archaeological Research Consortium (ARC)

Mobile, Alabama

Like my elder cousin (and, in the spirit of disclosure, ARC’s largest financial donor) Lilith Bonavendier, I fully support the idea that Mers and Landers share extensive genetic, sociological, cultural, and historical roots, in essence, being separate branches off the same family tree. However, unlike (but with all due respect to) Lilith, I prefer hard science to fanciful mythology when it comes to the ancient origins of Mer culture. Fables of Atlantis-like kingdoms, of half-human, fish-tailed beings, et cetera, are simply that: fables. Without going into volumes of detail about the artifacts and fossils gathered by Mer scientists for hundreds of years, I will sum up the indisputable conclusions briefly:

Mers and Landers diverged from a common ancestor at least six million years ago. Mer scientists excavating submerged sites off the coast of Africa in the late 1970s recovered the bones of numerous aquatic hominids, known in the research vernacular as “aquatic apes” (i.e. chimp-like head and torso, broadly splayed feet with fossil imprints of webbed toes).

According to Lander archaeologists and ancient Lander historians, Sumeria was the site of the first advanced human civilization, existing 6,000 years ago on the coast of modern-day Iraq. Yet Sumerian mythology speaks of earlier civilizations that predate that time by thousands of years and insists that half-man, half-fish “gods” came out of the ocean after a catastrophic worldwide flood that wiped out most of mankind (i.e. Landers). According to Sumerian texts, these gods were mentors and teachers from the lost cities. They restored civilization.

Yet Landers insist that no evidence of pre-Sumerian civilization exists. Why haven’t Lander researchers found such evidence? Because it is now hidden on the ocean floor.

Without dispute, all scientists, both Mer and Landers, agree that the last ice age ended approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. At that time, the melting of the glaciers raised ocean levels worldwide. It is accepted fact that the modern day Persian Gulf was once a vast, fertile plain fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. According to Sumerian legend, this veritable real-life paradise was home to an advanced civilization with numerous great cities along the ancient Mesopotamian coast.

Until the waters rose.

Geological evidence indicates that while this gradual flooding of each section of the continental coastlines worldwide, occurred over thousands of years, research also indicates that turbulent climatic changes also may have caused sudden, catastrophic increases in ocean level. In league with evidence of massive volcano eruptions, such as those suspected in the ancient Greek islands, one can easily picture shocking floods and enormous, deadly tsunamis. Indeed, since virtually every ancient culture on Earth — on every continent — includes legends of a “great flood” that destroyed most of mankind, it is accurate to believe that such legends date to specific, real, cataclysmic events associated with glacier melting.

How does this prove that Mer civilizations pre-date all known Lander civilizations, or at the very least, openly co-existed alongside Lander civilizations at one time?

The lost cities have been found.

While a few Lander scientists and curious sport divers have long reported finding mysterious, megalithic ruins in waters off the coasts of the world, their contention that those ruins represent human civilizations lost to glacier flooding, therefore pre-dating the earliest known civilizations by 10,000 years or more, have been laughed off by mainstream Lander archaeologists as bizarre conjecture.

Mer scientists, however, are under no such narrow presumptions. Working in deep waters, guided by ancient Mer texts, Mer researchers have gathered a treasure trove of extraordinary fossils, artifacts, and engraved writings from Mer and/or Lander civilizations at more than thirty major sites worldwide.

How then, if Mers once ruled empires of both Mer and Lander, may we explain the current state of affairs — i.e. that the end of the last ice age began a swift period of decline in Mer influence and population, so that our entire branch of the human race dwindled to a tiny, elite minority lost to legend and cloaked in secrecy?

Sadly, it has taken until recent decades for science to develop the tools that could answer that question definitively — i.e. the combination of forensics and genetic testing that have identified heretofore unsuspected clues.

Unfortunately, at this point in time, due to investigations and allegations being pursued by the Council in regards to the UniWorld situation, I’m constrained from elaborating on the details of those clues.

The Legend Of Water People

Excerpted From Fables of the Water People

Compiled and Edited by Lilith Bonavendier

In some ancient time of great honor and noble deeds, some millenium thousands of years before our own — once upon a time, as they say in fairytales — Melasine and the other Old Ones, male and female, ruled a great empire of extraordinary beings such as themselves, wholly human but also wholly aquatic.

Whether this mythical empire existed in the blue waters of the Aegean, as is usually coined by fervent fans of the Atlantis legends, or in some totally unconsidered ocean realm, is unknown. Certain scientists among our kind have quietly removed incredible statues of the Old Ones from sunken ports in every ancient coastal city of the world.

Their findings suggest that an amazing civilization existed long before the first Greeks erected temples to sea gods and goddesses. It is quite likely the fabulous worlds of Melasine and her kind had been in ruins for millennia when Neptune began paddling around Grecian male fantasies with his nubile nymphs and phallic trident.

Water is life, water is love, water is the womb. All the great religions believe so. Water People say the earth formed as an afterthought inside the glorious depths of great seas, hardening like the dull, dry pit of a luscious fruit. At the risk of insulting those Water People who believe Landers cannot possibly share our legacy, I must point out that if the sea is the mother of us all, then we must all be, at heart, both Water People and Land People. Do not all children float first in the womb as female beings? Thus all men begin in fluid, as women. Similarly, all Landers began as Water People. And all Water People began as the Old Ones.

Mermaids.

I rarely use that cartoonish term, but it does prove convenient for first impressions. Whether fact or fancy, the portrait of Melasine at Sainte’s Point indicates she is far more surreal and complex than a simple, popular name can surmise. I have no doubt she exists — an ancient, ageless, female being, isolated and reclusive, lonely and yet seductive.

* * * *

When Melasine and the others like her — both male and female — were young, they called themselves Tamerians, after their greatest city. The Tamerians openly ruled the coasts of the ancient world, creating amazing palaces in the waters, traveling across land via rivers and inlets and fantastically engineered channels which connected the great seas and freshwater lakes. Landers — pathetic, two-legged, short-lived humans — were deemed inferior and treated as servants or were driven to the wild interiors of the continents, where their shuffling, land-trapped ways could be ignored by the elegant and handsomely finned Tamerians.

Ta-Mera was built more in the water than on the land, with submerged temples and fluid passageways, fine promontories of marble for sunning in the warm air, and broad canals of the most beautiful stonework, allowing Melasine and her kind to travel throughout their empire without ever leaving the water. (Dear Readers: You might want to look for an article from the magazine Strange Science, circa May of 1997, titled “The Mysterious Lost Alleys of the Ancient Coasts.” It’s inaccurate but fascinating, especially to those of us who know why those “alleys” truly existed.) The Tamerians were a far older race than the plodding Landers. They considered themselves a far more brilliant kind, far more talented, far more evolved.

There is always a “pride goeth before the fall” theme in mythology, and the Ta-Mera story may be just such an instructional tale. Perhaps the Tamerians abused their hold over the Landers, treating them as a lesser tributary of the familial sea, and the Landers finally rebelled. Or the Tamerians worshiped inconstant gods who smote them for frivolous injustices. Or they were doomed by the ordinary afflictions of both Land and Water Kind — greed, envy, lust, and jealousy.

Whatever the curse that descended upon them, it inspired all the great fables of the world since. Is it not true that in the storytelling traditions of every major culture we find tales of unthinkable disasters, which cleansed the world and restored order? Of course, among Water People these tales have a certain irony. For example, in our version of Noah’s Ark, the world was destroyed by a great drought.

Be that as it may, some terrible cataclysm abruptly destroyed Ta-Mera and the vast empire it anchored, along with all the Landers — except three young men — and the Tamerians — except Melasine and two others — young mermaids named Acarinth and Leirdrela.

In some accounts the three surviving Landers are described by Water People as barbaric and low (typical Landers, some insist) and are assigned names commiserate with such an unpleasant portrayal. A web-footed priest writing in fourteenth century England named the Landers Gumaldin, Fray Daval, and Altenhop — names from the classic storytellers’ lexicon of bumbling demons and clownish villains.

Even modern Water People coax their children to sleep with disparaging comic tales about the three Landers. In many bedtime stories the trio become drooling lechers named Squat, Frag, and Goop, and children are assured that our finned foremothers nobly consorted with them only for purposes of repopulating the ocean with Water People.

Most Water People, however, prefer a more romantic and sympathetic image of the three legendary Landers — who are, after all, our mythological ancestors. They call the threesome by handsome names that were assigned to them in a classic eighteenth century narrative written by a Bonavendier relative, the infamous Victorian singer and poetess Emilene Merrimac Revere (Molly’s great-grandmother), of Boston, Massachusetts. To quote a verse:

Stalwart and true, by Ta-Mera’s princesses enslaved

Devoted lovers, bound to earth yet fulfilled in water,

We shall whisper their mortal names on shores kissed by eternal tides,

And forget them not in fluid rhyme:

Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime.

Beckrith, Padrian, and Salasime. The mates of the three Tamerians and the mythological founding fathers of all Water People. They were pureblooded, two-legged, ordinary Landers. After the great cataclysm nothing was left of either Land People or Water People except those three gentlemen and our three ladies. A classic dilemma.

Even if you were the only man left on Earth . . .

Melasine, Acarinth, and Leirdrela fell in love with the men. The Tamerians were not yet creatures of determined solitude. That came later, during centuries of loneliness and loss. But after many years their devoted Landers died, and also their halfling children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren — all mortal.

As the centuries passed, every lover and every child left them. The three Tamerians realized it would always be so. Thus they began to harden their hearts against Landers and even halflings, to stay alone, until some rare man lures them into love again or some descendent earns their sympathy.

So they cannot resist loving us. In their souls they cherish their mingled descendents, neither Lander nor Tamerian, neither earth nor water, but the best of both.

And that is a truth I believe.

* * * *

Popular modern myths say Melasine, Acarinth, and Leirdrela continue to take lovers among the men of the earth and to birth new generations of extraordinary descendents. The more pragmatic among Water People insist that no such finned ancestors ever existed and certainly don’t exist now, and that variations in our skills and physiology are mere vagaries, easily explained by random intermingling among our kind. (Dear Readers: I will not get into any wilder claims here, but do please read my addendum about clans.)