I had a very Catholic/Christian upbringing, so the name Noah and terms like “the Great Deluge” ring a bell or two. I know the gist; God gets angry and wants to essentially factory reset the world. He makes an exception for Noah and his family. He bestows upon him the responsibility of gathering two of every living animal and putting them on a big boat to survive the flood. I’ve seen movies and countless illustrations showing that big boat and the grumpy old man of God who built it – but I’ve never seen or witnessed Noah portrayed as a Merperson.

In Chapter 1 of Merpeople: A Human History, Scribner mentions Noah being depicted as half-man, half-fish. He also mentions that Early Christians saw Noah as “The second father of the human race, and the preserver and teacher of the arts and sciences as they existed before the Great Deluge” (third page of Chapter One). This is super interesting because while mermen symbolize knowledge and religion, Mermaids weren’t held in such high regard by Early Christian leaders. According to Scribner’s book, women were symbols of “lust, weakness, and man’s fall from grace.” But with Mother Mary being a symbol of purity and faith, they had to get creative – and thus, they borrowed the mermaid to make it clear that there’s no correlation between Mary and all the other evil women in the world. While this drastic generalization of women is, on all accounts, silly – nobody can deny that both the mermaid and the merman share a trait -power. Mermens’ power inspires Early Christian men. It almost seems like they are a representation of what man should strive to be—master of men and sea. The power mermaids hold is meant to be interpreted as something to be cautious of. Women tempt men on land; mermaids tempt men at sea? I don’t want to speak too confidently about this, as I am still learning, but I find this line of thought fascinating.

Luckily, my Catholic/Christian upbringing was very loose, and I’m able to freely think for myself. That being said, I read the first chapter out loud to myself and thought the Early Christian interpretations of women and mermaids were wild.