Have you seen a mermaid?

alt I used to love The X Files, but only the episodes that dealt with weird natural science stuff gone wrong. There's a funny side to my personality which sees me really, wickedly interested in pseudo-science monsters, urban legends, freaks and mythical beasts (hence my current obsession with Stephen Wagner's paranormal newsletters and all their creepy wildmen stories). Recently I stumbled across

a seemingly un-ending collection of true tales about mermaids, which are very haunting, beautiful and bizarre.

Mermaid folklore exists in every culture and culture, right back to ancient times, and they symbolise potent female love and seduction, but also nurturing, mothering and transformation. They are such a beloved element of our folklore, 500,000 New Yorkers even revel in the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade (held the first Saturday after the summer solstice)... a woman named Amanda Adams has written a book about how mermaid symbolism has governed her entire life... and lots of people feel comfortable using mermaid card decks to access their spiritual side... while serious mermaid nuts should apply here.

Merpeople's presence is particularly strong around the Mediterranean, and has been for 5000 years (a la The Odyssey's Sirens), which prompts me to believe they may have some lost connection with Atlantis. In other geographic places, I feel that there were times, energies or dimensions here on earth where monsters did co-exist with humans, as all the fairytales remind us. Thus, trolls lived under bridges, pixies carried people away, centaurs and dragons roamed the forests and mermaids sang to sailors. The humans of those magical, long-lost eras understood the half-animal/half-humans who shared their natural environments, and would have occasionally intermingled with them.

All those people dressing up in starfish bras for the Coney Island parade? Well, many of them have souls that 'remem alt ber' a time when living amongst mermaids was normal... or their souls may identify with actual mermaid energy. I met a girl once in a psychic reading who had long red hair and the first thing I got was, 'Mermaid!' I told her she was a mermaid and she got all misty-eyed and told me she was obsessed with Disney's Ariel (pictured above) as a child. So forget arguing about whether such creatures are 'real' or not -- if they mean something to you and bring you feelings of love and peace, that's all that matters. (I wonder why Doris Day, right, looks so thrilled?)