Dear regular reader, you may have noticed a mermaid theme running through a lot of my posts.

I confess – I FREAKIN” LOVE MERMAIDS, AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

Here are six reasons why.

1. I am super-crazy about the not-quite human. I spent my kiddy days reading mythology, pretending to be an elf or a hobbit, and chasing up on faery folklore. Mermaids (and faeries) are almost human, but not quite. They are more intense than people, their rules clearer, simpler, and darker, like all folklore beings. Awesome.

2. Hello?! They live under water! I love the sea – it scares me a bit, but I love it at the same time. It’s like another world down there – completely not human. I like the smell, I like swimming in it, I like seeing little fishes in there. I am crazy mad about water, lakes, ponds, pools, rivers, streams, oceans. We can’t live in the sea, and it’s I think always going to be an alien world to us – unless we evolve into dolphin-people that is.

3. To me mermaids represent the Wild Feminine – they can do whatever the hell they want, and they will, and they give not a crap what other people think. If they fancy someone, they take them, if they fancy someone else instead, they switch. They are unpredictable and changable as well as being contradictory and unchanging and they are exactly what they are, no apologies, ever.

That is so awesome!.

4. On the seduction note, in all the old sailory stories about them as sirens and luring sailors to their deaths, they are EVIL DEVIL CREATURES with no soul. They are women whom it was 100% OK to completely demonise and dehumanise, and they were used to display the root of everything that was wrong with women – sexy, seductive, fickle, emotional, unknowable to men, whatever – and the main thing that was wrong with them? They had power. They had power over men. They were about sex and birth and death. They weren’t part of the rational Man-World. They were powerful, and dude, that’s exactly why the ladies scared the heebie-jeebies out of men back in they day.

Mermaids are the continual source of Girl Power throughout history. Mermaids and us witches of course ;D

5. There are stories about mermaids in every continent all over the world, from Indonesia to Britain to Slovakia to China to Japan to Australia to India to America to Germany. Everyone all over the world thinks mermaids are important. Everyone. Promise.

6. …. I may have spent three years of my life obsessivley watching The Little Mermaid. I can’t believe I gave it away. What was I thinking?!

Another great reason to like mermaids, is that the stock mermaid painting (as exampled if you browse on over to wikipedia) is a mermaid that looks almost exactly like me.

Spooky.