Sirena

Two layers in the same water

Two separate traditions now answer to one name.

The sirena has a Spanish name and a European body: a woman above, a fish below, singing. She arrives with three centuries of colonial administration, in church art, in story, in the vocabulary of priests and sailors.

The kataw and her relatives are older. In the accounts Ramos collects they are water beings that take people, and several descriptions give them legs — they are not fish-tailed, and they are harder to recognise as not-human.

Those two have now almost completely fused in popular telling, which is why a Filipino child today draws a mermaid. The older layer is still visible in the regional names and in the details that do not fit the template.

The same process produced santelmo and duwende: a Spanish word settles over something that was already there, and three centuries later the loanword is what everyone says.

What the descriptions actually give

The fish tail is the best-attested feature of the imported figure and the weakest part of the older one.

For the sirena the recurring picture is fixed and short: a woman from the head to the waist, long dark hair, scales below, a tail. Ramos records it that way, and the collected legends in Eugenio repeat it with little variation. Hair carries most of the weight in the telling — long, loose, wet, often the only thing seen.

The older beings are described less consistently, and that is the interesting part. The earliest dated record of the Visayan catao is pictorial rather than descriptive: a male and a female figure among the marine creatures in Francisco Ignacio Alcina's Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas (1668), where the being is kept distinct from the dugong. Later accounts of the kataw give legs rather than a tail, which is what keeps it separate from the mermaid template, but the detail is uneven between regions and informants.

What the sources mostly do not give is a face. There is no standard set of eyes, teeth, hands or skin, no fixed colour, and no costume. The singing is attached much more firmly to the European siren than to the local beings, several of which simply pull. Where a modern Filipino illustration shows a crowned, jewelled, blue-tailed mermaid, that is twentieth-century commercial art working on a loanword, not folklore detail.

What the belief is for

Strip the tail off and the function is immediate.

The Philippines is an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands. Children swim. Men fish from small boats. The reef flat that you can walk across at low tide is cut by channels that drop away suddenly and run with current on the turning tide. River bends hold deep pools under flat-looking surfaces.

Drowning is among the leading causes of accidental death for children in the country.

A being that takes swimmers down is not a decorative idea. It is the local theory of the single most likely way for a child to die, and it attaches, as these beliefs always do, to the specific water everybody already knows is dangerous.

Being taken, not being killed

One feature distinguishes this from the Slavic and Mexican water material.

The näkki takes and that is the end. The ahuitzotl drowns and the body is recovered with obligations attached.

In a good deal of the Philippine material the person is taken to live below — kept, sometimes for years, sometimes returned, sometimes glimpsed afterwards. The encantada narratives have the same structure on land: a person goes into somebody else's household and comes back changed, or does not come back.

That makes the drowning a removal rather than a death, which is a gentler account to give a family and a more frightening one to tell a child.

What is found

The accounts and the modern retellings agree on the aftermath, and it is the detail with the most force in it.

Footwear at the edge of the water, placed neatly. A shirt folded on a rock. The ordinary evidence of somebody who meant to come back out.

Nothing in the folklore explains that better than the plain fact: a person who drowns while swimming has usually taken their sandals off first.

Sources

Ramos (1971) for the classification and for keeping the older beings distinct from the imported mermaid; Eugenio (2002) for the collected regional narratives; Plasencia (1589) for the colonial starting point of the written record. The drowning figures are modern public-health data rather than folklore sources.

• Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971). University of the Philippines PressThe classification of Philippine water beings, which distinguishes the older local figures from the imported mermaid.
• Damiana L. Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature: The Legends (2002). University of the Philippines PressCollected legends, including the regional water-being narratives that do not fit the mermaid template.
• Fray Juan de Plasencia, Customs of the Tagalogs (1589)The earliest friar account of Tagalog belief. Cited here for the arrival of Spanish vocabulary into Philippine water belief.