73

Unlike her counterparts from antiquity and the Middle Ages, whose seduction is deadly and evil, the Irish mermaid is attractive and fertile, she is a good wife and mother. The rituals and stories connected to her belong to an early European peasant calendar, that establishes a correspondence between the reproductive cycles of the earth, women and plants. Indeed this mermaid fits into a cyclical time where death is to the earth what menstruation is to women and flowering is to plants, fulfilling a fertile and nourishing potential.