Welcome to this magical conversation between myself and Irish Scholar and Elder Dr Mary McLaughlin, who specializes in Irish Keen traditions and Otherworld Songs, and is a magical songstress of Irish folk music.
Today we talk about the subject of Mermaids as denizens of the Otherworld, symbols of feminine magic and also deeply entwined with the feminine Keening traditions, lamentations, women’s magic, the liminal powers of water and the ocean, and the traditions of the Fairy Faith that have become reduced to myth or children’s fairytales.
The first song I learned back in 2020 was the Irish Mermaid song ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara / The Mermaid’ - which is a motherline lament, between mother and daughter, which felt very evocative for me, considering my daughter had been born on the first year anniversary of my mother’s death, with its line “my mother was a mermaid.”
Earlier this year, after sensing the presence of Isis of Pelagia (Isis as a Lady of the Seas) during my Feminine Magic School, I received a transmission from the Ancient Oracles of Water and the ‘Mermaid’ lineage of the Priestesses of Isis and Magdalene.
Isis was often carved on the prow of boats to protect them during journeys across the ocean, representing the original ‘Mermaids’ notorious as guardians of voyaging ships.
In magical lore, these sea journeys are not always real world travels. In Irish tradition they are called an ‘imrama’ - a mystical journeys into deep feminine consciousness or Otherworld, for transformation and communion with quantum magical frequencies.
Mermaids are also known as mistresses of sacred duality, they bridge the world of everyday, mundane, human life on ‘land’ - love, body, family, work - and the magical realms of the ‘ocean’ symbolizing feminine magic, spirit, fairy realms, where our soul is tethered in dreams, mystery, possibility, as a medium between the living and dead.
Even though we think of Mermaids as ‘beautiful and enchanting’ - in myth they are often depicted as ‘monstrous’ and are known as ‘ladies of the deep’, steeped in the mysteries of the dark waters, connected with death, transition, lamentation and sorrows. Their voice is a call to grief, remembrance and the rebirth of deep soul.
The Mermaids preside over death and renewal and the end and inception of new eras.
After this call of the mermaids, I launched the ‘Year of M’ - to follow this current.
So I spent a year listening carefully to the voice of the waters, who told me we needed to remember the aspect of water and ocean who was a ‘Femme Fatale’ - a dangerous, magical, enchanting lady, who could be stormy, deep, dark, and powerfully structural, who lived under the matronage of the moon and moved with the strict tides of life.
I was told that the ‘structural waters of the earth womb’ were changing, and this restructuring was also happening in tandem, inside the womb of women, who needed to be able to awaken their waterways to resonate with this structural transformation, so they could birth a new frequency of humanity, and a new era of culture.
On one visit to St Helena, where I travelled numerous times to commune with the ocean, I wrote this fragment down in my notepad, as a message from the water.
Flooding….
When water levels are low…
The Waters Remember….
The Waters Hold Mermaids…
Who must lament…
What they have seen and felt and known…
Before they are washed clean.
A month later the terrible flooding from Hurricane Helene devastated our mountains, and I heard the reflection that ‘everything in the path of water has been destroyed’.
I remembered what the water had told me - that she was also a ‘Femme Fatale’, a dangerous and deadly lady at times, that like poison plants, demanded respect.
In the aftermath I sang the sorrowful songs of the Mermaids, in the same way that when I sat with my mother’s dead body under a large Taurus full moon, I rubbed anointing oils into her skin as I sang her mermaid lullabies to guide her journey.
The Mermaid’s Lament has a spiritual power to take us across thresholds.
I believe the Mermaids are ancestral and eco-spiritual feminine guides, more mysterious than we could know, older than time, held inside the mystery of water, here to help us swim across a huge quantum transfiguration from an old epoch into an entirely new era of feminine magic.
Listen to Mary McLaughlin singing An Mhaighdean Mhara
Listen to Kitty Gallagher, an Irish singer from the 1950’s sing the song
In English:
“Oh mother of mine,”
Said fair Mary,
“Under the bank of the stony beach
And under the mouth of the sandy beach,
My noble mother is
A mermaid (silkie),”
Here you have Mary Hinny
She’s just after swimming the Erne.
In Gaelic:
“A ’mháithrín dhílish,”
Dúirt Máire Bhán,
Fá bhruach a’ chladaigh
’S fá bhéal na trá,
Is maighdean mhara
Mo mháithrín ard
Siúd chugaibh Maerí Shinidh
’S í ’ndiaidh ’n Éirne ’shnamh.
To connect with Mary or join one of her classes click here.
Read more about the feminine spiritual traditions of Mermaids
I will be sharing the video version of this recent podcast with my paid subscribers.
Apologies for my short interlude in the interview where I try and plug my computer in. I could have edited it out. But I prefer for you to be with me, informally, in the cottage.
On 11/11 - the ‘heathen halloween’, the date of the original Samhain traditions in Ireland, I am holding a Feminine Grief Salon that is open to the public….
It is also the opening of this years’s Feminine Magic School 1 Year Apprenticeship
AND the last opportunity to join my Year of M all-inclusive imrama journey
Register for The Mermaid’s Lament Grief Salon (read about Grief Mysteries)
Register for Feminine Magic School (read about last year’s here, and here)
Register for The Year of M (and read more about it here)
From Last Year, my essays and talks on Grief and the Ancient Traditions.
Listen to my podcast with Mary on Keening Women in Irish Tradition
Read my essays on Grief in the ancient traditions
KEENING WOMEN - Lost Women’s Rites of Death & Rebirth
I want to invite you into the feminine mermaid lineage of Grief Magic.
This grief is not a doing. It is not something you complete. Neither is it an obligation. It is not a grief to heal your wounds or save the world. It is more private and intimate. More feminine. It is a realm. A dimension. A treasury. A mood. A releasing exhale.
Grief is a fabric of the love that builds our world.
Grief is the poison path of love.
There is a deep glamour to this grief. A wisdom that is demanding and soft. In old traditions glamour meant a gramarye of knowledge passed down. I want to open this grand old door, and invite you inside to meet the Keening Women and the Mermaid’s Lament again. To discover your place in their lineage. To feel how grief can be a mode. A gesture. A portal.
To meet a world with thick black velvet curtains with moonlight pouring through.
We will start with the foundations, with kinship with this hidden lunar world, that also lives inside you. To circle your body until we face the shadow of your heart. We will grieve from our feminine soul, shrouded in magic and memory. We will sip slowly. Settling in with micro-griefs. Melancholy moods that sweep in like mist. With practice, as an orchestra, together we will ride bigger waves with our ripe open hearts.”
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