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Loteria is a bingo-style game of Latin America (although it descends from an Italian game of the 15th century). A designated frontperson pulls cards from a deck and calls the images out to players with boards/cards marked with the same images. The players are trying to get markers on four squares in a row to win a prize. The card-reader often talks in riddles or humorous rhymes to present the cards–which are appealingly heterogeneous.
As with many other card games through the ages, loteria cards are also used as a mechanism for divination. This brings us to today’s subject: “la sirena” the mermaid card in the lottery game. La sirena is represented as a classical mermaid—a beautiful nude woman with a green fish tale in lieu of legs. As you might imagine, the siren can mean many things when she crops up in divinatory readings—representing all sorts of distaff beauty and beguiling opportunities–but the main message is the one which is read in the boilerplate riddle associated with the cards:
Con los cantos de sirena, no te vayas a marear.
A (bad) translation might be “Don’t let the songs of the siren disorient you.” In Spanish “sirena” is synonymous with dangerous beguilement: the bewitching song and the sea-maiden are one and the same. The mermaid’s tempting beauty disguises a dangerous situation or is, at best, an illusion. This is a standard truism of the prediction business: It is indeed wise to look carefully at all aspects of an apparently desirable opportunity. This is especially true in our mercantile world which has become a rigged marketplace. Anyone looking at the internet will know that every worm online has a hook in it.
Yet look at the siren: she is the standout knockout of the loteria cards. Additionally, she has a mythological gravitas which the flowerpot, the boot, and the saucepan (other loteria cards) sorely lack. Surely her otherworldly beauty (and the beauty of her ocean habitat) have a worth which transcends a sententious admonition about temptation. It is true that mermaids are fantasy, but that doesn’t mean the longing they represent isn’t a puissant force.
Such thoughts also bring us to the dangerous misogyny inherent in mermaid concepts. In classical art and literature, beautiful sea maidens are most often an allegory for the trouble which lust brings men into. This seems unfair to mermaids who should be free to be who they are without being chastened as temptresses. Perhaps the real message of the mermaid is in her fundamental irreconcilable juxtaposition—she is a being who is one thing above and another thing below—a hybrid entity who lives in two incompatible worlds. That sounds like most people torn by the conflict of pursuing our own dreams and being forced by wage capital to help other people work on awful alien dreams which mean nothing to us. Perhaps we should spare some sympathy for the mermaid. That doesn’t mean we should let pretty flippers blind us to the perils of the ocean. Maybe when we look into her lovely features we shouldn’t see a trap, we should see a mirror–ourselves in an impossible predicament we have always been in.
ferrebeekeeper 