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For the first time in a long time, Ferrebeekeeper is presenting a theme week. This is mermaid week! We will explore the mythology and meaning of fish-people (a theme which occurs again and again throughout world culture). And there is a special treat waiting at the end of the week, when I reveal the project I have been working on for quite a while. I wonder if you can guess what creative project could I possibly be up to involving fish?
We will get back to the exquisite long-haired beauties with perfect figures and beautiful green tails later this week, but let’s start out with the Ningyo, the poignant & disquieting Japanese “mermaid”. The mythical Ningyo is indeed described as a sort of fish-person; but they were far more fish than person with a piscine body covered in jewel-bright scales. They had a strange bestial human head, almost more like a monkey’s face and a quiet beautiful voice like a lilting songbird or a flute.
The Ningyo was reputedly quite delicious and anyone who ate one would experience tremendous longevity…but there was a price. Eating the creature would result in terrible storms and dire misfortune. Additionally eating a magical sentient creature carried…spiritual risks which are hard to quantify but certainly sound detrimental to the immortal soul.
One story about a Ningyo, starts with a humble fisherman from the Wakasa Province (the seafaring “land of seafood” for the Chūbu region of Honshū). He caught a fish with a human face, the likes of which he had never seen and he butchered and prepared the creature as a special banquet for his closest friends and neighbors. Yet one of the guests peaked into the kitchen and saw the doleful eyes of the ningyo’s severed head and warned the other diners not to partake. One woman hid her portion in her furoshiki, and forgot about it. Later, her daughter was hungry and obtained the forgotten fish-morsel and gobbled it up. The woman expected catastrophe, but nothing happened and the whole sorry incident was forgotten…
Except…the little girl grew into womanhood and married and had a family. The people around her lived their lives and, in the course of time, grew old and got sick and died, but she maintained her youth and kept on living and living and living. Everywhere she went the people she cared for grew old and died to the rhythm of human life, but she stood outside watching like a child watching mayflies. She became a lonely religious recluse and eventually, after the better part of a millennium, she returned to the ruined, forgotten port of her childhood and took her own life, unable to bear existing in a world that she stood so far outside of.
The idea of the Ningyo asks uncomfortable question about our relationship with the natural world. Do we consume other beings for our own selfish amelioration or must we do so to survive? The fairytale above also asks painful questions about some of our most treasured fantasies. Would extraordinarily long life be a blessing or would it be a curse? Best of all (but hardest of all) it asks us to look again…at our relationship with the natural world and at our timeframe bias which prohibits us from seeing some of the things that are really happening (since our perspective is too brief).
Actually I feel like fish already actually have bestial human faces and are precious in mysterious ways. Yet we eat them anyway…in ever greater abundance… to the extent that almost all the fish are becoming scarce. Humankind is destroying the ocean, the cradle of life and all-sustaining backstop to every ecosystem. We are doing this, like the fisherman in the tale through a terrifying mixture of ignorance, hunger, and the attempt to impress other people. The Japanese (who have astonishing technological savvy, profound generosity, and enormous erudition) eat whales and dolphins with a special spiteful relish. Is this then our fate, to gobble up our miraculous fellow beings and then live on and on in a world stripped of vitality and meaning? Every thoughtful person I meet, worries that it is so.
Then too there is the other half to the Ningyo myth (unadressed in the myth I told above… that abusing them would lead to storms, inundation, and catastrophe. It is not hard to see parallels in contemporary society. It isn’t only eschatologists, astrophysicists, and ecologists who note the changing temperatures and cannot find analogies in the strange and diverse climate history of our world. Humans live longer and longer (outside of America, I mean) yet the storms grow worse and worse. Have we already eaten the Ningyo?
Many of the stories and myths of Taoism center on the eight immortals, a group of ancient entities who mastered powerful magic to such an extent that they transcended mortality and rose to a state of near divinity. Zhang Guo Lao, the eccentric elderly potions master, is one of the eight immortals (and we have seen what an odd figure he is), but some of the others are even more peculiar. Probably the strangest member of the group is Lan Caihe, whose age and precise origin are unknown. In fact, the gender of Lan Caihe is unknown: S/he is sometimes depicted as a young girl or a cross-dressing boy or a strange genderless old person.
Lan Caihe is the patron saint of florists and minstrels (or maybe I should say “singing courtesans” since the musical lifestyle in classical China often bore some relation to the pleasure trade). His/her sacred emblem is the flower basket, a bamboo or wicker container born on a hoe-like handle filled with up with sacred flowers, herbs, and plants. Lan Caihe is also sometimes shown holding castanets, playing a flute, or riding a crane. Ambiguity and the reversal of expectations are trademarks of this immortal as is the power of unheeded prophecy. In addition to not having a fixed gender, Lan Caihe dons heavy winter clothes in summer but strips down to a flimsy barely-there shift to sleep in snowbanks in the winter. Sometime s/he is portrayed within a melting snowbank transforming into steam from quasi-divine magic.
While some of the eight immortals have lengthy or complicated creation stories (involving magic items or a lifetime of study) Lan Caihe’s apotheosis to immortality was quick and random. While playing music, drinking heavily, and otherwise entertaining at a bar, Lan Caihe got up to go to the bathroom. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he/she flew up to heaven on a crane letting a single shoe fall down (in some versions of the tale various other dubious garments joined the shoe). Despite having immense power and magic (and immortality), Lan Caihe is frequently portrayed dressed in a frayed blue dress and only one shoe, consorting with the lowest classes of society. I can think of few figures from any mythology more evocative of the socially constructed nature of identity than this gender-ambiguous immortal.
Liu Haichan (Attributed to Wu Wei who lived from 1459-1508, Ming dynasty Hanging scroll, ink on silk)
Liu Haichan was a high official during the tumultuous Five Dynasties era, a time of bloodshed and civil war at the beginning of the tenth century in China. He served the powerful warlord Liu Shouguang, who in 911 proclaimed himself emperor. Liu Haichan became the new emperor’s grand councilor–one of the most powerful positions in China. Shortly thereafter, a famous Taoist wizard visited Liu Haichan to discuss the mysteries of the Tao with the councilor. At the end of the meeting, the wizard requested ten eggs and ten coins which he adroitly stacked into a teetering pagoda on the grand councilor’s desk.
“This is precarious indeed!” exclaimed Liu Haichan.
“It is not as precarious as your current life” stated the wizard who snatched the ten coins from the pagoda and vanished, leaving a ruin of smashed eggs on the polished wood.
The interview caused Liu Haichan to carefully re-examine his situation. The next day he abandoned the wealth and power of his position and fled to a wooded mountaintop to live as a hermit. Since the new emperor was soon captured by an opposing army and executed, this proved to be a wise choice.
Liu Haichan (by Yang Youlan, ca. 1700’s, Qing Dynasty, Ink on silk scroll)
Like Zhang Guo Lao before him, Liu Haichan devoted himself to a life of alchemy, sorcery, and potions in the wilderness. He became strong in Taoist magic, and rose to head the Quanzhen school of Taoism. In the fullness of time he took the name Haichanzi (Master Sea Toad) and apotheosized to immortality.
Liu Haichan gained his distinctive sobriquet because he is usually pictured with a three-legged toad, Chan Chu, who today has outstripped the Taoist master in fame. Stories concerning this toad differ, but my favorite is that the toad was the reincarnated spirit of Liu Haichan’s father, a greedy petty official whose human life was spent squeezing peasants for money. One day Liu Haichan peered into a ruined well and saw the toad’s red eyes glowing in the filthy darkness. Recognizing something familiar about the creature, Liu Haichan dangled a string of money down the well. The greed of his previous life could not be left behind and the toad grabbed the coins with his mouth. Liu Haichan drew Chan Chu up from the slime and thereafter the two became inseparable.
A black stone sculpture of Chan Chu, the three legged wealth toad
Liu Hainchan was a popular subject for Ming and Ching era literati painters but Chan Chu, the three legged wealth toad, went on to find international success. The avaricious amphibian admirably suits today’s zeitgeist. Statues of the wealth toad can be found in businesses around the world. Usually Chan Chu is portrayed holding a coin in his mouth sitting on a pile of gold coins. Sometimes he is covered with jewels. You could probably buy a resin Chan Chu statue at your nearest Chinatown or online. If you choose to do so, Feng Shui enthusiasts advise you to place the statue near the cash register facing away from the door so that money comes in but does not leave. Never put a wealth toad statue in the bathroom: Chan Chu regards moist enclosed spaces with little fondness after his time in the well.
A mass-produced resin sculpture of Chan Chu
Could a bat become a god in Chinese mythology? You need to read the story of the immortal Zhang Guo Lao!
The Chinese underworld illustrates how Chinese mythology portrays existence as a struggle through many different levels of enlightenment. The damned souls of the “dark mansion” (aka hell) are at the bottom of karmic heap. At the top of the pantheon are gods, spirit beings, bodhisattvas, and great magicians. Zhang Guo Lao was one such entity. This mythical figure was apparently based on a one-time real person, a hermit/mystic who lived on Mount Tiáo in Héngzhōu during the Tang dynasty.
One of the oldest of the eight Taoist immortals, Zhang Guo Lao was originally a fangshi (a sort of highly literate gentleman-alchemist). It was this mastery of potions which enabled him to step free of mortality (and he reputedly continues to make magical wines and elixirs from various berries, shrubs, and mushrooms). An eccentric among eccentrics, Zhang Guo Lao would frequently perform strange magic tricks to delight himself and was frequently found sipping from poison flowers and toxic plants for fun. Using his own “drunk kung fu”, he was capable of killing animals and people by pointing at them. Sometimes he would lie around dead and festering for months before leaping up and skipping through the woods.
Zhang Guo Lao
Zhang Guo Lao is known by his long flowing white hair, his extreme age, and by his pet donkey which he is often pictured riding on (backwards of course). This white donkey was no ordinary beast of burden: when Zhang Guo Lao had reached his destination he would fold the wondrous quadruped up into a tiny slip as thin as a slip of paper. He would then keep the donkey in his cap box. When he needed to travel he would reconstitute the creature with a jet of water from his mouth. The ancient immortal also carried a “fish drum. To quote Perceval Yetts’ article The Eight Immortals (published in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society), “[Zhang Guo Lao] is easily recognized by his pao pei, a curious object which to Western eyes resembles a diminutive golfer’s bag containing two clubs. Actually it is a kind of musical instrument called a “fish-drum”, composed of a cylinder, often of bamboo, over one end of which is stretched a piece of prepared fish or snake skin. What look like two projecting golf clubs are the ends of long slips of bamboo used as castanets.”
Earlier, I wrote that Zhang Guo Lao started as a fangshi. This is to ignore his long history of lives before he ascended to near-divinity. Stories say that Zhang Guo Lao claimed to have been a court minister for Emperor Yao in a former life. Additionally, elsewhere in the canon of Taoist literature, Yeh Fa-shan, a fabulist wonder-worker, told a story about how Zhang Guo Lao started out as a bat. Indeed Zhang Guo Lao is frequently portrayed with auspicious bats (a symbol of good fortune) and is said to be able to transform himself into a bat. The idea that a virtuous bat could rise up through the ranks of being–first into a man, then into an emperor’s minister, then into an alchemist/monk, and finally into an immortal quasi-god is a “rags-to-riches” story that Horatio Algiers could never conceive of. Zhang Guo Lao’s path to godhood illustrates that America holds no monopoly on Cinderella dreams.
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