Enchantress
School
Mermaid's Lament - The Irish Tradition of Sea Women
Mermaid's are symbols of feminine magic. Join me and Irish Elder Mary McLaughlin as we talk about mermaids in the Irish tradition and the mystical journeys into deep feminine consciousness for transformation and communion with quantum magical frequencie
Contents
Mermaid's in the
Irish Traditions
Mermaid Stories,
Combs, & Capes
The Metaphor of the
Wedding, Betwixt
Songs of the Mermaid
Welcome to Enchantress School
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
Mermaid's Lament - The Irish Tradition of Sea Women Time Stamps
2:07 The Year of M and Mermaids
6:44 Mermaids in the Irish Tradition
25:59 Mermaids as Mythic Symbols of Real World Traditions
32:13 Cloaks of the Mermaid
44:51 The Ocean
1:00:48 Maleficent Mermaids
1:13:38 Kidnapped by Fairies
1:18:51 Fairy Legends are Actually Encoding Lost Spiritual Tradition
1:26:36 Songs are Somatic
/en·chant·ress
What is an Enchantress? The dictionary defines her either as a woman who uses magic or sorcery and casts spells, or as a beautiful, fascinating and beguiling woman. But what is she really? She is a woman who practices feminine magic, an empowered woman whose energy weaves spells of beauty and manifestation. She is a woman of the moon, a lady who walks with the wolves, a creatrix and weaver of words, who knows who to birth and shape worlds, both her own and other people’s. Enchantress comes from the root word of chant or cant/incant.The path of the incantrice is a time-honored and forbidden magical art of notorious women. The Latin incantation means “singing into,” shaping energy with words, chants or songs, from canto, “song, chant.” In old times, witches were often known by the Latin title of incantatrix, which gave rise to French enchanteresse and, in turn, to English enchantress. These magical women presided over conception, birth, death, grief, love, sex, home, fertility and abundance.
For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.
Angela Carter
