Mermaids are portrayed as many things; sirens, succubuses, shapeshifters….but rarely as saints.
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The story of Li Ban sits somewhere between Irish mythology, folklore, and Christian hagiography. Preserved in medieval Irish sources such as the Book of the Dun Cow (Lebor na hUidre), the tale recounts the fate of an originally mortal woman whose homeland is destroyed by floodwaters, leaving her trapped beneath a lake. There she survives for centuries in a transformed state, part woman and part fish, a being we would later understand as a mermaid. She is also immortal.
We are supposed to see this as a terrible, cursed fate.
Eventually discovered by Christian clerics, Li Ban is brought to the surface, baptised, given the Christian name Muirgen and dies immediately afterwards, her soul ascending to heaven.
We are supposed to see this as a good thing. She has been ‘saved.’
On the surface, the narrative appears to be a straightforward Christian miracle story. Yet when examined through the lenses of folklore, religious history, and feminist theology, Li Ban emerges as a far more complex figure whose story reflects the profound cultural and spiritual transformations that accompanied the Christianization of Ireland and beyond.
The name Muirgen is suggestive in itself. Meaning "sea-born," it links Li Ban to a wider family of Celtic female figures associated with water, the sea, and the Otherworld who have similar names. The Welsh name Morgen, from which the Arthurian Morgan le Fay derives, shares a similar linguistic heritage. Folklorists have long observed the recurrence of "Morgan" figures throughout Celtic traditions: often women portrayed as beings connected to bodies of water, possessing supernatural wisdom, and existing at the boundary between the human and the divine. The similarities point towards a recurring motif deeply embedded within the Celtic imagination; that of a powerful female spirit of the waters.
This association between women and sacred waters was widespread in pre-Christian Europe and indeed across Eurasia. Rivers, springs, lakes, and wells were often regarded as living entities inhabited by divine presences. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that offerings were made to sacred waters across the Celtic world, while later folklore preserves memories of lake maidens, water horses, mermaids, and fairy women who inhabited these liminal spaces. Such beings frequently embodied the animistic worldview of pagan societies, in which nature itself was alive and infused with spirit. Indeed, such water beings were widespread across the globe, as Veronica Strang’s beautiful book Water Beings richly illustrates.
In this context, Li Ban's transformation from a supernatural water-being into a Christian saint can be interpreted not simply as an individual conversion story but as a symbolic representation of the broader religious transformation of Ireland itself. The old sacred powers of the landscape were often not destroyed outright but rather, they were absorbed, renamed, and incorporated into the Christian world. Indeed, Li Ban herself may be a Christianisation of the fairy Li Ban, who was portrayed as a water bird (siren, anyone?) This process enabled Christianity to establish itself without entirely severing communities from their ancestral landscapes and spirits.
Stories such as that of Li Ban may therefore function as literary expressions of a wider historical reality: the conversion not merely of people, but of places. A water source once seen as sacred in its own right instead becomes associated with a Christian saint; in this case the saint herself embodies both perspectives and worldviews. A symbol of both syncretism and folk religion.
From a feminist perspective, however, the story takes on a more sinister significance.
Many feminist theologians and scholars of religion, thealogian Carol P. Christ among them, have argued that the transition from paganism to Christianity involved not only a change in religious belief but also a transformation in the symbolic status of women and the feminine divine. Pre-Christian traditions often included powerful female figures associated with fertility, sovereignty, healing, prophecy, and the natural world, with life and with death. While these societies were by no means egalitarian, in fact the Iron Age was often brutally hierarchical and patriarchal, they nevertheless preserved a religious imagery in which female power could be sacred, autonomous, and central within ritual.
The Church, by contrast, increasingly developed within patriarchal structures that concentrated religious authority in male institutions, and images of the Divine as only ever male. Female spiritual power was reinterpreted through Christian categories that simultaneously preserved and diminished it. Goddesses or female animist beings became saints, fairies, or demons. Female spirits associated with nature were recast as temptresses, monsters, or souls in need of redemption, like Li Ban herself.
Before her ‘rescue’ by the clergy, she inhabits a liminal existence that is neither fully human nor fully animal. She belongs to the waters, surviving independently for centuries, existing outside the structures of human society and ecclesiastical authority. This cannot be allowed; in order to exist freely, she must be baptised; cleansed of the very sin of her existence, which the waters cannot wash away.
But the most striking element of the tale is what happens after her baptism. Li Ban does not continue living as a Christian. She does not return to society or establish a holy community. Instead, she dies immediately. The logic of the story is clear: death as a Christian is preferable to life as a mermaid; for such beings are by nature suspicious. Such beings were seen as uniquely feminine, in their sin, regardless of the fact that in the folklore there exist mermen and male selkies.
Indeed, mermaids have also more recently become a symbol of the trans movement, demonstrating the ambiguous nature of these beings, and the way that regardless of their supposed sex, they were seen by the male authorities as representing the wholly Other. Any body that doesn’t conform, be it female, trans, disabled, intersex, etc, has always been demonised. Our existence automatically suspect. Small wonder many of us feel an affinity with the symbol and lore of the mermaid.
Sarah Clegg says in her book Woman’s Lore that: ‘the mermaid of medieval Europe was a vicious temptress who haunted monasteries and cathedrals and stood for all that celibate churchmen feared about women and sex.” (p.145) In spite of this, Clegg points out, the image of the mermaid remained enduringly popular, showing up in art, literature and bestiaries, and usually depicted as a demonic siren who would steal men’s souls. Perhaps we should be grateful that Li Ban was allowed into heaven at all.
But where does she come from? How do we get from animistic water beings, seen as inhabiting certain places, revered by visitors, to this seductive, demonic, suspicious mermaid?
Sarah Clegg traces the mermaid back to a mixture of the classical sirens - who were more often depicted as part bird, but were associated with water and the tempting of men, much like Odysseus on his famous trip home in the Odyssey - and demons from the Middle East, particularly Mesopotamia, such as the Lamia, who in her turn is traced back to older demons such as Lilitu and Lamashtu.
These demons were sinister characters, it is true. But they were womens demons. They were associated not with the seduction of men, but rather with very real fears, anxieties, and perils that women faced. The Lamia was seen as a child stealer and was associated with miscarriage, stillbirth, and child death, something that would have been common in a world before modern medicine, when the processes of childbirth and pregnancy were not well understood, and when we didn’t have the knowledge that we have today.
But demon or not, she was specifically a woman’s demon, a tale that women told to one another, a tale that women would utter enchantments and curses and sing songs and burn herbs after, to encourage her to stay away. These were stories that were told by women to other women, a part of female knowledge and lore. Only later did the Lamia, Lamashtu, and Lilitu begin to become temptresses. and a seductress indeed. Researchers such as Clegg trace the Jewish demon Lilith back to these same Mesopotamian figures.
The Lamia could appear most especially as half snake, but also as half fish, showing her in the form of a mermaid. But by the time we reach medieval times, the mermaid has become not the stealer of children from women but rather the stealer of semen from men in her role as succubus and temptress. She was even associated with medieval prostitutes. As Clegg says, “in the 7th century, Isidore of Seville compared mermaids to prostitutes who lured men to destitution,” (p147. )
As well as the Lamia, mermaids were influenced by siren stories. It isn’t a straight line, which is why the mermaids are more likely to be fish-like, sirens were more likely to be bird-like. The Lamia sits between the two in that she was mostly shown with the body of a snake. It’s worth noting that the original sirens that tempted Odysseus didn’t tempt him with sex, but rather with knowledge. The sex part came later and again may have come partly through the stories from the Middle East, where Lilitu was already being depicted as a succubus.
Many stories show the Lamia sitting bare-breasted by the sea, spending her days seducing men before eating them alive. The Lamia was also known in ancient Greece, (most likely where she became entangled with the siren) and is shown on amulets as having long hair, bare breasts, and a serpentine or fish-like body. The similarities then to our own European mermaids are clear, and so we get a snaky line from the stories of Mesopotamian women seeking to avoid child loss, through the tempting sirens of the Odyssey, through to the fishy merladies of Northern Europe. Stopping along the way to mix in Christian conversion tales, that sought to sanitise spirits of place and make them more palatable to a church increasingly obsessed with theological purity.
Strang’s work goes even further back, to the water serpents of the Neolithic and possibly even the Paleolithic, to local spirits associated with water sources that later became associated with the bringing of rain…an early intuitive awareness of the water cycle. These are some of our oldest known stories, and later show up as the benign dragons of Eastern myth and even the fire-breathing malign dragons of Indo-European myth. The Rainbow Serpent of Aboriginal lore may be one of the oldest of these mythical beings, whose lore has survived largely intact. The further back we go, the fuzzier the history gets, but there is no doubt that our early ancestors revered and ritualised water sources and associated snake like beings with them. From this beginning, we get a wealth of lore that has transformed over the years, surviving through major cultural and religious change.
The story of Li Ban is more than a local wonder tale, but a snapshot of a deep and wide history that encapsulates the transformation of some of our earliest religious symbols.
And she is also a symbol of how women regarded as Other were sanitised by the early Church.
Perhaps it's time to resurrect her.
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