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Water Spirits
Does anybody know any good info on water spirits, either from a folklore perspective or otherwise? I had a really vivid dream this morning involving some.
I was standing on the seashore at a place that my brain identified as “Connecticut”, but it likely could have been anywhere. The shore was very rocky, with large rocks going right down into the waves. There was some kind of storm approaching and the sea was extremely violent, the waves crashing over the rocks with tremendous force.
Off in the distance, maybe 50 to 100 yards out on the water, I spotted what looked like horses prancing across the top of the water. Horses are just the closest analog though, as these creatures had too many joints in their legs and bodies to be horses. Their bodies were too long and strange, and covered in shaggy white hair. I pointed them out to my brother, who I don’t think could see them. Many other people were gathered at the shore.
These beasts came closer to the waters edge, and a few of us crept down towards the bigger rocks to get a glimpse of them. I didn’t want to get too close myself though, as I had a bad feeling about them. Suddenly, they took on another form, that of mermaids. They were not your Disney-style cartoon mermaids though. They were all white, pale like corpses, with small breasts and their fish-tails were scale-less and had other smaller tentacles protruding from them. Some of the men became enraptured with these women and beckoned them closer, hoping to make lovers of them. When the mermaids got closer it became apparent that they had small razor-sharp triangular teeth. And their breath smelled like they’d been feeding on rotting corpses. The men beckoned them closer, but I knew what their game was, and quickly backed off and hid behind a line of rocks.
At that point I woke up, and immediately put the pieces together of what these things were. There are some dreams that I have where the quality of them is different in such a way as to lead me to believe that things encountered in them are somehow real. This dream is a great example of that.
I did some research and it looked like there is a great deal of legend regarding sea-folk and water spirits coming from Scotland and in particular the Orkney Islands. I found a great site with lots of interesting accounts of Orcadian folkore. In my dream, I seem to remember a name for these creatures as being something similar to the word “Coro”, but I’m not sure. Coro seems to mean “choir” or “chorus” in a few different Romance languages. My dream creatures though bear some vague similarity to the Celtic legendary water horse like the Nuggle, the Kelpie, the Nuckelavee, the Aughisky and some others. But none of them seem to be a perfect match.
Here are a couple pages that might be of interest to people searching in this area:
If anybody knows other good resources, I’d definitely like to find out more about all this.
September 11th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
Sirens perhaps.
September 11th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
Based on my readings, it seems that sexual magnetism is one of the main traits of a lot of the water spirits in folklore. Which makes sense in light of tarot and other element interpretations which equate water with emotion and sex. The other half of the water spirit equation seems to generally be death…
September 11th, 2005 at 3:13 pm
Death and sensuality are closely related in an archetypal sense! Buddhism is the best living tradition to illuminate this. Sensuality traps one in the everyday world, imprisoning one in their own hylicity and psychic mindset. This is spiritual death, reversed by spiritual ressurection into the pneumatic life.
I have a lot of water and beach related dreams, myself. Just two nights ago, I had a dream where I was at a bar on a small rock island drinking margaritas. There was no motion in the water, it was calm and peaceful for miles in every direction. Rocks rose from the water in beautiful cliff faces in all directions, but the water never broke against their sides. It merely rested. The sky was orange and cloudy, like a beautiful sunset, and I never felt quite so peaceful. It was very, very vivid - and different from my normal dreams with water. There were no storms, no sea monsters, and no rocky beaches. Very odd.
September 11th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
A lot of folks have been reporting dreams of water lately.
September 11th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Water elementals (undines) have a powerful magnetism. You can find good experiences and information at this page http://lava.net/~pagios/undine.html
September 11th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
Ah undines, that’s the term I had forgotten about. Thank you!
September 11th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
I have a book called sexual alchemy where this guy tells you how to do these long complicated rituals that will bring you into contact with disincarnate entities for the purpose of sexual gratification. Seems like a lot of effort to go through to get off when you could just as easily hire a hooker.
Anyway he warns that undines are particularly hypnotic and seductive and cautions restraint along teh lines of “it would be easy to get lost in their embrace and forget yourself and drown (metaphorically) in tehir charms and bugger off the real world in a way that would not be good for you”
September 11th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
Donald tyson is the author. haven’t doen the rituals myself. funny reviews on amazon though.
September 12th, 2005 at 2:44 am
Hmm, searched around, and only came up with one interesting link. None of the stuff here really matches your dream (and it’s mostly the same sort of stuff on the pages you already linked to), but it’s an interesting read. Thought I’d post it up for that, at least.
Water Horses and Other Fairy Steeds
Here’s a small quote from the beginning - I really liked it:
But as I said, it’s more of that it was an interesting article that I decided to post it than I think it pertains to your dream.
You know, that’s a pretty powerful dream. You’ve got the sea, which can represent the unknown or the unconscious mind. There’s a storm, a bad one, which represents chaos or raw power or strong (mixed?) emotion. You’re on a beach - a meeting of two different spheres. The unconscious mind and conscious mind together, meeting in some way.
You have family there, but they don’t seem to see what you see. Could be that you feel different than the rest of your family, or that you’ve outgrown them in some way. Or maybe you feel you have a better connection to esoteric things. These’re just a generalization there - I’m just going on what stuff could be, so don’t bite my head off if I’m way off base.
(Family can be such a touchy matter.)
There’s also other people, but I can’t really say what they may symbolize. That would depend on a few things - are they people you know? Did you feel any sort of connection to them?
Then there’s the horse-like things. I can’t really give a good read on those either. Were they riding the storm? Did they seem to be bringing it in, or out running it? Also, they were white, but you also got a bad feeling from them, which in color terms would be grayish or black, depending on how bad the feeling was.
You were reluctant to go near them, and then they transitioned into a different form - a more malevolent form. When you usually think of mermaids, are they anything like the ones from your dream?
Get back on some of that, and I’ll try to dig in deeper if you wish.
September 12th, 2005 at 10:02 pm
Sounds like Kelpies.
September 13th, 2005 at 1:25 am
Yeah, kelpies was my guess as well. There’s a book called A Field Guide to Demons that has a reproduction of a 4th century roman design of a seahorse under it’s entry for kelpie that looks suspiciously like what I saw.
September 13th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
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