Melusine's Descent
-Of Mermaids, Serpents and Naga Queens
ArtWork By Jakki Moore
Rivers are dangerous places. In Ireland. So Manchán Magan writes in his wonderful Listen to the Land Speak (published by Gill. See link to DuBray Books, not greedy Amazon) Rowan trees were grown on their banks to keep the wee people away. Anything about the ‘wee people’, the Sídhe, in Ireland and anywhere else really, fascinate me and always have. Give me the wee people over Saint Patrick any day. I suppose that is why they called me Síofra, which means, As Gaeilge ‘changeling’, the baby who was taken by the faeries, and exchanged for a faery child. So, rivers. I certainly fell into them, jumped into them (often from a height) and picked frogspawn from them as a child. But wait. None of us little 1970s feral children ever drowned or came to harm (in our world, anyway). Manchán adds:- ‘poets described rivers teeming with fish as a result of the power and fertility of the local chief.’ The male sovereign had a contract to protect the land, and if he did he was rewarded. Rivers are sacred. Don’t let them run dry. Don’t mess with them. You’ll end up like the Fisher King, if you do.
Water is life, water is feminine. Women are the water- carriers. Think of the tale of the Well Maidens at Logres, raped by the degenerate King, who, violating his sovereign promise to guard the land, caused the wells to dry up. The land became a Wasteland. How withered became the Fisher King, with nothing to do but fish in the empty river.
What lurks in the waters? Well Maidens? Fish? Frogspawn? Nagas. The worship of these will fill any river with fish, frogspawn, might even bring the Well Maidens back. It’s a pre-Vedic tradition. Snake cult/ Naga worship in India still exists and it is directly connected to wells, rivers and streams, Naga worship was the earliest religion of Kashmir, preceding Indo-Aryan immigration. All over Northern India, temples are built near streams and rivers.‘Naga’ stands for spring, and ‘nagin’ for small spring. Surely that is where the Irish word naggin, as in a small bottle of spirits, hails from? Nagas reside in bodies of water. The Sanskrit word Naga is ‘snake’, specifically the cobra, representing fertility and the source of life.
The Nilmata Purana, refers to numerous temples built near springs. When I lived near Kashmir, in Ladakh, the Dalai Lama came to Leh to teach, and scolded Ladakhis for their Naga worship. But that’s something you could not cancel it by request. Long before the Aryans came to India, nagas dwelt in the Underworld in the city of Bhogravati, guarding treasures. They are ‘underwater serpents’. You might think we wouldn’t believe such things in the West, but the Merovingian kings and many other royal houses claimed descent from a ‘sea serpent’. Many royal houses, especially in France, ascribe their ancestry to the ‘mermaid’ Melusine, sometimes known, especially in the House of Anjou (Plantagenet), as ‘the Demon Countess’ according to the moralistic chroniclers of the middle ages.
Nagins (like Melusine) are beautiful, they shape-shift, they have emeralds on their skulls that grant them magical powers. They marry earthly princes. Like Arjun, hero of Mahabharat marries the Nag Princess Ulupi who protects him from all underwater creatures.
Art by: Jakki Moore
Nagas may be the cousins of Mermaids. I believe Melusine was something between a Nagin and a Mermaid. Known as Jalpari, in India, there was a report of one of these mermaids found in 2015 (of course you will say this is outrightly fake news) in Karachi, Pakistan and subsequently spotted in Porbander, Gujarat. She looks a bit wrecked in the photos.
A ‘mermaid baby’ was born in Kolkata Hospital, Bengal, in 2017 but died after four days. In Palolem, Goa, around that time, we took the riverboat with Babu, a boater, on a balmy afternoon. Between his sleepy river songs he told us about the Jalpari, which he had seen at the far end of the bay, beyond Palolem. Sitting on a rock. Just like that, he told us, in the same tone as he told us about the Kingfisher who was in the river bushes, and the Cobra whose shedded skin was hanging from the tree over the river, like a cast-off sock. He flung chicken guts into the river and the Eagles circled and swooped rapidly to their booty…
We slid down that silent river. The Cobra watched us from his tree, the Herons stared from the riverbank, the Kingfishers darted past, and Babu sang while an indolent fisherman waded through the waters catching glistening silver fish in his net. The Cobra, Babu told us, would leave his old skin in the tree that hangs over the river. That is the power of the serpent, as we shall see.
Melusine, the mermaid-faery-naga whose beauty tempted mortal (noble) men. The Western world has banished the serpent and the dragon. But the East reveres them. Chinese and Japanese, and of course Indian royal families in India claim naga descent. Manipur royalty in NE India trace lineage back to AD33 from the union of a ‘serpent princess’ with a human . So do many European royal houses, but few speak about it. Except the likes of David Icke, who’s been condemned to hell and banished from several countries, for spreading the fact (among other things, of course). Take the Merovingian clan, who claim descent from a sea-beast called a quiontaur: ‘In the event she was made pregnant, either by the beast or by her husband, and she gave birth to a son called Merovech, from whom the kings of the Franks have subsequently been called Merovingians.’ (7th-century Chronicle of Fredegar)
The Plantagenets, the Anglo-Norman dynasty that began the conquest of Ireland, claimed descent from Melusine. She was a shape-shifting beauty sometimes represented as a mermaid, other times a naga-like being and less frequently, as a full blown dragon(-ess). Melusine is sometimes known, especially in the House of Anjou (Plantagenet), as ‘the Demon Countess’ according to the moralistic chroniclers of the middle ages. Melusine ‘legends’ are connected with Northern France, Poitou, the Low Countries and as far east as Cyprus: the French Lusignan royal house that ruled the island from 1192 to 1489 claimed to be descended from Melusine. Other noble lines descend from her- the House of Luxembourg from the Holy Roman Empire and the Counts of Anjou, as we have seen.
Melusine, the ‘mermaid’ immortalised in the Starbucks emblem. Yet she has a double tale, not a single one. Melusine, mother of the Plantagenets. 'From the Devil we come, and the Devil we go,’ said one of the chroniclers, about the Plantagenets’ ancestry. The Count of Anjou brought home from a hunting journey, a beautiful woman called Melusine and married her on her condition that he did not disturb her on Saturdays. She was a stunner. The story has overtones of the beautiful shape-shifting Indian nagin. Melusine was adored by the people, but there was one thing that would lead to her downfall: she refused to stay in church for the sacrament of mass. So her husband had four knights stand on her cloak to stop her running off, but when the priest held up the host, Melusine flew out the church window with two of her children, shrieking, never to be seen again. Apparently, Henry II and Richard I Plantagenet used to make jokes about Melusine, their ‘demonic’ ancestor. Generally people believed the Counts of Anjou were descended from Melusine.
Melusine, the ‘Demon Countess’ of Anjou, had a grandson called Geoffrey Plantagenet, who shaped the future of England and France by supernatural (demonic?) skills in military strategy. Despite its abundant beauty and (fig trees, vineyards) the Angevin territory was regarded as savage by the Normans they saw them as people who desecrated churches, murdered priests and had disgusting table manners (with falcons at the table hunting live birds in pies). The Counts of Anjou were ferocious and warlike, had a huge greed for land and power. They were the first conquerors of Ireland, of course, led by King John (Lackland) Plantagenet. We have nothing to thank them for.
Where, then, did this serpentine faery hail from? Melusine’s mother Pressyne had commanded her own husband, Elainas, the King of Albany (Scotland), never to enter her chamber at childbirth, when she bathed, when she washed their children. (There are often rigid conditions attached pairings with nagas, sídhe and the like, but this was to prove a little tricky). When Pressyne gave birth to triplets, one of whom was Melusine, the King was so excited he burst into her private bath and found that her ‘Saturday Secret’ was that she was a hybrid: half serpent and half human. Pressyne, condemned and enraged, vowed that from then on her descendants would avenge her. She fled with her three daughters, Melusine, Melior and Palatine, to Avalon, where they grew up. Later, Melusine asked why they were banished to Avalon, and where on earth was their father? When she found she and her sisters decided to lock him up in a mountain with all his treasures. Pressyne flew into a rage (again) when she found what they’d done and cursed Melusine to take her own ‘affliction’: to take the form of a serpent from the waist down every Saturday.(Gareth Knight in his “Melusine of Lusignan & The Cult of the Faery Woman” suggests that was the Sabbath and she was exhausted from pretending to be ‘normal’ the rest of the week). In the 1478 woodcut of the French editio princeps she is a mermaid with a serpent’s tail ‘as thick as a herring barrel, and very long, and she was splashing her tail in the water so much that she made it shoot up to the ceiling.’
In the House of Lusignan, Melusine (she is also their ‘progenitor’), carries a different version of the story, in that the daughters of Pressyne went to Albany and trapped their father in the forest of Brandebois. When Pressyne’s rage was unleashed, Meliot was banished to an Armenian castle, Palatine was abandoned there too, and Melusine carried the ‘cursed’ burden of her mother’s lineage: to transform into a sea serpent from the waist down, on Saturdays. Just like a Nagin?
Melusine set off for the Black Forest and the Ardennes, and to the forest of Colombiers in Poitou where people greeted her with: ”We have been waiting for you to rule the land." When she was at the Fountain of the ‘Fays’, at Colombiers forest, she met Count Raymondin de Lusignan, who had accidentally killed his uncle the Count of Poitou (which links Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Plantagenets with this House of Lusignan and of course both claim descent from Melusine). So, Raymondin falls madly in love with her. She agreed to be married as long as, you guessed it, he stayed well away from her on Saturdays. Apparently she’d inherited her father’s treasures and with this she built the Lusignan Castle by the fountain where they had met.
A pile of sons they had, ten in total, eight of whom bore some mark of their faery ancestry (one had a one blue eye, one had one red eye, one had a long tooth) but these defects somehow enabled them to become great warriors. Raymondin’s cousin, the Count of Forez, told Raymondin he’d better find out what his wife actually did on a Saturday. Which was fair enough, really, since it required him to avoid her at all costs. By sneaking up on her, he found that she was that she was only from the waist upwards a beautiful woman, but from the waist down, she was a serpent. The real curse of Melusine, I think, is that she felt she could not be loved as she was, with her defects. Such a ‘condition’ is common for women.
Raymondin decided, when their son Geoffrey of the Giant Tooth killed 100 monks (including his own brother), that this was Melusine’s demonic influence. She had corrupted the lineage, she had incited her Giant son to this monstrous act of evil. Accused thus, she shape-shifted into a fifteen foot serpent (is Icke so deranged?) the form of a fifteen-foot serpent:
‘Melusine came to Lusignan and circled it three times, shrieking woefully in a plaintive female voice. Up in the fortress and in the town below, people were utterly amazed; they could see the form of a serpent, yet they heard the lady’s voice issuing forth from it’. Jean d’Arras, Roman de Melusine (1393) The Romans of Partenay or of Lusignen: Otherwise known as the Tale of Melusine.
But at night, she stole back to nurse her children, who went on to become the King of Cyprus, the King of Armenia, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Luxembourg, the last King of Jerusalem, and The Lord of Lusignan. Quite some work, for a mermaid. Raymondin couldn’t have done any of that without her, and he went on to live a life of misery. Melusine returns to wail when a Lusignan dies. Some say she sank into a rock after Raymondin spied on her Saturday bath, and every seven years she appears out of it with a golden key in her mouth. She’s also said to have returned to wail when the Castle of Lusignan was blasted to the ground.
Those Lusignans had by the 11th Century risen high in the ranks of nobility, and took a scunner against Eleanor of Aquitaine after they rebelled against her and she’d confiscated their lands.
Now, there is a woman, beautiful and all- powerful, Duchess of Aquitaine, once married to Louis VII, Queen consort of France, then to Henry II Plantagenet, Queen of England. While married to the latter, she was ambushed and not for the first time. The Earl of Salisbury was escorting her to Poitiers and when the Lusignan brothers popped out of a bush, Salisbury gave Eleanor his destrier and off she sped, but Salisbury was pierced by a lance hurled at him by Guy de Lusignan or his brother Geoffrey. Guy went off to seek a fortune in Outremer, no longer welcome at the Plantagenet court.
After her annulment to Louis VII, Eleanor had been at mercy of bounty hunters and kidnappers. At Blois, Count Theobald V plotted to seize her on 21 march 1152, she was forced to flee in darkness, taking a barge on Loire to Tours. At Port des Piels Geoffrey of Anjou younger brother of Henry II, the man Eleanor would marry in a few weeks, lay in wait. Warned by a good angel, she got away.
The point about Eleanor of Aquitaine is that she was not treated dissimilarly to Melusine, the Demon Countess. Sadly when her husband Henry II Plantagenet locked her up in Old Sarum for 16 years for supporting their sons in rebelling against him in 1174, she could not fly out the window in the form of a dragon like Melusine. Eleanor however had her own serpentine ancestry as she was descended from the Merovingians, who were descended from that sea-beast called a quiontaur. For whatever reason, this charismatic, beautiful and powerful woman was condemned. Bernard of Clairveaux took a more or less permanent scunner against her. The ladies of her court wore the kind of ‘serpentine sleeves’ that made her like a daughter of Belial, according to him. She wore mutton sleeves and she looked like the devil in paintings. She slashed her mantles- her sleeves flowed like those of hermits and worst of all, she wore pointed shoes.
A French chronicler described her asking the barons of France after the dissolution of her marriage to Louis VII: “Look at me Sirs. Is not my body delightful? The king thought I was the Devil!”. The Minstrel of Rheims called her ‘a very Devil’. By 13th Century many people decided in retrospect that Eleanor had wanted to elope with Sultan Saladdin who had stolen Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Shakespeare in King John referred to Eleanor as a ‘cankered grandma, a monstrous injurer of Heaven and Earth’. Clearly, there were no ‘fact-checkers’ in the day. These representations of Eleanor are easily refuted by the most superificial of ‘fact-finding’ missions. Sultan Saladdin, for example, was a mere child when Eleanor was in Jerusalem.
Melusine’s children, including Eleanor’s husband Henry II were among the bastion of European royal houses. The Plantagenet line also had the Merovingian bloodline. And yet they were savage warriors, wily politicians and bloodthirsty conquerors. There is little redemption in that, for me. The secret of the Grail is what they supposedly protect- the venom and blood of the serpent, which provides the Elixir of Life. If only the European royals who claim such descent were decent human beings who deserved that elixir. IF the power of those bloodlines come from serpent-beings, nagas, mermaids with double tails, faeries with conditions for marrying mortals, dragons (as in China and Japan), or the sea-beast called a quiontaur and who knows what in the Windsor House, then why is the serpent condemned in the Judaeo- Christian world?
The serpent is the very power of life. They jealously guard it, and demonise serpents and dragons in the interest of guarding that very elixir. Think of the Cobra on the river that Babu showed us, its skin hanging over the river on a branch, like a sock. The moon sheds its shadow to be born again. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. ‘The serpent represents immortal energy and consciouness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. In India, even the most poisonous snake, the cobra, is a sacred animal, and the mythological Serpent King is the next thing to the Buddha. The serpent represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive. The world is but its shadow — the falling skin.” Joseph Campbell.
Not so in the Christian world. Not so when it comes to women, fairies, mermaids or Queens- she is condemned, as the serpent is condemned. Yet it would seem the source of the power of western royal houses, was in its connection to the serpent.
“That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.” Joseph Campbell
Disclaimer: Although I’ve done much academic work, I’m not an academic. I’m not interested in ‘proving’ anything. I like myth, folklore and tales. And I love history. But in narrative form, so don’t expect me to reference my work. Not in a blog. Life’s too short. I write novels. This research here is for my novel, the King of the North Wind, which is about the imprisonment of Eleanor of Aquitaine after her part in the rebellion against her tyrannical husband, Henry II. In my story, she is his Melusine. Except that she can’t fly away. Melusine is a powerful archtype: beautiful, hybird serpentine, banished from society to the forest, taken into society for producing heirs and banished for her ‘deformity’. She’s now being incorporated into my Heroine’s Writing Journey, a creative writing course I teach through myth and meditation.
As a direct descendant of Melusine, a double Pisces, and born in the year of the snake, thank you for this fascinating text. And: I am grateful to have been crossbred with the kindest line of Irish known to man. I have not had children and I am 48. So the line stops here.
Interesting and well told. Thank you.