ON MERMAIDS AND WATER SPIRITS

For the reasons I developed an interest in mermaids, please read my semi-autobiographical account, "Mermaids and Endtime Jezebels: New Tales from Old Calabar" written for Sacred Waters: Mami Wata and other Water Spirits of the Afro-Atlantic World (Henry John Drewal, editor) to the exhibition of the same name at UCLA's Fowler Museum.

More recently I have written on the demonizing treatment of mermaids by some Pentecostal churches and deliverance ministries in Nigeria. For the text of "Is Satan Local or Global? Reflections on a Nigerian Deliverance Movement." (an invited chapter for Pentecostalism and Globalization [Bayreuth University]). The founder of one movement (the Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries in Lagos, Nigeria) considers that water spirits are the "primary agents of Satan." For graphic images in this regard, see the covers from a magazine and a book.