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Western European folklore

Melusine is a mermaid-like character from European folklore, cursed to take the form of a serpent from the waist down. Later depictions sometimes changed this to a fish tail. At some point, possibly in the late nineteenth century, her name became attached to the two-tailed mermaid of heraldry.

The alchemist Paracelsus 's treatise A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits (1566) spawned the idea that the water elemental (or water sprite) could acquire an immortal soul through marriage with a human; this led to the writing of De la Motte Fouqué 's novella Undine, and eventually to the famous literary mermaid tale, Hans Christian Andersen 's " The Little Mermaid ".

During the Romanesque period, mermaids were often associated with lust.