The Monstrefact: Hortus the Rotting Mermaid
Stuff To Blow Your Mind
iHeartPodcasts
4.4 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
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Summary
In this episode of STBYM’s The Monstrefact, Robert discusses the mermaid Hortus as described and illustrated in the book “Dr. C. Lillefisk's Sirenology” by Jana Heidersdorf.
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| 0:00.0 | John Stewart is back in the host chair at The Daily Show, which means he's also back in our ears on the Daily Show, Ears Edition podcast. |
| 0:08.1 | Join Late Night Legend, John Stewart, and the best news team for today's biggest headlines, exclusive extended interviews, and more. |
| 0:15.4 | Now this is a second term we can all get behind. |
| 0:18.4 | Listen to The Daily Show, Ears Edition on the IHeheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:30.5 | Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio. |
| 0:37.1 | Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short-form series from |
| 0:41.5 | Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time. |
| 0:51.1 | As you probably know, I love a good monster manual, I love a good bestiary, |
| 0:54.9 | and I recently picked up an especially imaginative book by German fantasy and horror illustrator |
| 1:01.5 | Yana Heidersdorf titled Dr. C. Lily Fisks Explorations in Sirenology, |
| 1:08.3 | A Guide to Mermaids, and other under-the-sea phenomena. |
| 1:13.6 | Purported to have been written by sirenologist Dr. Cecilia Lilifisk, who is described as, |
| 1:19.7 | quote, most definitely a real person, the book guides readers through a fanciful and horrifying |
| 1:24.9 | imagined world of mermaids, sirens, gill people, and related creatures. |
| 1:30.4 | One of the things I love about this book is the way it fully embraces the weirder and, from our vantage point, |
| 1:37.0 | horrific details of marine life, and folds them into its treatment of mermaids, |
| 1:42.8 | mythic and folkloric beings that are based in a very |
| 1:46.0 | anthropocentric view that populated the ancient seas with mere reflections of terrestrial and human life. |
| 1:53.0 | So the fantastic beings of the sea in this book are never mere women of the deep, |
| 1:59.0 | but bizarre creatures whose human likenesses are infused with all manner of underwater mimicry, predation, and camouflage. |
| 2:07.6 | For just one example, I'd like to discuss the Hortus, a creature from the latter portions of the book that deal with denizens of the lightless midnight zone. |
| 2:16.6 | The main illustration for this entry depicts a mermaid resting on the sea floor, of the book that deal with denizens of the lightless midnight zone. |
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