Olivia Møller
Freediver - Activist - Explorer
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Olivia Møller
Freediver - Activist - Explorer
Humans were never built for the ocean. No gills, no fins, no streamlined bodies. And yet, some part of us has always longed for it — not as intruders, but as something closer to native sons and daughters of the deep. This ancient yearning spawned stories. Not the polished fairy tales you find in illustrated children's books, but raw myths: dark, seductive, terrifying. Myths of beings who could hold their breath for hours, dive into the abyss, and live between worlds — half-human, half-sea. Sirens, selkies, ningyo, water spirits. You know their names. You’ve heard the echoes. But look deeper. These creatures are not just folklore. They are artifacts of human obsession with one impossible dream: to live underwater, even when everything about our biology screams otherwise. The myths were never just about them. They were about us.
Let's begin with the sirens — the pop stars of maritime mythology. Forget Disney’s sanitized version. The real sirens were monsters. In Homer’s Odyssey, they weren’t mermaids at all. They were part-woman, part-bird creatures whose song was so haunting that sailors willingly hurled themselves into the waves to reach them, drowning before they ever arrived.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one talks about: the siren song is not just an external threat. It’s internal. It's the voice that every freediver, every pearl diver, every ancient spearfisher hears in their own head. Stay longer. Go deeper. Ignore the burning in your lungs. You belong down here. Physiologically, freedivers face the urge to breathe — the hypoxic siren call. Ignore it too long, and you blackout. Listen too soon, and you miss greatness. Sirens didn’t need to drag sailors under. We’ve always been ready to drown ourselves for a dream.
Move north to the frigid waters of Scotland, Ireland, and the Faroe Islands, and you meet another breed: the selkies. Seal-people who could shed their skins to walk on land as humans — or slip them back on to return to the sea. In selkie myths, the ocean is not a curse. It’s home. And land is exile.
This mirrors a deeper truth that modern freedivers still experience today. The human body is laughably fragile compared to the ocean. Skin shivers in cold. Lungs compress under pressure. Blood shifts. Vision narrows. Bones feel brittle against the endless mass of water. But in freediving, a transformation happens. Metabolic rates slow. Heart rates plummet. Blood vessels constrict. It’s called the mammalian dive reflex — a trait we share with whales and seals. Science frames it clinically. But stripped of jargon, it feels like something far older: a memory. As if, buried deep in our DNA, is the knowledge that we once belonged to the sea — and might, for a few minutes at a time, become its creatures again. The selkie is not a fantasy. It’s a metaphor for what happens every time a human slips into water and changes.
Europe didn’t monopolize the underwater myths. Every coastal culture birthed its own legends. In Japan, the ningyo was a fish-human hybrid whose flesh granted immortality (at a heavy, cursed cost). In West Africa, the Mami Wata spirits lured believers into the water, sometimes offering wisdom, sometimes death. In Slavic folklore, rusalki were water maidens — the souls of drowned women — who tangled with the living.
Notice the pattern? Across continents, cultures instinctively understood that staying underwater too long meant stepping into a liminal, dangerous realm. You’re not fully alive down there. You’re not fully dead, either. You’re something in between. Modern freedivers talk about flow states, about feeling out of body during deep dives. They experience hallucinations, euphoria, the breakdown of linear time — effects caused by oxygen deprivation, sure, but also effects that eerily echo the oldest stories about becoming other. Our bodies obey biology. Our minds tell myths.
Today, we know how freedivers can stay submerged for minutes — sometimes even longer than an untrained person could survive. There’s no magic. There’s the blood shift, the bradycardia, the trained tolerance to rising CO₂. There’s the boring, clinical study of spleen contractions and oxygen saturation curves.
But when you watch a human slip beneath the surface, silent, fluid, vanishing into blue, science feels thin. An explanation. Not an understanding. Because here’s the hard truth: Myth was never about facts. Myth was about meaning. It captured something science still struggles to explain: Why are we, as a species, drawn to risk annihilation just for the chance to touch the unreachable? Why do we need to believe we could live in a world that would otherwise kill us?
Sirens, selkies, ningyo — these weren’t random fictions. They were cultural Rorschach tests. Each one asked: What are you willing to lose in order to belong to the deep? Maybe that’s the same question freediving asks today. Every deep diver knows the pull. The temptation to push beyond safety. To flirt with blackout. To merge, even for a heartbeat, with a world where breath — that fundamental rhythm of life — ceases to matter.
Maybe we don’t tell stories about selkies and sirens because we believe in magic. Maybe we tell them because, in the quiet part of our hearts, we know we’re not really surface creatures. We’re just visitors. And sometimes, visitors don’t come back.
In the end, myths about breath-holding creatures aren’t a relic of a superstitious past. They are a mirror held up to the most dangerous, most beautiful part of ourselves: the refusal to accept the limits nature placed upon us. Every time a freediver descends past 30 meters, 60 meters, 100 meters, chasing some invisible line into the abyss, they’re not just breaking personal records. They’re continuing a conversation that began thousands of years ago: a conversation between land and sea, flesh and water, life and death.
And maybe, just maybe, every deep dive is a small answer to the oldest, most reckless question humanity ever asked itself: What if we could belong to the ocean? We can’t. But that doesn't stop us from trying. And it never will.