On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (4 page)

As a
literal
creature, the monster is still a vital actor on the stage of indigenous folk cultures,
²²
and it’s safe to say that even in our developed and otherwise secular world, the idea of a literal demon or devil still haunts the minds of many evangelical and mainstream Christians. In this book I am concerned with literal monsters, but the monster as metaphor is probably more relevant for us now. In some cases, the literal and the metaphorical merge in a dance of causation, as in the case that Teresa Goddu tells of a vampire clan in Murray, Kentucky, in the late 1990s.
²³
Here the legends of vampire activity, such as drinking blood and killing, actually inspired some teenagers to role-play, acting to such a degree that they murdered a parent.

Thankfully, most people don’t have to worry about actual blood drinking and instead employ the monster concept metaphorically rather than literally. But even so, we have begun to realize the important role that metaphors play in shaping our thoughts and our experiences. According to the theorists Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, we have many conceptual metaphors that act like lenses for filtering and organizing our experiences: “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to
other people.”
²⁴
When we say “He was a monster,” our listeners have a general sense of what we mean because they conceptually map some inhuman qualities onto the person we’re talking about. We perform a metaphorical operation that helps us to understand one domain of action by seeing it through another, more concrete domain of action. When trying to convey the way your colleague at work “uses people” and seems to “feed” on their weaknesses, you refer to him as a “vampire.” It’s a classic case of using an obvious activity (drinking someone’s blood for nourishment) to clarify a more subtle and intangible activity of instigated workplace drama. Johnson and Lakoff claim that these metaphors are often prelinguistic aspects of our thinking, shaped by cultural conventions and native psychophysical tendencies.
²⁵
I suspect that monsters are metaphorical archetypes of this nature, and I want to trace the anatomy and evolution of some of these metaphors.

Hand in hand with this idea that metaphors shape our thinking, communicating, and even feeling is the idea that
imagination
is more active in our picture of reality than we previously acknowledged. The monster, of course, is a product of and a regular inhabitant of the imagination, but the imagination is a driving force behind our entire perception of the world. If we find monsters in our world, it is sometimes because they are really there and sometimes because we have brought them with us.

BOTH THE EAST AND THE WEST
are rife with monsters of every stripe. Demons, dragons, ghosts, wrathful Buddhas, and supernatural animals occupy the theology, folklore, and daily rituals of religious cultures around the globe. The “hungry ghost” is a common creature in Asia. It usually represents a monstrous afterlife for a person who was gluttonous or greedy in this life; in the afterlife, the person is tortured by his insatiable hunger. These creatures, sometimes imagined with a giant stomach and a pinhole mouth or no mouth at all, continue to play an important role in Eastern cultures; Southeast Asia and China still have annual hungry ghost festivals. They are imaginative symbols of the frustrations of hedonism and the doomed pursuit of pleasure. A comparative study of similar Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist monsters could give us important insight into our common search for the ecstatic experience, our ascetic bifurcation of spirit and flesh, our quest for ideals and perfections, and our retreat from evil. Indeed, any comparative cross-cultural study of monsters in Eastern and Western cultures could provide an interesting picture of what is common and what is unique in our hopes and fears. But, anxious that such an East-West project might be too big for an in-depth analysis, I have chosen an
only slightly less daunting endeavor: a cultural and conceptual history of Western monsters. Here, too, the terrain is immense, but I believe that a coherent thread can be followed from the ancient to the contemporary. The concept of monster has evolved over time, and I hope to track some of the main branches of that Western genealogy. And I hold out the hope that some future book will take the East as its primary focus.

IT SEEMS IMPORTANT TO SAY A WORD
about the
word
“monster.” Obviously it’s not a complimentary term. Like the words
imbecile
and
moron
, which psychologists once used as technical descriptors for IQ levels, the word
monster
once had a slightly less pejorative set of connotations but has now slipped wholly into the derogatory. The term was never entirely friendly, but in certain eras it was used to, among other things, designate those persons whom we now refer to as developmentally or genetically disabled. Perhaps the word is so charged with prejudicial values that it can never again be used in an objective or purely descriptive manner. No one who finds himself at the receiving end of the monster epithet can be confused about its negative connotations, and it is probably fair to say that, in reference to humans, there is no longer any truly
literal
sense of the term. To be completely accurate I should, throughout this book, place every instance of
monster
in scare quotes to indicate my ironic use of the term. This would be stylistically tedious, even irritating. So we’ll have to be satisfied with a disclaimer: no disrespect is intended by the author to any particular monsters, living or dead.

The whole earth echoed with their hissing
.
ALEXANDER’S LETTER TO ARISTOTLE

A
FTER DEFEATING KING PORUS IN THE PUNJAB REGION
, Alexander the Great chased the tyrant farther into India. “However,” Alexander reported, “it commonly happens that when a man achieves some success, this is pretty soon followed by adversity.”
¹
Lost in the deserts of the Indus Valley, Alexander and his army found themselves dehydrated and demoralized by a fierce and hostile environment. Alexander relates the frightening events of that campaign in a letter to his old teacher, Aristotle.
²
Marching through the desert, Alexander’s forces were so thirsty that some of the soldiers began to lick iron, drink oil, and even drink their own urine. A devoted soldier named Zefirus found a tiny puddle of water in the hollow of a rock, poured it into his helmet, and brought it to Alexander to drink. Alexander was moved by the soldier’s generosity, but he poured the water out on the ground in front of the whole army to demonstrate that he, as their leader, would suffer with them. This show of strength and solidarity gave inspiration to the troops and they marched on until they finally reached a river. But frustration rose further when they discovered that the river was poisonous and undrinkable.

In the middle of this large river sat a strange island castle. Alexander tried to communicate with the naked Indians therein, asking them where he might find good water, but they were unresponsive and took to hiding. Two hundred lightly armed soldiers were sent wading through the water to try to pressure the castle’s inhabitants for help. When the
soldiers were a quarter of the way through the river, a terrible turbulence began to churn and the men began screaming and disappearing underwater. “We saw emerging from the deep,” Alexander explains, “a number of hippopotamuses, bigger than elephants. We could only watch and wail as they devoured the Macedonians whom we had sent to swim the river.” Alexander was so enraged by this calamity that he gathered together the guides, local men who had betrayed them by leading them into this hostile land, and marched them into the deadly water. “Then the hippopotamuses began to swarm like ants and devoured them all.”

After another day of marching, the exhausted and dehydrated soldiers finally came to a “lake of sweet water” and a surrounding thick forest. All the men drank their fill and regained some of their strength. They pitched camp there at the sweet water lake, cutting down huge swaths of forest to build fifteen hundred fires. They organized their legions into defense formations in case something should attack in the night, and settled down to rest. “When the moon began to rise,” Alexander reports, “scorpions suddenly arrived to drink at the lake; then there came huge beasts and serpents, of various colors, some red, some black or white, some gold; the whole earth echoed with their hissing and filled us with considerable fear.”

It’s not hard to imagine the terror. Soldiers don’t lack fear, after all; they just override it with stoic resolve. Anyone who has ever been in a strange forest after dark knows the pulse-quickening fears that can take hold. If you’ve ever tent-camped in grizzly country you’ll have an inkling of the dread that must have filled these soldiers. The fears of the Macedonians, however, were not just imagined but actually realized over the course of that long night.

After killing some of the serpents the soldiers were relieved to see the creatures retreat. But their hopes of finally getting some sleep were dashed when dragons began to slither out of the woods toward them. They were larger than the serpents, thicker than columns, with a crest on their head, breasts upright, and mouths wide open to spew poisonous breath. “They came down from the nearby mountains and likewise made for the water.” After an hour of fighting, the monsters had killed thirty servants and twenty soldiers. Alexander could see that his men were overwhelmed by the strangeness and resilience of the dragons, so he leaped into the fray and told them to follow his monster-slaying technique. Covering himself with his shield, he used nets to tangle the enemy and then struck at them viciously with his sword. Seeing his success, the soldiers rallied and finally drove back the dragons. But then came the giant crabs and crocodiles. Spears and swords were ineffective
against the impenetrable shells of these enormous crabs, so the soldiers used fire to kill many of them and drive the rest back to the forest. Alexander lists the subsequent parade of foes:

Alexander and his army fight a parade of monsters in India. Scene from the
Romance of Alexander
, France (Rouen), c. 1445. Royal MS 15 EVI. From Alixe Bovey,
Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts
(University of Toronto Press, 2002). Reprinted by permission of the British Library.

It was now the fifth watch of the night and we wanted to rest; but now white lions arrived, bigger than bulls; they shook their heads and roared loudly, and charged at us; but we met them with the points of our hunting spears and killed them. There was great consternation in the camp at all these alarms. The next creatures to arrive were enormous pigs of various colors; we fought with them too in the same way. Then came bats as big as doves with teeth like those of men; they flew right in our face and some of the soldiers were wounded.

As if this onslaught were not enough, the men were astonished next to see an enormous beast, larger than an elephant, emerge from the forest. The behemoth, first appearing in the distance, headed for the lake to drink but then saw Alexander’s encampment. It turned quickly, revealing three ominous horns on its forehead, and began charging toward the men. Alexander ordered a squadron of soldiers to meet the earth-shaking juggernaut head-on, but they were overrun. After engaging the monster in difficult
battle for some time, the soldiers managed finally to kill it, but only after the creature had taken seventy-six Macedonian warriors to a bloody end.

Still shocked and shaken, the tattered army watched with horror as oversized shrews skulked out of the darkness and fed upon the dead bodies strewn around the beach. Dawn mercifully broke and vultures began to line the bank of the lake. The ordeal was over.

“Then I was angry,” Alexander says, “at the guides who had brought us to this dreadful place. I had their legs broken and left them to be eaten alive by serpents. I also had their hands cut off, so that their punishment was proportionate to their crime.”

Alexander’s letter is almost certainly apocryphal, but it has formed an important part of the legend and mythology of Alexander.
³
Most of the letter’s descriptions of frightening creatures come from a book about India written by Ctesias in the fifth century
BCE
, so, although the events of the letter are fabulous, the monsters were a commonplace in the ancient belief system. An ancient Greek or Roman citizen would have had no trouble believing this story of Alexander’s difficulties in exotic India. In fact, the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23–79
CE
) reinforces the point a few centuries later, when he writes, “India and regions of Ethiopia are especially full of wonders…. There are men with their feet reversed and with eight toes on each foot. On many mountains there are men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.”
⁴