On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (9 page)

Aristotle could not agree. He noticed that embryos developed from homogeneous-looking material to heterogeneous structures or forms, but he believed that an underlying
logical
and
metaphysical
reality existed beneath that
physical
process. In describing biological development, he says, “In order of time…the material and the generative process must necessarily be anterior to the being that is generated; but in logical order the definitive character and form of each being precedes the material.”
¹⁵
In order for a biological process to be regular, predictable, coherent, and successful, it has to know where it’s going. An embryo doesn’t literally
know
where it’s going (as tissues form organs, etc.); it’s not a conscious process. But the very fact that animals develop so predictably over and over again, and do not slosh chaotically into a biotic mess, is a kind of proof that organisms have blueprints of some kind. Organisms have internal formal instructions that tell them to make a leg here and a tongue there and when to
stop
making arms, mouths, and so on.
¹⁶
This blueprint Aristotle called the essential form, and this essential form is what guarantees that acorns always grow into oak trees, dogs always give birth to dogs, and humans always give birth to humans.
¹⁷

Aristotle was more than familiar with his intellectual predecessors; he had studied them carefully and always took time to consider their teachings. One of his more illustrious forerunners was Empedocles (490–430
BCE
), who seriously considered monsters a generation before Aristotle.
¹⁸
Empedocles offered a theory of animal origins that looks very similar to Darwinian natural selection, whereby organisms form randomly and the environment selects the more successful experiments. He claimed that in the distant past, before contemporary species, single parts of animals arose separate from each other. Heads without necks rolled pathetically around the environment, trying to survive. Arms, legs, spleens, and eyes presumably crawled the earth in a grotesque parade. Occasionally these organs and limbs accidentally clumped together and managed to survive for a short time, whereas others perished quickly. Among these monstrous creatures, Empedocles mentions the “man-headed oxen” as just one example of random hybrid weirdness. Only your imagination need limit the permutations of viscera. While these beasts were being winnowed by the harsh environment, Empedocles imagines, humanoid creatures without sexual differentiation evolved out of mud. The final stage was the evolution of male and female genders.

Aristotle did not like the idea that we were all monsters once and that “chance fitness” sorted us into our current zoological forms. But unlike
today’s creationists he did not object on religious grounds. Instead, he thought Empedocles was doing bad science.
¹⁹
According to Aristotle, Empedocles had the
causal
story exactly backward. “The process of development,” Aristotle explains, “is for the sake of the thing finally developed, and not this for the sake of the process. Empedocles, then, was in error when he said that many of the characters presented by animals were merely the results of incidental occurrences during their development.”
²⁰
For Aristotle, the “essential form of a man” is what directs the developmental changes, bringing about a coherent biological process; the “essential form of an ox” similarly guides the process of oxen reproduction. Without the fixed essence, we would see reproductive chaos on a regular basis: monsters would be the norm rather than the exception. Since we don’t see that chaos, we can conclude that all development (embryological or evolutionary) must be working toward some fixed goal. If Aristotle had lived to see the birth of modern genetics, with its theory of stored hereditary information in the form of DNA, he would have celebrated it as a kind of formal recipe that guides growth and development. As it is, he had no such knowledge and made the best science he could with what he had.

So we did not have a monstrous past, where parts of creatures accidentally clumped into organisms, because “parts” exist only as components of “wholes.” “That this is true,” Aristotle says, “is manifest by induction; for a house does not exist for the sake of bricks and stones, but these materials for the sake of the house; and the same is the case with the materials of other bodies.”
²¹
In contrast to this rather philosophical argument, Lucretius offers more mundane proof against monstrous ancestors: monsters would have needed the exact matching sexual organs in order to procreate, and that fit seems even harder to believe if chance is the only cause.
²²
In the same passage, he offers an interesting argument for why centaurs could not exist. Lucretius points out that humans mature at a much slower rate than horses do; young foals are independent very quickly after birth, whereas humans are dependent on their mother for years. Consequently, the half-man half-horse would be ridiculous; when the back half of the monster was well grown, independent, and capable of running and jumping, the front half would not even be able to hold up its head. Lucretius uses this logic to eliminate the possibility of any hybrid monsters that are similarly discordant in terms of their developmental trajectories.

Aristotle further reasoned that monsters are simply
mistakes
that occur when normal reproductive processes are interrupted or otherwise corrupted. Nature inadvertently creates monsters when the “essence” of the animal (its final or formal cause) is corrupted by wayward matter. In the same way that grammatical mistakes can creep into an author’s writings,
Aristotle suggests, so, too, can biological mistakes creep into the purposeful direction of nature.

Feminist historians have rightfully highlighted the gender implications of Aristotle’s biology. Aristotle argues that an essential form is uniform, the same for everyone in a given species. The form, being a kind of biological recipe, has a degree of specificity that differentiates one species of animal from another. Because
matter
is the same in every physical thing (earth, air, fire, and water, and their mixed “tissues”), it must be
form
that separates one kind of thing from another. Form is the cookie cutter, so to speak, and matter is the dough. When a man and a woman have sex, Aristotle says, the form of the offspring is passed along via the man’s semen. The woman’s uterine blood provides the raw matter upon which the semen information goes to work, concocting and shaping the eventual fetus. The recipe provided from the male would, if it could, create an exact replica of itself, but the clumsy interference of unpredictable matter (too much of this, too little of that) actually corrupts the replication process. So
heredity
is explained by the male contribution to procreation, and
variation
and
diversity
are explained by the female contribution.
²³

In an illuminating passage in
Generation of Animals
, Aristotle gives the ancient world a new view of monsters: “Even he who does not resemble his parents is already in a certain sense a monstrosity.”
²⁴
In other words, where there is deviation from the type (and there always is), one sees the minor errors inherent in reproduction. Everyone is just a little bit monster, in this trivial sense, but a more dramatic deviation (again caused by matter) creates the true “grotesques” of teratology: conjoined twins, craniofacial anomalies, missing limbs, polydactyls, hermaphrodites, and so on. He even offers a mundane scientific suggestion for why we don’t see more human monsters. “Why is it,” he asks, “that quadrupeds of a small size most often give birth to monstrosities; whereas man and the larger quadrupeds such as horses and asses do so less often? Is it because small quadrupeds such as dogs, pigs, goats, and sheep, have more abundant progeny than the larger animals, which either always or usually produce only one offspring at a time?”
²⁵

Unlike many ancients who loved to speculate on the meaning or purpose of a particular monstrous birth, Aristotle concluded that monsters have no purpose or special meaning. To ascribe such meanings to natural accidents would be as wrongheaded as saying that a crack in the sidewalk is
for the purpose
of letting grass grow through. Monsters are just cases of biological bad luck and therefore don’t require special explanations. Aristotle joins the other scientists in claiming that there is no additional purpose or portent in bizarre ram’s horns (Anaxagoras) or seeming centaurs (Thales).
All of Nature, according to Aristotle, should be understood in terms of purpose (teleology), such as when he says that an eye must be explained by its purpose of seeing and an acorn’s purpose is the oak tree. But despite this framework, or rather because of it, there are no special purposes for monsters beyond the usual species-specific goals. A monster born of humans, no matter what it looks like, is a failed attempt to actualize a human essence. It is not a new species or a hybrid species or an alien creature or even a message from the gods. It is just an anomalous or abnormal human being.
²⁶
But Aristotle’s demystification of monsters turned out to be a minority report, largely ignored by the ancient populace. Anomalous births continued to augur important revelations for superstitious Greeks and Romans.

If the ancient scientists were right in their general skepticism about monsters, was everyone else just stupid and naïve? Lucretius offers a charitable clarification of why people continued to believe in monsters. The reason, which seems paradoxical at first, is that people continued to
see
monsters. But now Lucretius, following the general atomistic theory, redefined this “seeing” of monsters within an overall paradigm of perception.

According to atomists, all physical objects are constantly shedding gossamer-thin films of themselves, phantom images that emanate off the object. A horse, for example, is always emitting a transparent copy of itself, fluid-like, through the medium of air until it reaches my eye. I take in this representation through the eyes and it travels on to the mind. This process transmits to the
inside
of a person a little image or replica (material in nature, but very subtle matter) of an
outside
material thing. This theory of perception is quite far from our notion of light bouncing off objects and entering the retina, to be reorganized in the back of the brain by the visual cortex. But it’s still an impressive way to solve the riddle of how we get representational information.

These gossamer webs, which are constantly radiating off objects, do not stop impinging on us when we go to sleep. In fact, their infiltration into our senses and then our minds while we’re sleeping is the atomistic explanation for dreaming. But while we sleep, Lucretius claims, we cannot separate the true images from the false because our intelligence is dormant. When we dream of our dead father, it is because some leftover image film, floating free of its deceased source object, has drifted into our senses. On this account, monstrous hybrids and fantastical creatures are common “perceptions” because separate gossamers, from separate animals,
have mingled and conjoined while floating through the air. A horse gossamer and a man gossamer have mingled their atoms accidentally, and when they are received by the perceiver they are confused as one. As Lucretius explains:

The Cerberus-visages of dogs we see,

And images of people gone before—

Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago;

Because the images of every kind

Are everywhere about us borne—in part

Those which are gendered in the very air

Of own accord, in part those others which

From divers things do part away, and those

Which are compounded, made from out their shapes.

For truly from no living Centaur is

That phantom gendered, since no breed of beast

Like him was ever; but, when images

Of horse and man by chance have come together,

They easily cohere, as aforesaid,

At once, through subtle nature and fabric thin.

In the same fashion others of this ilk

Are created. And when they’re quickly borne

In their exceeding lightness, easily

(As earlier I showed) one subtle image,

Compounded, moves by its one stroke the mind,

Itself so subtle and so strangely quick.
²⁷

In one deft move Lucretius and the atomists were able to eliminate the superstitions of belief in monsters and portentous dreams, but also acknowledge their real experiential basis. Confused phantom images (hybridized creatures, dead people, etc.) were actually entering our senses (because the air is thick with a metaphysical mist of images), but people were misinterpreting these as objectively real. Like Aristotle, however, Lucretius failed to have much impact (despite turning atomism into a
poem
) on the everyday culture of the ancient world. Shortly after Lucretius, Livy was still giving great weight to omens, dreams, and monsters, and this trend continued right through to the fourth century
CE
in the form of popular books of omens.
²⁸

A multitudinous, many-headed monster
.
PLATO