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.
PART
I
Ancient Monsters
1
Alexander Fights Monsters in India
The whole earth echoed with their hissing.
ALEXANDER’S LETTER TO ARISTOTLE
AFTER 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 ou
r 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.”
EMBELLISHING
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
The story of Alexander’s monster battle at the sweet water lake may be wholly invented by ancient writers, or it may be partially true with significant embellishments. Psychologists have identified a common human tendency to unconsciously exaggerate perceptions. These misperceptions are heavily influenced by our subjective emotional and cognitive states. People who are startled to discover a burglar in their home, for example, usually report the size of the intruder as much larger than he actually is. The cognitive scientist Dennis R. Proffitt has amassed significant empirical data that demonstrate the tendency of those afraid of heights to actually see a greater distance between themselves and the ground. We don’t need science to deliver up commonly understood truths, but scientific validation is helpful. Proffitt speculates that perceptual exaggeration of spatial distances probably evolved as a safeguard to promote caution and prevent recklessness when our ancestors engaged in climbing activities. “With respect to fear of falling,” he explains, “…the perceptual exaggeration of steep hills and high places increases their apparent threat, and thereby promotes caution and its adaptive advantage.”5 Applying this Darwinian notion to our perception of monsters, it seems useful for humans to see a creature as more dangerous than it truly is.
The creatures described in Alexander’s letter may have been real exotic animals, such as cobras and rhinoceroses, which were then multiplied and enlarged by fear-filled misperceptions. Add to this misperception the embellishments of self-report (e.g., the fisherman’s syndrome of magnifying the dimensions of the one that got away) and you have a recipe for a fantastic monster story.6
Regardless of the veracity of Alexander’s description, the symbolic nature of the story is provocative. Among other things, the narrative is a testament to masculine stereotypes of courage and resilience. Wherever we find monsters, there, too, we also find heroes. The Macedonians were intensely afraid to be in such uncharted territory, then wave after relentless wave of dangerous attack came at them from out of the jungle. Yet though they took losses and even occasionally waned in commitment, they ultimately stood their ground against inhuman enemies. It’s a manly story of virile strength and valor. When dawn finally broke at the sweet water lake, Alexander reminded his worn-out soldiers “to be brave and not to give up in adversity like women.”
The travelers’ stories of encounters with exotica are certainly filled with wonder, but they are equal parts fight stories, demonstrations and justifications of martial masculinity. According to this view, the exotic world is not benign, and we must make our way defensively and aggressively. Monsters live with the barbarians, and indeed are the most extreme form of barbarian. One cannot meet them with rational persuasion because they lack the proper faculties, nor can the arts of diplomacy pave a road to compromise.
MANLINESS
There is a lesson in such monster stories as Alexander’s victory at the sweet water lake. Each of us will eventually encounter some awful obstacles in life, obstacles that will make us want to lie down, give up, or go away. The lesson is: don’t.
As we will see in the discussion of Beowulf in part II, in our more liberal intellectual culture macho monster fights have become a quaint genre of outmoded heroics. After all, why must men, who cause these aggression problems in the first place, go around slaying dragons? The monster-killing man has become a bit of a joke, trivialized by the ivory tower as too obvious. Hollywood, however, continues to understand this feature of the monster story very well. In 2007 Will Smith starred in a film version of Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi classic I Am Legend, playing the vampire-slaying last man in New York City. In 2005 Steven Spielberg’s remake of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds pitched Tom Cruise against the bloodsucking aliens from a distant planet. Or consider M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 blockbuster Signs, with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix fighting off the invading aliens. All these films portrayed the monster killers as fathers, family men forced to extremes to protect their children. As Robert Neville (Will Smith) in I Am Legend tells his daughter, “Don’t worry, Daddy’s going to take away the monsters.” This may seem trivial, obvious, and even naïve to the cynical cognoscenti, but what father hasn’t felt this same impulse deep in his bones?
Contrary to the narrative of early twentieth-century anthropology, early humans were probably not bold, assertive predators, marching confidently through the savanna to spear their threatening competitors. Male aggression, we were told, was put to good use in the realm of the hunt and of course in primitive warfare. This kind of domination and mastery of the field was helped along by some burgeoning brain power, but such domination of the other animals led to much further cognitive and cultural progress. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Blood Rites, surveys more recent anthropology and corrects the old story. We should not think about “man the hunter” in Paleolithic times, she writes, but “man the hunted.” She reminds us that humans are fragile creatures: “Our biology is alone enough to suggest an alarming level of vulnerability to the exceptionally hungry or casual prowler.”7 If we are to infer some aspects of human psychology from the evolutionary environment in which they developed, than we had better get an accurate picture of that environment and our status in it. Early humans were not uber predators but scavengers, waiting in the bushes to sneak in and pilfer morsels. It doesn’t occur to us anymore to factor in the huge role that big cats, for example, must have played in the cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of our progenitors, but we were constantly harassed and victimized by them. Moreover, even in recent history, when the numbers of such predators are way down, a staggering number of deaths from lions, tigers, crocodiles, and wolves have been chronicled. “The British,” Ehrenreich reports, “started
recording the numbers of humans lost to tigers [on the Indian subcontinent] in 1800, and found that by the end of the century, approximately three hundred thousand people had been killed, along with 6 to 10 million farm animals.” Though it may seem a remote possibility to us now, during the formation of the human brain the fear of being grabbed by sharp claws, dragged into a dark hole, and eaten alive was not an abstraction.
Men tend to respond to fear and vulnerability with aggression. The philosopher Harvey Mansfield writes, “Men have aggression to spare; they keep it in stock so as to have it ready when it is needed and even, or especially, when it is unneeded and unwanted.”8 Before men ever fought for honor or economic gain or even turf they must have fought for their own children and mates. Monsters, both real and imagined, are bound up with our feelings of insecurity and our responses to those anxieties. Masculine audacity and bravado is the reflex response to vulnerability.
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Page 3