On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  This universal paternal impulse to protect and use whatever aggression is necessary is rehearsed again in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel The Road. McCarthy gives us a powerful story about a father trying to protect his son in a postapocalyptic world of roaming cannibals. The father must safeguard his son, lest he become a captive catamite slave whose limbs are harvested by cannibal monsters. Among other things, it is an allegorical story about the need to shelter the good, which is fragile, from the monstrous world.

  To a young boy, monsters are exciting and alluring. They are invoked daily as the imaginary foes of the playground. Anyone, I think, who has raised a boy gets this point. When that boy becomes a man, however, he feels keenly, rightly or wrongly, that monsters have become his responsibility, part of his job.9

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  Monsters Are Nature’s Playthings

  Creations at which to marvel.

  PLINY THE ELDER

  IN ALEXANDER’S ADMITTEDLY SEXIST PEP TALK to his troops, we have an expression of a perennial attitude toward exotic creatures, peoples, and lands. Imperialist campaigns like Alexander’s are not for traipsing through strange lands to collect aesthetic oddities and make friends with strangers. They are for coming to subdue, exploit, and civilize the savage world.

  Monsters seem to represent the most extreme personified point of unfamiliarity; they push our sense of abnormality beyond the usual anthropological xenophobia. People with customs different from ours are weird, but perhaps different skin colors are weirder still, and people with a dog’s head and headless people with a mouth in their chest, well… Animals are similarly conceptualized on a continuum of strangeness: first, nonnative species, then familiar beasts with unfamiliar sizes or modified body parts, then hybrids of surprising combination, and finally, at the furthest margins, shape-shifters and indescribable creatures.

  In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus and twelve of his men became trapped in a cave with a giant Cyclops named Polyphemus. “He was a horrid creature,” Odysseus informs us, “not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain.”1 Odysseus at first tries to do some fast talking, but the Cyclops is not moved to mercy and breaks off discussion abruptly. Odysseus reports, “With a sudden clutch he gripped up two of my men at once and dashed them down upon the ground as though they had been puppies. Their brains were splashed upon the ground, and the earth was wet with their blood. Then he tore them limb from limb and dined upon them. He gobbled them up like a lion in the wilderness, flesh, bones, marrow, and entrails, without leaving anything uneaten. As for us, we wept and lifted up our hands to heaven on seeing such a horrid sight, for we did not know what else to do.”2

  Monsters and fabulous beasts like the Cyclopes generally originate in the myths and legends of poetry and allegory.3 Homer and Hesiod are probably the earliest fountains of Western monster archetypes (e.g., chimeras, Cerberus, Hydra, Minotaur). But these literary creatures evolve and new species are added to the list in the popular tales of travelers. As explorers, soldiers, and traders penetrated strange lands, they absorbed local legends and encountered unfamiliar creatures, bringing all this back to urban Greece and Rome. Additionally, around the time of Herodotus, travel stories and myths were taken up by emerging writers of natural history, a budding science of description. These three literatures of monsters and beasts—poetry, travel tales, and natural history—continued to feed each other all the way down to the seventeenth century.

  GRIFFINS

  The griffins are an interesting case study. They are common characters in Greek literature; Aeschylus refers to them in his tragedy Prometheus Bound (460 BCE) as “sharp beaked.” In later texts, such as Pliny’s Natural History (77 CE), the gryps or griffins are bigger and winged. In the fourteenth century, in Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Mandeville expands the legend further by claiming that “one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than a hundred eagles such as we have amongst us.”4 This monstrous griffin helps us understand how an unexplainable observation can snowball into an elaborate cultural narrative, a narrative that grows so huge as to conceal its original source altogether.

  Most scholars since the seventeenth century have uniformly considered the ancient griffins to be purely fanciful combinations of lion and eagle bodies, a product of the overactive Greek imagination. But one researcher, Adrienne Mayor, has argued that these mythical griffins are literary descriptions of real, albeit extinct, monsters.5 These creatures are not pure fantasy, but actually appear to have zoological origins.

  The first known use of the Greek word gryph, meaning “hooked” like a claw, occurs in the writings of Aristeas in the seventh century BCE. Aristeas’s book Arimaspea is now lost but it was popular in the ancient world and chronicled his travels into Central Asia, where he encountered the Scythian people, a Greek term referring to all the nomadic people who lived between the Black Sea and Mongolia. Over two hundred years later we find Aeschylus relying on the Arimaspea for scene-setting details in his Prometheus Bound tragedy, set in Asia. Aeschylus describes a frightening land where live the Phorcides, old mumbling maids, swan-shaped, having only one eye and tooth to share between them; the Gorgons, three sisters with snakes for hair who kill you if you gaze at them; fierce griffins; and a race of one-eyed nomadic men called Arimaspeans, who mine the region for its rich gold deposits. Herodotus (484–425 BCE), who traveled through western Scythia himself, also cited Aristeas and tried to corroborate the additional claim that these one-eyed nomadic men were in constant combat with the griffins, who apparently nested in the gold-saturated sands of the region.

  For the next six hundred years or so the legend of the griffins expanded and received further nuances from the ancient writers Ctesias, Pliny, and Appolonius. The basic anatomy of this Greek version of the monster, a giant quadruped with a sharp beak, echoes peculiar representations from Scythian art dating back to the eighth century BCE. Scythian tombs, originally created during the time of Herodotus and Aeschylus, were excavated in the twentieth century by Russian archaeologists, revealing scores of gold figurines of beaked quadrupeds.

  These cultural convergences regarding the morphology and environment of the griffins suggest that more than fable held this monster together. The regions between the Altai and Tien Shan mountains are extremely rich in fossil deposits, and in the 1920s the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews began searching this region after hearing Chinese folklore about dragons’ teeth and bones. He discovered massive fields of windblown strata with the skeletons of late Cretaceous dinosaurs strewn over the landscape. Perhaps the most eerie sight was a giant nesting ground of Protoceratops, with juvenile skeletons and even fossilized egg clutches.6 Andrews was the first to dig out over one hundred Protoceratops from this land, but if Adrienne Mayor is correct, Andrews was not the first to discover these bones; they were regularly picked up and examined by ancient Scythian nomads between 800 BCE and 300 CE. A skeleton of a Protoceratops, and especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur (also found in the Dzungarian basin), looks exactly as you might imagine a gryph skeleton to look. Mayor summarizes the matter:

  The most common remains, including eggs and young, are of the Protoceratops (ceratops means “horned head”). This creature appears to combine the features of a mammal and bird of prey in a striking way. The body is about seven or eight feet long, and resembles that of a carnivore, but the skull has a powerful beak. The large nostrils and eye sockets and the knobs and frills of protoceratopsids (and distinct skulls, beaks, and giant claws of other dinosaur species) may explain the features of the archaic images of the gryps (and might account for some other unidentified animals in Scythian art).

  A skeleton of a Protoceratops, especially the psittacosaurus or “parrot-beaked” dinosaur found in the Dzungarian basin, looks exactly as you might imagine a griffin skeleton. Attempts to make sense of
dinosaur fossils certainly stimulated monster speculations in the ancient world. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch by Albrecht Dürer.

  Russian archaeologists excavating throughout the first half of the twentieth century discovered more than one hundred ancient gold mines in this area of Central Asia, some dating back to 1500 BCE. Mayor and Michael Heaney speculate that nomads and traders sifted these areas for gold for centuries, regularly stumbling on the skeletons of frightening creatures that seemed to have perished in a series of large-scale battles with their neighbor enemies, the mythical one-eyed Arimaspeans. For the nomads, this would constitute a very plausible story for how these animals became extinct, or how they came to be absent in current times.

  MONSTROUS BONES

  This raises an interesting point about extinction in general. Today, living on the other side of Darwin, we dig monsters out of the ground all the time and have theoretical concepts such as evolution and extinction to make perfect sense out of why we don’t see monsters walking among us anymore. But the intellectual landscape of ancient Greece was quite different from our own, and ideas such as evolution were marginal. So how, generally, did the ancients understand the monstrous bones they discovered? Were the creatures really extinct? Were the bones representative of species or just isolated giant individuals? Did these creatures continue to live on elsewhere, in distant lands?

  Pliny the Elder gives us an idea of how the ancients viewed fossils in his account of a giant skeleton found near Joppa (present-day Tel Aviv), interpreted to be the skeleton of a huge Triton, a kind of merman.7 He seems quite confident that Tritons exist and reports that Emperor Tiberius was assured of their existence by ambassadors from Olisipo (Lisbon). He adds credibility to his belief in Tritons by invoking “two illustrious knights” who witnessed, near Gades (Cadiz, Spain), the giant mermen climbing onto the sides of ships to sit, occasionally capsizing boats in the process. These bones caused quite a stir when brought to the imperial capital. “The bones of this monster, to which Andromeda was said to have been exposed, were brought by Marcus Scaurus from Joppa in Judaea during his aedileship and shown at Rome among the rest of the amazing items displayed. The monster was over 40 feet long, and the height of its ribs was greater than that of Indian elephants, while its spine was 1 and 1/2 feet thick.”8

  We have additional evidence that the ancients were aware of and intrigued by giant fossils (Miocene and Pleistocene mammals), but of course they didn’t have a modern concept of such vanished species or a concept of geological time. Suetonius (69–130 CE) tells us in Lives of the Caesars that Caesar Augustus liked to display fossils in his home: “His own villas, which were modest enough, he decorated not so much with handsome statues and pictures as with terraces, groves, and objects noteworthy for their antiquity and rarity; for example, at Capreae the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called the ‘bones of the giants,’ and the ‘weapons of the heroes.’”9

  The Cyclops legend was fueled by ancient Greek misinterpretations of mastodon skulls found in Mediterranean caves. Pencil drawing and collage by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

  It’s not entirely clear whether the ancients conceived of their monsters as extinct species.10 The examples above suggest that the creatures were believed to be rare but not entirely gone. One wonders, for example, if the exaggerated three-horned monster that Alexander faced at the sweet water lake (called an Odontotyrannus or “tooth-tyrant”) was a fantasy based on the author’s encounter with a fossil skull. The Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel (1875–1945) argued in 1914 that the Greek myths of the Cyclopes were grounded in people’s encounters with fossil elephant skulls, which are plentiful in Mediterranean coastal caves. The large nasal cavity in the center of the skull looks very much like the eye socket of a giant creature.

  In a world relatively unexplored and so much larger than it is now, it would be quite reasonable to conclude that dinosaur-like creatures were living in India and other far-off, mysterious places. In fact, naturalists as late as the eighteenth century assumed that the giants whose remains we regularly unearth were still alive in the unexplored regions of the world. Thomas Jefferson, for example, introduced a strange fossil to the scientific community at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in the 1790s;11 he called it Megalonyx, or “Great Claw.” Jefferson believed that the enormous claw, discovered in a cave in Virginia, must have belonged to a monstrous cat-like creature; modern researchers have identified it as the giant ground sloth. The interesting point for our purpose is that Jefferson did not think the creature was extinct, but rather living somewhere in the uncharted frontier. “In the present interior of our continent,” he suggests, “there is surely space and range enough for elephants and lions, if in that climate they could subsist; and the mammoths [mastodons] and megalonyxes who may subsist there. Our entire ignorance of the immense country to the West and North-West, and of its contents, does not authorise us to say what it does not contain.” When he sent Lewis and Clark westward, Jefferson encouraged them to keep a lookout for giant living creatures. Suffice it to say that the ancients were no clearer on this issue than was Jefferson.

  NATURAL HISTORY AND CREDULITY

  The issue is not whether the ancients were more credulous than we are today, but what theories are available and reasonable in a given age. Even today cryptozoology, the study or search for legendary creatures (e.g., the Loch Ness Monster, yeti, chupacabra), is a reasonable venture, albeit marginal and easily lampooned. How much more reasonable and widespread would belief in cryptids be in the ancient world? Wouldn’t monsters qualify as an odious subgroup inside this larger taxon of marvelous beings? Unlike much of today’s science, ancient natural history, together with travelers’ tales, often increased the credibility of monsters. More accurately, natural history, both ancient and modern, tends to live on the boundary line between the credible and the incredible.

  Aristotle, a notable skeptic, was not particularly skeptical about the existence of a large hairy quadruped called a Bolinthus that fought its enemies by spraying acid-like excrement great distances.12 He describes a beast that is bigger and stronger than an ox, with a long shaggy mane, that “defends itself by kicking and voiding excrement over a distance of about twenty-four feet.” The excretion is so pungent that it burns the hair off dogs.13 The animal appears to be an embellished version of the European bison. Even a beacon of rationality like Aristotle can seriously entertain marvelous stories from faraway lands.

  One of the most important characters in the history of monsterology, Pliny the Elder, also waffled between reflective skepticism and gullibility. As the historian Margaret Robinson puts it, “It was Pliny’s Natural History that persisted as the ultimate authority on the subject [of marvelous beasts] for fifteen hundred years.”14 His natural history transmitted the ancient beliefs about exotica into the medieval world; St. Augustine referred to him as “a man of great learning.”15 But today Pliny is considered more of a scrivener, an unreliable inventory taker, rather than a systematic synthesizer like Aristotle. With a little effort, however, reading his passages reveals some important cultural undercurrents.

  As a general rule, Pliny accepted almost everything that was reported to him. He informs us, for example, that eels living in the Ganges River in India grow to be three hundred feet long, and that “King Pyrrhus’ big toe on his right foot cured an inflamed spleen by touch. The story goes that when he was cremated his big toe would not burn along with the rest of his body; it was put in a chest in a temple.”16 To the long list of amazing descriptions Pliny adds a monster called the manticore, from the Greek for “man-eater.” This beast is first described by Ctesias, and Aristotle cites the same description in his History of Animals; they all believe the creature to live in India. Pliny says it has “a triple row of teeth like a comb, the face and ears of a man, grey eyes, a blood-red color, a lion’s body, and inflicts stings with its tail like a scorpion. The manticore has a voice that soun
ds like a pan-pipe combined with a trumpet, achieves great speed and is especially keen on human flesh.”17

  It’s hard to imagine something that Pliny would not assent to in his considerations of nature, but then, rather surprisingly, he suddenly draws a line. “I am obliged to consider,” he informs us “and with confidence— that the assertion that men are turned into wolves and back to themselves again is false, otherwise we must also believe in all the other things that over so many generations we have discovered to be fabulous.” Apparently werewolves cross the line of credibility for Pliny.

  In his explanation of the werewolf story, which comes from Arcadia, Pliny unwittingly reveals an interesting criterion for accepting or rejecting a fabulous narrative. Arcadian legend has it that someone chosen by lottery is led to a marsh. He hangs his clothes on an oak tree and swims naked through the swamp to a deserted territory. “There he is turned into a wolf and associates with other wolves for nine years. If he has avoided contact with a human during that period, he returns to the same marsh, swims across it and regains his shape with nine years’ age added to his former appearance.”18 The story so far is dubious, but not more so than the griffin or the three-hundred-foot eel or the Triton, all of which Pliny reports without editorializing. The giveaway for Pliny is that the werewolf, now returned to human form, actually gets back into the nine-year-old clothes hanging on the oak tree. That really tears it for Pliny, and he sighs, “It is astonishing how far Greek gullibility will go.”