On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  The manticore monster was thought to favor human flesh. Descriptions of the beast appear in the natural history texts of Ctesias, Aristotle, and Pliny. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a sketch from Edward Topsell’s seventeenth-century bestiary.

  It may seem the height of hypocrisy to accept all manner of monster but then bar the entrance for the poor werewolf. And yet a deeper logic may be at work. The tipping point appears to be the story itself. Something about the narrative of this man—leaving his clothes on a tree, turning into a wolf and back, and dressing again in the same clothes—feels like a joke, both for us and for Pliny apparently. He can’t rule out the werewolf on its own terms; after all, weirder creatures are acceptable to him. It’s the literary conventions of the story itself that seem too much like a comedy to accept. Mimesis, or the imitation of life in the techniques of art and literature, was very well understood by the ancients; Aristotle devotes much of his Poetics to the philosophy of mimesis. It is not the monster itself that gives Pliny pause, but the “bad play” quality of the story.

  Why is a werewolf itself not a cause for skepticism? For the same reason that a manticore or a race of one-eyed men are not intrinsically doubtful: nature is stranger than fiction. This is a time when strange monsters in the form of exotic animals are really being discovered in far-off lands. During the reign of Claudius Caesar, Pliny claims to have actually seen the corpse of a hippocentaur (half-man, half-horse) preserved in a vat of honey and brought from Egypt.19 One suspects that the animal was some other exotic species honestly misidentified or perhaps an early form of Barnum-style hucksterism. In any case, we have to put ourselves in ancient shoes to remember that the Greeks had only recently, relatively speaking, come into contact with elephants and rhinoceroses. With these discoveries still somewhat fresh, it was hard to rule out fantastic creatures. The safest bet was credulity.

  Credulity and incredulity are highly relative frames of mind and indigenous to all eras. Pliny tells a story about a monstrous octopus weighing more than seven hundred pounds and with thirty-foot tentacles that used to swim into the uncovered tanks of a fish farm in Cartiea. When the farmers realized that the creature was foraging for food in the fish farm, they sealed off the inlet with fences. At night the beast returned and finding no way to swim to the food, actually scaled a large tree and thereby crossed over the fence barrier. Pliny explains that the octopus could be caught only by employing hunting dogs.

  These surrounded the octopus as it was returning at night and roused the overseers, who were terrified by its strange appearance. Its size was unheard of, and likewise its color; it was smeared with brine and had a dreadful smell. Who would have expected to find an octopus there, or to recognize it against such a background? They seemed to be locked in a struggle with something out of this world, for it nauseated the dogs with its terrible breath, lashed them with its tentacles, round which one could scarcely put both arms, which it used in the manner of clubs. After great trouble it was dispatched with the aid of many tridents.20

  When I read Pliny’s description of a tree-climbing octopus, I laughed smugly for half an hour. Gosh, I thought, Pliny cracks me up. Then a nagging thought occurred to me, and after some research into cephalopod biology, I discovered to my embarrassment that octopi do indeed occasionally crawl on land, especially in pursuit of turtles or to get from one tide pool to another. The size of the creature may have been exaggerated by Pliny, but probably not the incredible behavior. I, like Pliny, cannot be sure what creatures are capable of, because they keep surprising me.

  Skepticism gives one a certain sense of pleasure, perhaps the pleasure of feeling superior, of not being had. But belief, especially in the fantastic, is also very pleasurable. Indeed, with its emotional abandonment of improbability, it seems to trump the cool satisfactions of doubt. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) reminds us that the passions of “surprise and wonder” are very “agreeable emotions,” and when they are triggered by anecdotes or reports these passions actually lend a sheen of credibility to those reports. “With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travelers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures, strange men and uncouth manners?”21

  MONSTROUS RACES

  “Strange men and uncouth manners” were important topics for ancient writers who wished to explore the “monstrous races” of the human species. The interest in monstrous animals such as the griffin was outdone only by these early anthropological impulses. And again India, which was shorthand for the entire East, was the assumed habitat of these exotic beings.

  Most ancient Greeks and Romans considered all human ethnic groups other than their own to be barbarians, but another group of humanoid creatures fell outside the usual bounds of cultural and ethnic difference. The literature of the ancients reveals a continuum of degrees, whereby races of men decline further and further away from their ethnocentric starting place. Some of these humans are monstrous because their culture is considered odious, like Pliny’s Scythian tribes who feed on human bodies. But some of these humans strain the category itself and exist somewhere between man and animal, as shown in a report by Megasthenes (350–290 BCE) of Indian men who have reversed feet with eight toes on each foot, or men with a dog’s head who bark instead of speak. Or consider the umbrella-footed race of creatures reported by Ctesias (and repeated by Pliny), who have only one leg and hop at astonishing speed and who also lie on their back and raise their large foot to act as an umbrella against inclement weather. In his chapter “Man” Pliny tells us of satyrs living in the eastern mountains of India who “are very fast moving animals, sometimes running on all fours, sometimes upright like humans.”22 The satyrs may have been monkeys in reality, but many ancients knew little about nonhuman primates and tended to interpret reports of them as exotic pseudo-human races.23 The dog-headed men, for example, may have been an embellishment based on travelers’ reports of Old World yellow baboons (Papio cynocephalus) from eastern Africa.

  These humanoid oddities are bordering on human because of some morphological and cultural similarities with “normal” humans, but properly speaking they are lusus naturae, “freaks of nature.” More than the occasional individual monster (such as Medusa), whole classes of unclassifiable creatures were admitted by the ancients into the category human. These monstrous races will become increasingly important in the medieval imagination, as Christians begin to contemplate their spiritual status: Can these races be redeemed by the gospel?

  For the most part, in the ancient world the bigotries about other peoples were not theological in nature. It is true that the Bible carves up races into the descendants of Noah’s children, but Greek and Roman ideas about species and race were somewhat more naturalistic. Homer and Hesiod describe a variety of human origins; in addition to the predictable “created by gods” story, we are also born of water, and sometimes born of earth (in the case of autochthones). There was no single orthodox belief on the question of origins. More important, the philosophers all pushed a variety of pseudo-scientific explanations, favoring a kind of spontaneous generation of human beings. Xenophanes, Parmenides, Democritus, and Epicurus all believed that mankind was born of slime.24 Slime is, indeed, a humble and somewhat egalitarian beginning. For the most part, then, the ancients were ethnocentric for cultural rather than metaphysical reasons.25

  The Far East was a land of romantic and fearful projections for ancient Westerners. Foreign people, such as Persians, Indians, and Chinese, were often linked with the strange and alien creatures of bogus natural history and mythology. Sometimes the stereotyping was mild or innocuous, as when Pliny says, “The Chinese are mild in character, but resemble wild animals in that they shun the company of the rest of their fellow men and wait for traders to come to them.”26 But sometimes the stereotyping was more pernicious. Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus all demonized the Persians as autocratic and alien, in contrast to Greeks, who apparently loved freedom and ratio
nality.27 Dehumanizing one’s enemy is nothing new, nor is it a purely Western hobby of mind. The Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana describe foreign tribes (presumably Westerners) as karnapravarana, giant-eared races, with ears so large that one could wrap up in them to sleep.28

  Imagining a group of people as monstrous can serve political agendas quite well. The literary theorist Edward Said has famously called this form of political stereotyping “orientalism,” a term that refers to the way Occidental writers, artists, and politicians invent a negative category of cultural qualities for Asian and African people in order to better justify Western imperial interests.29 Scholars like Said, who believe that all knowledge is a kind of power, would certainly see the early anthropology of the ancients as a thinly veiled attempt to create an “us versus them” political dynamic. Maybe this is true; we will have many more opportunities to reflect on it later in this book. But for now it is important to articulate what these fantastical races and creatures meant to the ancients themselves. Before importing too much theory about the latent meaning of extraordinary creatures, we need to give great weight to their manifest meaning.30

  Pliny himself shows us the way when he asks the natural question, Why do these monsters and wonders exist at all? He concludes that amazing creatures exist as Nature’s “playthings.” If they have any purpose at all, it is to create the experiences of wonder, marvel, and astonishment in us. Referring to disappearing “ghost-men” in Africa, Pliny grows philosophical and says, “These and similar kinds of human beings ingenious Nature has made to be playthings for herself and for us, creations at which to marvel. Indeed, who could list the things she does day by day and almost every hour? Let it be sufficient for the revelation of her power to have included races of men among her marvels.”31

  3

  Hermaphrodites and Man-headed Oxen

  The glutted earth swarms even now with savage beasts.

  LUCRETIUS

  PPRODIGIES AND PORTENTS were perceived to be everywhere in the ancient world. All of nature was sending signals foretelling the future. If one could read the signs properly, which was the job of augurs in Rome and oracles in Greece, then one could predict the fate of military campaigns, the health of marriages, or the prosperity of business ventures. The Romans practiced an art of prophesy that came down from the Etruscans and involved reading the liver of a sacrificed animal. The liver, thought to be the source of blood and life itself, was charted into subdivisions that corresponded to deities. Cults of fortune-tellers evolved an elaborate and secret science of viscera interpretation.

  The Roman historian Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) tells a typical story about the bad omen of a sacrifice in 90 BCE. The Roman consul Rutilius Lupus sacrificed an animal and “failed to find the lobe of the liver among the organs; ignoring the omen he lost his army and was killed in battle.”1 In contrast, in 43 BCE Caesar Augustus sacrificed an animal on the eve of his military campaign against Marc Antony. Livy reports that “the animal he sacrificed had twin sets of internal organs. Success followed him.”

  IN-BETWEEN BEINGS

  Like a missing liver lobe, the discovery of a hermaphrodite human was considered by most Romans to be very bad for the health of the state.2 Apparently the founder of Rome himself, Romulus, felt threatened by hermaphrodites and ordered them to be drowned upon discovery. The logic of this custom, as with many customs, is unclear. The classicist Carlin Barton suggests that hermaphrodites, with their ambiguous, unclassifiable sexuality, may have been simultaneously threatening to the increasingly rigid official Roman culture but also alluring and exciting to those Romans who felt repressed by the bureaucratic, authoritarian, and hierarchic mores of an expanding empire.3 The ambiguously gendered person did not conform to traditional male or female parameters.4 Hermaphrodites, on this account, represented a dangerous freedom, in the same way that “noble savages” must have done for Enlightenment-era urbanites. A more prosaic, and probably accurate, explanation is that monstrous offspring represented a terrible economic and energy burden on the family, and if they should make it to adulthood they would be a burden on the state as well. It’s reasonable to expect laws and taboos to emerge in a society that reinforces the specific ecological survival needs of its families. This practice of drowning hermaphrodites was extended to all seriously disabled children in the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables: “A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster, or has a form different from that of members of the human race.”5

  The hermaphrodite is a liminal being. Liminal comes from the Latin word limen, meaning “threshold.” When you are on a threshold, you are neither inside nor outside but in between. Hermaphrodites, with their ambiguous genitalia, are in between the traditional categories of male and female. One sees, immediately I think, that the idea of a liminal being, something between categories, is a very useful way to think about many of the subjects of this book, not just hermaphrodites. Griffins, with their ambiguous avian-quadruped shape, would qualify as liminal, as would centaurs, the chimera, the Gorgons, the Minotaur, and the Hydra. Mosaic beings, grafted together or hybridized by nature or artifice, reappear throughout the history of Western monsters as the Golem, Frankenstein’s creature, and transgenic animals. Even zombies, though not hybridized, are liminal monsters because they exist between the living and the dead. In short, liminality is a significant category for the uncategorizable. Of course, the extraordinary and the ordinary are often just different by degree rather than kind. So the extent to which everyone is a little hard to categorize is the extent to which we are all liminal.

  Theory aside, Livy chronicled many murders of hermaphrodites in the last two centuries before the Common Era. A short sampling of his very long list will suffice to demonstrate the common perception of hermaphrodites as monsters. In 133, “in the region of Ferentium, a hermaphrodite was born and thrown into the river”; in 119 “a hermaphrodite eight years old was discovered in the region of Rome and consigned to the sea”; in 117 “a hermaphrodite ten years old was discovered and was drowned in the sea”; in 98 “a hermaphrodite was thrown into the sea.”

  The practice of drowning hermaphrodites was extended to all seriously disabled children in the Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables. “A father shall immediately put to death a son recently born, who is a monster, or has a form different from that of members of the human race.” Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008, based on a hermaphrodite sketch in Ambroise Paré’s sixteenth-century On Monsters.

  Many other types of monsters are cited in Livy’s encyclopedic history, including many unfortunate developmentally disabled children. A sad litany of abnormalities is offered as examples of bad omens, including conjoined twins and babies born with no hands and feet or too many hands and feet. Livy himself seems completely unmoved by any of these stories and recites them as though he’s reading sports scores. His entry for 108 BCE reads, “At Nursia twins were born to a freeborn woman, the girl with all members intact the boy with the following deformities; in front his abdomen was open, so that the uncovered intestine could be seen, and behind he had no anal opening; at birth he cried out once and died. The war against Jugurtha was carried on successfully.” But things seemed to be looking up for hermaphrodites, at least, by the time Pliny writes his Natural History. We find a refreshing tolerance developing toward hermaphrodites when he states, “There are people who have the characteristics of both sexes. We call them hermaphrodites, the Greeks androgyny. Once considered portents, now they are sources of entertainment.”6

  Some scholars see a teleological arc here. That is to say, the transition from superstitious murder of hermaphrodites to benign neglect and even amusement looks like progress. It looks like progress because it is progress, ethically speaking. But history and ethics don’t always converge on the righteous path. The classicist Luc Brisson and the gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling both suggest that hermaphrodites suffered terribly in the early days of Roman law, but then rational progress ultimately created a mo
re hospitable Rome for first-century hermaphrodites.7

  But even while Pliny was assuring the reader that hermaphrodites were in the clear, so to speak, drownings continued.8 Monsters did not simply evaporate as rational humanism came on the scene. The fear of monsters hung on in the vast stretches of darkness, while the thin flare of rationality, possessed by a few elite philosophers, swept around the terrain, without much illumination or impact.9

  REASON AND SUPERSTITION

  The ancient story about monsters does not progress from crazy paranoia to cool-headed tolerance. Instead, superstition and rationalism shared territory, just as they do today. But it is still important to notice, even without the triumphal narrative, that cool-headed tolerance did evolve in the ancient world. The failure of the masses to adopt a scientific attitude toward abnormal beings does not diminish the impressive achievements of the rational minority who did. Anaxagoras’s examination of a deformed ram’s head is a good example to illustrate the uneasy simultaneity of ancient mysticism and empiricism.

  The Greek historian Plutarch (46–127 CE) chronicled the moral characters of esteemed Greek and Roman leaders. One of his subjects was the ruler of Athens in the Golden Age, Pericles (495–429 BCE), who happened to be a good friend of the Ionian philosopher Anaxagoras (500–428). Anaxagoras, who had an unflappable character, was a great inspiration to Pericles. According to Plutarch, Anaxagoras was once accosted in the marketplace by an abusive citizen who hurled several hours of insult and even followed him to continue the diatribe outside Anaxagoras’s home. Completely unfazed by the verbal abuse, Anaxagoras saw that it was growing dark and “ordered one of his servants to take a light and to go along with the man and see him safe home.”10