On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  But it was Anaxagoras’s scientific acumen that not only won Pericles’ respect but also ushered in a new phase of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras developed a mechanical theory to explain the origin and motions of the heavenly bodies, suggesting that a powerful sifting force he called Nous, or Mind, slowly differentiated the material soup of the early cosmos. Presaging the materialism of later atomist philosophers, he argued that every physical thing had small bits of other substances hidden within it. So the transformations in nature that we see, such as growth and decay, are really the result of these invisible mechanical processes. He looked for predictable causes, rather than superstitious divinations, and his ideas demystified the natural world.

  One day Pericles heard that a monstrous ram had been born on one of his farms and he sent for the animal. When it arrived at his court, a crowd gathered around and studied the strange anomaly. The animal had only one horn growing from the center of its head. A revered fortune-teller named Lampon announced that the current political struggle between Pericles and his rival Thucydides would finally be resolved in Pericles’ favor. The monstrous ram, found on Pericles’ estate, was the auspicious sign indicating political victory. Lampon read the monster as a good omen.

  Anaxagoras, who was present for the spectacle, made a careful examination of the one-horned ram and then chopped its head in half. Plutarch reports, “Anaxagoras, cleaving the skull in sunder, showed to the bystanders that the brain had not filled up its natural place, but being oblong, like an egg, had collected from all parts of the vessel which contained it, in a point to that place from whence the root of the horn took its rise.” In other words, he offered a scientific, causal explanation of the monster. A developmental glitch had produced a wonder.

  Apparently this bit of demonstrable empiricism won Anaxagoras a moment of respect and admiration from the many bystanders at the court. People could actually see with their own eyes the mechanical causes of the monstrosity. But this was a very short-lived triumph of reason over superstition, because a brief time later Pericles did indeed prevail over his political rival and then Lampon the seer was the court darling all over again. This suggests, for one thing, that rational science was not exactly a juggernaut of truth, crushing the culture of superstition in its path. It also suggests that neither science nor superstition ever definitively rules out the other one. Explaining how a monster came to be monstrous, as Anaxagoras did, still failed to explain the monster’s purpose. The purpose or teleology of monsters remained a vital concern for the ancients, and then the medi-evals, long after the mechanical explanations emerged.

  This widespread cultural anxiety about the purpose of portentous monsters was partly a reflection of scientific naïveté in the uneducated classes, but more essentially it was a reflection of human nature. The Roman philosopher Lucretius, writing some three centuries after Anaxagoras, still laments the human tendency to fall into destructive emotions such as fear. Praising his philosophical mentor Epicurus (341–270 BCE), Lucretius tells his readers that Hercules himself, and most of the other gods, were not as impressive as his rationalist hero, who banished the mental monsters of superstition. But he acknowledges the inevitable tendency for undisciplined minds to fall back into fright and trepidation. Even if monsters exist, he exclaims, they cannot really hurt you if your mind is well trained. We should fear more the internal irrational emotions.

  And the rest of all those monsters slain, even if alive,

  Unconquered still, what injury could they do?

  None, as I guess. For so the glutted earth

  Swarms even now with savage beasts, even now

  Is filled with anxious terrors through the woods

  And mighty mountains and the forest deeps—

  Quarters ‘tis ours in general to avoid.

  But lest the mind be purged, what conflicts then,

  What perils, must bosom, in our own despite!

  O then how great and keen the cares of lust

  That split the man distraught! How great the fears!

  And lo, the pride, grim greed, and wantonness—

  How great the slaughters in their train! and lo,

  Debaucheries and every breed of sloth!

  Therefore that man who subjugated these,

  And from the mind expelled, by words indeed,

  Not arms, O shall it not be seemly him

  To dignify by ranking with the gods?11

  Controlling the mind and controlling nature are ways for men to become god-like on this earth. Knowledge, according to the philosophers, is a great weapon against internal and external monsters. When the philosopher Thales (624–546 BCE) was shown a centaur, he actually laughed and offered a very mundane, albeit disturbing, explanation for it.12 A young shepherd who tended the flocks of Periander, the ruler of Corinth, brought a newborn foal to show the ruler. Jorge Luis Borges retells the humorous story in his Book of Imaginary Beings: “The newborn’s face, neck, and arms were human, while the rest of its body was that of a horse. It cried like a baby, and everyone thought this a terrifying omen. The wise Thales looked at it, however, laughed, and told Periander that he should either not employ such young men as keepers of his horses or provide wives for them.”13

  ARISTOTLE’S MONSTERS

  Aristotle (384–322 BCE) followed the rationalist lead of Thales and Anaxagoras, developing the most impressive and ambitious scientific research program to be found anywhere in the ancient world. He had a knack for getting his hands dirty in areas of study that would have repelled his more refined and academic teacher Plato. When Aristotle was motivating his hesitant students to roll up their sleeves and actually do the animal dissections necessary for the understanding of physiology and anatomy, he told them of Heraclitus’s kitchen. A group of dignitaries came to visit Heraclitus and found him warming himself at the stove of his kitchen. They hesitated to enter because kitchens were considered undignified places, especially for serious discussions. Heraclitus said, “Come in, don’t be afraid. There are gods here too.”14

  This willingness to investigate the undignified and indecorous aspects of nature led Aristotle to study monsters directly. Being the son of a physician, he had little interest in mythical creatures or phantasms, but focused instead on teratology, the study of developmental malformations that emerge during gestation. Actually, to introduce them as “developmental” is misleading, since it was part of Aristotle’s great accomplishment to notice (through dissections) that embryogenesis and growth are epigenetic; that is, embryos grow from simple blobs to highly articulated forms. This seems obvious to us, raised as we are on amazing PBS-style microscopy images and documentary films of time-lapse fetal development. Of course the egg develops from simple to complex. But the ancients were not privy to this kind of technology-wrested information, and we should also remember that no one even knew that mammals produced eggs until the 1820s, when Karl Ernst von Baer made the discovery. A competing theory, called pre-formationism, suggested that the fully formed animal was already complete at the beginning of gestation, a kind of miniature seed animal; growth was simply a process of getting bigger, not progressive development. This actually seemed more reasonable than epigenesis because the ancients could not understand how molding forces could get inside the womb to sculpt the changing fetal material. By analogy, a piece of leather takes on complex form only when a cobbler works on it, and proponents of preformation could not see any such transformative assembly in utero, so, they concluded, the zygote must be a micro person already.

  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 proce
ss 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 igno
red by the ancient populace. Anomalous births continued to augur important revelations for superstitious Greeks and Romans.

  PHANTOM IMAGES

  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: