The important point in all this is that the ancients were trying to work out a language and a way of thinking about internal forces, usually monstrous, sometimes benign. There are things inside us that raise their ugly heads during crisis points in our lives. As Dodds puts it, they “are not truly part of the self, since they are not within man’s conscious control; they are endowed with a life and energy of their own, and so can force a man, as it were from the outside, into conduct foreign to him.”
The aspect of this ancient demonology that is harder for us to grasp in our own age is that the demons who populate our internal and external world are not just spirits from another copresent dimension that occasionally step into our lives to wreak havoc. These certainly do exist for the ancients, but demons are also created by our own misdeeds. They do not just come from a realm of spectator spirits who are watching our behaviors and dispatching just deserts accordingly. Jason makes it clear that Medea has actually created an avenging fury by her own deeds.13 First she betrays her father and kills her brother; this creates a demon searching for blood vengeance. But this vengeance, in the form of the now slaughtered sons, has struck at Jason as well as her.14 Now Jason curses Medea with another source of trouble: “May the avenging Fury of our children destroy you— may you find blood justice.” Uncontrollable forces inside us cause us to murder and misbehave, and the misdeeds cause more uncontrollable forces to return to us like karmic consequences.
For the more educated members of Euripides’audience (Anaxagoras and even Plato were overlapping contemporaries of Euripides), the demonic forces were internalized and identified with psychological faculties such as thumos. Monsters may be harassing us from the external world, but now we must recognize that our own desires and emotions are harassing us from inside as well. Plato’s theory of the tripartite psyche may be applied to Medea in the sense that even when she knows right from wrong (rationality) she is unable to fight the urge for revenge because her thumos has never been properly trained to submit to reason’s authority.15
The response to this realization of internal monsters is not asceticism and denial of our emotional lives. By and large, Greeks and Romans did not recommend the kind of cave-dwelling yogic responses to desire that their Eastern contemporaries advocated. Thumos, the locus of our passions, was considered more like a blind force, spontaneous and powerful, capable of energizing good deeds but also evil ones if the vitality was aimed in the wrong direction. Another of Plato’s metaphors for thumos, besides the lion, is the dog.16 This is because the dog can be very aggressive with its enemies but gentle and protective of its own clan, including its master. Dogs embody thumos because they are spirited and dangerous but also loyal if well trained. The challenge for the ancients was not to renounce one’s inner dog, but to cultivate its love for its master (reason). In that way, our chances of becoming Medea-like monsters could be diminished. If passion goes untrained it can become the force that drives one to murder one’s children, but it is this same spirited part of our psyche that, if properly trained, makes good mothers protect their children when threatened and drives the courageous acts of warriors who, like Alexander demonstrating monster-killing techniques, protect their comrades, their families, and their countries. It may be appropriate to become beastly in some circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we have to become monsters.
There is an ongoing debate from the Hellenistic era through the early Roman Empire about how much power to accede to passion. Are we really powerless in the face of such monstrous inner drives, or is this just a weak and cowardly characterization built by snivelers who refuse to master themselves? The former Roman slave and Greek Stoic Epictetus (50–130 CE) argued that Medea was not really divided between rational and irrational forces; she may have been pushed and pulled by conflicting impulses, but she could have adapted to things beyond her control. Understanding what is in our control (a rather finite inventory) and what is not (a significantly bigger list) and adjusting our emotions accordingly is the basic philosophy of Stoicism.
The classicist Julia Annas characterizes the Stoic interpretation of Medea thus: “We say, Medea could not help acting as she did; she was overcome by passion, so surely she had no real choice. No, says Epictetus; she thought she had no real alternative, but this was wrong. She could have adjusted to her loss, difficult though this would be. ‘Stop wanting your husband, and nothing you want will fail to come about,’ he says. Everything I do, I am responsible for; there is always something else, I could have done, some other attitude I could have taken up.”17 One cannot accuse Epictetus, who suffered many hardships as a slave, of being out of touch with the anguish of thwarted desire. He must have known it well.
The Stoic consideration leaves us with a good ending point for reflection. It is interesting to notice that while the ancients had sophisticated ideas about the structure of the psyche (reason, passion, and appetite) and also had nuanced theories about developmental psychology, they had little in their ideas of human monstrosity about the role of bad luck.18 This point is all the more striking when our own age is dominated by a commitment to the idea that human monsters are made that way by childhood experiences, experiences that they are not responsible for. Amid the explanations of Euripides’ karmic demon possession, Plato’s untutored thumos, and Epictetus’s Stoic theory, one wants to ask, What about the bad stuff that just happens to you? Susan Smith, a modern-day Medea who murdered her own children in 1994, was brutally and regularly molested by her stepfather while growing up. America’s first female serial murderer, Aileen Wuornos (subject of the Hollywood film titled simply Monster, 2003), also suffered a childhood filled with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Many other murderers whose special brand of sadism invokes the “monster” epithet have been victims of terrible violence early in life. It has become simple common sense to immediately ask after the childhood of a criminal the moment we hear about his or her heinous infamy. But that was not the question first on the minds of the ancients.
There was not a big conceptual or cultural space in the ancient world for “victim monsters,” people who might be excused from some portion of responsibility or agency. The Stoic response most clearly undermines any victim status of a monster by claiming that even the most abused individual still has power over the fates by dint of rational freedom. According to the Stoics, when you can no longer master yourself, your external world or your internal urges, you still have the gift of suicide.
In his essay “On the Proper Time to Slip the Cable” (in Epistulae Morales, epistle 70), Seneca considers it a great consolation that Nature “allowed to us one entrance in life, but many exits.” He offers several examples of men who avoided extreme “victimhood” (torture and abuse) by freely choosing their own death. In a rare acknowledgment of barbarian nobility, Seneca tells of a German slave who was being forced against his will into a gladiator contest. Rather than allowing someone else (or the unfriendly Fates) to choose his destiny for him, he elected to “slip the cable.” Seneca writes, “He withdrew in order to relieve himself,—the only thing which he was allowed to do in secret and without the presence of a guard. While so engaged, he seized the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat; thus he blocked up his windpipe, and choked the breath from his body. That was truly to insult death!” Seneca follows this with several other nauseating paeans to self-determination, leaving readers feeling positively embarrassed about their own misfortunes and received slights.
Though it is hard to welcome suicide in our current paradigm of thinking, it is nonetheless true that many ancients recommended suicide as a dignified alternative to extreme cases of victimization. No matter how bad things get, you can still slip the cable and avoid both the abuses of a monster and also becoming a monster yourself. It was a way to restore one’s humanity in the face of dehumanization. Admittedly, this is cold comfort. But it’s interesting that some ancients contemplated their fears of external and i
nternal monsters so carefully as to rejoice in their discovery of the ultimate escape.19
PART
2
Medieval Monsters
Messages from God
5
Biblical Monsters
And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind.
BOOK OF ENOCH
IN THE ANCIENT POLYTHEISTIC WORLD, monsters were like free agents. Neither the gods nor the monsters were omnipotent, so they fought indefinitely, with humans in the middle. When a person was set upon by overwhelming forces that brought death and terror into his family or village, he appealed to the gods for help. Gods and monsters existed equally in a counteracting, dualistic relationship. But when monotheism became the dominant premise of religious culture, monsters had to be brought under the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. Monsters needed to be explained within the idea of a universal creator God who presumably created frightening beasts, deformities, and demons, too, or at least let them exist. Monsters became intertwined with the theological question, Why did God create evil? As the religion scholar Timothy K. Beal suggests, monsters became intimately bound up with the theodicy problem: “Who is more monstrous, the creatures who must live through this vale of tears, or the creature who put them here?”1
GOD’S LACKEYS
One of the ways monsters were recast was as God’s lackeys. Monsters threatened human health and happiness, but at God’s bidding; that is to say, the suffering they inflicted was morally justified by a new concept of a unitary personal God. Satan’s experiment with the righteous Job may be the most obvious case of local evil taking place in a mitigating context of global divine goodness.2 Satan tells God that the happy and pious Job is only righteous because he is so prosperous. So, in a game to test this hypothesis, with God’s consent Satan destroys Job’s money, property, children, and health, leaving him a highly confused, mere husk of his former self. God eventually tells Job that humans cannot understand the world as God does and therefore should not try to judge it. God alone is king of all and does not need to answer to his creation. Then God restores Job to even greater wealth, giving him ten new children and extending his life for 140 more years.
Satan’s relative power has always been a topic of interest for theologians. Most of his appearances, like the episode with Job, show Satan as a servant (albeit an unpleasant one) to God. But there are incidents, as in Chronicles 21, where Satan appears to act according to his own free will against God: “And Satan rose up against Israel: and moved David to number Israel.”3 This autonomous Satan is sometimes thought to be the result of influences from Iranian Zoroastrianism, a dualistic religion of two equally powerful good and bad Gods, influences that seeped into some monotheistic scriptural narratives. This more sovereign Satan, however, is distinctly heterodox to mainstream Abrahamic monotheism, and, theological flirtations aside, it never became dominant. Even the satanic possession of Judas (Luke 22:3) can be brought in line with orthodoxy if we understand the episode as a step in God’s overall sequence of Christian redemption.4 In this sense, the Satan of the New Testament is entirely consistent with the trouble-making accuser we meet in the Book of Job. As the art historian Luther Link puts it in his survey of devil imagery, “The Evil One is on God’s side. He carries out the garbage.”5
Some of the most well-known monsters of the Bible, Behemoth and Leviathan, also appear in the Book of Job and echo this henchmen theme of God’s monster accomplices. They don’t actually plot against anyone, but these giant beasts of earth and water, respectively, serve as evidence of God’s power and strength; they act as living billboards for God’s sublime creativity and awe-inspiring authority. The giant creatures are not opposed to God but represent the more chaotic and frightening visage of God. Behemoth and Leviathan are introduced after Job has finally broken down and complained about his suffering. God, in the form of a whirlwind, tells Job, “Gird up thy loins like a man” (accinge sicut vir lumbos tuos). The harsh lesson that follows is obviously drawn from the Jewish Septuagint, but it augurs a very common theme later developed in Christian ethics: that humans should be humble, not proud. (I will examine this point more carefully in my discussion of Beowulf?) Humility, meekness, gratitude: these are the proper sentiments for a puny species like man, and to better understand this frailness Job need only witness the gigantic land monster. “Behold Behemoth whom I made with thee, he eats grass like an ox. His strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He sets up his tail like a cedar, the sinews of his testicles are wrapped together. His bones are like pipes of brass, his gristle like plates of iron.”6
Symbolic of God’s power, the biblical Behemoth appears in the Book of Psalms and Job. Pencil drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.
The use of Behemoth and Leviathan in the scriptures is highly ambivalent. In some places, such as Psalm 74 and Job 3, Leviathan is described as a frightening monster that threatens order and stability, a giant sea monster that rises from the depths to cause mayhem but who is easily checked by the power and righteousness of Yahweh.7 In some cases, God is described as smashing Leviathan’s head, but in other places, such as Psalm 104 and Job 40, Leviathan is identified as a part of God’s wonderful creation, a sublime force that reflects God’s overwhelming aspect. In these passages, the giant sea monster is an ally and even a manifestation of God.
It may be impossible to reconcile the various characterizations of Leviathan, especially if they are meant to reflect different and even conflicted human religious sentiments within us. Beal suggests that Leviathan functions as a threat because “the challenge of taking on Leviathan merges with the challenge of taking on God,”8 and such a challenge would be a foolhardy expression of pride. The idea that God is beyond our weak human faculties and that our minds would be overwhelmed if we tried to grasp him is a common theme in religion, though much of this tendency was toned down by rationalist theologians from Maimonides to Aquinas and beyond.9 Still, long before the lucid God of the rationalists, there was the incoherent sublime God so prevalent in mythical and mystical traditions in the East and West. That God, symbolized by the frightening monsters of Behemoth and Leviathan, conveys a parallel religious emotion found in many Hindu scriptures. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita (ca. fourth to second century BCE) the god Krishna famously reveals himself to the warrior Arjuna in a sublime vision that overwhelms and subjugates him:
Seeing your infinite form with many mouths, eyes, arms, thighs, feet, stomachs, and many fearful teeth; the worlds are trembling with fear and so do I, O mighty Lord.
Seeing Your great effulgent and various-colored form touching the sky; Your mouth wide open and large shining eyes; I am frightened and find neither peace nor courage, O Krishna.
Seeing Your mouths, with fearful teeth, glowing like fires of cosmic dissolution, I lose my sense of direction and find no comfort. Have mercy on me! O Lord of gods, refuge of the universe. (11:23–25)10
The notion of God as frightening, a disturbing reality that destroys human perceptual and conceptual equipment, is not entertained to the same degree in Western monotheism as in Hinduism.11 But in the creatures of Behemoth and Leviathan one finds a glimmer of the Abraha-mic God’s more horrifying dimension. This dimension is reiterated in the Christian New Testament, when the Book of Revelation unrolls its unique prophecy of monstrous doom. But in Revelation and its prophetic precursor, the Book of Daniel, monsters function more traditionally as enemies to be crushed and overcome. In the prophetic scriptures it’s clear that God may have allowed some monsters to exist, and even to have their fun for a while, but the time has come to crush them under righteous foot.
These monsters of the prophetic tradition appear to have no zoological significance whatsoever. The four beasts of Daniel and the dragon and hydra of Revelation are incarnations of the fallen state of being: fallen angels in the case of Satan, and fallen men in the case of oppressive Roman imperial power.
THE APOCALYPSE
The Book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse of John, was written in the early 90s of the Common Era, during the reign of Emperor Domitian. It is a beautiful, frightening jumble of end time forecast, conspiracy history, and veiled sociopolitical manifesto. The description of monsters involves, among other things, a giant red dragon (ecce draco magnus rufus, 12:3), a hybrid leopard-bear-lion beast (et bestiam quam vidi similes erat pardo et pedes eius sicut ursi et os eius sicut os leonis, 13:2), and a two-horned beast that emerges from underground (et vidi aliam bestiam ascendentem de terra et habebat cornua duo similia agni, 13:11). The dragon plays a crucial role throughout the Apocalypse and also down through the ages as a symbolic counterpart to Christian virtue, but it is unclear whether John’s influences were Greek or Near Eastern.12
The author of Revelation, John of Patmos, spins an elaborate mystical vision of the end of the world and explicitly draws on the earlier prophetic traditions to reinforce and validate the urgency of his call to repentance. His confusing visions entail a trinity of terror that focuses on the central demonic character of the giant seven-headed dragon (draco), “who is called the devil and Satan” (12:9). This satanic dragon first appears in a vision, beside a woman who is about to give birth to a child (the messiah). The dragon menaces the woman, waiting to devour the child. But the creature’s evil plan is thwarted because when the son is born he is immediately whisked up to God and his throne, and the woman escapes to the wilderness. A gigantic battle ensues in which the dragon and his minions fight unsuccessfully against Michael and his angels, who overcome the dragon with the blood of the lamb. The dragon and his army are hurled down from Heaven and must continue their nefarious ways on the earth, where they persecute “the woman who brought forth the man-child” (mulierem quae peperit masculum, 12:13).
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Page 8