On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
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BAPTIZING THE MONSTROUS RACES
Giants, of course, were not the only monsters to cause a flurry of medieval theorizing. The old standbys from Pliny’s famous text were all on hand to pose Christian integration puzzles. Augustine and Isidore both describe the Cyclopes and the dog-headed men, Cynocephali. Augustine adds a list of favorites from antiquity, including some men with “feet turned backwards from the heel; some, a double sex, the right breast like a man, the left like a woman, and that they alternately beget and bring forth; others are said to have no mouth, and to breathe only through the nostrils; others are but a cubit high, and are therefore called by the Greeks ‘Pigmies.’ ”10 He goes on to describe the race of men who have two feet but only one leg, the Sciopodes, and also Pliny’s Blemmyae, the men who have no head proper but a face looking out from their chest, and who apparently live south of Egypt.11
In the late medieval period a text circulated that led many to believe that Augustine had seen Blemmyae firsthand. In a sermon entitled “Ad Fratres in Eremo,” Augustine writes, “I was already Bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some servants of Christ there to preach the Gospel. In this country we saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in their breasts; and in countries still more south, we saw people who had but one eye in their foreheads.”12 This passage was popular and considered to be compelling for the credulous, but we now know that it is probably a twelfth-century apocryphal fake. Anyone who was truly familiar with Augustine’s monster discussions in The City of God would have a hard time reconciling this so-called eyewitness account. Yet the passage was influential in the folk culture of late medieval Europe.
Umberto Eco offers a wonderful speculative description in Baudolino of the Sciopodes and Blemmyae. In search of the mythical kingdom of Prester John, Eco’s fictional characters encounter the monstrous races. A Sciopod surprises the travelers: “It had a leg, but only one. Not that the other had been amputated; on the contrary, the single leg was attached naturally to the body, as if there had never been a place for another, and with the single foot of that single leg the creature could run with great ease, as if accustomed to moving in that way since birth.” Eco fleshes out the medieval descriptions and pictorial traditions by describing the creature’s foot as twice the size of a human’s, but “well shaped, with square nails, and five toes that seemed all thumbs, squat and sturdy.” The monster in Eco’s story is handled charitably, as in the Augustinian tradition. The Sciopod is described as being “the height of a child of ten or twelve years; that is he came up to a human waist, and had a shapely head, with short, bristling yellow hair on top, a pair of round affectionate eyes like those of an ox, a small snub nose, a broad mouth that stretched almost ear to ear and revealed, in what was undoubtedly a smile, a fine and strong set of teeth.” Eco’s description of the Blemmyae is also worth quoting because it crystallizes many historical descriptions: “The creature, with very broad shoulders, was hence very squat, but with slim waist, two legs, short and hairy, and no head, or even neck. On his chest, where men have nipples, there were two almond-shaped eyes, darting, and beneath a slight swelling with two nostrils, a kind of circular hole, very ductile, so that when he spoke he made it assume various shapes, according to the sounds it was emitting.”13
The contemporary artist David F. Driesbach portrays some of the monstrous races, including the Sciopodes, the Blemmyae, and the Cynocephali. “Prester John’s Land,” color intaglio print (1995, 35 ¾ × 23 ¾). Reprinted by kind permission of the artist.
Isidore, who was one of Eco’s sources, fuels the natural history of monsters by listing the Antipodes, whose feet point backward, locating their home in Libya. The dog-headed men, Cynocephali, are reaffirmed to live in India, and the Sciopodes are located in Ethiopia. “In the remote east,” Isidore explains, “races with faces of a monstrous sort are described. Some without noses, with formless countenances; others with lower lip so protruding that by it they shelter the whole face from the heat of the sun while they sleep; others have small mouths, and take sustenance through a narrow opening by means of oat-straws; [a] good many are said to be tongueless, using nod or gesture in place of words.”14 He also describes the Satyrs as homunculi with upturned noses, who “have horns on their foreheads, and are goat-footed, such as the one St. Anthony saw in the desert.” Here Isidore refers readers to the then well-known legend of the early Christian hermit, St. Anthony, who encountered a strange Satyr in the desert. When Anthony asked the Satyr who he was, the creature responded by saying that he was only a mortal beast, whom locals in their pagan ignorance had mistaken for a spirit or god. The Satyr was excited to learn more about Jesus Christ and the true God, leading Anthony to exclaim, “Woe to thee, Alexandria [a stronghold of pagan beliefs]! Beasts speak of Christ, and you instead of God worship monsters.”15
This brings us to an important question regarding medieval monsters: Do they have souls? The Latin word for soul, anima, and the Greek, psyche, have descended to the present, giving us two different aspects of the soul concept. On the one hand, the soul is that which animates creatures; it is the principle of life and distinguishes animals from inanimate objects. But soul is also used more narrowly to express the uniquely human psychology, the inner cognitive self. It is fair to say that the ancients stressed the more general meaning, of the soul as the principle of life, whereas thinkers in the medieval world confined their interests to the more narrow sense of the soul as a uniquely human “divine spark.”
While Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars constructed a primarily religious notion of the soul as allowing one to live on after death, they also grafted this idea onto earlier Greek concepts. From Augustine to Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and beyond, Christian philosophers interpreted the Genesis passage in which God makes man “in his own image” as a description of God’s creation of the human mind. The human mind, a little fractal form of God’s mind, was considered to be the most godlike part of the human being. In Confessions Augustine writes, “But that he judgeth all things, this answers to his having dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over all cattle and wild beasts, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. For this he doth by the understanding of his mind, whereby he perceiveth the things of the Spirit of God; whereas otherwise, man being placed in honor, had no understanding, and is compared unto the brute beasts, and is become like unto them.”16 Eight centuries later, in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas argues that intellectual creatures are, properly speaking, made in God’s image.17 In this emphasis on rationality, the Church fathers were following Aristotle’s original lead.
In De Anima, Aristotle offered a rather naturalized description of the soul and its distribution in the animal kingdom. The soul was a broader concept and applied to all living things, not just the apex of creation. But the Stagirite recognized that souls come in varying styles and degrees. Plants, for example, have “nutritive souls,” that is, they have the power to take in food and grow. They differ from rocks and sand and iron by dint of this additional physiological potential. Animals obviously have this power too but represent a new class of creatures in their ability to move around and to feel sensations. This level of soul, up a step from mere growing potential, brings the powers of locomotion and sensation and distinguishes dogs, monkeys, fish, and every other animal from trees and plants. The relation of soul categories is asymmetrical because every animal, every sensate soul, also has the soul capacities, the physiological powers, of a plant, but not vice versa. The crowning potentiality of the soul is realized only in the human species, and this is the power to reason. Aristotle has no creation story such as Genesis to explain why this is so; in fact he doesn’t seem very interested in the origin of this distribution of the rational soul. He merely empirically describes the natural world as he finds it.
These days most people think about the soul as a thing, a substance of some sort. Whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, you proba
bly imagine some rarified nouminous spirit inhabiting the mechanical body. Thinking of the soul as an entity is inevitable when the traditional metaphors refer to the soul as the captain of a ship or a ghost inside a machine.18 But as we can see in the works of Aristotle, an equally old tradition argued that the soul is more like a function than a substance, more like a physiological activity than a thing. This is important with regard to monsters.
For medieval intellectuals, who carried on and modified the ancient philosophies of soul, monsters were just extreme cases of the larger metaphysical question regarding the status of animals. What creatures are capable of redemption? Which have souls, and how do we know? St. Aquinas, for example, concludes that animals do indeed have sensate souls (i.e., can feel pain, pleasure, etc.), but they lack reason. Animals don’t innovate and problem-solve in the same way humans do: “That animals neither understand nor reason is apparent from this, that all animals of the same species behave alike, as being moved by nature, and not acting on any principle of art: for every swallow makes its nest alike, and every spider its web alike. Therefore there is no activity in the soul of dumb animals that can possibly go on without a body.”19 Add to this argument the typical Thomist logic: humans regularly contemplate immortal life and crave it, but animals cannot do so because they are trapped in the play of immediate stimuli and cannot apprehend themselves in the far distant future.20 In other words, without reason, a creature cannot attain immortality.
This philosophy gives us a sense of how the scholastic mind understood monsters: if they have souls, then they can attain immortality. But candidates for redemption have a downside: they are capable of sinning. In other words, having a soul implies that one has agency. In what category do monstrous dog-headed men or men with a face in their chest fall?
Augustine’s answer is refreshingly charitable: “Whoever is anywhere born a man, that is, a rational mortal animal, no matter what unusual appearance he presents in color, movement, sound, nor how peculiar he is in some power, part or quality of his nature, no Christian can doubt that he springs from that one protoplast. We can distinguish the common human nature from that which is peculiar, and therefore wonderful.”21 Using the Aristotelian criterion, the essential definition of rationality, Augustine decides that the monster question is an empirical one. If the creature displays rationality, then it is, despite its horrifying appearance, a kind of human. Entailed in that humanity is the potential for redemption, immortality, and legal and moral standing. This is an impressive tolerance for otherwise repellent creatures.
Perhaps the best evidence for a charitable Christian view of monsters (viewing them as redeemable) is the fact that St. Christopher was himself a Cynocephalus. The dog-headed version of Christopher, a third-century martyr, is not well known among Roman Catholics or Protestants, but he was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Before his conversion Christopher was known by the name Reprobus and was said to have come from the land of cannibals and dog-headed people. According to a medieval Irish Passion of St. Christopher, “This Christopher was one of the Dog-heads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh.”22 Reprobus, a gigantic and fierce warrior from a tribe west of Egypt, was captured by Romans sometime around 300. He appears to have been a Berber from the tribe of Marmaritae, and after his capture he was enlisted to fight for the Romans in a Syrian garrison. Sources are confusing, but he seems to have converted and been baptized shortly after his capture; subsequent to his conversion he refused to abandon Christianity under Roman pressure in Antioch. The Passion explains that Reprobus “meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads.” After asking God to give him the gift of speech, “an angel of God came to him and said: ‘God has heard your prayer.’” The angel blew upon Reprobus’s mouth, and “the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired. Thereupon Christopher arose and went into the city, and immediately began to stop the offering of sacrifice. ‘I am a Christian,’ he said, ‘and I will not sacrifice to the gods.’ ” Authorities in Antioch tried repeatedly to kill him but he proved magically resilient. They tried burning him, skinning him, throwing him down a well, and various other techniques.
St. Christopher, the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed version of Christopher was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.
The dog-headed Christopher proved to be troublesome company because every Antioch citizen who came in contact with him converted to Christianity. The frustrated authorities then set upon these fresh converts with redoubled zeal, torturing and killing them because they too refused to worship the Roman gods. “Christopher kept encouraging the Christians, telling them that the kingdom of heaven awaited them. And on that Sunday ten thousand three hundred and three of the Christians were put to death.” Finally Christopher agreed to his own martyrdom and allowed the executioner to remove his canine head.23
The legend speaks a lesson of possible redemption for even the most vile of creatures. Not only is a Cynocephalus saved, but he is sainted and celebrated for his evangelism, devotion, and courage. With popular tales like this floating around in the folk cultures of the medieval era, it is understandable that sophisticates like Augustine could take a charitable view of the beasties.
A monster who converts to Christianity certainly demonstrates, by exercising his higher faculty, the existence of his soul, but another type of monster posed special difficulties for the soul question. When beings appear to be made up of multiple creatures, to be at once unitary and multiple, how should we understand their spiritual status? How many souls, for example, reside in the conjoined twin? In the case of newborn conjoined twins, most of whom would not live long enough to demonstrate the existence of their rational souls, the question of their status weighed heavily on the practical question of baptism. If the monster was truly human, then it needed to be baptized immediately to save it from eternal damnation.
The medieval scholar John Block Friedman has pored over church manuals for parish priests and discovered that some rough-and-ready rules of thumb could be utilized by the baffled clergy. When the offspring looks humanoid (form indicating function), then one should treat it as bap-tizable. When the baby has one head but excessive body parts, then one should baptize it as one soul. When two heads are present, one should treat it as two souls in need of baptism.24
This question about the souls of conjoined twins and other monsters continued to fascinate European clergy well into the scientific era. The seventeenth-century magazine Athenian Mercury considered the famous Italian conjoined brothers, Lazarus and Baptista. Added to the old question of the rational soul, Christians wondered whether the bodies of these extraordinary creatures would also be resurrected on the Day of Judgment.
Lazarus toured all over Europe in the 1630s and 1640s, exhibiting himself for money. His parasitic brother, Baptista, consisting of a head, torso, and leg, emerged from Lazarus’s chest and hung upside down. Baptista showed negligible signs of consciousness and did not speak, but he did respond reflexively to pain. According to the Athenian Mercury (1691), Lazarus would probably go to beatific eternity alone, without his more deformed brother. The magazine suggested that because Baptista did not demonstrate rationality, Lazarus would surely “rise without him at the Day of Judgment, for there will be no monsters at the Resurrection.”25 And if Baptista should turn out to have a very rudimentary, passive mind, then he will be raised up with the children and imbeciles but housed in a new, perfected body.
The famous Italian conjoined brothers, Lazarus and Baptista. From George Gould and Walter Pyle, Medical Curiosities (W. B. Saunders, 1896).
THE DESCENT OF MONSTERS
In addition to all this theorizing about the souls of monsters, theologians were also intrigued by the question of their genealogy: Who or what were the progenitors of these misshapen creatures? In particular, the races of monsters were difficult to square with the biblical Table of Nations. If they were indeed men, then we mus
t conclude that they, like every other human race, were descendants of Adam.
The descent of monsters was usually put in the context of Genesis 9. Two very important themes arise from this chapter. One theme is Noah’s lineage: that “the sons of Noah, who came out of the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth…and from these was all mankind spread over the whole earth” (9:18–19). Another theme is the “curse of Ham.” In this narrative Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. Ham accidentally witnesses his naked father and reports it to his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who quickly walk backward (to prevent seeing Noah’s nakedness) and cover him with a cloth. When Noah awakes from his drunken state and “learns what his younger son has done to him” he curses the descendants of Ham, decreeing that subsequent generations of Ham’s son, Canaan, will have to be the servants or slaves of Japheth’s and Shem’s descendants. This influential episode eventually served as a map by which Christians viewed infidel races. By the time of the Crusades the Table of Nations had become a handy template for metaphysically separating the “noble” races from the ever-threatening exotic foreign hordes. Monsters, Jews, races of color, and Muslims all came to occupy a conceptual territory outside orthodoxy. The curse of Ham was just one of these many boundary inventions.26
On the face of it, the curse of Ham episode makes little sense. A son sees his father naked, and because of this the father damns all subsequent generations to live in servitude. The narrative seems incoherent on both dramatic and theological grounds, and several schools of interpretation arose around this passage. The rabbinic interpretations suggest that Ham actually castrated Noah and was subsequently punished severely, or Ham’s son Canaan castrated Noah, or Ham had sex with a dog while on the ark and this led his offspring to be “dusky,” or Ham raped Noah, or even that he raped and then emasculated Noah.27 The Christian interpretations, found in Augustine and Ambrose, among others, are rather more symbolic and perhaps tame by comparison. According to Augustine, Noah’s naked state is symbolic of Christ’s vulnerability, the Passion itself. Augustine claims that Ham laughs at or derides his naked father, symbolizing the betrayal of Jesus by the Jews (Christ’s own family).28