On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” Nonetheless he argues in Beyond Good and Evil that the pagan cultures of nobility arose out of barbaric, even beastly sentiments of power, strength, and pride. Unlike Tolkien, who was happy to see such will-to-power tamed by Judeo-Christian virtues, Nietzsche missed the old days and wished we would bring back a little bit of our monstrous selves. He would have liked the pagan Beowulf, a tribal-minded monster killer. Reaching back to a pre-Christian notion of nobility, he quotes Norse mythology approvingly:

  In honoring himself, the noble man honors the powerful as well as those who have power over themselves, who know how to speak and be silent, who joyfully exercise severity and harshness over themselves, and have respect for all forms of severity and harshness. “Wotan has put a hard heart in my breast,” reads a line from an old Scandinavian saga; this rightly comes from the soul of a proud Viking. This sort of man is even proud of not being made for pity, which is why the hero of the saga adds, by way of warning, “If your heart is not hard when you are young, it will never be hard.” The noble and brave types of people who think this way are the furthest removed from a morality that sees precisely pity, actions for others, and desinteressement as emblematic of morality. A faith in yourself, pride in yourself, and a fundamental hostility and irony with respect to “selflessness” belong to a noble morality just as certainly as does a slight disdain and caution towards sympathetic feelings and “warm hearts.”9

  The sign of the Cross, and a little steel, help St. George vanquish a dragon. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

  Pagan heroes want to be publicly recognized for their acts of heroism; they want honor as payment for their monster-killing services. Beowulf himself says he wants fame. Another medieval hero, the crusader Roland from La Chanson de Roland (ca. 1170), is motivated by his desire to have a good song, rather than a bad one, sung about him back home in France. Judaism and Christianity, on the other hand, demote public honor in favor of private honor. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, prideful men misidentify their proper audience: “They act out the drama of their lives before the audience of their contemporaries rather than before the all-knowing and merciful eyes of God.”10 This mistake makes them prideful giants, impressive in the short term but ridiculous from the point of view of eternity.11

  8

  Possessing Demons and Witches

  Be not angry…for it is not he, but the demon which is in him.

  ST. ANTHONY OF THE DESERT

  WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK OF MEDIEVAL MONSTERS, they think of demons, witches, and ghosts—in short, supernatural monsters. This kind of monster is perhaps more frightening than what might be called zoological monsters, deformed creatures and exotic races, because of their ability to possess. The idea that monsters can get inside a human being and use him or her for monstrous ends predates the medieval period, flourishes during it, and continues to the present.1

  ST. ANTHONY FIGHTS THE DEMONS

  The story of St. Anthony of the Desert (ca. 251–356) had a huge impact on the development of Christian monasticism. He is sometimes referred to as the Father of Monks, having created a desert monasticism that drew Christian ascetics far away from the urban centers. But his famous fight with monsters in the Egyptian desert also laid the groundwork for medieval thinking about demons and possession.2

  Anthony was a pious Egyptian boy, born of Christian parents who died when he was around eighteen years old; subsequently, on a religious impulse, Anthony gave away all his property and possessions.3 He studied with local ascetics, learning how to better discipline his mind and his loins, and eventually mastered the practical difficulties of living without comforts. “But the devil, who hates and envies what is good, could not endure to see such a resolution in a youth, but endeavored to carry out against him what he had been wont to effect against others.”4 The devil began by “whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth…love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table and other relaxations of life,” but Anthony remained firm in his regimen of fasting and prayer. So the devil redoubled his efforts to snare Anthony’s desires, even taking on the shape of a woman one night and imitating all her beguiling ways. “But he, his mind filled with Christ and the nobility inspired by Him, and considering the spirituality of the soul, quenched the coal of the other’s deceit.” Anthony then moved to live in a tomb outside the village, where he was attacked by a “multitude of demons” who sliced him into a bloody mess. “He affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment.” But his faith revitalized him and he rallied back. After throwing off the temptations of the flesh, Anthony was revisited by the devil many times, but the devil always shape-shifted to appear as some creature.

  But changes of form for evil are easy for the devil, so in the night they make such a din that the whole of that place seemed to be shaken by an earthquake, and the demons as if breaking the four walls of the dwelling seemed to enter through them, coming in the likeness of beasts and creeping things. And the place was on a sudden filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of them was moving according to its nature.

  These creatures, together with demonic hounds, attack and torture Anthony, but he insults the devil with audacity, telling him that such shape-shifting attacks are evidence of his weak cowardice. Eventually a ray of light pierces the dark tomb and causes the monsters to disappear. God has intervened, after years of torture. Anthony asks, “Where were you? Why didst thou not appear at the beginning to make my pains cease?” God responds, “Anthony, I was here, but I waited to see thy fight.” Convinced that Anthony has the right mettle, God commits to give him support and strength ever after.

  Anthony moves farther into the desert now, finding an abandoned fort “filled with creeping things” and taking up residence there. For twenty years he lives in solitude, fighting temptations and creatures, until other pious young men, hearing of his legendary asceticism, begin to join him in the desert. A reluctant role model, Anthony imparts his wisdom to the new desert monks. First, he explains to the neophytes that one must never be afraid of demons. The devil and his minions may have had significant power in the old days, but ever since Christ came to earth the evil ones have lost most of their power. After Christ’s victory, Anthony explains, the demons have no power and “are like actors on the stage changing their shape and frightening children with tumultuous apparition and various forms.”

  The German engraver Martin Shongauer’s fifteenth-century print of St. Anthony’s troubles. From Edward Lucie-Smith and Aline Jacquiot, The Waking Dream: Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art (Knopf, 1975).

  The major weapons of the demons are fear and temptation: “When they cannot deceive the heart openly with foul pleasures they approach in different guise, and thenceforth shaping displays they attempt to strike fear, changing their shapes, taking the forms of women, wild beasts, creeping things, gigantic bodies, and troops of soldiers.” But the most effective response to an immediate threat, Anthony explains, is the sign of the cross. As a long-term strategy against evil, monks have three weapons with which to do spiritual battle: prayer, fasting, and faith.

  Anthony warns his brethren that if they should survive these waves of demonic assault, there will certainly be a final phase of frightening attack. The minions, in their frustration, will finally invoke the “prince of the demons,” the devil himself. His eyes will burn like the morning star, his mouth will pour the fire and smoke of a conflagration, and his nostrils will fume like hot coals. But Anthony insists that even this terrifying monster is all sizzle and no real substance. In a fascinating, albeit brief, piece of biblical interpretation, Anthony characterizes the devil as a chump, a two-bit thug. The evidence can be found as far back as the torture of Job. The devil had no real power over Job; it was God who allow
ed every bit of torture of the hapless victim. Anthony’s indictment here is strange because although it makes the devil look bad, it makes God look worse. Seemingly uninterested in the theodicy problem, Anthony suggests that the only thing to fear is God.5

  All this makes sense, according to Anthony, when we realize the true nature of demons, their true metaphysical status. “The demons,” he explains, “have not been created like what we mean when we call them by that name for God made nothing evil, but even they have been made good. Having fallen, however, from the heavenly wisdom, since then they have been groveling on earth.” They are not inherently rotten, malicious creatures, and they are not imbued with some Manichaean force that rivals God’s goodness. They are in fact tragic characters who have made themselves miserable by their rebellion and now seek to make men miserable. The demons envy the Christians. Like circus performers, they have the ability to make spectacles, and this leads pagans to erroneously fear and worship them, but Christians should just despise them.

  Anthony admits, however, that the demons have gradations of ill intent, and it behooves one to cultivate a kind of demon radar. He says, “When a man has received through the Spirit the gift of discerning spirits, he may have power to recognize their characteristics: which of them are less and which more evil; of what nature is the special pursuit of each, and how each of them is overthrown and cast out.” Because Anthony himself is just such a virtuoso of demonology, he is regularly appealed to for exorcisms.

  In addition to demons who shape-shift into frightening phantasms, which are easily banished by a resolute sign of the cross, Anthony acknowledges the phenomenon of real human possession. This is somewhat difficult to square with his persistent claim that demons have no real power. In the second half of the Life of Anthony Athanasius tells of many terrible cases of people who have come into the custody of demon spirits. A man named Fronto, for example, had a madness that involved biting his own tongue and injuring his own eyes; a woman from Busiris had mucus fall from her nose that immediately turned into worms once it hit the ground; and “another, a person of rank, came to him, possessed by a demon; and the demon was so terrible that the man possessed did not know that he was coming to Anthony. But he even ate the excreta from his own body.” This young man actually attacked Anthony, but the sage said, “Be not angry with the young man, for it is not he, but the demon which is in him.” Anthony cured all these cases and many more, but it is unlikely that the man eating his own excrement would have agreed with Anthony’s refrain that demons are powerless. For that matter, if they are truly powerless, why would anyone need Anthony’s exorcising acumen? The logic here, if there is any, is never quite expressed but can be reconstructed perhaps by saying that demons do not have real power unless you become afraid of them, in which case you grant them entry into the cause-and-effect world. Our response to demon attack can either give them causal traction in our world or banish them from it. We are instrumental in the outcome of the encounter.6

  WITCHES

  The early medieval period is dominated by the sort of demonic harassment that plagued St. Anthony, but the later period is given over to those peculiar vessels of demonic ill will, the witches. From the Inquisition of the late Middle Ages to the New England trials of the 1690s, witches were the monsters foremost in the imagination.7 And more than the imagination, they became players in a new legal bureaucracy.

  Heresy hunting was a major interest for two centuries after the Great Papal Schism, an almost forty-year span in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century when the papacies of Rome and Avignon (and later Pisa) battled for dominance and legitimacy. The Council of Constance in 1414 restored the Roman papacy, but paranoia grew around issues of orthodoxy and authenticity. The official culture of the day saw itself as beset by schismatics, Turks, apostates, heretics, idolaters, and even the Antichrist.

  Heresy itself was understood as a kind of “monstrous thinking.” The heretic Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), for example, had become too clever for his own good and veered away from the true faith into atheism. Bruno, a hero to many subsequent free thinkers, once frightened Henry III in Paris by demonstrating astounding powers of memory. When Henry accused him of witchcraft, Bruno assured him that his skill was the product of study. Eventually his Pythagorean ideas were used against him by the Inquisition in a trumped-up charge that Bruno had abandoned the Aristotelian-Christian teachings on the soul in favor of reincarnation (metempsychosis). He was judged to be a heretic and was burned at the stake in the Campo dei Flore in Rome. The Bruno case, taken with what follows here on witches, demonstrates how both high-culture academic knowledge and folk culture shamanism fell equally under suspicion by the anxious Church. Rooting out and persecuting witches were common in this culture of fear.8

  In 1579 a small coven of witches were executed in Abington, England, and a news pamphlet of the time, published in London, set forth some important aspects of witch belief.9 The pamphlet is titled A Rehearsal both straung and true, of heinous and horrible actes committed by Elizabeth Stile, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, fower notorius witches apprehended at Winsore.10 We learn that, “among the punishments which the Lord God hath laid upon us, for the manifest impiety and careless contempt of his word, abounding in these our desperate days, the swarms of witches, and enchanters are not the last nor the least. For that old Serpent Satan, suffered to be the scourge for our sins, hath of late years, greatly multiplied the brood of them, and much increased their malice.”

  The devil and his minions were plaguing innocents with treachery, but also enlisting the service of already prideful, vain, and envious people. Tempted by Faustian desires, marginally corrupt people could be made into irredeemable servants of the demons. “The witch bears the name, but the devil dispatches the deeds—without him the witch can continue no mischief.”

  The mischief of the four Windsor witches included transforming themselves into various beasts, keeping demonic black cats and other nefarious animals that they fed with their own blood, killing several townspeople (including a former mayor, a landlord, and a couple of butchers) by making effigy pictures of the victims in red wax and sticking pins in their hearts, and reversing a child’s hand so that it painfully twisted palm-side up. These and other black magic deeds were attested to by trustworthy neighbors and ultimately confessed to by the accused themselves.

  As one might imagine, the evidence for the demonic nature of these women was so paltry and circumstantial that no right-minded adult could take the claims seriously. For example, one neighbor testified to feeling sick after every visit with one of the women and concluded that magic was being used against him. Similarly feeble substantiation was considered compelling to judges and jailers of the time. Still, we must measure this seeming gullibility by the evidential methods of the time, not by our own. Moreover, the power of paranoia in corrupting the search for evidence is not limited to any historical era and has to be admitted as a dominant causal force in all such cases of moral panic.11 We also have to factor in the possibility that natural chemical causes may have given the accused and the accusers some real hallucinations that were difficult, if not impossible, to explain without appeal to supernaturalism. One thinks here, for example, of the impressive link that has been established between the Salem witch trial hallucinations and seizures and the effects of spoiled rye grain. Ergot, a parasitic fungus that produces LSD-type hallucinations and grows on damp grain in storage, can poison whole communities. Many historians and anthropologists believe that such an epidemic broke out in Salem and explains the bizarre and ultimately tragic events, events that could be explained at the time only by resort to metaphysics.12

  In Windsor, Elizabeth Stile was arrested first and testified against the other witches, which led to their subsequent arrest. When the other witches were taken into custody, they used their powers to inflict revenge on Stile. Mother Deuel bewitched Stile so that “the use of all her limbs was taken from her, and her toes did rot off her feet, and she
was laid upon a barrow, as a most ugly creature to behold.” In less than one month after their arrest, the witches were executed. This short-order justice epitomized the sort of witch-hunt culture that flourished all over Europe and New England.13

  In a letter written in 1649 in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, a local citizen reported on the case of two witches recently captured and executed.14 John Palmer and Elizabeth Knott were found to be colluding in black arts, and Palmer even confessed to being a witch for over fifty years. The report of their downfall includes some telling passages, revealing the shock and original incredulity of the reporter himself: “It had been very difficult to convince me of that which I find true, concerning the wiles of that old Serpent the Devil, for the supporting of his dark dominions, which appears in the subtle trade he drives for the enlarging of his territories; by strengthening himself upon the weakness of his subjects, relapsed men and women.” In particular, the devil and his demons target a man like Palmer, who, “rather than keep his station, will trial what the Devil can do for his advancement in knowledge.” A man like John Palmer was ripe for conversion to witchery because he had “an inordinate desire to know more than his Maker had thought fit for him to know.”15

  When the witch John Palmer “adjoined himself to the Devil,” he received a branding mark on his side, some sort of bizarre tattoo of a dog (inexplicably named “George”) and a female figure named “Jezabell.” This mark somehow symbolized the unholy compact (tattoos were common for witches), and henceforth Palmer engaged in a variety of magical crimes, including the seduction of Elizabeth Knott, the remote murder of Miss Pearls by using a clay effigy and hot embers, a “revenge killing” of a horse, the bewitching of a cow, self-transformation into a trouble-making toad, and other, lesser misdeeds. Palmer, like other witches, had incriminated himself with a confession, most probably involving torture.