On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Institoris tells a brief story to illustrate the corruption of “those subject to excessive love or hatred.” In the diocese of Konstanz, Germany, a beautiful virgin lived simply and piously. A “certain man of loose character” took a lascivious interest in her; in fact he was entirely overcome with the infatuation. “After a while he did not have the strength to conceal the wound to his sanity. So he came to the field where the said virgin was working and, expressing himself decorously, revealed that he was in the net of an evil spirit.” She rebuffed his advances; he grew angry and vowed to have her by magical means, if need be. They parted. Sometime later, after an interval of feeling “not a spark of carnal love for the man in herself,” the virgin began to “have amorous fantasies about him.” By most standards, this eros episode is pretty mild stuff, no real drama to speak of. But even here, when the actors appear to be in relative possession of themselves, Institoris is convinced that demons are squirming in every act of the tepid tryst. The horror of giving in to temptation is averted, thankfully, when the virgin makes haste to her confessor and unloads the terrible burden of her wicked feelings. Confession, together with a pilgrimage to a holy site, sets the girl in order and, more important, smooths the bumpy terrain of her soul so that no demon can find traction there and no male witch can coerce her emotions with magical techniques.

  Lack of self-control, here made literal as possession and magical manipulation, is the same monster we encountered before. But the difference between Stoic madness and Christian is that not only can you no longer answer to yourself, tossed and frayed as you are by your own craving, but now you can no longer answer to God. Taming your internal monsters is not only good advice for living well (the Greek eudemonia), but now it is also allegiance to the will and plan of the deity.

  All this talk of discipline and desire raises an important general question about witches, one that Institoris addresses directly. Granted that they could be found in either gender, why were so many of the accused witches women? One answer is that women were considered the carnal flashpoints for any man’s spiritual journey. Just as God was using demons to punish fallen humans, demons were using women to tempt the fall of priests, monks, and husbands. Women could be highly effective tools in the devil’s attempt to dismantle men.34 But another explanation, more physiological in tone, held that women were more completely dominated by sexual lust; their receptacle natures were always in need of filling, and this made them crave penetration. Institoris says that one part of the woman that “never says ‘enough’” is the “mouth of the womb.” Consequently, women’s amorous condition makes them easy targets for demons who wish to find some way to influence affairs. And this natural lustful condition makes women proficient temptresses without much effort or study. All the other usual stereotypes are trotted out to buttress this view: a woman is more credulous and therefore open to superstition; a woman will talk incessantly in groups and therefore easily transmit the demonic information, creating covens; and “when she hates someone she previously loved, she seethes with anger and cannot bear it,” therefore she is quick to engage in the revenge and retribution tactics so prevalent among witches.

  Demonization and gender. An example of “woman as dangerous monster.” Here, in Felicien Rops’s drawing The Organ of the Devil, we find Satan unveiling the tempting nude female. Sexual liberation has played an ongoing role in the clash of civilizations. From Edward Lucie-Smith and Aline Jacquiot, The Waking Dream: Fantasy and the Surreal in Graphic Art 1450–1900 (Knopf, 1975).

  DRIVING OUT THE DEMONS

  Finally, we must turn to solutions. What can be done about these monsters? How can we defeat the demons and the witches? Witches were tested using trials by ordeal (e.g., carrying red-hot iron, being dunked in water, being pricked) and torture (e.g., stretching and dislocating limbs with ropes and levers, and virtually anything else a sadistic imagination can dream up). How one interpreted the trial by ordeal was rather inconsistent; some accepted a miraculous ability to carry hot iron as evidence of innocence and God’s favor, while others (Institoris in some passages) suggested that such lack of injury be taken as satanic protection. When the witch confessed to black arts and named others, she was often exiled, imprisoned, burned, or hanged. When the witch refused to confess such atrocities, particularly after significant torture, she was said to be especially strengthened by Satan and subsequently sentenced to burning or hanging. Not much rehabilitation or healing existed for witches, only degrees of punishment.

  Those who were possessed were in a different position. In the case of possession, the person afflicted was not considered to be evil or malicious but set upon, not entirely responsible for his or her actions. In these cases, the person’s monstrous behavior could be exorcised and he or she could be restored to fully human status. Interestingly, Institoris notes that when exorcism fails after multiple attempts, the victim may have been misdiag-nosed and probably deserves his or her condition as a divine punishment.

  A typical exorcism is outlined by Institoris.35 It’s best if a cleric performs the function, but anyone of good character can do it if necessary. First, the afflicted person must be made to confess. Next, a careful search of the home must be made to detect any magical implements (e.g., amulets, effigies), and these must be burned. It is important to get the individual into a church at this point, and he or she should be made to hold a blessed candle while righteous witnesses pray over him or her. This should be repeated three times a week to restore grace, and the victim should receive the holy sacrament. In stubborn cases, the beginning phrases of John’s Gospel should be written on a tablet and hung around the person’s neck, and holy water should be applied liberally. If exorcism ultimately fails, then either the person is being punished by God and has to be surrendered, or the faith of the exorcist was not strong enough and new administrators might be brought in.

  The message of medieval monsterology is that the causes and cures of monsters are spiritual in nature. Human pride may bring them out, but they are metaphysically real. Heroism of the pagan variety will not conquer the monsters. Only submission to God and humility will beat back the enemy.

  PART

  3

  Scientific Monsters

  The Book of Nature Is Riddled with Typos

  9

  Natural History, Freaks, and Nondescripts

  We ought to make a collection of all monsters and prodigious births, and everything new, rare, and extraordinary in nature.

  LORD FRANCIS BACON

  I must have the fat boy or some other monster or something new.

  P. T. BARNUM

  THE HYDRA

  IN THE 1730S A YOUNG Carl Linnaeus stood before a monstrous creature in Hamburg. Legend held that the creature had been killed several centuries earlier and its stuffed remains looted after the 1648 battle with Prague, eventually becoming the prized possession of Count Konigsmark. When Linnaeus examined it, the creature had only recently come into the collection of the burgomaster of Hamburg. Linnaeus, who later became the greatest naturalist of the modern era (second only to Darwin perhaps), had traveled from his home in Sweden to examine the “curiosities” of the continent, including Jews (who were then banned in Sweden).1

  The monster of the burgomaster’s cabinet, with seven heads, sharp teeth, frightening claws, and a giant snake-like body, was called a hydra. It was already a well-known subject of the science of the day because drawings of it had been included in many celebrated natural history compendia, such as Albertus Seba’s Thesaurus. The hydra of Hamburg was just one of many monsters populating the collections and imaginations of eighteenth-century Europeans, and it represented the frightening unknown dimension of a nature that was permeated with the supernatural. For Linnaeus and many other gentile Europeans, Jews and hydras and other aliens represented the sublimely vast and menacing terra incognita, an unknown frontier, barely touched by the tiny border where new sciences forged ahead.

  A drawing of the hydra monster that Linnaeus eventually debun
ked as a taxidermy hoax. From Albertus Seba’s compendium Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, republished by Taschen Books, 2005. Reprinted by kind permission of Taschen Books.

  When Linnaeus arrived to study the hydra, the burgomaster was in negotiations to sell the monster at a significant profit; even the king of Denmark had made an offer. But Linnaeus’s careful eye detected the skilled hand of a deceptive taxidermist. The clawed feet and the teeth appeared to be taken from large weasels; the body was a graft of mammal parts carefully covered in places with various snake skins. Linnaeus believed that the creature had been fashioned by Christian monks to serve as frightening evidence to the faithful that the Apocalypse was imminent. He conjectured that the creature was supposed to be a portentous dragon from the Book of Revelation fabricated to scare the wayward flock.

  News of Linnaeus’s discovery spread quickly, and the price of the burgomaster’s trophy plummeted. Reading the writing on the wall, Linnaeus left town, lest he himself become a taxidermied trophy.

  The story of Linnaeus debunking the apocalyptic monster is characteristic of the new scientific era. Science was on the rise, and monsters were being exposed as hoaxes or were being cleaned up and fit into the new system of uniform natural laws. Linnaeus himself became the great classifier of animal and plant species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla. A conceptual grid of hierarchic categories had been laid over the teeming chaos of nature, and a calm order had been imposed on the seemingly infinite diversity of God’s creation. But monsters, from Aristotle’s time to the present, always disrupt the neat categories of taxonomy and pose irritating anomalies for science. Hybrids and border-crossing beings are fanciful (like the griffin or centaur) but also real (like the platypus and the slime mold), and the scientific demystification happens only slowly and laboriously. The knowledge that unicorns do not belong in legitimate natural history came arduously, by degrees, whereas the platypus, sent to Europe as a stuffed specimen, was long considered a fake because scientists found the weird creature impossible to believe.2

  A dragon from Ulisse Aldrovandi’s sixteenth-century Natural History of Snakes and Dragons. From Dover Pictorial Archive Series, ijoo Real and Fanciful Animals, from Seventeenth-century Engravings by Matthaus Merian the Younger (Dover Publications, 1998).

  Eventually creatures that seemed to exist between taxonomic categories, together with other data sources, led to serious questions about the ontology of species. But all of that came later. In this section I want to discuss the earlier forms of skepticism, the forms that naturalized the animal kingdom by removing it from the moral sphere of medieval spiritualism. Monstrous species, as the extreme fringes of the animal kingdom, were slowly reconsidered under the conceptual lenses of the new life sciences. But human attraction to and repulsion from the grotesque could not be expunged entirely, even with the new rigorous natural history. Fresh marvels, both hoaxes and realities, continued to excite the more sober endeavors of life science.

  Woodcut of a sea monster in Konrad Gesner’s credulous sixteenth-century natural history. From Curious Woodcuts of Fanciful and Real Beasts: A Selection of 190 Sixteenth-century Woodcuts from Gesner’s and Topsell’s Natural History (Dover Publications, 1971).

  The medieval Liber Monstrorum (discovered with the Beowulf text) is a forerunner of later scientific monster skepticism and a taste of prescientific incredulity.3 The doubt was strangely selective and seemed aimed more at pagan poets and philosophers, but nonetheless it expressed a nagging question that continued to grow until reaching a crescendo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Which exotic creatures are real and which are fake?4

  It did not help matters that in the prescientific era most zoology was explicitly religious and moral. One of the most influential works of allegorical zoology from the early Middle Ages through the early modern era was the encyclopedia of animals known as the Physiologus. Of unknown authorship, the originally Greek Physiologus dates back to second-century Alexandria but became highly influential several centuries later, when it resurfaced in Latin translation. Together with St. Isidore’s later Etymologiae, the Physiologus inspired a whole tradition of medieval animal allegories, usually illustrated, called “bestiaries.” This allegorical tradition often repeated and embellished the same list of creatures; early versions contained animals and legends from the Mediterranean and North Africa, and later versions incorporated the fauna and fables of northern Europe. It bears mentioning that monsters often had their origin in the specific animal threats of a geographic region. In the imaginative construction of a frightening beast, a folk culture will frequently embellish the local predators rather than compose a completely novel monster. The medieval monster folklore of northern Europe, for example, drew heavily on the devouring wolf as an archetype of monstrosity.5

  ERADICATING THE FANTASTIC

  Very slowly the allegorical tradition gave way to more objective zoology. In the early seventeenth century the gradual turn from magical thinking to science had major implications for monsters. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who said, “We must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature,”6 argued that systematic knowledge would surface only after we amassed collections and specimens in warehouses of study, called “Solomon’s houses.” In his highly influential book The New Atlantis (1626), Bacon imagined scientific societies where researchers would work together sharing information and conducting experiments. “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”7

  To this end, real scientific societies began to form in the century that followed Bacon’s call for Solomon’s houses, including England’s Royal Society, France’s Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. These groups embraced the new empirical epistemology: that knowledge derives from experimental observation rather than scripture and classical tradition. Skepticism had graduated from suspicion of other cultures (e.g., the Liber Monstrorum’s distrust of pagan sources) to suspicion of all folk superstition. The savants of this era believed that a universal rationality operated below the surface of idiosyncratic cultural bias and could be accessed through careful empirical analysis and mathematics. Bacon argued that science should build itself from the bottom up using inductive reasoning; particular observations come first, then axioms or hypotheses, and, once corroborated, laws of nature could then be stated. But concerning monsters and natural history, the work was always fraught with obdurate gullibility.

  When we collect monstrous specimens, Bacon argued, we must be careful of men who practice “natural magic or alchemy” and also those who are “suitors and lovers of fables.” Gullibility seems to be the norm when cataloguing nature, so he argued that whatever we admit into our new scientific system must be “drawn from serious and credible history and trustworthy reports.”

  In the tradition of Bacon’s skepticism, Thomas Browne (1605–1682) published a compendium of “vulgar errors” called Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646) in which he rolled his eyes, so to speak, at the legends of griffins and other monsters.8 He argued that when the Bible and other revered texts refer to the griffin, they are only referring to a large bird, and that the idea of a hybrid monster has come down to us through hyperbolic embellishment of the original meaning. Furthermore, he suggested that any direct references to the griffin’s hybrid status can be shown to be directly or indirectly derivative of the old Aristeas legend of the Arimaspean war with the Griffin, a legend that has no outside corroboration.9

  Sketch of a sea-devil in Ambroise Paré’s sixteenth-century book On Monsters. From Ernst Lehner, Symbols, Signs and Signets (Dover Publications, 1969).

  The generations of naturalists that followed Bacon and Browne began to emphasize taxonomy, the rational naming and grouping of species. This method began to produce new compendia that, unlike the pell-mell bestiaries that listed animals alphabetically, had some logical organi
zation, grouping animals according to common environment, common morphology, common physiological function, or other criteria. It wasn’t enough anymore to pile together a bunch of mundane and fantastical creatures, only to point out their Christ-like symbolism. Naturalists such as Linnaeus, Buffon, Lamarck, Geoffroy, and Cuvier were discovering the inner logic of nature, referring nature to itself rather than the deity.

  In addition to developing a common language, Linnaeus’s Latin binomial nomenclature, naturalists also began to use the pictorial tradition (e.g., woodcuts, etchings, illuminations, pencil illustrations) to sift through the credible and incredible history of animals. If multiple drawings done by different sources of an exotic creature all conveyed a similar shape and comportment, one could feel more confident about those data. If, however, an image only reproduced earlier images (as the bestiaries did) without actual firsthand observation, then those data fell into a dubious category. The gaps in the fence of acceptable knowledge were closing and leaving monsters and fantastical creatures outside in a kind of limbo.

  Ambroise Paré’s “very monstrous animal that is born in Africa,” in his book On Monsters. From Ernst Lehner, Symbols, Signs and Signets (Dover Publications, 1969).

  The unicorn, for example, was a fantastic creature whose pedigree went back to Ctesias and Pliny; it appeared in the Bible (the King James translation), and it regularly appeared as an incarnation symbol in the bestiaries. But Harriet Ritvo points out that as scientific collecting and classifying progressed, the unicorn seemed more and more unlikely. The only physical evidence of such a creature was the horn that populated many early European curiosity cabinets. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, these long straight horns were successfully identified as the tusks of the arctic narwhale (Monodon monoceros). “By the end of the Victorian period ‘unicorn’s horns’ had come, in the eyes of progressive modern curators, to symbolize the dark ages of museology.”10