On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  25. In “Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror,” Other Voices 1, no. 3 (1999), Steven Schneider argues that Lakoff’s conceptual metaphors are more productive starting points than purely linguistic metaphors because they allow for the obvious image- or visual-based monster metaphors that we encounter in film and other pictorial media.

  CHAPTER 1

  1. This and all other quotations from Alexander’s letter are taken from two versions (a tenth-century Italian-Latin version and an Old English version from the same codex that preserves Beowulf) compiled by Richard Stoneman in Legends of Alexander the Great (Everyman, 1994). Although these are late versions, they draw on much earlier Greek versions from pseudo-Callisthenes’ third-century Alexander Romance.

  2. For compelling arguments against the long-standing acceptance of a scientific exchange of information between Alexander and Aristotle, see James S. Romm, “Aristotle’s Elephant and the Myth of Alexander’s Scientific Patronage,” American Journal of Philology 110, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 566–75. Romm is doubtful of Pliny the Elder’s claim in book VIII of Natural History that “King Alexander the Great had a burning desire to acquire a knowledge of zoology, and delegated research in this area to Aristotle, a man of supreme authority in every branch of science.”

  3. Alexander invaded India in 326 BCE. His actual letter is lost, and most information regarding it comes from the Medieval Latin and Old English translations. Nonetheless, independent ancient sources (Ctesias from Knidos, Megasthenes, etc.) bear out the fact that many of the assumptions and credulous claims of these later versions are indeed symptomatic of ancient Greco-Roman attitudes. See Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–97.

  4. From book VII of the Zoology section of Pliny’s Natural History, translated by John F. Healy (Penguin Books, 2004).

  5. Dennis R. Proffitt, “Embodied Perception and the Economy of Action,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 1, no. 2 (2006).

  6. The Roman philosopher Lucretius (99–55 BCE) famously attempted throughout his book On the Nature of Things to debunk superstitions. He offered natural materialistic explanations for seemingly supernatural events.

  7. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (Metropolitan Books, 1997), chapter 3.

  8. Harvey Mansfield, Manliness (Yale University Press, 2006), chapter 3. There is also suggestive evidence that specific genes are partly responsible for belligerence in men. At the sixth International Congress of Neuroendocrinology (2006) in Pittsburgh, Dr. Stephen Manuck argued that variations in the genes that regulate serotonin levels are good predictors of male aggression. See “Why Men Are More Aggressive,” Science Daily, June 21, 2006.

  9. Some ancient narratives celebrate the female monster killer, such as Atalanta, who kills the Calydonian Boar, but most monster combatants have been male. With the onset of new popular narratives about female monster killers, such as Buffy Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ripley in the Alien series, one suspects that the traditional gender-based division of labor will change. One wonders, however, whether the biological division of labor (the consequence of androgenic hormones in males) will continue to trump the cultural changes and preserve the age-old masculinity of warriors.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Quotes here are from Samuel Butler’s translation of the Odyssey, book IX.

  2. Odysseus and his men escape after blinding Polyphemus with a stake and then strapping themselves to the bottom of the Cyclops’s sheep. When Polyphemus lets his sheep out of the cave to graze, he does not feel the undersides of the animals and fails to catch the men as they escape.

  3. See Margaret Robinson, “Some Fabulous Beasts,” Folklore 76, no. 4 (1965).

  4. Mandeville himself probably never existed, and his very popular Travels were cobbled together from previous (fantastical) travel accounts. In chapter 29 the questionable Mandeville reports, “In that country be many griffins, more plenty than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth, that they be of that shape. But one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than an hundred eagles such as we have amongst us.”

  5. I am indebted to Adrienne Mayor, who read an early proposal of my work, for leading me to this exciting recent research, and for her general guidance on ancient monsters. My account here draws on her book The First Fossil Hunters (Princeton, 2000) and her and Michael Heaney’s article “Griffins and Arimaspeans,” Folklore 104, no. 1/2 (1993): 40–66.

  6. The eggs may have belonged to the therapod Oviraptor found nearby, not the Proto-ceratops.

  7. See book IX, “Creatures of the Sea,” 9–11, and book V, 128, in Pliny’s Natural History.

  8. Romans seem to have interpreted the “stone” character of the fossilized remains as the result of an encounter with the Gorgon’s head, which Perseus used to rescue Andromeda from the sea creature. If you look at a Gorgon, you turn to stone.

  9. The Deified Augustus, in Lives of the Caesars, chapter 72.

  10. Most naturalists of the era, particularly Aristotle, were simply preoccupied with current living creatures, whose numbers and varieties seemed quite enough to engage their investigative energies. The idea of “failed varieties,” however, was certainly available in the ancient world. Lucretius echoes earlier naturalists when he describes monsters who lived long ago but did not survive to the present day. In chapter 5 of On the Nature of Things he says:

  And other prodigies and monsters earth was then begetting of this sort—in vain,

  Since Nature banned with horror their increase, and powerless were they to reach unto

  The coveted flower of fair maturity, or to find aliment, or to intertwine

  In works of Venus. For we see there must concur in life conditions manifold,

  If life is ever by begetting life to forge the generations one by one:

  First, foods must be; and, next, a path whereby the seeds of impregnation in the frame

  May ooze, released from the members all; Last, the possession of those instruments

  Whereby the male with female can unite, the one with other in mutual ravishments.

  This passage seems to suggest that prehistoric creatures (not necessarily species, but individuals) could not survive because they lacked the necessary adaptive traits. In particular, they lacked the respective male and female genitalia necessary to have intercourse.

  11. Thomas Jefferson originally presented the fossil to his colleagues in 1797 but published the description in 1799. “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 4 (1799): 246–60.

  12. In all fairness to the Stagirite, Aristotle may not have been so credulous about the Bolinthus. The account appears in a text of dubious origin, called “On Marvelous Things Heard,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1995).

  13. The quote is from the more fantastic account (the possibly apocryphal pseudo-Aristotle “On Marvelous Things”), but a more sober version, wherein the animal projects its excrement only eight feet, is found in Aristotle’s History of Animals, 9.45.

  14. Robinson, “Some Fabulous Beasts.” In “Marvels of the East,” Rudolf Wittkower also argues that Pliny had significant influence on medieval lore for well over a thousand years after his death.

  15. Augustine, City of God, 15.9.

  16. See Pliny, Natural History, book VII, for the discussion of “bodily parts that possess special powers”; see book IX for the Ganges eel.

  17. Pliny, Natural History, book VIII.

  18. Ibid.

  19. For a detailed discussion of monster hoaxes in antiquity, see Mayor,
First Fossil Hunters, chapter 6.

  20. This nightmarish tale appears in Pliny, Natural History, book IX.

  21. But since this passage is part of Hume’s general critique of miracles (or the epistemology of confirming miracles), he goes on to lament, “But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end to common sense.” See “Of Miracles” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

  22. These reports from Ctesias, Megasthenes, and Pliny himself are gathered in book VII of Pliny’s Natural History.

  23. Aristotle describes something called a “Barbary ape” (which was really a Macaque monkey), but he probably never saw a real ape.

  24. See E. E. Sikes’s survey of Greek human origin stories in “Four-footed Man: A Note on Greek Anthropology,” Folklore 20, no. 4 (1909).

  25. In The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2004), Ben Isaac accepts the current wisdom that ancients were not prejudiced about skin color, but he finds them positively prejudiced about people who lived in inhospitable geographic regions (i.e., the unpleasant weather of northern Europe produced inferior human beings).

  26. Pliny, Natural History, book VI.

  27. Jasper Griffin, in “East vs. West: The First Round,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007, points out that Greek negative views of Persians were not groundless; it’s just that the accusations against Persians could also be leveled against the Spartans. Griffin says, “The King of Persia referred officially to his most exalted officials and soldiers, the governors of great provinces (’satrapies’), as ‘X, my slave….’ Greeks commented that, in the Persian system, ‘all men were slaves but one.’ But we should not forget that Sparta was a slave-owning and highly military society; all over Hellas, Sparta opposed the rise of democracies.”

  28. The Indian tradition describes ears so big that a person could wrap up in them to sleep. This legend was turned around by Megasthenes and other Westerners and reapplied to Indian races. See Bacil F. Kirtley, “The Ear-Sleepers: Some Permutations of a Traveler’s Tale,” Journal of American Folklore 76, no. 300 (1963).

  29. Edward Said’s Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) has become an important tool for understanding the political agendas of all media representation. While Said refers specifically to the age of European imperialism, many scholars have applied his perspective to other historical eras, with mixed results.

  30. Aristotle’s famous dictum “All humans by nature desire to know” still stands as a respectable alternative to the view of Foucault and Said that “all knowledge is power.” Actually it was Francis Bacon who originated the knowledge = power formula, but the postmodernists expanded the notion to mean that any pursuit of knowledge about “the other” is primarily imperialist in motivation.

  31. Pliny, Natural History, book VII.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. References to Livy are drawn from Naphtali Lewis’s collection of ancient primary sources, The Interpretation of Dreams and Portents in Antiquity (Balchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1996).

  2. Currently the term hermaphrodite is a somewhat contested label, and advocacy groups together with the medical community seem to prefer the term intersexual. Intersexuality describes a person whose sexual genotype (actually chromosomal makeup) or phenotype (genitalia) is neither exclusively male nor female. It is extremely rare to find both testicular and ovarian tissue in one individual; more commonly, a person will have a male chromosomal pattern, XY, but then have hormonal abnormalities in utero (e.g., adrenal gland problems), causing the growth of external female genitalia. Likewise, XX females will get abnormal doses of virilizing hormones in utero and develop a mock penis. There is some debate about the percentage of intersexuals in a given population. Anne Fausto-Sterling has put the figure very high, almost five million in the United States, while Leonard Sax, with the Montgomery Center for Research in Child and Adolescent Development in Maryland, puts the figure around fifty thousand. Sax argues that Fausto-Sterling has inflated the numbers by including groups who are not truly intersexual. A high number would help validate Fausto-Sterling’s belief that gender is a “social construction” rather than a biological fact. See Leonard Sax, “How Common Is Intersex? A Response to Anne Fausto-Sterling,” Journal of Sex Research 39, no. 3 (2002), and Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,” The Sciences 33, no. 2 (1993) and Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000). In The Ontology of Sex (Routledge, 2006), Carrie Hull points out that Fausto-Sterling revised her numbers down, from 4 percent of all people to 1.728 percent. When Hull checked the math of the new figure, however, she found significant error; she places the number at a mere 0.373 percent. See chapter 4 of Hull’s thoughtful study.

  3. Carlin A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993), chapter 4, “Envy.”

  4. Remember Lucretius’s description of prehistoric monsters, some of whom were her maphrodite: “In those days also the telluric world strove to beget the monsters that upsprung with their astounding visages and limbs—the Man-woman—a thing betwixt the twain” (On the Nature of Things, chapter 5).

  5. Quoted in John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Harvard University Press, 1981), chapter 9.

  6. See Pliny, Natural History, book VII.

  7. See Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, translated by Janet Lloyd (University of California Press, 2002), chapter 1, “Monsters.” Also see chapter 2 of Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body.

  8. I have to agree with David D. Leitao, who argues persuasively that the transition from Livy to Pliny was not so simple as a triumph of reason. Interestingly, Leitao seems to suggest that Livy probably exaggerated the drowning of hermaphrodites, but it’s equally possible that Pliny was overly sanguine in his report. See Leitao’s review of Brisson in Scholia Reviews, ns 12 (2003).

  9. One wonders if Christianity didn’t have a bigger influence than rationality on the growing dignity of hermaphrodites in the millennium that followed.

  10. The passages from Plutarch’s Lives: Pericles are taken from the John Dryden translation.

  11. Chapter 5 of On the Nature of Things.

  12. Plutarch relates the story in his “Dinner of the Seven Wise Men,” in book XIII of Moralia.

  13. See Borges’s entry on “The Centaur” in Book of Imaginary Beings, translated by Andrew Hurley (Penguin Books, 2006).

  14. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 654.

  15. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, book II, part I. “The ordered and definite works of nature do not possess their character because they developed in a certain way. Rather they develop in a certain way because they are that kind of thing, for development depends on the essence and occurs for its sake. Essence does not depend on development” (Aristotle, Generation of Animals, book V).

  16. Aristotle is “fixist” in the sense that an essential form preexists the element potentials, and subsequently that form is not a mere accumulation of material (in the atomist sense). Act precedes potency in Aristotle, and therefore, though he recognizes that embryogenesis is epigenetic, form and function are not merely “effects” of that process.

  17. Aristotle articulates this “essential form” in the context of his overall causal theory: “There are four causes underlying everything: first, the final cause, that for the sake of which a thing exists; secondly, the formal cause, the definition of its essence (and these two we may regard pretty much as one and the same); thirdly, the material; and fourthly, the moving principle or efficient cause” (Generation of Animals, book I).

  18. Legend has it that Empedocles threw himself into an active volcano, Mt. Etna in Sicily, to turn himself into an immortal. See Ava Chitwood, “The Death of Empedocles,” American Journal of Philology 107, no. 2 (summer 1986).

  19. In his Physics Aristotle contemplates the possibility that nature cobbled its
elf together without any sense of direction, without purpose: