On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity? What is drawn up must cool, and what has been cooled must become water and descend, the result of this being that the corn grows. Similarly if a man’s crop is spoiled on the threshing-floor, the rain did not fall for the sake of this—in order that the crop might be spoiled—but that result just followed. Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come to be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his “man-faced ox-progeny” did. (Physics, book II, part VIII)

  20. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, book I, part I.

  21. Ibid., book II.

  22. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, chapter 5.

  23. This whole theory has appeared sexist to some scholars, and perhaps Aristotle was and should be chastised accordingly. But in fairness to him on this particular point, he claims that some of the developmental errors in reproduction can be ascribed to semen as well as uterine material. In Aristotle’s Problems (see volume 2 of Jonathan Barnes’s The Complete Works of Aristotle), he says, “Monstrosities come into being when the semen becomes confused and disturbed either in the emission of the seminal fluid or in the mingling which takes place in the uterus of the female.” Furthermore, it’s not much of an insult to argue that women provide variation unless one is arguing for some strange eugenics position, which Aristotle (unlike Plato) did not, and which seems impossible in principle given his point about the inevitability of variation in the mechanics of reproduction.

  24. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, book IV.

  25. Aristotle, Problems, 898a.

  26. If malformed creatures are aiming at actualizing their respective essences but missing the mark, so to speak, what about the essences themselves? In other words, individual monsters are “failed” members of actual species, but might there exist monstrous species, monstrous essences? The answer is somewhat nuanced. Technically, there are no monstrous essences or species, because a “monster” for Aristotle is an individual animal that fails to achieve its specific telos, or developmental end goal. These end goals are the forms or types, and, unlike individual organisms, they are fixed. But Aristotle does admit the reality of very weird and hard to categorize species, whole taxa that seem to straddle the fence between traditional categories (for example, a “slime mold” that appears both animal and plant). These are liminal creatures, on the threshold between categories, but they are not monsters. They are rare and intriguing and form puzzling links in the chain of being (scala naturae), but they are not mistakes. Nature poses certain challenges for the taxonomist, but strange and exotic creatures will ultimately find a place in the scheme of nature and on the subtle grid of classification (even if they straddle that grid indefinitely). Monsters and bizarre species do not fall outside of nature, but reside inside the complex system.

  27. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, chapter 4.

  28. See Julius Obsequens’s popular Book of Prodigies, for example. Nothing is really known about Obsequens, not even his dates. But his book, culled from Livy’s history of Rome, appeared sometime between the second and fourth centuries. Napthali Lewis, in Dreams and Portents in Antiquity, says, “The simple fact of his making and publishing this collection speaks volumes about the impact of such material on the popular mind.”

  CHAPTER 4

  1. See Plato’s love dialogue, Phaedrus. It’s very rare for Socrates to leave the urban setting of Athens, and he is unapologetic about his distaste for nature, preferring instead the company of people and philosophical dialogue to trees and rivers. Perhaps it is his amorous attraction to Phaedrus, a constant throughout Plato’s dialogue, that leads Socrates to depart somewhat from his usual haunts.

  2. See Republic, book IX.

  3. See Republic, Stephanus numbers, 573c and 577d.

  4. If this harmony argument were not enough to rescue justice from the pessimistic treatment, Socrates points out another profound feature of gangster life. Gangsters can never have true friends: when people are ruled by their appetites, they will sell each other out when times get bad.

  5. Ultimately Plato rescues love from the more disparaging characterization and argues famously that eros can be redirected from its selfish nature to a selfless concern for the beloved. But this requires a careful balance, preserving the sexual tension (this intense energy is the engine that brings us to glimpse the Forms) while refraining from the actual sex. See the Symposium as well as the Phaedrus.

  6. In March 1999 Marilyn Lemak of Naperville, Illinois, killed her children, Thomas, three, Emily, six, and Nicholas, seven, by first drugging their peanut butter with antidepressants and then smothering them. The prosecution successfully argued that Lemak killed her children as a means of punishing her husband because he had started to see another woman. In 1994 a South Carolina woman, Susan Smith, intentionally drowned her two children, Michael, three, and Alex, fourteen months, by driving her car into a lake while her children were in their locked car seats. Apparently Smith was attempting to win the affections of a man who had expressed anxiety about getting involved with a woman who had children. These cases of infanticide are quite different, of course, but share the common theme of mothers whose romantic interests seem to have trumped their maternal ones. For a scholarly treatment of the Medea mythology, see Susan Iles Johnson and James J. Clauss, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art (Princeton, 1996).

  7. When vacationing in Europe in the early 1990s I chanced to flip on the TV in my pensione. The scene haunted me for years afterward and I unsuccessfully quizzed film buffs relentlessly to help me identify the film. Fifteen years later I finally discovered that the scene was from an obscure Danish television version of Medea by director Lars von Trier (originally aired in Denmark in 1988). Von Trier reportedly once said, “A film should be like a rock in the shoe.” His Medea has been like a rock in my shoe for almost twenty years, and counting.

  8. One is reminded here of William Congreve’s famous passage in The Mourning Bride (1697), “Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” The quotations from Euripides’ Medea are taken from Ian Johnston’s translation.

  9. In Euripides’ tragedy Hecuba we see the same sort of descent into inhuman monstrosity, but the injury that provokes Hecuba’s vengeance—betrayal by a supposed friend who murders Hecuba’s son—makes her more sympathetic in her outrage and her response. Sometimes one must meet monstrosity with something similarly frightening in order to return balance to justice. The metaphor of Hecuba’s transformation is that, by sinking to animalistic retaliation, she will become a dog, a hapless hound. In The Fragility of Goodness, chapter 13, Martha Nussbaum argues that the whole play is “an assault upon our fondest thoughts about human safety and human beneficence.” The play is a rare recognition, in an otherwise much less vulnerable ancient literary culture, of the external uncontrollable factors in human happiness.

  10. Scylla was the horrifying sea monster who, together with Charybdis, formed a legendary gauntlet of doom for sailors traveling between Italy and Sicily.

  11. See chapter 2 of Dodd’s still impressive The Greeks and the Irrational (University of California Press, 1951).

  12. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (Norton, 1962), chapter 3.

  13. Alastor is a Greek term that means “avenger” and was personified as a demon that surrounded family feuds in particular. Alastor is the demon that avenges blood crimes, even if he must visit t
he sins of the father upon the sons.

  14. Interestingly, Jason interprets his own sin not as betraying Medea, but as knowing that she was evil (murderer of her own brother, etc.) and still going ahead with their romance. He is being punished because he didn’t get out when the going was good.

  15. Socrates’ famous theory that people never knowingly do wrong but only make cognitive mistakes about the good is here undermined by Medea. Socrates’ notion that proper understanding clears away immoral action looks rather naïve next to the subtler psychology of Euripides and even Socrates’ student Plato.

  16. See book II of the Republic.

  17. Julia Annas, Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 1.

  18. Aristotle, both in his embryology and his ethics, is perhaps the best exception to this generalization.

  19. Christianity came along later and removed this escape plan by making it a sure doorway to more severe and eternal monster harassment.

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Timothy K. Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2002), introduction.

  2. Satan is widely accepted as the engineer of Job’s misery, and he unambiguously colludes with Yahweh to begin the torture of Job. But, as many commentators have pointed out, the term translated as Satan is ha-satan and means generally “the adversary” or “the accuser”; it is not a proper personal name. In any case, the mainstream exegetical tradition has interpreted the adversary as Satan.

  3. Consurrexit autem Satan contra Israhel et incitavit David ut numeraret Israhel (Chronicles 21:1). Unless otherwise noted, Bible passages are from the Latin Vulgate Bible.

  4. Intravit autem Satanas in Iudam qui cognominatur Scarioth unum de duodecim. Of course, the relatively recent discovery and publication of the Gospel of Judas has redefined Judas along Gnostic lines. In that suppressed and then long-lost gospel, Judas is more positively rendered. He delivers the body of Jesus to the high priests, but it is with Jesus’ full knowledge and blessing. Judas is characterized as a catalyst for ultimate redemption, not an enemy of goodness. See Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (Viking, 2007).

  5. Luther Link, The Devil: Archfiend in Art from the Sixth to the Sixteenth Century (Harry Abrams, 1996).

  6. Book of Job, chapter 40.

  7. See chapter 3 of Beal’s Religion and Its Monsters for a nice discussion of these various meanings of Leviathan.

  8. Ibid., chapter 4.

  9. Christian philosophers such as St. Anselm (1033–1109) and St. Aquinas (1126–1198), but also the Muslim scholar Averroes (Ibn Rushd; 1126–1198) all considered some form of the “paradox of omnipotence.” Was God bound by logical consistency, or could he violate the laws of rationality? Could God make a square circle or create a stone so heavy that he could not lift it? In general, Western monotheists opted for a rational omnipotent God, one that observed the laws of logic and maintained some level of coherence to our human minds.

  10. Baghavad Gita, translated by Ramanand Prasad (American Gita Society, 2004), chapter 11, available at http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/gita.htm.

  11. For an opposing viewpoint, see Partha Mitter, History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Clarendon Press, 1977). Mitter argues that Western interpretations of Indian art assume, unsurprisingly, a hierarchy of quality that places a premium on more Western-looking representations (such as the Ghandharan styles). But he also argues that Westerners overemphasize the “metaphysical” and “spiritual values” of Indian art. “I would suggest,” Mitter says, “that a more effective and fruitful way of studying the nature and quality of Indian art and the entire relations between art and religion would be in concrete and human terms and not by presenting collective notions or metaphysical generalizations” (286). But while Mitter is certainly correct about the dangers of generalizing, it seems disingenuous to suggest (for the sake of his argument) that metaphysics and spiritual values are not concrete human concerns. The argument that we should divorce Indian depictions of the Buddha or Vishnu or Ganesh from metaphysics seems more like an ordnance volley in the academic battle between cultural materialists and symbolic anthropologists. More trenchant, Mitter never really delivers on his promise for an alternative (nonspiritual) analysis of Indian art. Thanks to my colleague Joan Erdman for referring me to Mitter’s interesting discussion of monsters.

  12. Myths of Babylonian dragons were well known, and the extended Book of Daniel refers to such a creature in Bel and the Dragon. In this version of the Daniel story (originally included in the 1611 King James Bible, but not subsequent versions) Daniel kills a dragon revered by Babylonians by feeding it cakes made from pitch, fat, and hair. The dragon’s belly explodes.

  13. Historians are divided as to whether Domitian’s reign was really marked by Christian persecution. See L. L. Thompson, The Book of Revelation: Apocalypse and Empire (Oxford University Press, reprint edition, 1997).

  14. Most scholars agree that the infamous number 666 is a coded way of referring to the Roman emperor (a numerological breakdown of his name), though which emperor, Nero or Domitian, is still contentious.

  15. The date of the composition of the Book of Daniel is a highly contested business. Most believers, particularly those of a literal bent, date its composition to the sixth century and see its various prophesies validated by the historical events of the second century (namely, the persecution of Jews during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes). In this reading, Daniel’s visions come to pass centuries later and help to recommend the Bible as a source of supernatural truth. Others date the work much later, claiming that it was actually written during the second-century persecutions but posing as a much earlier work of prophesy.

  16. Most conservative Christian exegetes dubiously interpret the fourth beast as a prophecy about the coming terror of the Roman, rather than Greek, Empire. Among other implications, this move brings Daniel and Revelation into even greater parallel.

  17. Among other passages, see chapter 12, part 2 of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah and also his Yemen Epistle in Maimonides Reader, edited by Isadore Twersky (Behrman House, 1976). Martin Luther originally argued that there was “no Christ” in the strange text of John’s vision, and he downgraded its importance, considering it a dangerous apocryphal text.

  18. The biblical monsters, originally articulated long before the medieval period and properly belonging to the ancient era, are nonetheless highly animated in the literary and pictorial traditions of medieval Europe. Biblical monsters inform medieval thinking about cosmology, geography, anthropology, and theology. For that reason I have chosen to introduce them in this, rather than the previous, chapter.

  19. See chapter 3 of Andy Orchard’s excellent book Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf-Manuscript (D. S. Brewer, 1995).

  20. Western mainstream Jewish and Christian traditions now consider the Book of Enoch to be an apocryphal work, but it had a significant influence on early and medieval biblical culture. Even canonical scripture, for example Jude 14 and 15, refers unapologetically to the Enoch story. Up until the fourth century Enoch was a respected text, seen as genuine by patristic writers such as Origen and Tertullian. Discovery of Dead Sea Scroll fragments of Enoch at Qumran led scholars to treat the scripture (or parts of it) as originating sometime before the second century BCE. The Book of Giants, also found at Qumran, is another influential apocryphal text (based on Enoch and Genesis); it was recomposed and championed by Mani (216–276 CE) as a Manichaean text that describes, among other things, how God killed the giants in the Flood.

  21. Cited in chapter 3 of Orchard’s Pride and Prodigies.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. “We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle. But it is not without reason that these writings have no place in that canon of Scripture which was preserved in the temple of Hebrew people by the diligence of suc
cessive priests; for their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings.” Augustine, The City of God (De civitate Dei), book XV, 23. This and other quotes from Augustine’s text are from Marcus Dod’s translation (Modern Library, 1993).

  2. Augustine, City of God, book XV, 9. One suspects that Augustine, like so many other pre-Victorians, actually stumbled on an extinct creature’s fossilized part, but he did not have a theoretical paradigm that included dinosaurs.

  3. Ibid., book XV, 23.

  4. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book XI.

  5. Isidore’s list, and that of every other medieval monsterologist, is heavily influenced by Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.

  6. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book XI, chapter 3.

  7. This sort of pantheism is hinted at in the doctrines of many ancients, including Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Stoics, but doesn’t get its fullest expression until Spinoza’s Ethics (1675) and his notion of the deus sive natura.