On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  8. Plato’s Timaeus articulates a well-known version of this cosmology.

  9. Augustine, City of God, book XV, 23.

  10. The Greek word for cubit is pygme.

  11. All these monstrous races could be read as moral inspirations or warnings: Pygmy races were symbols of humility, giants were symbols of pride, and dog-headed races were symbols of slanderous lying. See Wittkower, “Marvels of the East.”

  12. Augustine, Sermo 37, “Ad Fratres in Eremo.”

  13. See chapter 20 of Umberto Eco’s entertaining novel Baudolino (Harcourt, 2002).

  14. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, book XI, chapter 3, 18.

  15. See St. Jerome’s The Life of Paulus the First Hermit.

  16. Augustine, Confessions, book XIII, chapter 33. Also see Isidore’s Etymologiae, book XI, chapter 1, for a similar discussion of mens and anima.

  17. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, first part, question 93, article 2.

  18. For the captain metaphor, see, for example, Plato’s Republic, Phaedrus, and Phaedo. For the ghost metaphor, see Descartes’ Meditations and Discourse on Method and Gilbert Ryle’s influential interpretation of Descartes in Concept of Mind. For comparison with the East, see the Hindu notion of soul (atman) as the captain or rider of a chariot in the Katha Upanishad and the Buddha’s rejection of soul in the Potthapada Sutta.

  19. Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, book II, chapter 82.

  20. “In everything that is apt to arrive at any perfection, there is found a natural craving after that perfection: for good is what all crave after, everything its own good.” Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, book II, chapter 82.

  21. Augustine, City of God, book XVI, 8.

  22. This and other quotes from the Irish Passion of St. Christopher are from a 1913 Fraser translation, which can be found at www.ucc.ie/milmart/chrsirish.html.

  23. Most Roman Catholic versions contend that Reprobus, instead of being a dog-headed Berber, was a giant of a man who converted to Christianity and was instructed by a hermit ascetic to help people cross a difficult river. He dutifully carried many people across the turbid waters until one day a small child asked for his assistance. The child was heavier than any other human that Reprobus had previously encountered, and it was revealed to him that the child was actually the incarnation of Jesus, heavy with the burden of human sin.

  24. Cited in chapter 9 of John Block Friedman’s masterful study The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought. Guido of Mont Rocher (b. 1333) laid out the relevant considerations for struggling clergy: “And for this reason it may be supposed that if there be two chests and two heads there are two souls. If however, there be one chest and one head, however much the other members be doubled, there is only the one soul.”

  25. The story of Lazarus and Baptista and this quote from the Mercury are nicely discussed in Stephen Pender, “No Monsters at the Resurrection,” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota, 1996).

  26. The idea that Ham’s descendants were damned to servitude was often employed by anti-abolitionists in nineteenth-century America to justify the slavery of imported Africans, particularly between the years 1830 and 1865. See Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2002), chapters 4, 5.

  27. For a discussion of the rabbinical and Christian historical exegesis of the Genesis passage, see Haynes, Noah’s Curse, chapter 2.

  28. Augustine, City of God, book XVI.

  29. This color-coding was based on an interpretation of Ham’s name as alternately “burnt” or “hot” or “dark.” A more comprehensive listing of the Table of Nations might be as follows: the descendants of Ham would include Egyptians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and the Mongol tribes; the descendants of Shem would include the Hebrews, Persians, and Assyrians; the descendants of Japheth would include the Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Celts, Scythians, and Medes.

  30. It is interesting to note that the Table of Nations is still the preferred explanation of races among some contemporary fundamentalist Christians. The stories of the relative offspring of Ham, Shem, and Japheth are detailed as “good creation science” in the displays of the Kentucky Creation Museum (opened in spring 2007 in Peters burg). The racist interpretation of the table has been removed in the museum version, and an egalitarian tone is brought to bear on the story of Ham, Shem, and Japheth. For an overview of the museum itself, see Stephen T. Asma, “Dinosaurs on the Ark: The Creation Museum,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 18, 2007.

  31. Augustine, City of God, book XVI.

  32. Ibid., chapter 8. It’s difficult to penetrate further Augustine’s thinking here. The argument as presented begs for further clarification, but none is given. For example, should the deformed baby be considered an actual member of a faraway race, or merely an isomorphic token of such a race, a symbol? If the child is in fact a proper member of the monstrous tribe, how are we to understand its gestation in a nonmonstrous woman? Even when we abandon our contemporary notions of heredity, Augustine’s theory still seems peculiar. It is as if he were thinking about a biological atavism (a throwback), but along geographical rather than temporal lines. One suspects that the whole argument hinges on treating the parallel between race and individual as symbolic rather than literal. But whatever the case on this issue, Augustine ends the reflections by emphasizing, yet again, that all such oddities are indirect descendants of Adam.

  33. It’s interesting to note that by the time Columbus set out for the New World, and no doubt long before, the criteria for identifying threatening and irredeemable races had become more explicitly physiognomic. In his famous letter of 1493, Columbus informs his fellow Europeans that the new native races will most likely be receptive to conversion. His optimism is based on his admission that they are not the monsters that he fully expected to encounter. They do not appear to have tails or dog’s heads or one eye, or other abnormality.

  34. Naomi Reed Kline, “The World of the Strange Races,” in Monsters, Marvels and Miracles: Imaginary Journeys and Landscapes in the Middle Ages, edited by Leif Sondergaard and Rasmus Thorning Hansen (University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005).

  35. For a good discussion of the mappaemundi and Alexander’s gates, see Evelyn Edson, “Mapping the Middle Ages: The Imaginary and the Real Universe of the Mappaemundi,” in Monsters, Marvels and Miracles, edited by Sondergaard and Hansen. According to Edson, Alexander’s achievements were often included on Christian maps because “he was thought to be a precursor of Christ—as Alexander conquered the physical world, so Christ conquered the spiritual world.”

  36. My discussion of the Hereford map draws on Kline’s fine essay “ ‘The World of the Strange Races.”

  37. See Friedman, Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, chapter 5.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Both the Travels of Sir John Mandeville and the Travels of Marco Polo (1299?) describe Alexander’s gates. Both were highly influential travel narratives and helped to codify and transmit ideas about exotic lands and peoples well into the age of exploration. Both are also filled with fantastical and bogus stories (including, quite possibly, the existence of Mandeville himself), and many of these stories resurrect the ancient monsters, but now with travelers’ tales that either discredit or more likely corroborate their existence.

  40. According to legend, ten Jewish tribes were deported out of Samaria after the Assyrians conquered the region. They disappeared from recorded history, and most modern-day Jews trace their lineage to the remaining tribes of Benjamin, Judah, and Levy.

  41. To this extent, Mandeville at least demonstrates a better understanding of Islam than does the twelfth-century French epic La Chanson de Roland. In The Song of Roland the Moors of Saragossa are erroneously thought to worship a trinity of gods: Mohammed, Termagant, and Apollo. This confusion undoubtedly made it easier for some European Christians to group Muslims in with other forms of polytheistic paganism.

  42. F
or a fuller discussion, see Andrew Fleck, “Here, There, and In Between: Representing Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” Studies in Philology 97, no. 4 (2000).

  43. I am obviously tracing the discourse about monsters as it appears in the theological and travel writings of the time, but it bears mentioning that the larger, illiterate European majority was probably not as Christian as is usually supposed. Theological nuances in particular were probably not as relevant in driving prejudices as were things like images and rumors. In The Black Death (Harvard University Press, 1997), David Herlihy points out that “early in 1348, the rumor arose that the Jews of Northern Spain and Southern France were poisoning the Christian wells, and thus disseminating the plague” (65). The rumor spread all over Europe, and probably did much more damage than any doctrinal or lettered form of prejudice. Christianity itself, which we usually think of as typifying the medieval mind, probably floated more like a small elite island on a sea of folk religion (animism) and culture. Herlihy argues that the black plague probably helped to Christianize the illiterate populations by driving them to develop cults of saints in order to garner improved protections against the raging disease. He offers compelling evidence for this claim by combing over birth records and finding a huge spike in the saints’ names given to newborns during the plague period. I mention these points as a simple reminder that although my study must of necessity track the literate cultures of a given era, much more than literature and education were at work in these eras.

  44. Judith Taylor Gold, Monsters and Madonnas: The Root of Christian Anti-Semitism (Syracuse University Press, 1999), epilogue.

  45. Considerable interpretive differences continue, however, with some scholars arguing that Dhu’l-Qarneyn is Cyrus the Great. Those who suggest that he is Alexander point to the popularity of the early Alexander legends during the Hellenistic era, a popularity that extended throughout Christian and Jewish as well as pagan cultures. The stories of Alexander’s gates were probably already in circulation in the Hellenistic era, and it’s likely that they would have been known by the people of the Arabian peninsula.

  46. Qur’an, Surat al-Kahf, verses 92–96, translated by Marmaduke Pickthal.

  47. My discussion here draws from Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Past and Present, no. 134 (1992).

  48. See Andrew Runni Anderson, Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Enclosed Nations (Medieval Academy of America, publication no. 12, Cambridge, Mass., 1932).

  CHAPTER 7

  1. Quotes from Beowulf are from Frederick Rebsamen’s translation (Harper Perennial, 1991).

  2. In “Beowulf as Palimpsest,” in Monster Theory, edited by Cohen, Ruth Waterhouse points out that the passage attributing Cain’s bloodline to Grendel is probably a rewrite by the scribe who replaced the Old English “in chames cynne” (in Ham’s kin) with “in caines cynne” (in Cain’s kin). We’ve already seen that both Ham and Cain were historically assigned the status of “monster father,” but the Beowulf scribe’s alteration might indicate a point at which Cain made more sense to European Christians. In medieval folk traditions Cain had become more loathsome, and the tradition of assigning him paternity to the monsters had become more entrenched. But the original use of Ham is telling and reveals the racist genetic connection assumed between the human races of color (African and Asian races, usually assigned to Ham) and the monsters.

  3. J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was read on November 25, 1936, as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture (published by Humphrey Milford, 1937).

  4. Tolkien’s position, that the poem is a unified Christian critique of paganism, has been taken up more recently by Andy Orchard in Pride and Prodigies. Orchard makes a very compelling argument, based on a comparison with the other works bundled together with the Nowell Codex, that an overarching critique of pagan pride can be detected in each. My own discussion of the issue is much informed by both Orchard and Tolkien, but I’m aware that their reading is still a minority report in the sense that they ascribe a purposeful unified voice to the poem.

  5. Both Catholics, Chambers and Tolkien were friends and might be said to offer a uniquely Catholic perspective, one that celebrates rather than ignores the issues of evil, on early English literature.

  6. Obviously in Christianity there is a parallel narrative that sees the suffering of Jesus as the ultimate monster killer redeeming the world from sin through his suffering. But although this is a familiar version to us now, we must recognize that it made little sense to the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean and northern Europe. The idea that one “wins” (righteousness) by “losing” (undergoing suffering) was paradoxical to the cultures of strength, loyalty, and power.

  7. Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, chapter 4.

  8. “Alexander the Great’s Journey to Paradise,” in Legends of Alexander the Great, edited by Stoneman.

  9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman, in Fifty Readings in Philosophy, edited by Donald Abel (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Some careless readers have interpreted Nietzsche’s distinction between slave morality and master morality in racial terms. This reading is rendered incoherent when Nietzsche explains that both forms of morality, vying for dominance, can exist within each person: “In fact, you sometimes find them [master and slave morality] sharply juxtaposed—inside the same person even, within a single soul” (aphorism 260).

  10. Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly (Bantam Books, 1992), chapter 8.

  11. Perhaps the more popular “new man” fusion of the pagan and the Christian is the simpler fusion. The monster-killing hero is simply baptized and made into a saint. St. George is a monster killer who, like almost every other monster killer, saves innocents from doom. But now he, and other similarly talented saints, do their monster killing in the sanctified context of missionary work. Christianity may have all the merciful and peaceful tendencies in it that believers (like Tolkien) respect and skeptics (like Nietzsche) scorn, but both sides forget that Christianity was a mythos before it was an ethos. The majority of medieval folk culture would have been less interested in “turn the other cheek” proverbs and more interested in stories of Christian power, the supernatural efficacy of Christianity and its God to ameliorate the problems of life.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. Even while I wrote this chapter a story about a botched exorcism made the daily news. In July 2007 in Phoenix, Arizona, police responded to a report of an exorcism on a young girl. When police arrived they found the girl’s grandfather choking her, and they used stun guns on him.

  The 3-year-old girl and her mother, who was also in the room during the struggle between 49-year-old Ronald Marquez and officers, were hospitalized, police said. The relative who called police said an exorcism had also been attempted Thursday. “The purpose was to release demons from this very young child,” said Sgt. Joel Tranter. Officers arrived at the house Saturday and entered when they heard screaming coming from a bedroom, Tranter said. A bed had been pushed up against the door; the officers pushed it open a few inches and saw Marquez choking his bloodied granddaughter, who was crying in pain and gasping, Tranter said. A bloody naked 19-year-old woman who police later determined to be Marquez’s daughter and the girl’s mother was in the room, chanting “something that was religious in nature,” Tranter said. (Associated Press, CNN.com, July 29, 2007)

  2. Anthony’s marvelous episodes have also fueled the pictorial tradition, from the medieval period to the present. Paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grunewald, and Salvador Dali, for example, have helped to keep Anthony’s tribulations in the popular imagination. Anthony’s battle with monsters comes to us via his famous biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373). Athanasius chronicled Anthony’s life in a work titled simply Vita Antonii, or Life of Anthony.

  3. Anthony had a younger sister whom he placed in a nunnery, where she could preserve her virginity.

  4. All quotes from the Life of Anthony are taken from Rev. H.
Ellershaw, Select Writings of Athanasius, in Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (New York, 1957), series II, vol. IV.

  5. Anthony offers more evidence of the weakness of evil spirits when he tells the famous gospel story about Christ’s exorcism of a man named Legion. This man was possessed by many demons, and when Christ drew them out of the man, the evil spirits actually begged Christ to enter a herd of swine. He granted this transfer, and the swine then ran straight into the lake and drowned themselves. Anthony asks his monks why, if demons are powerful, they have to ask permission and beg for such trivial mischief.

  6. Centuries later Aquinas was still refining Christian demonology and giving nuance to the ideas first formed by St. Anthony. In his Summa Contra Gentiles Aquinas considers whether demons are inherently evil. He offers some standard theological and scriptural ways of thinking about demons and monsters, but he also gives a more philosophical argument for thinking that demons are not all bad. The wider popular culture believes demons to be inherently evil beings that intentionally seek the pain and suffering of others as their only real goal and purpose. But Aquinas argues that demons are confused and weak-willed and accidentally evil, but not essentially evil. When those demons tortured St. Anthony, for example, they were motivated by their (admittedly selfish and wrongheaded) sense of good. Like other cases of evil and sin, the suffering of St. Anthony is the result of a “false judgment” rather than a “bad will.” Properly speaking, for Aquinas, there is no such thing as a bad will really, only a confused will. By definition, a willful choice is always toward a good, so a bad will, one that always and by nature chooses bad rather than good, makes no sense.