Monsters—composite beings, half-human, half-animal— play a part in the thought and imagery of all people at all times.
—Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters”
In the study of culture and folklore monsters come to our attention most often as enemies of culture heroes in the various ethnic traditions, both past and present. Mythologists like Joseph Campbell and others (Gould 1969; Holiday 1973; D. Cohen 1970,1982) have written much about the theme of the Epic Hero who goes out to fight monsters in order to rescue maidens or to save society as a whole. At various times, Campbell writes about the recurrent archetype of both the hero figure and the monster in the world’s cultures. He points out that the figure of the monster-tyrant is well known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares of the entire world; he adds that the characteristics of these monsters are everywhere “essentially the same.” Campbell also notes that the existence of monsters calls forth heroes who must perform the same function the world over, that of clearing the field for humanity. Many monsters remaining from primeval times still lurk in the outlying regions and, through malice or desperation, set themselves against the human community: “They have to be cleared away.” The elementary deeds of the hero are clearing of the field of monsters (1968: 15, 337–38).
As the hero’s constant and inevitable foil, the monsters of myth share many characteristics. But what are these characteristics? And why are they the same across cultural boundaries? How can we conceptualize and analyze this apparent sameness? That the human heroes of myth are so similar is not surprising, given that their mythic function is always to clear the field of dangers. The tales of heroism, too, follow standard narrations and moral lessons: the young champion marches forth, vanquishes monsters in marathon battles, and returns the conquering hero. And of course these champions in whatever culture have more or less the same character more or less: brave, adventurous, confident dragon-slayers or, in Campbell’s Freudian view, exalted father-killers. But how are humanity’s terrible foes—the evil beasts—conceived, and why do they always oppose order and goodness? Whence springs this negative—the brutality, violence, moral deformity, generic horribleness that make monsters so irresistibly interesting?
By what criteria can we envision Campbell’s essential sameness? A comparative study of monsters must combine what ethnologists call “cryptozoology”—the study of imaginary creatures—(Heuvelmans 1990; Coleman and Clark 1999) with a psychological inquiry into why humanity has a need to create scary visions to instruct and enthrall. A cursory glance at monster lore suggests common features that indeed attest to shared fantasies. These common threads will form the basis of our inquiry, and both a sociocultural and a psychodynamic perspective are necessary.
As we have seen, for most Western observers the monster is a metaphor for all that must be repudiated by the human spirit. It embodies the existential threat to social life, the chaos, atavism, and negativism that symbolize destructiveness and all other obstacles to order and progress, all that which defeats, destroys, draws back, undermines, subverts the human project—that is, the id. As Marina Warner puts it in her aptly titled book No Go the Bogeyman (1998), the bogeyman is always the spirit that says no. Yet the monster, in all its guises, is also and paradoxically awe-inspiring, admirable in a perverse way. As depicted in folklore and fiction, terrible monsters are impressive exactly because they break the rules and do what humans can only imagine and dream of. Since they observe no limits, respect no boundaries, and attack and kill without compunction, monsters are also the spirit that says “yes”—to all that is forbidden. There is, obviously, a certain ambivalence here.
There is also a dualism of geography to consider: the place of monsters in the landscapes of the mind. In every cultural tradition, monsters are said to five in borderline places, inhabiting an “outside” dimension that is apart from, but parallel to and intersecting the human community. They often live in lairs deep underground, in an unseen dimension as it were, or in watery places like marshes, fens, or swamps. Or else they infest distant wildernesses of which people are afraid, like mountain tops, oceans, glaciers, or jungles. They emerge from these fastnesses at night or during abnormal cosmological events to shake humans from their complacency, appearing in darkness or during storms, earthquakes, famines, or other times of disturbance.
“A Werewolf Attacks a Man.” From Die Emeis of Johann Geiler von Kaiserberg.
Then, of course, there is the narrative component to consider in the monster’s sudden irruption into the world. The typical story of attack shows a recurrent structure, no matter what the culture or setting. As Campbell and many other students of myth have discovered, the story is basically threefold, a repetitive cycle. First, the monster mysteriously appears from shadows into a placid unsuspecting world, with reports first being disbelieved, discounted, explained away, or ignored. Then there is depredation and destruction, causing an awakening. Finally, the community reacts, unites, and, gathering its forces under a hero-saint, confronts the beast. Great rejoicing follows, normalcy returns. Temporarily thwarted by this setback, the monster (or its kin) returns at a later time, and the cycle repeats itself. Formulaic and predictable, the dialectic is predictable to the point of ritualism (Andriano 1999).
The predictable narrative is so widespread in myth, its symbolism so ubiquitous, its moral messages so recurrent, its imagery so consistent, that it is odd (indeed monstrous!) that anthropologists have not followed the lead of other scholars in delving into the subject. As one literary critic writes, “The ubiquity of the monster dictates that its analysis will draw on a wide variety of subject areas, and critical studies of the monstrous reflect this range” (Williams 1996: 17).
Recently, some postmodern scholars have examined the theme of what they call “the Monstrous” and “Deformed Discourse” in art and fiction. Most of these authorities affirm the above observations in different language but with a modified focus relating to political role. Postmodern research, mainly in Western literature and art, emphasizes the demonization of the “Other” in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy—the transgressors and deviants (cf. Bann 1994; J. Cohen 1996). Deformed, amoral, unsocialized to the point of inhumanness, the monster in Western fiction, for many postmodern theorists, symbolizes the outcaste, the revolutionary, the pariah. For these theorists, then, the monster can only be seen as symbolizing human threats to Western bourgeois society, all that is subversive of, or threatening to, the prevailing political order: “the inimical other” (Fiedler 1978: 92). From this perspective, too, the impulse to create monsters stems from the need of the majority to denigrate those who are different, be they the lower classes, foreigners, or marginalized deviant groups.
Given the rich trove of political symbolism involved in monster imagery in Western culture, orthodox Marxist scholars have waded in. John Law, a historical sociologist (1991), sees the monster archetype in the European literary tradition (Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.) as symbolizing entrepreneurial capitalism. Such demonic beasts as vampires symbolize the awful energy that sucks the lifeblood from the masses. Restricting their scope to romantic European fiction, Marxists see monsters as symbolizing the anti-human power emanating from the predatory bourgeoisie of Leninist demonology. More explicitly, Marxist theorist Franco Moretti, in an article “The Dialectic of Fear” (1983), speaks of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel as an embodiment of monopoly capitalism. Both are predatory, acquisitive, alien, and parasitical; the sucked blood equates to cash and the monster’s depredations to the exploitation of capital. Deformed discourse— the emphasis on hideous misshapen, malformed images—relates them to the supposed deformations and distortions of human nature that capitalism causes in Marxist dogma.
To underscore the simile, Moretti refers to Marx’s use of the term vampiri in Das Kapital to indicate the noxious economic activity of capitalism: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (cited in Grady 1996: 225). So for Marxist thinkers we have a one-to-one symbolism, monsters embodying the death-force of a single form of social and economic organization: late monopoly capitalism. Such a model, while perhaps useful for Victorian Britain, would be hard put to explain the power of the aboriginal Windigo among Native Americans, or the demons of Oceania, places where capitalism postdates monster lore by thousands of years. But then again, to be fair, these Western-confined theorists do not have the luxury of comparative data.
Taking all the above views into consideration is useful in understanding the complexities of monsters; however, my goal in this book is to integrate psychodynamic and social interpretations to gain insight into monsterhood in both capitalist and noncapitalist systems. As we have seen, monsters are universal, as universal as family or incest taboos, occurring in all kinds of societies and under all economic conditions, so the explanation of their role and function cannot be confined to a study of capitalist cultures, late monopoly or otherwise. Given this ubiquity, a Marxist or relativistic social-constructivist approach just does not take us very far.
Furthermore, and just as important, it is clear that no study of monsters and assimilated fantasies can proceed entirely without a psychodynamic referent (Dundes 1998). Assessing the powerful emotional tone always associated with monsters, the critic Rosemary Jackson argues that when people make up fanciful, dreamlike images, especially of monsters and demons, they are in fact recombining pieces of empirical reality, not inventing from scratch (1981: 6). The deformations imply repressed experience and the operation of unconscious processes, if only because of the energy imparted in creating the distortions and recombinations. These creative processes in turn, because they infuse reality with fantasy images, indicate a psychic dimension. “Fantasy in literature,” she notes, “deals so blatantly and repeatedly with unconscious material that it seems rather absurd to understand its significance without reference to psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic readings of texts.” It could not be put any more succinctly or persuasively.
Indeed, since Freud’s time, we have come to know the monster of the imagination as not simply a political metaphor, but also a projection of some repressed part of the self. Whether the repressed part is called the id, Thanatos, animus, anima, or instinct, whether it encapsulates the repudiated wish or the sense of guilt, the monster of the mind is always the familiar self disguised as the alien Other. Accepting this advice to look within as well as without is not only logical but also ignored at peril. We can point out that folktales, myths, and other cultural productions, including public events such as rituals and rites, are, as semioticians have advised us, also symbolic texts—animated ones to be sure in the case of rituals and films, but still symbolic texts expressing inner feelings and fantasies. Understanding cultural texts and formulas also requires an awareness of depth psychology. A psychoanalytic approach is unavoidable in any serious approach to monster lore.
Accepting that a view both “outside” and “inside” the self is unavoidable in studying monsters, the approach I take here, then, will be a broadly eclectic one. I will open my study with a preliminary analytical framework of three major theorists: Sigmund Freud, Victor Turner, and Mary Douglas. There will of course be other thinkers to be considered, especially theorists of ritual like René Girard and Timothy Mitchell, and I will naturally make modifications when dealing with the ideas of theorists mentioned above. No one interpretation can claim pride of place.
As for Freud, psychoanalysis furnishes us with useful models of sublimation, projection, and displacement as tools for approaching the construction of monstrous images from human experiences. I realize Freud has been much criticized lately for theoretical positions at odds with current understandings, but here I am adopting his methods rather than standard psychoanalytic tenets. With the analytical tools Freud has given us, we can effectively conceptualize the psychic mechanisms at work in the creation and scene-setting of monster imagery. Freud’s notion of “dreamwork,” proposed long ago in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), furnishes a workable model for analyzing the unconscious processes of visualization and objectification, and of condensation and symbolization, that figure prominently in the transformation of emotional states into pictorial tropes. Freud writes that the dream conflates and combines perceived images into one superimposed structure.
He explains it this way: the dream works by means of unification, “in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for the purposes of dream-condensation by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image.” For Freud, the visual collage, or collective image, physically juxtaposes, rather in the manner of a double-exposed photograph, two or more people into one person (or two or more objects into a single object). In the same way, the horrific fusion figure, the monster, is produced by a process of superimposition in the imagination, or on film as the case may be, of distinct types of beings into a grotesque and bizarre composite, which as we have seen is one of the criteria of all monsters.
Applying these ideas to fantasy and nightmare imagery, Freud’s follower Ernest Jones provides some further insights to this phenomenon. Adhering strictly to psychoanalytic orthodoxy, Jones sees imaginary monsters as representing the primary sadistic eroticism of the infant. The inevitable cannibalism and fear of being eaten (which we have noted above is virtually synonymous with monster behavior) reflect primitive oral aggression, and the monster’s fierce, unbridled power mixes erotic and hostile impulses (1971: 151). For Jones, monster imagery in fiction and fantasy is a dreamlike manifestation of id forces, particularly sexual sadism, in visual and scenographic terms.
So far, so good. Beyond this modest and unobjectionable observation, however, but still in a strictly Freudian sense, we may add that the monster may stand for the Olympian castrating father of fantasy, and so the hero-myth simply works as an allegory for the Oedipal conflict in which the recurrent cannibal imagery serves as a metaphor for castration displaced to the entire body. As critic Leslie Fiedler notes, virtually all folklores of origins have a tribe of “monstrous patriarchal giants” who must be killed off by their children for humanity to survive (1978: 93). We will see this Oedipus-writ-large scenario ad infinitum in the mythologies of the early civilizations with heroes like Marduk, Seth, Thor, and so on. These culture heroes are always young warriors (sons); they always vanquish old and ancestral ogres, giants, dragons, and the like, many of which are depicted, like parents, as remnants from some distant past when the earth was young, that is, during the infancy of the human race. It seems, then, that there is no way getting around monster = Oedipus equation in pictorial form, as Campbell and other mythologists insist. But of course there is much more to it than a simple animation of universal symbols.
Although orthodox Freudianism can become reductionistic, psychoanalysis does permit us to appreciate the moral ambiguities and affective ambivalence of the nightmare images we are contemplating here. As projections of inner conflicts, these terrible images reflect both repressed desire and their opposites: guilt, awe, and dread in which the person feels both violent repudiation and a desperate empathy, as the monster inhabiting the dark dream inspires both terror and identification (as does the mutilating Oedipal father in classical psychoanalytic theory). The recurrent reappearance of the monster also brings to mind classic psychoanalytic notions of repetition compulsion, expiation, paranoia, and nemesis. The monster is so powerful an image, so universal, and so imbued with the Oedipal developmental cycle in all humans that it may even represent an autonomous instinct or drive.
Taking all the above into account, one may indeed argue that the monster that frightens the child and always returns in dreams and fantasies represents simultaneously an incarnation of the punishing superego and id forces which the child both identities with and struggles against. In this dualistic, contradictory, and starkly ambivalent sense, the monster represents an amalgam of opposing psychic energies, not just id but an alliance between id and super-ego. Surrounding the threatened ego, the composite monster unites the chaotic danger of the id and the punishing superego, the alpha and omega of the mental apparatus.
If psychoanalysis is indispensable for capturing intrapsychic dynamics of monsterhood in all its Technicolor complexity and richness, then cultural anthropology furnishes us with the complementary heuristic tools for conceptualizing its cultural implications. In Purity and Danger (1966), anthropologist Mary Douglas provides an enlightening viewpoint on the relevance of monster imagery to group belief and behavior, especially in the community culture of tribal peoples.
Working with ethnographic concepts of danger and “un-naturalness,” Douglas correlates notions of pollution and terror with the transgression or overthrow of established cultural categories. In her terminology, conceptually anomalous constructs like monsters, as well as anomalous but harmless animal species, hermaphrodites, or organic deformities, are “interstitial,” by which she means existing between and in contrast to normally existing categories. Because they conflate or collapse cognitive boundaries recognized as the foundations of order, such deviations are frightening. They are frightening for many reasons: not just because of their ugliness and unfamiliarity, but also because they challenge the moral and cosmological order of the universe. Because they do this they are taboo—invested with magically destructive powers.
Additionally, the focus Douglas puts on categorical schemes suggests a means to account for the usual emphasis on the monster as “un-natural,” threatening, and impure, and consequently for its relevance to propitiation or expiation in community folklore, belief, and, as we will see later, in rituals. Abnormal and anomalous, the monsters of the mind violate the established taxa people use for basic understandings of nature. Ontologically intermediary, neither fish nor fowl, they do not fit into the mental scheme people rely on to explain the world. Being thus inexplicable, monsters are not only physically but cognitively threatening: they undermine basic understandings. By smashing distinctions, monsters offer a threat to the culture’s very integrity as an intellectual whole, or more precisely to the assumption that such distinctions can de drawn in the first place (Uebel 1996: 266). In other words, monsters expose the radical permeability and artificiality of all our classificatory boundaries, highlighting the arbitrariness and fragility of culture.
Other anthropologists have also noticed the importance of mental monsters and their role in the philosophical and linguistic structures of pre-literate peoples. For example, in a cross-cultural study of lexical and faunal categorizations, British anthropologist Edmund Leach writes that the imposition of order in socialization leaves “certain objects in interstices of categories,” that is, abnormalities that fall into the cracks of belief systems (1982: 4). Such inevitable anomalies include the sacred, deformities, and supernatural monsters. As deformed mirrors reflecting fears and anxieties, such anomalies, Leach proposes (presaging Douglas), offer a richly variant perspective into the cultural order.
All this gives us a clue why monster effigies are so useful in folklore and in community rituals when people gather to share stories and experiences. Transcending normal limits and domains, the monster-figure appears to be invincible or unstoppable; embodied as a giant beast, it becomes a perfect metaphor not only for the limitless power of evil, but also for dissolving of the boundaries that separate us from chaos (Fernandez 1986). The monster then represents all that is beyond human control, the uncontrollable and the unruly that threaten the moral order—a metonymy that seems psychologically acceptable to audiences both young and old. This fits into Douglas’s claim that culturally impure objects are generally taken to be invested with magical powers as “taboo” objects, and, as a result, are often employed in rituals as objects of both veneration and persecution (see also Carroll 1990: 34).
At this point, we pause to consider the role of monstrous images in the folk rituals we will later explore. The object here is to compare these rites with their dragons and demons to monster imagery elsewhere and to ascertain the common narrative features in the rituals, imagery, and mythology. And here we must turn to the work of Victor Turner. In his publications on the African Ndembu (1967, 1977), Turner also helps us further understand how ritual works in this model of cultural transgression and danger.
Having studied ceremonies among many societies, Turner argues persuasively that all societies have pressure points or “nodes of affliction” (1967), where internal contradictions and conflicts abound. These inner conflicts in the culture create an uncomfortable uncertainty in people that must be relieved to ensure the smooth functioning of the body politic. By its very nature, culture is also at least partly founded on the repression of instinct, and the resulting discontent bubbles beneath the outwardly calm surface. Basing his ideas on pioneering work on rites of passage by Arnold Van Gennep (1960), Turner argues that rituals and rites perform the function of relieving these tensions in pre-industrial societies (and in industrial ones, too). The performance of a ritual presents the people with a liminal time—a temporal punctuation in everyday reality, a conceptual “time out”—when the people can work out and reconcile these ambivalent or contradictory tendencies and impulses in their culture. At such times, new and unexpected formulations emerge out of the people’s unconscious and take on monstrous forms that contradict and subvert reality. Turner writes that the power of liminality is to be found in its release from normal constraints, making possible the deconstruction of the normal constructs of common sense, ordinary objects are transformed into novel creations, some of them bizarre to the “point of monstrosity” (1977: 68).
From this perspective, the creation of monstrosities, recombinants, anomalies, and so on frees humans from their day-to-day location in the world of common sense. In the act of recreation of elements of the world, the weird recombinants permit visionary experiences and insights into both the world and the self. Monsters and dragons are compounded from various discriminata of the culture, each of them originally an element in the common sense construction of the social reality. In a sense they have the pedagogical function of stimulating people’s powers of analysis and revealing to them the building blocks from which their hitherto taken-for-granted world has been constructed. In a way they reveal the freedom of the imagination, the free play of humanity’s cognitive capacities. Monster construction encourages creativity, synthesis, and art as well as analysis (1977: 69). It is from this mental ferment, as the French philosopher Gilbert Lascault (1973: 102) has suggested, comes the bricolage (Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term for inventive scavenging) that creates the monster out of scraps of reality.
This is the same cognitive process, turned inside out, that interprets and evaluates the strictures of the known world and the self. As monster maven Jeffrey Cohen explains it, the monster is never created out of nothing, but rather through a process of fragmentation and imaginative recombination in which elements are extracted from various forms in nature and then reassembled as an entity that can then claim autonomous existence in consciousness (1996: 11).
The somewhat simplified account above of Douglas and Turner points us in some interesting directions. We can see that monsters are both interstitial (Douglas) and liminal (Turner); as such they are conveniently concrete and animistically embodied as visibly organic things that by their very weirdness impinge strongly and unforgettably upon our consciousness.
The final leg of my model derives from the work of French theorist Rene Girard, who in his masterful book Violence et le sacré (Violence and the Sacred, 1972) makes an important distinction between “original violence” and “ritual violence.” This can help us better understand the role of symbolic violence in the relation of monster to community. In ritualized violence, such as occurs in gothic fiction, horror movies, and village festivals, the hypothetical victime émissaire (scapegoat or sacrificial victim) acts as a symbolic target for the therapeutic displacement of pent-up aggressions. Girard calls the ritual monster or devil a “mimetic creature,” that is, a mythical being which symbolizes evil in order to cleanse the society of its own guilt and terror. The process of converting feelings into effigies is what Girard refers to as “projection, polarization, and magico-persecutory thought,” a psychological model for ritual scapegoating that Hispanicist Timothy Mitchell uses effectively in his study of symbolic violence in Spanish folklore and rites, and which we will also incorporate into our analysis of rituals.
In a series of publications, Mitchell shows how in Spanish ceremonies, violence is turned into a two-way street, with the community both potential victim and victimizer (1988, 1990, 1991). A similar process occurs in the corrida (bullfight), where the toro bravo, or fighting bull, the official stand-in for violence and chaos, both attacks and is attacked. Like the fighting bull, the ritualized monster is feared, hated, admired, and beloved all at the same time.
To conclude: in the chapters that follow we will take a look at horrible monsters as they appear in various cultural contexts from prehistoric Europe to aboriginal North America. We start with a historical overview of monster lore in Western culture in antiquity and the Christian era. Then we move on to preliterate societies, including aboriginal North and South America, Asia, and Oceania, where ogres and cannibal giants reign. Then we turn to slightly more domesticated ritualized monsters in Spain and to a lesser extent in France, especially the Tarasca, the serpent-dragon of Corpus Christi. Finally, we attempt to place all this fearsome material in single perspective and to derive some conclusions about what monsters mean.