Dreams and Beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
We saw that the ancients regarded their monsters as closely—if paradoxically—related to notions of divinity. Like the Babylonian Tiamat and the Egyptian Apophis, the terrible beasts of the early civilizations predate not only humankind but also the very gods, encompassing within their deformed bodies an unformed universe. Or else, as in the case of the Cyclops, the Minotaur, and the Harpies in Greek mythology, they are begotten by gods gratuitously, or to bedevil or to instruct humans, or else as divine challenges for mortal heroes like Odysseus. With the advent of Christianity, these attitudes underwent subtle shifts in line with the new theological and eschatological assumptions about a beneficent God.
First of all, there was the problem for Christian thinkers of reconciling monsters of the imagination with an all-knowing moral deity, the contrast of good and evil posing an intellectual dilemma for theologians much in line with the clerical question of God’s purpose in allowing evil into the world. The patristic fathers in the first few centuries after Christ experienced a great deal of ambivalence about this conundrum. Most tended to accept that monsters did exist in reality and to view them as essentially evil, as sworn enemies of God, and, specifically in light of Christian eschatology, as descendants of Cain or emissaries of the Devil, antediluvian remnants of pagan sinfulness that had to be wiped out by warriors of the cross. But the question still remained why God tolerated monsters, why they persisted into the Christian era. Herein lies once again a case of the basic ambivalence of monsters vis-à-vis humans.
As did the age of Greece and Rome, the following centuries teem with representations of grotesque beings, literary and folkloristic as well as pictorial. The Old English and Norse sagas, composed between the eighth and tenth centuries, are bursting with grotesqueries: man-eating ogres like Grendel in Beowulf not to mention a horrid dragon in the same poem. The Scandinavian and Germanic sagas likewise roil with demons, half-human fiends, and, especially, man-eating giants like those that threaten Thor (J. Cohen 1999). One only has to look at the legions of hideous gargoyles on European cathedrals to appreciate how much a part of everyday life monsters had become by the Middle Ages—icons of spiritual ugliness and terror, ubiquitous metaphors for moral depravity, indelible images for the contemplation of churchgoers everywhere.
Medievalist J. R. R. Tolkien, a man obviously enchanted by fantasy, wrote an important academic paper, entitled “The Monsters and the Critics” (1984) on this subject. In this influential paper (less well known of course than the Ring stories) he explores the meaning of the monsters in the minds of early Christians in areas bordering the North Sea. He tells us that there was at this time a momentous change in the mental landscape in which marvelous beings dwelled, accompanied by a shift in the didactic function of monsters as expressed in works like Beowulf. To get an idea of the change in focus from the pagan to the early Christian era, as expressed in this epic literature, he invites us to compare the moral and thematic position of Grendel in the Anglo-Saxon poem to that of the Cyclops Polyphemus in Homer.
In both poems, written about a millennium apart, the culture heroes battle man-eating ogres. The opponents are depicted in both cases as prodigiously evil figures—not much difference there. They threaten men with dismemberment and death, and their man-eating proclivities are the sign of moral monstrosity. But there are important differences in the way these personifications are conceived and their fates rendered. Let us take Beowulf first.
Although Beowulf was composed in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) between the eighth and tenth centuries, the action takes place primarily in what is now Denmark and Sweden. The plot is a simple adventure story with spinetingling effects. Once upon a time, the terrible monster Grendel lived with his “troll-dam” (mother) in a misty marsh. This frightful creature emerges on moonless nights to stalk, butcher and devour the subjects of the local Danish prince, Hrothgar. Variously described as “shadow-walker,” “death-shadow,” “grim demon,” “monster,” or simply “fiend,” Grendel is portrayed throughout as a half-human giant of superhuman strength who takes great delight in rending his victims limb from limb before snacking on their flesh. Aside from casual references to wolves and other wild beasts, the physical appearance of Grendel is otherwise never fully realized, this vagueness making his menace perhaps even more dreadful (Friedman 1981: 106).
The Grendel from Bulfinch’s Mythology.
Unable to cope, Hrothgar calls the champion Beowulf to the rescue, Beowulf being at the time the king of the Geats, a Germanic tribe living nearby in what is now Sweden. Accepting the challenge, Beowulf perilously crosses over the stormy seas. After many bloody battles—described in gory detail—he succeeds in destroying Grendel, in fact ripping him apart (in a nice touch, he hangs the bloody arm and shoulder on the wall of the Danish banquet hall avenging the monster’s many dismemberments). Enraged. Grendel’s mother naturally flies at Beowulf, only to be cut down in turn after an equally grisly struggle (which takes place underwater), concluding with the ceremonial decapitation of her corpse. Having rid the world of the two monsters in this particularly gruesome fashion, Beowulf returns to Sweden to reign more or less peacefully over the Geats for more fifty years.
However, toward the end of his life, danger again threatens in the form of a giant fire-breathing “worm” (wyrm, dragon), which menaces the kingdom anew. After a few unsuccessful encounters with this fire-spewing beast, Beowulf defeats it in an apocalyptic confrontation, but is mortally wounded. Borne off on a warrior’s bier of honor, he thereupon enters into the legends of his people as a hero of the highest renown (Heaney 2000: x).
Turning to the Greek myth, we see initial similarities. In the Odyssey it is the one-eyed giant Polyphemus who plays the foil for Odysseus, and in similar dramatic circumstances. On the surface, Polyphemus is presented in the same metaphoric terms as Grendel: a ferocious and horrible monster with superhuman strength and nasty habits, including man-eating. In the relevant episode, Polyphemus captures the shipwrecked sailors and, as Grendel did with Hrothgar’s men, proceeds to eat them one by one, saving Odysseus for last. However, the wily Odysseus is able to trick the Cyclops into getting drunk, and when Polyphemus lies down to sleep it off the hero puts out his single eye with a sharpened stake, enabling his escape. So the two heroic narratives involved are not dissimilar: hero-man vs. monster; hero wins after numerous trials; hero saves the people; etc.
But there is one important thematic difference. Polyphemus, although a typical monster in size and shape not to mention habits, is himself god-begotten and under divine protection. He is, after all, the son of the sea god Poseidon. In Beowulf, conversely, with its fervent Christian imagery, Grendel is described in no uncertain terms as a member of the clan of Cain, “whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts” (in the Heaney translation, 2000: 9). Cursed and banished by the Almighty, Grendel is therefore an “inmate of hell,” a “banished monster,” and consequently an “adversary of God.” The Old English poem leaves no ambiguity on this point. For the early Christians, monsters have come to symbolize pure unvarnished evil, at least at the conscious level, meaning that which is opposite to God, spiritual malignancy in a general sense. The real battle is between the soul and its adversaries. Monsters are awesome, yes, but not in any way admirable, except for their formidable (if evil) powers.
Tolkien notes that by the time of the northern European Dark Ages, with the moderating influence of the spiritual quest of early Christianity, the old monsters became images of the evil spirit or spirits, or rather the evil spirits entered into the monsters and took visible shape in the hideous bodies of such anomalies as Grendel, Grendel’s dam, the wormy dragon, and all the other malign cryptomorphs that the human mind could imagine. The authors of the Anglo Saxon, Norse, and Icelandic sagas make clear that inhuman fiends like Grendel are the descendants of Cain. They are banned by God and are God’s implacable enemies. They are heathens who have not accepted Christ; they are pagan holdouts, deniers of Christ.
And so, from being ambivalently portrayed as omens from the gods in pagan days, monsters became pagan enemies of Christ, the favorite foils of missionary saints and holy men. In early Christianity monsters became a visual trope to visualize God’s opponents and were put in the service of the Catholic cause as theological “other,” equivalent to the Prince of Darkness (Friedman 1981: 89; D. White 1991:19). There are certainly unmistakable similarities between Grendel and Beowulf, not the least of which is their superhuman strength and bravery and their love of disemboweling enemies. The nagging question remained for churchmen as to why God tolerated the existence of such fiends in the first place. Or were all these monsters just a figment of the poetic imagination, a literary device to assist in pious devotions? Did the people of the time really believe in them as ontological realities that God tolerated? Ambiguities abound.
Given the central moral mission of monsters in the new religion, many Catholic theologians wrestled with such weighty questions and began to write their own interpretations of the epistemological implications of the existence or nonexistence of monsters. Why Grendel? Did fiends and dragons really exist? Important treatises specifically relating to this subject and its moral complexities were penned by such celebrated holy men as St. Augustine, in his De Civitate Dei, and, notably, by the Visigoth encyclopaedist St. Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologiae (ca. 673). Numerous other theologians considered the subject worthy of comment in the period between 500 and the tenth century.
The Christian texts devoted to monsters included the tract called Wonders of the East, written in Latin and translated into Old English, which takes up the question of the existence of unnatural beasts; the anonymous Old English “Letter of Alexander to Aristotle,” which also considers this question; and many other fragments, all of which make specific reference to mysterious beings and their relationship to God and the Devil (Friedman 1981: 150; Orchard 1995: 34–36; see also J. Cohen 1999). By the eighth century, monsters had become a veritable cottage industry in Europe (excerpts from many original texts may be found in a lushly illustrated book by Joe Nigg 1999).
So important had the conception of the monstrous in the scheme of God become by the ninth century in fact, that the best minds of the time got together to ponder the subject, and after much consideration produced a number of treatises on supernatural creatures (Waterhouse 1996: 31). The most famous of these is probably the multi-authored Latin work Liber Monstrorum [Book of Monsters) written at various times between 900 and 1000. Before considering this curious text, however, let us first consider the contributions of Augustine and Isidore, for these are liberally cited as authorities in the Liber and form the basis of much contemporary thinking.
Responding to reports of fabulous beings dwelling in the far reaches of the earth, Augustine takes up the issue in chapter eight of the sixteenth book of De Civitate Dei, entitled “Whether certain monstrous races of men derived from the stork of Adam or Noah’s sons?” He argues that if monstrosities exist as had been reported, they must be part of God’s plan and great design, for God is omniscient (D. White 1991: 30). Referring to Genesis, he notes that therefore the monstrous races must be the inheritors of the curse God put on Cain. They are thereby “descendants of the disobedient offspring of the Biblical Noah”; that is, children of Ham and his sons (cited in Jeffrey 1980: 48) whom God suffers to exist for the edification of men.
According to medieval scholars like David Gordon White, Augustine therefore “sanctified” monsters in medieval Christian lore—a “revolutionary” view, as White calls it, at least as compared to that of some of his classical predecessors, for whom monsters were amoral at best (1991: 30). Monsters existed in reality for Augustine’s theology, and their purpose in God’s plan is to remind us of our sins. For White, this Augustinian view of monsters represents a carryover of the dualistic eschatological vision of early Christianity that assumes a great cosmic drama, a battle between Good and Evil, between God and the Adversary. Such a dualistic moral vision, Manichaean in its polarities, was a logical consequence of the biblical creation story in which God ordered chaos—Tehom, the Deep, the equivalent of the Leviathan of Hebrew lore, and all sea monsters—and in which the talking serpent of the garden of Eden was transformed into a seven-headed dragon in the last days (D. White 1991: 193). But whatever the basis of the thinking, there is an underlying structure of ambivalence about the meaning of monsters and their role in the world, just as there was among the ancients.
Somewhat later, in the early seventh century, the Gothic divine Isidore of Seville takes up Augustine’s ponderings with equal fervor, writing a long taxonomy of monsters in his Etymologiae (622–33). In defining what monsters are, he includes such criteria as “superfluity of body parts,” “composite beings,” and “mixture of human and animal parts” (cited in Williams 1996: 107–8). Like his holy predecessor whom he cites copiously on the subject, he accepts the existence of monsters as proven. And he also regards them as being not outside God’s plan, that is, not “contra naturam,” but part of the intended creation in all its diversity and richness (Wittkower 1942: 168).
To paraphrase Isidore’s declaration here, the monstrous is a contradiction not of nature but of human epistemological categories, “since the Creator’s will is the nature of everything created.” For the pious Isidore as for Augustine, monsters like people derive from God’s creative powers to invent living forms. This procreative force, originating in God’s will, extends to the human ability to know and to classify what it knows, as always, having a purpose, however enigmatic. Thus, no matter how horrifying to human sensibilities, the monstrous being forms part of this semiotic aspect of nature in that, unlike other signs that reflect the intelligible world, the monster “portends,” “points to,” and “demonstrates” the unintelligible world and its mysteries (Williams 1996: 13).
The fragments constituting the Liber were composed by various hands between the mid ninth and early eleventh centuries, probably by both Old English and continental scribes (Butturff 1968: 1–3). The complete title of the scattered work is Liber Monstrorum de Diversi Generibus, or Book of Monsters of Various Kinds. It consists of five tattered manuscripts now residing in museums in Europe. The original text is in Latin, possibly a translation from the European vernaculars. With great earnestness, it addresses a number of questions about nature, God, men, and monsters. It starts out by replying to a hypothetical question:
You have asked about the hidden parts of the earth and if truly there were as many species of monstrous beings as had been reported in the hidden corners of the earth, beyond the deserts, and in islands of Ocean and in the remote hiding places of the furthest mountains. You have desired me specifically to speak of the three earthly genera that strike mankind with the maximum awe and terror. That is, the monstrous progeny of men, the numerous hideous beasts and the hideous species of dragons, snakes and vipers, (cited in Friedman 1981: 150)
The Liber goes on to summarize early medieval wisdom on the subject, borrowing liberally from Isidore and hence from Augustine, and so buttresses a venerable philosophical tradition. The authors of the Liber tell us first that monsters exist in reality as a category or “genus,” in a threefold plan composed of men, animals, and monsters. This last category consists of neither man nor animal, but something morphologically anomalous with traits of both, rather like Mary Douglas’s interstitial anomalies. Subsumed under the heading of monster are curious beasts that are hybrid in shape; polymorphous, uniting many genera; gigantic in size; or with some other kind of prodigious or disgusting physiological deformity that is in itself symbolic of sinful excess or enormity. The Liber then enumerates the defining characteristics of monsters. Reflecting timeless notions about good and evil, these are instructive.
First, emphasizing the paradoxical relation of man and monster, the Liber asserts that the distinguishing characteristic of monsters is in fact their anomalous morphology (Butturff 1968: 24); or else they are the result of men having crossed over into the bestial realm by acting in some animallike way. Such beastly transgressors are then transformed through the power of their innate evil into half-human creatures, that is, monsters. Second, the authors insist that monsters were always geographically distant to civilization, living in border places beyond the pale, “in the dark sea” or in remote and hidden lairs or on mountain peaks, from which they emerge to wreak havoc (Orchard 1995: 111). Rarely seen, monsters are the children of darkness, hidden away, fugitive, remote, exemplars of the dark, the unknown, the alien. As in Beowulf, they are always with us.
Next, as one might expect, the Liber continues the long tradition of seeing monsters as fundamentally hostile to the human race: they are defined as having unprovoked malice toward humans, an “immense hostility” (Butturff 1968: 11), as well as an implacable antagonism to the divine order. And of course, promoting yet another stereotype, the Liber depicts monsters as always being larger than life: they are by definition giants, “monstrously huge.” And their size of course makes them more dangerous and more terrifying. Gigantism is itself regarded in the texts as a form of sinfulness: a challenge to the immensity of God, a double-sided metaphor implying hubris as well as power.
Finally, there is what historian Andy Orchard refers to as a continual “marine metaphor” in describing monsters. The Liber often describes them in terms associated with the ocean, with the vast depths, with watery places and misty marshes. All this of course corresponds to the biblical emphasis on the mysterious Leviathan, another ancient immensity, which stems directly out of the Hebrew tradition of the forms of the unknowable. In the Old Testament, as we saw above, the sea-dwelling Leviathan is the epitome of all the monsters in the sea, just as in the same tradition Behemoth is the epitome of terrestrial monsters and elemental opposites. In the Bible Leviathan is identified usually as the whale, but originally as the dragon in its origin as a sea creature (Williams 1996: 183–86).
The authors of the Book of Monsters were skeptical about classical sources. But they believed in monsters as God’s revelations rather than as wonderful fables or simply metaphors for sin. The patristic tradition begun at the dawn of Christianity was that monsters were “emblems” or signals of God’s plan, an important aspect of Christian eschatology, which can never be fully understood by mere mortals (Butturff 1968: 56). Regardless of proofs of their actual existence, monsters represented a figurative, not a literal truth. Monsters were terrible and evil, of course, but they were also in some mysterious way reflections of divine purpose. In this way they reflect the same moral ambivalence as in the Beowulf-Grendel equation, in which hero and monster are mirror images.
What we encounter, then, in the formative period of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, is a bifurcation in the perception of the Monstrous, reflecting doctrinal and epistemological undercurrents and controversies in Christian cultures of Europe, with marked regional differences, especially between Nordic and Latin. One tradition, common in the south and east of the continent and descended from the thoughts of Augustine, reaching an apogee in Isidore, holds up monsters as revelations or as integral parts of God’s purpose. This revelatory biblical tradition continues—at least in the sense of ascribing an allegorical or metaphorical role to monsters. This is especially true of the Liber Monstrorum, which seems to accept monsters as divinely ordained or in some inscrutable way God’s means of instructing about sin, evil, and righteousness. The writings in this tradition are mainly in Latin, produced by clerics, theologians, and holy men, and retain some of the ancient theories about monstrosity as a portent.
In addition, there is a sense in which this Latin tradition minimizes the opposition between humans and monsters, humanizing the latter, as it were. The difference between monsters and humans—if monsters were, as the biblical tradition would seem to indicate, descended from “one protoplasm” of Adam’s stock—was not so much one of kind as one of degree (D. White 1991: 194). All this leads to what may be called an ecumenical view of monsters: they are pitiful beings, worthy of sympathy, understanding, and rehabilitation. They are our evil twins, yes, but still our kin.
A somewhat contrasting view takes hold in northwestern Europe, possibly because of the Germanic peoples’ later conversion to Christianity and the insecurity of the new religion in those remote places. For these marginal people, monsters symbolized the unmitigated and irredeemable evils associated with unrepentant heathenism, which was still a threat. Conveyed in works written in the vernacular, mainly by poets, and sung before warriors, this tradition is exemplified in the Norse and Teutonic sagas like the Icelandic Edda, the German Niebelungenleid, and Anglo-Saxon epics like Beowulf. Here monstrous humanoids like Grendel are embodiments of evil forces, the implacable enemies of God; they have no meaning in God’s plan other than as mortal enemies to be destroyed. According to medieval historian David Jeffrey (1980: 53), this second tradition continues in the Germanic areas of Europe down to the nineteenth century, as reflected in works on folklore such as the Teutonic Mythology of Jacob Grimm (1882), which discusses monsters, giants, wood-demons, and incubi, all seen as pagan and unalterably evil, opposed to God’s design. Nevertheless, despite the negativity, monsters still have a redemptive role: as foils for the good and the holy, for heroes of the cross who match monsters in ferocity and power. So the difference is perhaps less deep that it appears. In both traditions, as Nietzsche warned, the abyss looks back at those who so bravely peer into it.
In the European later Middle Ages, some other subtle shifts occurred in the appreciation of monsters. Many later medieval churchmen took an acute interest in monstra because these creatures had come to represent a metaphorical realm in which God’s desire to instruct people was most unambiguously manifested in the form of visual objects. Many pious artists in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, like Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughel, and Mathias Grünewald, used ugly creatures as symbols to represent God’s power over nature and His fecund imagination, their canvases teeming with fanciful organisms, half-human, half-animal, all grotesque. Like the Devil, monsters reflect, then, a monitory tendency, a warning to man, and can have positive uses in pointing out human frailty.
“Troop of Furies,” detail, center panel, from The Temptation of St. Anthony, by Hieronymous Bosch (ca.1450–1516). Musee d’Arte, Paolo. Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
Temptation of St. Anthony, detail from Isenheim altarpiece by Mathias Grünewald (1455–1528). Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.
La Caputa degli Angeli ribelli (The Fall of the Rebellious Angels) by Pieter Breughel the Elder (ca.1525–1569), detail. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.
Some medieval thinkers, especially the Christian Neoplatonists (between the tenth and fourteenth centuries) even came to regard monsters as things of value, as instructive, didactic revelations to man from God. In David Williams’s words, these philosophers actually “valorized the grotesque and the monstrous” as evidence of God’s concern for humanity (1996: 108). This viewpoint is evident, for example, in the fifteenth-century work Liber de Monstruosis Huminibus, written by Thomas of Cantimpré (Wittkower 1942: 178).
The fascination with imaginary monsters grew apace in the high Middle Ages. So powerful did it become among common folk that clerics began to include within editions of holy books, including the Bible, long descriptions of monstrous beings and demons that might be encountered by the average churchgoer. Jeffrey (1980: 55–56) quotes one passage from a twelfth-century German book of Genesis enumerating the various demons seen cavorting in the land. It is worth repeating at length:
Some had a head like a dog,
some had their mouth on the chest
and eyes on their shoulders:
these were obliged to do without a head.
Some thought with their ears
(this is strange to hear!)
one kind had a foot
which was big and thick;
he ran swiftly
like and animal in the forest.
One kind gave birth to a child
which walks on all fours like a beast.
Some are marked (garbed) in beautiful colour,
some appear black and disgusting
beyond comparison
—the eyes glowed continuously,
the teeth were angled in the mouth
(and) when they flash them
they (would) frighten the devil.
Similarly did all their offspring
use their teeth as weapons.
Made as they were,
the order of creation must keep them on the outside.
So obsessed were the people of the period with the spiritual meanings inherent in monsters and grotesque deformities—both imaginary and actual birth defects—that many concerned clerics inveighed against the time and energy their congregations were spending upon such idolatry. These pious critics also attacked the artists and the architects who portrayed monstrous forms in churches and in religious art, as for example in the numerous stone figures and proliferating gargoyles that adorned Gothic church facades and interiors. The theologian St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153) wrote an outraged letter to his parishioners in rebuking them for wasting their time contemplating the grotesqueries on church walls instead of paying attention to sermons. These people, he said, “spend the whole day gaping at every detail of these oddities” instead of meditating at their prayers (cited in Mode 1973: 11). “What is that ridiculous monstrosity doing?” he demanded (cited in Nigg 1999: 5). Monsters were becoming too emblematic of a whole age, too much on the mind of good Christians!
Monsters still consumed the Western imagination in the early modern period, even in the heart of Europe. One remarkable example of this enduring fascination in Europe is the magnificent statuary in the so-called Parco dei Mostri, or Park of Monsters, near Bomarzo, Italy, built by the nobleman Vecino Orsini (1523–85) in the mid-sixteenth century (Cresti and Cresti 1998). Also called II Sacro Bosco, or the Sacred Wood, and undoubtedly the first theme park ever created, it contains a set of massive stone sculptures depicting bizarre organic forms, many deriving from classical lore, others from the imagination of the local artists and stonemasons (Bredekamp 1985). One such stone monster represents the Greek manticore, depicted as in the form of a scaly dragon and shown battling not humans, but various animals. Another massive sculpture depicts a giant cannibal head, complete with a cavernous mouth yawning open and a few symbolically gigantic teeth—irresistible as a tourist photo-op for willing victims. It represents the entrance to hell.
By the later Renaissance, however, there occurred another subtle shift in monster lore in Western Europe. Two parallel trends appeared. The first, sparked largely by the discoveries of the New World and other European explorations in distant lands, devoted itself to the contemplation of “monstrous races” thought to exist on the margins of Europe. Examples spawn by “Homo monstrosus” fantasies were such grotesqueries as the Blemmyae, supposedly people with no head and a face on their chests, the Sciapodes, who lived in the antipodes and who had one leg with a gigantic foot; the Cynocephalics, or dog-headed cannibal people in the tropics and in India, and so on (de Waal Malefyt 1968). A kind of proto-anthropology with racist and political overtones, this trend will not concern us here.
The other early modern trend was a growing concern for morphological freaks called “monstrosities” or “prodigies,” that is, real deformities and, notably, grotesque birth defects. This morbid interest gave rise to various pseudo-scientific enterprises, one of which was a rebirth of the discipline of teratology, the study of monstrous births (Fielder 1978), a field that persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. Also a legitimate medical specialty in the nineteenth century was the sister science of teratogeny, the study of monstrous embryology, the word having been coined by Etienne Saint-Hilaire in 1830 (Huet 1993: 108).
Stone fantasy figure of manticore-dragon in the Parco dei Monstri (Park of Monsters), Bomarzo, Italy, mid-sixteenth century. Photo courtesy Lee Stern.
Fascinated by anomalies and errors of nature, people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded physical mutations as signs from God, “legible deformities” (Pender 1996: 148). They were bestial, visible incarnations of the horror of our sins, sent directly by die Almighty to admonish Christians, to, as one late-sixteenth-century French teratological tract put it, “repentance and penitence” (cited in Daston and Park 1998: 189). There is clearly in this fascination an echo of medieval monster worship, with the same ambivalence about the moral status of the deformed object. However, since the “sciences” of teratology and teratogeny concern birth defects rather than imaginary or mythical beings, we will not spend more time on them here. The reader is advised to consult the fine works on this subject by Fiedler (1978), Daston and Park (1998), and Huet (1993).
Perhaps alarmed by all the attention given to monstrous things, real and imaginary, by the late seventeenth century the European churches began to crack down on such imagery in ecclesiastical art and architecture, leading to a kind of temporary suppression, at least as far as official iconography was concerned. Perhaps frustrated by the loss of fanciful creatures as officially sanctioned displacements, many people instead turned their attention at this time to human scapegoats. The most common of these, of course, were witches and, in central Europe, vampires and werewolves, leading in both cases to crazes and mass hysterias. In his study of early modern monster imagery, Gilbert Lascault, while arguing for the universal psychological functions of monsters, notes that, at least officially, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe—the age of Enlightenment—constituted an age “without monsters” (1973: 45). This was perhaps true in the literate culture of the time, except of course for representations of the devil. Perhaps the lack of sanctioned monster lore drove the gullible to other forms of paranoid delusion. No wonder Europe and New England had witch hunts instead!
By the late eighteenth century, however, interest in imaginary beasts revived, spurred to some degree by scientific discoveries such as galvanism and electromagnetism. Literary monsters in particular make a comeback in the Gothic literature of the nineteenth century, led by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Much has been written about these two avatars of monsterhood (see Bann 1994), and I will only add a few relevant observations.
First, it is noteworthy that, like other monsters before and after, both examples of modern monsterdom are morphological hybrids breaching recognized boundaries. The Frankenstein monster is a composite being mixing the dead and living, and Dracula is a cross between human and animal (bat mostly, but sometimes a wolf). Like the historical monsters we have seen, also, both monsters are large in size. Although no giant, Dracula is represented in the novel and films as a tall man when in human form. Furthermore, both are capable of bloody violence against innocents, conceived in each case as inflicting bodily mutilation or eating human flesh. Dracula sucks the blood of his victims, shriveling and depleting them, while Frankenstein, although he does not eat humans, uses his powerful arms to rip people apart.
Frankenstein’s monster. Publicity still from Frankenstein (1931).
The spatial convention is respected in both stories as well. Both creatures dwell in dark border places, from which they launch attacks on ordered society: Transylvania is described in the Stoker novel as the most remote and unexplored spot in Europe, “an imaginary dreamscape (Luciano 1987: 7). The vampire travels from there to bustling London in a casket filled with his native earth. The Frankenstein monster hides in Swiss forests like an animal, ultimately escaping to the most remote place on earth: the Arctic. In addition, Dracula adheres to the temporal fantasy, being the decayed remnant of a prior time (he is described as hundreds of years old, a fossil, a revenant from the time of the Turks). But turning this hoary convention on its head, Frankenstein’s monster is “new”: or at least he has been recently created from dead parts, put together by a spanking new science. Reflecting that curious twisted relationship of man and monster, it is the man, Dr. Frankenstein, who is ancestral (father) to the creature. The relationship, though reversed, is still organic.
Western science has by no means relegated monsters to oblivion. The need to believe still exists, even if it is only temporarily satisfied in fiction and hoax, as in the case of the famous Loch Ness monster. Yet folklore still recognizes the power of nightmare creatures to enter and agitate human affairs from Sweden to Spain. For example, many Russian rural people still believe in the Indrik beast, a violent, earth-shaking giant (Mayor 2000: 76). The analogous Swedish myth of the lindorm (a kind of scaly dragon) stirred Scandinavian blood up to the end of the nineteenth century. Found near Värend in central Sweden, the lindorm was said to be about ten feet long, but specimens of eighteen or twenty feet have been observed, according to Swedish folklorist Hyltén-Cavallius in 1883 (cited in Eberhart 1983: 11). This Grendel-like cryptid was said to be black with a yellow-flamed belly. It had a forked tongue and long, white, shining teeth. It eyes were large and saucer-shaped with a “frightfully wild stare.” The Swedish source continues:
The monster-serpent is fierce and ill-tempered and his strength and pugnacity make him a dangerous enemy. When alarmed he gives off a loud hissing sound. . . . His scaly body is so hard that even a scythe will have little effect on him. During the night he spits forth a poisonous liquid.
Until recently, rural Estonians believed in a water monster that is still summoned up to frighten children. It is described in a recent book on apocryphal beasts as a monstrous, fish-shaped creature of gigantic proportions that walks on feet on land but mostly it inhabits the waters (Rose 2000: 158). The so-called tarasque, a demonic ogre, still haunts the remote rural areas of southern France, scaring the wits out of gullible people, as does its analogue, the tarasca, in northern Spain (Rose 2000: 354). Every year on Corpus Christi, the Catalonians exorcize the tarasca in a festival in which the fire-breathing beast is ritually defeated by the townspeople (Warner 1998: 14)—a matter we will take up in Chapter 9.
In Britain, people still encountered hostile dragons until at least the middle of the seventeenth century. The home of one such beast was Henham, a little village between Bishop’s Stortford and Saffron Waldon in Essex, thirty miles northeast of London. The Henham Dragon made its appearance about a quarter of a mile from the village in 1668, eating cattle and attacking people before it was finally killed by a concerted effort of townspeople. A pamphlet published the following year (1669) entitled, “The Flying Serpent or Strange News Out of Essex,” describes the events as follows:
The first time that he was seen was about the 27 or 28 of May last, a gentleman’s way lying by the place where this serpent keeps his station, as he rid carefully on, expecting to receive no hurt as he intended none, on a sudden this Serpent assailed his horse, affrighting the rider so much with his monstrous proportion and bold courage to give such an onset, that all in a maze he spurred his horse, who almost as much afraid as his master, with winged speed hafted away, glad that they had escaped such an eminent danger.
Being come home he acquaints his friends and neighbours with what he had seen of this monstrous serpent, especially makes it known to a neighbour in whose grounds this serpent doth lurk, wishing him to beware of his cattle, and to use his best indeavour for destroying it, least by protraction of time it might do much mischief when had I wist would be but small comfort to him for the losses he might sustain.
Not long after two men of the same parish walking that way, espied this serpent as he lay on a hillock beaking [basking] himself again in the sun, where they beheld his full proportion, being as near as they could guess 8 or 9 foot long, the smallest part of him about the bigness of a man’s leg, on the middle as big as a man’s thigh, his eyes were very large and piercing, about the bigness of a sheep’s eye, in his mouth he had two row of teeth which appeared to their sight very white and sharp, and on his back he had two wings indifferent large, but not proportionable to the rest of his body, they judging them not to be above two handfuls long, and when spreaded, not to extend from the top of one wing to the utmost end of the other above two foot at the moll [tip], and therefore altogether too weak to carry such an unwieldy body. These men though armed with clubs and staves, yet durst not approach to strike this serpent, neither it seems was the serpent afraid of them, for railing himself upon his breast about the heighth of two foot, he stood looking on them as daring them to the encounter. (<www.henham.org/henham_dragon.htm>)
A contemporary woodcut shows a big, legless creature with a leathery skin and the suggestion of bodily segmentations. The ugly head, carried aloft on a long supple neck, has a rather large single eye and the tail is equipped with the usual broad-arrow shape. A stone carving of the monster is still visible on a pillar of Henham’s parish church (Holiday 1973: 92).
Water creatures are still scaring people in modern-day Britain, and not only the famous Loch Ness monster of Scottish lore. One such preternatural event occurred in another lake in Scotland, in August 1969.
In the early evening, two long-distance truckers, Duncan MacDonnell and William Simpson, both respectable and sober, were returning from a fishing trip up Loch Morar in their motorboat. It had been a warm, sunny day, and the lake was totally calm. MacDonnell was steering when he heard a disturbance from the stern side of the boat and spotted something very large on the surface of the water overtaking the craft. A bare second later he felt an impact as the object struck the boat; the two men naturally ran to see what had hit them.
The boat, stationary now, was lying astern of what appeared to be a huge sea creature, the sight of which frightened the men to the extent that they grabbed a deer rifle and fired it into the thing. At this, it slowly sank out of view. Shaken but unharmed, the men came ashore. Fearing ridicule, neither divulged the episode to the press until the story leaked out a few days later through a third party. The men described the monster as about thirty feet long, the skin being scaly in texture and dirty brown in color. It had three humps standing about eighteen inches above the water line. MacDonnell claimed the thing had a long, flat snake-like head about a foot wide. Interviewed later, Mr. Simpson said “I don’t want to see it again—I was terrified” (Holiday 1973: 179). This is but one of hundreds of water monsters encountered in the British Isles.
Closer to home for Americans, there is the famous story of the Jersey Devil. The story begins in colonial days, around 1735, when a woman living in the small town of Leeds Point in the Pine Barrens of central New Jersey allegedly gave birth to a deformed and grotesque creature. It was said to be a hideous monstrosity, an inhuman thing, with cloven hooves for feet, a horse’s head, bat’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. This weird creature, which was first called the Leeds Devil and only later in the nineteenth century the Jersey Devil, scampered off immediately after birth to haunt the region for centuries to come. Other versions of the monster’s origin have it appearing spontaneously from the wastes of the Pine Barrens or spawned by the Devil himself. People said they could hear it howling in the woods at night, and its appearance was generally thought to be a harbinger of evil.
Things reached a climax for the Devil in 1909, between January 16 and 23. The events of that year are chronicled in a book The Jersey Devil, written in 1976 by two local men, James F. McCloy and Ray Miller. According to the authors, thousands of New Jerseyans saw the Devil or its footprints during that week and testified to the fact. One fairly typical deposition was that of E. W. Minster of Bristol:
As I got up I heard an eerie almost supernatural sound from the direction of the river. ... I looked out upon the Delaware and saw flying diagonally across what appeared to be a large crane, but which was emitting a glow like a fire-fly.
Its head resembled that of a ram, with curled horns, and its long thick neck was thrust forward in flight. It had long thick wings and short legs, the front legs shorter than the hind. Again it uttered its mournful and awful cry—a combination of a squawk and a whistle, beginning very high and piercing and ending very low and hoarse, (cited in D. Cohen 1982: 259)
The next morning the Devil supposedly flew menacingly over the local fire-house and attacked a man in Collingswood and a pet dog in Camden. Accounts of the these events appeared in newspapers across the United States (Coleman and Clark 1999: 120–21)
People continuously afterward found what they took to be the hoof prints of a weird animal in the snow, and the disappearance of chickens and some other larger animals was attributed to the depredations on the Jersey Devil. The legend continued. In December 1933, John Irwin, a summer park ranger in the Wharton State Forest of New Jersey and a respected figure in the community, was patrolling at night when he spotted a large sinister figure approaching him from the woods. According to the ranger’s deposition, it stood on two legs like a human, was well over six feet tall, and had black fur that looked wet and matted. The report later submitted to the state police by Irwin’s superior officer stated that Irwin “sat in his car only a few feet away from the monster. His initial shock soon turned to fear when the creature turned its deer-like head and stared through windshield. But instead of gazing into the bright yellow glow of a deer’s eyes. John found himself the subject of a deep glare from two piercing red eyes.” How closely this description fits the first recorded monster in human history: the bison-man “sorcerer” of Trois-Frères! Not much has changed in 15,000 years of human foibles.
The phenomenon of the Jersey Devil refused to disappear. As late as 1951, this mystery cryptid made another appearance, when a number of local people, mainly teenagers, reported simultaneous sightings in the area around Gibbstown. Farm animals were found dead and disemboweled. On investigation, the local police school authorities denounced the excitement as a mixture of hoax and hysteria (D. Cohen 1982: 259–60).
It has been pointed out that a large group of people still believe in the existence of wondrous beasts in the United States, Canada, and other Western countries. In fact, such inveterate “monster buffs” constitute a large and profitable industry in America, with their own earnest associations and scientific meetings and conventions (D. Cohen 1970:6). All of which brings us to the movies.
Movies are the perfect medium for monsters because of the technology of special effects. The cinema has offered up a ravishing gallery of beasts, demons, extraterrestrials, and apparitions since the first showing of The Golem, a silent film about a Hebrew stone giant rampaging through Prague, directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese in 1919. In its monster heyday, more or less between 1948 and 1962, Hollywood produced over 500 films featuring sci-fi monsters (Luciano 1987: 1), beating out all other genres for sheer quantity—if not quality. The overheated imaginations of script writers and special effects artists ran wild!
Hollywood monsters need no introduction. Everyone has shivered before the likes of King Kong, Nosferatu, Godzilla, all the hideous mutations spawned by atomic radiation, weird invaders from outer space, and so on. Like monsters in literature and folklore, celluloid terrors are routinely hostile to humans and “anthropophagic” (as some film critics have put it) as a matter of course—a plot setting theme rarely questioned (Flusser and Rabkin 1987: viii). Numerous books have explored monster imagery in films, a much-beloved classic being Famous Monsters of Filmland, a three-volume selection of 450 photos of creatures designed to make readers shiver with delight and their flesh crawl with horror.
Rather than reviewing this massive genre, let us briefly consider a few recent paragons of filmic monstrosity. My own favorites are Jaws (1975), directed by Stephen Spielberg from Peter Benchley’s novel; Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott; and Jurassic Park (1993), also a Spielberg film, from the Michael Crichton book. The first involves a monstrous squalus, the second a killer-beast from outer space, the third a nightmare dragon from the distant past. What do the shark, extraterrestrial, and T. rex have in common?
First, again, all are giants. Bursting horribly out after incubation within a man’s stomach, the alien starts out as a tiny, lizard-like marauder, but quickly—supernaturally—grows intimidatingly huge. “It’s big,” one crewmen says fearfully after a few colleagues are slaughtered. The shark in Jaws is presented as over thirty feet long—much bigger than normal great whites, and there are tantalizing references throughout the novel to the mysterious Carcharodon megalodon, the extinct mega-shark paleontologists say may have reached fifty feet or more, providing an added frisson of terror (Andriano 1999: 22). Needing no introduction, the largest carnivore of all time, Tyrannosaurus rex, measures over forty feet in length and has dagger-like teeth six inches long. The inspiration for countless Godzilla-like reincarnations, its sudden appearance in the film at night during a hurricane is overwhelmingly terrifying, a thrilling masterstroke of the filmic genre.
Second, all three brutes are implacably hostile to humans, and their antagonism is only equaled by their ferocity. Third, in terms of morphology, all are “un-natural” composites or mutants: the space alien is depicted as a bizarre cross between a lizard and an insect with some human traits (intelligence); T. rex is of course a reconstructed dinosaur (living and dead matter again); and the shark combines animal savagery with human malice and vengefulness, provoking the taciturn shark-hunter Quint, before being devoured, to comment on its sinister, unnatural intelligence.
Godzilla. Publicity still from Godzilla. King of the Monsters! (1956).
Fourth, all three monsters have primitive traits suggesting an irruption from the distant, evolutionary past. The man-eating shark conjures visions of a Cenozoic predecessor; the alien is some kind of archaic-looking reptile complete with an exoskeleton like an even more primitive invertebrate; and T. rex has been—well—extinct for sixty-five million years.
Fifth, in line with the usual spatial convention, these mega-beasts all lurk in dark, hidden, watery places, bursting out of hiding to wreak havoc. The shark of course, comes from the depths of the sea, but it is also described as attacking in murky waters; the extraterrestrial, drooling continuously from its ferocious maw, emerges from a slimy chiaroscuro nest on some unknown planet where perpetual twilight reigns; and T. rex initially attacks on a stormy night. Moreover, the action in Jurassic Park takes place on a remote Caribbean island. All three creatures therefore have associations with liquid: either water or slime.
Next, there is the familiar motif of eating human flesh. All three monsters are vicious carnivores that eat (or rend) human flesh with gusto. The three films lovingly display grisly remains or dismembered, half-eaten, or disemboweled victims, the horror enhanced by the graphic visuals. Adding to this theme is the scenographic emphasis on yawning mouths, cavernous throats, and bloody teeth, almost as defining features of the monsters. Given the virtuosic flexibility of films, this oral-aggression theme is taken to its imaginative limits. The horribleness of the space alien is compounded by perhaps the most cinematographically imaginative conceit in recent horror films: the retractable mouth-within-a-mouth, a murderous buzz-saw that pops out of the original maw, itself lined with razor-sharp fangs. T. rex of course is little more than a walking mouth lined with dagger-like teeth. Similarly, the monster shark is basically a rampaging mouth with fins.
Last, there are some narrative and emotive similarities. For one thing, although the monsters are all horrible and disgusting, there is, paradoxically, a measure of awe, even reverence about them. Gigantic, relentless, and terrible, the creatures seem to be both superior and inferior to humans. There is in each case as well a subliminal moral element: human wickedness is linked mysteriously but firmly to each monster. In Jaws, the greed of local officials lets the shark feed on swimmers; in Alien, evil multinational corporations protect the creature; and the hubris and venality of a fatuous millionaire are responsible for both the creation and the unleashed chaos of Jurassic Park. And, in each case, through its destructiveness, the unleashed monster instigates the mobilization of the right-minded of the community and its ultimate and redemptive unity.
Horrible monsters have stalked the European imagination since people lived in caves in the Paleolithic, maybe even earlier. Who knows what our Neanderthal predecessors dreamed about? In the Western world, humans and monsters are essentially coterminous. What has changed and what has remained the same?
Today, people no longer regard monsters as their direct lineal ancestors as did the ancients. However, there remains the same close organic relationship between monsters and those who fight them. God made both people and monsters, heroes and demons; so in His eyes we are brothers and sisters. In the divine plan, monsters are still bound up mysteriously with human emotions and with sinfulness, personifying the errors of our ways. In the modern age, as in the cinema, greed and evil behavior (e.g., bad science) either produce monsters or abet monsters in their depredations. So Western monsters still reflect, embody, and thrive on human failings.
Additionally, throughout European history, monsters have always carried with them the whiff of a remote and distant past, either morphologically in an atavistic appearance, or metaphorically through some chronological inversion (e.g., T. rex). So in the same enigmatic way as in ancient Egypt and Greece, monsters are still symbolically ancestral to humanity, dredging into consciousness some deep-seated hint of superseded, archaic times dimly remembered. In the Norse and Anglo-Saxon epics this temporal theme is recapitulated by the notion of Grendel as a holdover from the previous age of pagan depravity. Aggressive and belligerent, these ancient, primitive monsters still challenge our heroism, bringing out the best and the worst in modern humanity.
Other traits have remained virtually unchanged throughout the ages. Monsters still emerge periodically from dark, hidden lairs, often but not always from underwater (after all, what is outer space, but an extension of the unplumbed depths, a disjunctive dimension). Of course monsters still relish mutilating people and feasting on human flesh. Their grim mouths, always lined with fearsome teeth or fangs, have remained the focus of obsessive fears and fantasies for people since antiquity. As Jeffrey Cohen says, “a fascination with monsters, dismemberment, and the materiality of the body is not the invention of late twentieth-century Hollywood,” but goes back eons (1999: 63).
Too, in terms of personal characteristics (if one may so speak about imaginary creatures), monsters in the Western world are still depicted as being instinctively hostile, prone to attack without cause, gratuitously violent. In whatever age, these qualities mean that monsters must be confronted, defeated, above all, engaged if humanity is to survive; monsters are thus peremptory, inescapable, unavoidable, and cannot be ignored. Now let us turn to non-Western societies. We start with aboriginal America, specifically the Indians of central Canada, the land of the fearsome Windigo.
