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tags: Teratology
The constitution of the monster implies that taboos have been transgressed to promote adventures into the realm of impossible possibilities… It is an evasion at once liberating and intoxicating, lifting from life all barriers confining the species. And so, the monstrous is exciting - Jean Brun “Le Prestige du monstre”
Why Study Monsters?
The dream of reason produces monsters - Francisco Goya
The mind needs monsters.
In NYS the Iroquois are still bedeviled by malignant creatures called “stone giants.” These are powerful demons, half-human in shape. They lie in wait in dense forests, where, protected from human weapons by the skin of their impenetrable slate, they eat hapless hunters.
~ Like many comparable monsters in belief systems, they live at the periphery of the people’s universe.
There is a widespread archetype of pond or lake demons. Without the slightest possibility of cultural diffusion, identical ideas of monster appear among disconnected peoples, revealing some deep human thread.
Thought
Human thread (in completion of an unknown), but maybe also a human thread that is related to common environmental influence (earth matters, such as a death at a lake).
Must seek an example of a monster that is not “endemic” to a location as predicted. Like a mountain beast in a desert community, or a water spirit communicated through the legend there. A forest being too where trees do not grow.
In the west, because of the everyday presence of monsters in popular culture, we tend to take them for granted while not believing in their actual existence. We rarely stop to consider their meaning, and the meaning of their appeal.
Monsters are important to study as they figure prominently in folklore.
Don Quixote battles windmills he mistakes for giant ogres of medieval romance.
The idea of monster springs up from the same aesthetic-intellectual impulse that gave rise to civilization itself. Aside from figures in European cave are, the first unequivocal and identifiable monsters are to be found in dynastic Egypt and Mesopotamia. Monsters arise with civilization and with human self-consciousness.
What is a monster?
The text will confine the usage to supernatural, mythical, or magical products of the imagination.
Ruth Waterhouse’s paradigm of the Monstrous
- large and deformed, with a quality of inherent evil
- wickedness towards humans Joseph Adriano
- dangerous objects of fear, with this fear including the primal fear of being eaten.
- bigness
- physical grotesqueness
- malice Joseph Campbell
- some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct
- exhibit morphological oddity, such as the joining of unnatural forms that are weird and shock. Hybridization or reshuffled familiarity.
We define a “monster” as a new shape resulting from a combination - usual in visual form, but sometimes only in words - of characteristic components
Etymology - literary interest in monsters begins with the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle, who wrote extensively about them in The Generation of Animals. The word he used for abnormal creatures is teras, meaning a warning or portent. Teratology was the biological study of organic malformations, freaks, and anomalous births. Monster derives from the Latin monstrum which stems from a prodigy or portent, stemming from meaning to show or warn.
How to Approach Monsters
Western observe the monster as a metaphor for all that must be repudiated by the human spirit. It embodies the existential threat, chaos and negativism that symbolize destructiveness to order and progress. But this also give the monster awe-inspiring, and admirable in a perverse way due to their breaking of rules and doing what only humans can dream to do.
The ritual of a monster rel:Survey of Shadows
- 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.
By being inexplicable, monsters not only physically but cognitively threaten: they undermine basic understandings and expose radical permeability and artificially of all our classifactory boundaries, highlighting the arbitrariness and fragility of culture.
Monsters also free humans from their day-to-day location in the world of common sense. The weird recombinants permit visionary experiences and insights into both the world and the self.
Monsters in the West - The Ancient World
Monsters provided a way of rationalizing the forces of nature that threatened them.
There are some ambiguous and symbolic nature to cave drawings. Leroi-Gourhan believes they represent the first evidence of the metaphysical side human imagination. In the French caves many composite figures exist, having a base of a human body attached to animal appendages like antler and horns. Some have animal heads, or an animal snout.
Thought
Are some instances of these costume? Presently we wear masks of monsters. This is actually our main form of physically approaching actual monsters.
How can I tell a costume (a man being a monster) from a monster? Why is the man always putting on the costume to become a monster?
The “sorcerer” of Trois-Feres cave
Possibly they represented some kind of primitive hunting magic or pictoform propitiation. But despite the acknowledged ambiguity of form and function, the beast of Trois-Freres shows that imaginary beings combining human and animal elements are among the concepts to be rendered from human consciousness as visual notations.
Monsters are more than incidental in the rise of literate culture, and monsters have a critical role in the rise of civilization itself.
Egyptian Sphinxes, a composite of a woman’s head atop a melange of dagerous animal parts. In ancient times there were multiple types of sphinxes, each with variants of the melange.
- hierocosphinx - hawk-head lion
- androsphinx - a lion with a human head
- criosphinx - a ram-headed lion
narrative of man-versus-monster, the universal “combat-myth” of civilization’s origins, such a vision underlies each and every ancient civilization as a cosmological starting-point.
Amun. He is represented in Egyptian myth as a monster with a lion’s body, the hindquarters of a hippo and a crocodile’s head. Called the “devourer of the dead” he ate the hearts of all those who were judged unworthy at the final judgement.
Mesopotamian Monsters Marduk was the hero god that held off all those host of chaos monsters who were hostile towards mankind, and Mesopotamian cultures.
Principal in his enemies was Tiamat, a female monster and the living spirit of primeval chaos. She starts off as a creator-goddess, but in later texts she is portrayed as a composite behemoth rather like the Egyptian Apophis, with a scaly reptilian body, bird’s legs and talons and the horns of a bull.
Hebrews had Leviathan and Behemoth, one a sea monster and the other terrestrial. The Hebrew bible says
Behold now behemoth, which I am made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in the loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar; this sinews of his stones are together. His bones are like strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron.
God made Behemoth for unfathomable purrpose. Hebrew b’hemah means “beast.”
And in that day will two monsters be separated, a female named Leviathan to dwell in the abyss over the fountains of water. But the male is called Behemoth which occupies with his breasts an immeasurable desert named Dendain.
Shared traits
The great heroes are all alike - monster slaying, world-saving and braver and stronger than ordinary men.
No matter how grotesque the monsters are there is an ambiguous organic link we see. Virtually all ancient monster-enemies of mankind are primordial ancestors, conceived of as mothers or fathers or both, parental figures who stand in a tormented relationship with the younger generation who overcome them.
The Basilisk - as from Pliny in Natural History
It routs all snakes with its hiss, and does not move its body forward in manifold coils like other snakes but advancing its middle raised high. It kills bushes not only by its touch by also by its breath, scorches up grass and bursts rocks. Its effect on other animals is disastrous: it is believed that once one was killed with a spear by man on horseback and the infection rising through the spear not only killed the rider but the horse. Yet to a creature so marvelous as this - indeed kings have often wished to see a specimen when safely dead - the venom of weasels is fatal: so fixed is the decree of nature that nothing shall be without its match.
Many Greek authors wrote copiously about the monsters, not dismissing them as silly fables. Most authorities corroborated their existence with whatever evidence they could muster.
Early philosopher Empedocles wrote at length deploring the literal belief of myths and folktales amongst his countrymen. Yet in one passage of his surviving works he discusses the existence of these creatures, and decides they are are or were quite real. He writes in the infancy of humanity nature brought forth all manner of weird hybrids endowed with shapes wondrous to behold. He accepted all monster stories as real, yet disputed Olympian myths of gods and derring-do.
Classicist Adrienne Mayor describes huge bones of extinct mega-animals would be visible to the naked eye, sticking out of promontories and quarries. Since these could not be identified they were taken as monstrous evidence.
The Christian Era
Dreams and Beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Patristic fathers in the first few centuries after Christ tended to accept that monsters did exist in reality and viewed them as essentially evil, sworn enemies of God, and in light of Christian eschatology, as descendants of Cain or emissaries of the Devil, remnants of pagan sin that had been wiped out by warriors of the cross.
But the question remained of why God tolerated monsters.
JRR Tolkein wrote “The Monsters and the Critics” paper. He explored 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 like in Beowulf. He compares moral and thematic position of Grendel to that of Cyclops.
In both poems, the culture heroes battle ogres, foes are evil creatures. But there are differences in personification.
Grendel
Grendel: Once upon a time Grendel lived with his mother in a misty marsh. At night he emerges to devour subjects of the Danish prince Hrothgar. Variously described as shadow-walker, “death shadow”, “grim demon”, Grendel is portrayed as a half-human of superhuman strength. The physical form is still vague, making his menace even more dreadful.
Unable to cope, Hrothgar calls champion Beowulf to the rescue, Beowulf being the kind of the Geats, a Germanic tribe living in what is now Sweden. Accepting the challenge, Beowulf crosses stormy seas. After many bloody battles, he destroys Grendel, ripping it apart and hanging the bloody remains on the banquet hall, avenging the monster’s many dismemberments. Grendel’s mother attacks, they fight underwater, and he ceremonially decapitates her body.
Towards the end of his life, Beowulf attacks a wyrm, dragon which menaces his kingdom. He is mortally wounded and borne off into a warrior’s bier of honor where he enters the legends of his people as a hero of the highest renown.
Cyclops
On the surface the story is presented similarly. Polyphemus is presented in the same metaphorical terms as Grendel. He captures shipwrecked sailors, and eats them one by one, saving Odysseus for last. Odysseus is able to trick the Cyclops into getting drunk and he strikes his single eye with a sharpened stake, allowing him to escape.
Polyphemus is a typical monster, but is himself god-begotten and under divine protection, being son of the sea god Poseidon. Grendel though is a member of the family of Cain “whom the creator had outlawed as outcasts.”
Why does god tolerate the existence of such fiends in the first place. Or were all these monsters just a figment of poetic imagination, a literary device to assist in pious devotion. Did the people of the time really believe them as ontological realities that god tolerated?
Recent Modern Monsters
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 Jersey Devil - 1735 a woman living in the small town of Leeds Point in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey gave birth the a deformed and grotesque creature. It was a monstrous thing with cloven hooves, a horse head, bat’s wings and a serpent’s tail. First called the Leed’s Devil, it scampered off and came to haunt the region for years to come. Other origins have it spawning out of waste in the Pine Barrens or spawned by the devil himself.
Wendigo
Lurks in the backlands of central Canada, with name roots stemming from “one who lives alone.” It crashes through the woods and within its hideous, malformed body is a pitiless block of ice where a heart should beat.
He lacks lips, so hungry for flesh that he has eaten them off. His breath is foul and from his gruesome maw produces rows of jagged teeth, making a hissing that rivals windstorms and can be audible for miles around. His eyes are yellow and protuberant like that of an owl but bigger and roll in blood.
He can only be dispatched by melting his frozen heart. Some variants are made fully of ice, or internal organs are all of ice.
Going windigo
A human being can be possessed by the spirit of the monster, and becomes prone to cannibalistic urges. For the Cree Indians, they are say most Windigos were just ordinary people who went bad.
There is a culture-bound disorder called “Windigo psychosis” whose symptoms are anorexia, vomiting, insomnia, and melancholic withdrawal into oneself. Indians feel they can be cured during initial stages but further stages are characterized by perceptual distortions causing the victim to see other persons as edible. When in the violent stage the afflicted person must be killed by the community itself, and burned to melt their icy heart and forestall resurrection.
Common Features of American Monsters
All new world monsters are violent cannibals. American Bogeys are large enough and bizarre enough to be frightening only by their appearance, which like the Grendel is often mysteriously indistinct or bizarrely changeful. They are anticultural and respect no rules, or behavioral limits. Finally they all have borderline qualities, inhabiting the land between the human and the animal, the known and the unknown, wilderness and civilization.
NOTE
Text goes onto various region specific monsters.
Our Monsters, Ourselves
What seest thou else in the dark backward of abysm of time? - Shakespeare
Gigantism
Webster dictionary gave as a primary definition of monster anything of “enormous or extraordinary size”. Yet physical enormity is not semantically implicit in the English word, which originates from roots meaning sign or portent.
Thought
I’m seeing this more like monstrous, which I can see carrying the scale sense.
Malevolent Maws
The emphasis on the colossal mouth as an organ of predation and destruction.
Cannibalism
Monsters are man-eaters.
Hybrids
Piaget says that such freewheeling unconstrained mental operations as creating imaginary monsters provide Spielraum, an imaginary play-space in which young people can experiment with revolutionary ideas and images, or as Erik Erikson as put it a means to infuse reality with imaginative potentiality. As Bruno Bettelheim has said, this form of creative mental play permits children to give their anxieties a “tangible form” that then can be distanced and defeated.