On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (11 page)

When Jason learns that his children have been murdered, he explicitly demotes Medea from the normal human status of woman. In a passage that tellingly synthesizes her foreign, non-Greek ethnicity with her abominable actions, he says, “When you married me and bore my children, in your lust for sex and our marriage bed, you killed them. No woman from Greece would dare to do this, but I chose you as my wife above them all, and that has proved to be a hateful marriage—it has destroyed me. You’re not a woman. You’re a she-lion. Your nature is more bestial than Scylla, the Tuscan monster.”
¹⁰

One of the central themes of the play is the idea that forces exist within us that are fundamental to our psyche but also alien to our rational self-identity. The classicist E. R. Dodds argues that the ancients understood this uncontrollable internal force as a literal demonic spirit, and it only slowly came to be identified with natural rather than supernatural emotions.
Just as in my earlier discussion of morphological monsters, however, the sequence of beliefs did not traverse a simple upward path of antisuper-stitious enlightenment. Rather, belief in demon possession alternated in seriousness from one age to the next. Dodds points out, for example, that “people in the
Odyssey …
attribute many events in their lives, both mental and physical, to the agency of anonymous daemons; we get the impression, however, that they do not always mean it very seriously.”
¹¹
But then the much later
Oresteia
trilogy of Aeschylus (525–456
BCE
) is populated by a more abundant and seemingly literal host of meddling demons, “more persistent, more insidious, more sinister.” By the time we get to Euripides’
Medea
we have a pluralistic expression of natural and supernatural demons at work within the human breast. The Greek mind allows for the possibility, at this time, that a demon can actually use Medea’s thumos to kill her children: the literal and figurative expressions of thumos are not mutually exclusive. It is like the case of the hermaphrodite or the abnormal ram’s horn: they may be both natural results of “too much matter” (or developmental blockages or what have you) and also portents or messages with more cosmic meaning. Socrates championed antisuperstitious rationalism on most issues, but also claimed to have regular consultations with an internal helpful demon (
daimon
). During these episodes of possession, he would stand quite motionless and seem altogether absent, leaving modern scholars to speculate about the possibility of epilepsy.

Much later Freud would offer a psychological bridge in the form of
projection
to connect the mysterious external world of spirits with the mysterious internal world of passions. In
Totem and Taboo
Freud claims that “spirits and demons were nothing but the projections of primitive man’s emotional impulses; he personified the things he endowed with affects, populated the world with them and then rediscovered his inner psychic processes outside himself.”
¹²
In an important sense the objectification of volitions is entirely understandable when the boundaries of inner and outer have not yet been defined.

The important point in all this is that the ancients were trying to work out a language and a way of thinking about internal forces, usually monstrous, sometimes benign. There are things inside us that raise their ugly heads during crisis points in our lives. As Dodds puts it, they “are not truly part of the self, since they are not within man’s conscious control; they are endowed with a life and energy of their own, and so can force a man, as it were from the outside, into conduct foreign to him.”

The aspect of this ancient demonology that is harder for us to grasp in our own age is that the demons who populate our internal and external world are not just spirits from another copresent dimension that
occasionally step into our lives to wreak havoc. These certainly do exist for the ancients, but demons are also
created
by our own misdeeds. They do not just come from a realm of spectator spirits who are watching our behaviors and dispatching just deserts accordingly. Jason makes it clear that Medea has actually created an avenging fury by her own deeds.
¹³
First she betrays her father and kills her brother; this creates a demon searching for blood vengeance. But this vengeance, in the form of the now slaughtered sons, has struck at
Jason
as well as her.
¹⁴
Now Jason curses Medea with another source of trouble: “May the avenging Fury of our children destroy you— may you find blood justice.” Uncontrollable forces inside us cause us to murder and misbehave, and the misdeeds cause more uncontrollable forces to return to us like karmic consequences.

For the more educated members of Euripides’audience (Anaxagoras and even Plato were overlapping contemporaries of Euripides), the demonic forces were internalized and identified with psychological faculties such as thumos. Monsters may be harassing us from the external world, but now we must recognize that our own desires and emotions are harassing us from inside as well. Plato’s theory of the tripartite psyche may be applied to
Medea
in the sense that even when she
knows
right from wrong (rationality) she is unable to fight the urge for revenge because her thumos has never been properly trained to submit to reason’s authority.
¹⁵

The response to this realization of internal monsters is not asceticism and denial of our emotional lives. By and large, Greeks and Romans did not recommend the kind of cave-dwelling yogic responses to desire that their Eastern contemporaries advocated. Thumos, the locus of our passions, was considered more like a blind force, spontaneous and powerful, capable of energizing good deeds but also evil ones if the vitality was aimed in the wrong direction. Another of Plato’s metaphors for thumos, besides the lion, is the dog.
¹⁶
This is because the dog can be very aggressive with its enemies but gentle and protective of its own clan, including its master. Dogs embody thumos because they are spirited and dangerous but also
loyal
if well trained. The challenge for the ancients was not to renounce one’s inner dog, but to cultivate its love for its master (reason). In that way, our chances of becoming Medea-like monsters could be diminished. If passion goes untrained it can become the force that drives one to murder one’s children, but it is this same spirited part of our psyche that, if properly trained, makes good mothers protect their children when threatened and drives the courageous acts of warriors who, like Alexander demonstrating monster-killing techniques, protect their comrades, their families, and their countries. It may be appropriate to become
beastly
in some circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we have to become
monsters
.

There is an ongoing debate from the Hellenistic era through the early Roman Empire about how much power to accede to passion. Are we really powerless in the face of such monstrous inner drives, or is this just a weak and cowardly characterization built by snivelers who refuse to master themselves? The former Roman slave and Greek Stoic Epictetus (50–130
CE
) argued that Medea was not really divided between rational and irrational forces; she may have been pushed and pulled by conflicting impulses, but she could have adapted to things beyond her control. Understanding what is in our control (a rather finite inventory) and what is
not
(a significantly bigger list) and adjusting our emotions accordingly is the basic philosophy of Stoicism.

The classicist Julia Annas characterizes the Stoic interpretation of Medea thus: “We say, Medea could not help acting as she did; she was overcome by passion, so surely she had no real choice. No, says Epictetus; she thought she had no real alternative, but this was wrong. She could have adjusted to her loss, difficult though this would be. ‘Stop wanting your husband, and nothing you want will fail to come about,’ he says. Everything I do, I am responsible for; there is always something else, I could have done, some other attitude I could have taken up.”
¹⁷
One cannot accuse Epictetus, who suffered many hardships as a slave, of being out of touch with the anguish of thwarted desire. He must have known it well.

The Stoic consideration leaves us with a good ending point for reflection. It is interesting to notice that while the ancients had sophisticated ideas about the
structure
of the psyche (reason, passion, and appetite) and also had nuanced theories about
developmental
psychology, they had little in their ideas of human monstrosity about the role of bad luck.
¹⁸
This point is all the more striking when our own age is dominated by a commitment to the idea that human monsters are made that way by childhood experiences, experiences that they are not responsible for. Amid the explanations of Euripides’ karmic demon possession, Plato’s untutored thumos, and Epictetus’s Stoic theory, one wants to ask, What about the bad stuff that just happens to you? Susan Smith, a modern-day Medea who murdered her own children in 1994, was brutally and regularly molested by her stepfather while growing up. America’s first female serial murderer, Aileen Wuornos (subject of the Hollywood film titled simply
Monster
, 2003), also suffered a childhood filled with physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Many other murderers whose special brand of sadism invokes the “monster” epithet have been victims of terrible violence early in life. It has become simple common sense to immediately ask after the childhood of a criminal the moment we hear about his or her heinous infamy. But that was not the question first on the minds of the ancients.

There was not a big conceptual or cultural space in the ancient world for “victim monsters,” people who might be excused from some portion of responsibility or agency. The Stoic response most clearly undermines any victim status of a monster by claiming that even the most abused individual still has power over the fates by dint of rational freedom. According to the Stoics, when you can no longer master yourself, your external world or your internal urges, you still have the gift of suicide.

In his essay “On the Proper Time to Slip the Cable” (in
Epistulae Morales
, epistle 70), Seneca considers it a great consolation that Nature “allowed to us one entrance in life, but many exits.” He offers several examples of men who avoided extreme “victimhood” (torture and abuse) by freely choosing their own death. In a rare acknowledgment of barbarian nobility, Seneca tells of a German slave who was being forced against his will into a gladiator contest. Rather than allowing someone else (or the unfriendly Fates) to choose his destiny for him, he elected to “slip the cable.” Seneca writes, “He withdrew in order to relieve himself,—the only thing which he was allowed to do in secret and without the presence of a guard. While so engaged, he seized the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses, and stuffed it, just as it was, down his throat; thus he blocked up his windpipe, and choked the breath from his body. That was truly to insult death!” Seneca follows this with several other nauseating paeans to self-determination, leaving readers feeling positively embarrassed about their own misfortunes and received slights.

Though it is hard to welcome suicide in our current paradigm of thinking, it is nonetheless true that many ancients recommended suicide as a dignified alternative to extreme cases of victimization. No matter how bad things get, you can still slip the cable and avoid both the abuses of a monster and also becoming a monster yourself. It was a way to restore one’s humanity in the face of dehumanization. Admittedly, this is cold comfort. But it’s interesting that some ancients contemplated their fears of external and internal monsters so carefully as to rejoice in their discovery of the ultimate escape.
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And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind
.
BOOK OF ENOCH

I
N THE ANCIENT POLYTHEISTIC WORLD
, monsters were like free agents. Neither the gods nor the monsters were omnipotent, so they fought indefinitely, with humans in the middle. When a person was set upon by overwhelming forces that brought death and terror into his family or village, he appealed to the gods for help. Gods and monsters existed equally in a counteracting, dualistic relationship. But when monotheism became the dominant premise of religious culture, monsters had to be brought under the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God. Monsters needed to be explained within the idea of a universal creator God who presumably created frightening beasts, deformities, and demons, too, or at least let them exist. Monsters became intertwined with the theological question, Why did God create evil? As the religion scholar Timothy K. Beal suggests, monsters became intimately bound up with the theodicy problem: “Who is more monstrous, the creatures who must live through this vale of tears, or the creature who put them here?”
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One of the ways monsters were recast was as God’s lackeys. Monsters threatened human health and happiness, but at God’s bidding; that is to
say, the suffering they inflicted was morally justified by a new concept of a unitary personal God. Satan’s experiment with the righteous Job may be the most obvious case of
local
evil taking place in a mitigating context of
global
divine goodness.
²
Satan tells God that the happy and pious Job is only righteous because he is so prosperous. So, in a game to test this hypothesis, with God’s consent Satan destroys Job’s money, property, children, and health, leaving him a highly confused, mere husk of his former self. God eventually tells Job that humans cannot understand the world as God does and therefore should not try to judge it. God alone is king of all and does not need to answer to his creation. Then God restores Job to even greater wealth, giving him ten new children and extending his life for 140 more years.