On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (25 page)

Between four and five o’clock in the morning, Thomas West was casting for salmon when the weight of his submerged net became unaccountably heavy. Thinking he had hit upon a thick school of fish he happily struggled it to the surface, whereupon he drew back in horror. He saw, in the net, “a fiend, not a fish; at the least a monster, not an ordinary creature.” The hefty five-foot creature seemed part giant toad and part man, capable of
gulping with its wide toothy maw for prey, but also able to paddle-swim with humanoid arms. The posterior of the beast terminated with a whalelike tailfin. Here the author of the pamphlet breaks off from the reportage and muses on the history and significance of this toad-fish monster: “Now the coming up of this monster into the fresh river, and so nigh the shore, is more than remarkable (never any of this strange kind ever having been seen by any age before).” One exception, the reporter notes, is that Pliny “the naturalist” did describe something like a monster toad-fish, but the beast lived far under the sea. Pliny “never saw or heard of any taken upon any coast save one, which was in the year that Nero (that never-sufficiently detested tyrant) was born.” Pliny notates this correlation of the toad-fish and Nero by saying “Monstrum praecessit monstro” (an omen precedes the monster). Pliny “plainly divined that its arrival was ominous, as indeed all histories do with constant consent maintain and write, that all unusual births, either in men or brute creatures, in sea or upon land, especially out of their seasons, have ever been the forerunners and sad harbingers of great commotions and tumults in states and kingdoms, if not mournful heralds of utter desolation.” At the end of the pamphlet the author crumbles into a stream of prayers, beseeching the Lord for mercy.

The precise significance of a particular prodigy was often turned to some political purpose. In the Reformation era Catholics and Protestants used monsters to foretell the destruction of their opponents. Martin Luther published a pamphlet in 1523 that discussed a monstrous cow born in Freiburg that year. The calf was born with a thick folded skin around its neck and back, making it appear as if clothed in a monk’s cowl. In addition to a woodcut depiction of the “monk-calf,” Luther’s pamphlet included a woodcut of a “pope-ass” monster (part sea creature, part donkey) supposedly caught in the Tiber River a few years earlier. These monsters were taken to be living symbols of the corruption and eventual decay of the Roman Church. The monk-calf was like a typical Catholic monk: pious and humble on the outside, but base and brutish on the inside.
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Luther claimed that two other monsters, one born without a head and another with inverted feet, constituted omens foreshadowing the death of Frederick the Wise.
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In addition to large-scale social meanings, monsters born of human parents continued to indicate moral or spiritual depravity in the specific kin. Without any medical understanding of madness, a British broadsheet from 1652 demonstrates the way aberrant behavior was punished with
aberrant issue. The sad story of Mary Adams, a resident of Tillingham in Essex, involves her heretical decline into “wickedness.”
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The pregnant woman began to tell her neighbors that she was the Virgin Mary and that “she was conceived with child by the Holy Ghost, and how all the Gospel that had been taught heretofore was false; and that which was in her, she said, was the true Messiah.” Mary’s revelation was very badly received by her neighbors, who quickly had her locked up in jail. When she eventually went into labor, she struggled for eight days and nights in great agony. On the ninth day she delivered “the most ill-shapen monster that ever eyes beheld; which being dead born, they buried it with speed, for it was so loathsome to behold; for it had neither hands nor feet, but claws like a toad in the place where hands should have been, and every part was odious to behold.” “And as for Mary,” the pamphlet continues, “who had named herself to be the Virgin Mary, she rotted and consumed as she lay, being from the head to foot as full of botches, blains, boils, and stinking scabs, as ever one could stand by another.” All this was a terrible lesson, the pamphleteer explained, reminding us to stay committed to the true faith. Mary had been a pious member of her community until she began to fall in with the “heretical” Anabaptists. After associating with these fringe believers in adult baptism, her entire life unraveled to its monstrous end.

In 1636 John Sadler wrote a book titled
The Sick Woman’s Private Looking-Glass
, designed for women who might be worried about giving birth to a monster. In it he gives us evidence of the conceptual turn that was symptomatic of the era, from a spiritual view of monsters to a materialistic view. Sadler begins by reminding his readers that God can punish parents by giving them deformed offspring: “The Divine cause proceeds from the permissive will of God, suffering parents to bring forth such abominations, for their filthie and corrupt affections which are let loose unto wicked-nesse, like brute beasts that have no understanding.” This explains, Sadler continues, why monstrous or otherwise disabled people are not allowed in temples or churches. God does not want monsters to “pollute” his sanctuaries “because the outward deformity of the body is often a signe of the pollution of the heart, as a curse layd upon the child for the parents incon-tinency.” Then Sadler’s discussion makes the naturalistic turn that slowly pivots physicians from the seventeenth century right down to Darwin’s age: “Yet there are many borne depraved which ought not to bee ascribed unto the infirmity of the parents. Let us therefore search out the naturall cause of their generation, which…is either in the matter or in the agent, in the seed or in the wombe.”
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John Sadler is symptomatic of the sea change in monsterology, but the man who is usually credited with rescuing monsters from the melodramatic
arena of spiritual and moral meaning is his predecessor, the French surgeon and scholar Ambroise Paré (1510–1590). His influence was not enough to effect a complete revolution in monsterology, and he himself was highly superstitious, but he paved the way for future medical scientists to study birth anomalies. In the conceptual history of monsters he certainly represents a turn toward the more naturalistic explanation of extraordinary beings.
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Paré’s book
On Monsters and Marvels
took a relatively empirical approach to monsters, preferring the collection and dissection of oddities rather than the pursuit of hearsay natural history. In fact, he had little interest in the traditional taxonomy pursuits of the natural history tradition that I examined in the previous chapter. Monster races like the Blemmyae and Cynocephali were of little interest compared with human monstrosity.

Paré’s
On Monsters
is really a transitional work, steeped in the superstitions of the day but struggling to extricate itself from dead-end research avenues. One finds all the usual ingenuousness about unicorns, sea creatures, and such, but also an attempt to put some monster legends to rest. For example, the incubi and succubi stories reappear in Paré’s work, but now they are reconsidered. Recall that these demonic monsters were thought to lure human men and women into sexual encounters, then steal the male semen and plant it in different women. Paré argues against these legendary monsters in a way that demonstrates his naturalistic approach. He says it is “an absurd thing” to believe that devils can take seed from a man and transport it to a woman to effect a pregnancy: “In order to disprove this empty opinion, I shall say only that seed, which is made of blood and spirit [and] which is apt for reproduction, if transported very little [or slowly], or not at all, is immediately corrupted and altered, and consequently its force is completely extinguished, because the warmth and spirit of the heart and of the whole body is absent from it, so much so that the seed is no longer free of excesses, either in quality or in quantity.”
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The seed must go immediately into the woman or it is useless; this is why men with very large penises are usually sterile, because “the seed, having had to take such a long journey, is already cooled before it is received into the womb.” Other, similar stories (such as the case of the woman who got pregnant from her contaminated bath water, and the case of the woman who got pregnant from semen she retrieved from the ground) are equally disproved. But then Paré scolds the reader with some basic erotic metaphysics: “You must not believe at all that demons or devils who are of a spirit nature can have carnal knowledge of women; for in the execution of that act flesh and blood are required, which spirits do not have….Besides, demons are immortal and eternal; what necessity, then, have they of this
reproduction, since they have no use for offspring, in as much as they [themselves] will always exist.”

Having shown the unreasonableness of such demonic intercourse, Paré offers an explanation of why some people believe they’ve had supernatural sexual encounters. Sometimes a person reclining in repose will feel as if he is “being oppressed and suffocated by some heavy load on his body, and it comes principally at night; the common people say that it is an old woman who is loading down and compressing the body.”
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But Paré explains that this sensory experience with a succubus is nothing more than severe indigestion: “The cause is most often from having drunk and eaten much too vaporous viands, which have caused an indigestion, from which [viands] great vapors have arisen in the brain which fill one’s ventricles, by reason of which the animal faculty—which makes [us] feel and move—is prevented from coming into full luster by the nerves, from which an imaginary suffocation arises, through the lesion which is created as much in the diaphragm as in the lungs and other parts which are used in respiration.” Paré has eliminated the succubi and incubi from the list of real monsters and has relegated them to the realm of misinterpretations.

An even more compelling example of his strategy to reduce supernatural to natural causation can be seen in his analysis of hybrid monsters. Creatures that appear to be half-animal and half-human are not the result of supernatural causation; they are not omens or signs sent to us as coded messages. They are more mundane than that. Paré includes in his book many woodcut images of hybrid monsters: a figure of a child-dog fusion, a goat with a man’s face, a pig with a man’s face and hands, and more. These sad monsters are no mystery, he explains; they are the result of “sodomites and atheists” having sex with animals. These impure humans “join together and break out of their bounds—unnaturally—with animals, and from this are born several hideous monsters that bring great shame to those who look at them or speak of them. Yet, the dishonesty lies in the deed and not in words; and it is, when it is done, a very unfortunate and abominable thing, and a great horror for a man or a woman to mix with or copulate with brute animals; and as a result, some are born half-men and half-animals.”
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Other kinds of monstrous births are similarly naturalized, albeit less scandalously, as products of material causation. Working somewhat systematically, unlike Gesner, Topsell, and other taxonomic list makers, Paré begins with definitions of terms and then proceeds to causes. “Monsters,” he begins, “are things that appear outside the course of Nature…such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary.”
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Notice that, despite
terminology, Paré is not disagreeing with the much earlier theological naturalism laid down by Isidore of Seville, for he is stating only that monsters deviate from the norm. Well beyond the abnormalities of monsters, however, are the “marvels” and “prodigies”: “Marvels are things which happen that are completely against Nature as when a woman will give birth to a serpent, or to a dog.” In other words, even the barriers of taxonomic kinds are violated or transgressed. Throughout the book, when Paré describes and discusses these marvels he usually turns to “historical” tales and reports rather than rely on firsthand experience. He further distinguishes monsters and marvels from “maimed persons,” “the blind, the one-eyed, the humpbacked, those who limp or [those] having six-digits on the hand or the feet…or any other thing that is against Nature.” Notice the strangeness of this category, which contains both congenital defects and accidental wounds. Paré’s logic here cannot be entirely appreciated, because he mentions the maimed only briefly and focuses instead on monsters and marvels.

His list of the
causes
of monsters demonstrates his historical cusp status, at once progressive and enlightened but also backward and uncritical. “There are several things,” he says, “that cause monsters.”

The first is the glory of God.

The second, his wrath.

The third, too great a quantity of seed.
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The fourth, too little a quantity.

The fifth, the imagination.

The sixth, the narrowness or smallness of the womb.

The seventh, the indecent posture of the mother, as when, being pregnant, she has sat too long with her legs crossed, or pressed against her womb.

The eighth, through a fall, or blows struck against the womb of the mother, being with child.

The ninth, through hereditary or accidental illness.

The tenth, through rotten or corrupt seed.

The twelfth, through the artifice of wicked spital beggars.

The thirteenth, through Demons and Devils.
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