On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (5 page)

The story of Alexander’s monster battle at the sweet water lake may be wholly invented by ancient writers, or it may be partially true with significant embellishments. Psychologists have identified a common human tendency to unconsciously exaggerate perceptions. These misperceptions are heavily influenced by our subjective emotional and cognitive states. People who are startled to discover a burglar in their home, for example, usually report the size of the intruder as much larger than he actually is. The cognitive scientist Dennis R. Proffitt has amassed significant empirical data that demonstrate the tendency of those afraid of heights to actually see a greater distance between themselves and the ground. We don’t need science to deliver up commonly understood truths, but scientific validation is helpful. Proffitt speculates that perceptual exaggeration of spatial distances probably evolved as a safeguard to promote caution and prevent recklessness when our ancestors engaged in climbing activities. “With respect to fear of falling,” he explains, “…the perceptual exaggeration of steep hills
and high places increases their apparent threat, and thereby promotes caution and its adaptive advantage.”
⁵
Applying this Darwinian notion to our perception of monsters, it seems useful for humans to see a creature as more dangerous than it truly is.

The creatures described in Alexander’s letter may have been real exotic animals, such as cobras and rhinoceroses, which were then multiplied and enlarged by fear-filled misperceptions. Add to this misperception the embellishments of self-report (e.g., the fisherman’s syndrome of magnifying the dimensions of the one that got away) and you have a recipe for a fantastic monster story.
⁶

Regardless of the veracity of Alexander’s description, the symbolic nature of the story is provocative. Among other things, the narrative is a testament to masculine stereotypes of courage and resilience. Wherever we find monsters, there, too, we also find heroes. The Macedonians were intensely afraid to be in such uncharted territory, then wave after relentless wave of dangerous attack came at them from out of the jungle. Yet though they took losses and even occasionally waned in commitment, they ultimately stood their ground against inhuman enemies. It’s a manly story of virile strength and valor. When dawn finally broke at the sweet water lake, Alexander reminded his worn-out soldiers “to be brave and not to give up in adversity like women.”

The travelers’ stories of encounters with exotica are certainly filled with wonder, but they are equal parts fight stories, demonstrations and justifications of martial masculinity. According to this view, the exotic world is not benign, and we must make our way defensively and aggressively. Monsters live with the barbarians, and indeed are the most extreme form of barbarian. One cannot meet them with rational persuasion because they lack the proper faculties, nor can the arts of diplomacy pave a road to compromise.

There is a lesson in such monster stories as Alexander’s victory at the sweet water lake. Each of us will eventually encounter some awful obstacles in life, obstacles that will make us want to lie down, give up, or go away. The lesson is: don’t.

As we will see in the discussion of
Beowulf
in
part II
, in our more liberal intellectual culture macho monster fights have become a quaint genre of outmoded heroics. After all, why must
men
, who cause these aggression problems in the first place, go around slaying dragons? The monster-killing man has become a bit of a joke, trivialized by the ivory tower as too obvious. Hollywood, however, continues to understand this feature of the
monster story very well. In 2007 Will Smith starred in a film version of Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi classic
I Am Legend
, playing the vampire-slaying last man in New York City. In 2005 Steven Spielberg’s remake of H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
pitched Tom Cruise against the bloodsucking aliens from a distant planet. Or consider M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 blockbuster
Signs
, with Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix fighting off the invading aliens. All these films portrayed the monster killers as fathers, family men forced to extremes to protect their children. As Robert Neville (Will Smith) in
I Am Legend
tells his daughter, “Don’t worry, Daddy’s going to take away the monsters.” This may seem trivial, obvious, and even naïve to the cynical cognoscenti, but what father hasn’t felt this same impulse deep in his bones?

Contrary to the narrative of early twentieth-century anthropology, early humans were probably not bold, assertive predators, marching confidently through the savanna to spear their threatening competitors. Male aggression, we were told, was put to good use in the realm of the hunt and of course in primitive warfare. This kind of domination and mastery of the field was helped along by some burgeoning brain power, but such domination of the other animals led to much further cognitive and cultural progress. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book
Blood Rites
, surveys more recent anthropology and corrects the old story. We should not think about “man the hunter” in Paleolithic times, she writes, but “man the hunted.” She reminds us that humans are fragile creatures: “Our biology is alone enough to suggest an alarming level of vulnerability to the exceptionally hungry or casual prowler.”
⁷
If we are to infer some aspects of human psychology from the evolutionary environment in which they developed, than we had better get an accurate picture of that environment and our status in it. Early humans were not uber predators but scavengers, waiting in the bushes to sneak in and pilfer morsels. It doesn’t occur to us anymore to factor in the huge role that big cats, for example, must have played in the cognitive, emotional, and imaginative lives of our progenitors, but we were constantly harassed and victimized by them. Moreover, even in recent history, when the numbers of such predators are way down, a staggering number of deaths from lions, tigers, crocodiles, and wolves have been chronicled. “The British,” Ehrenreich reports, “started recording the numbers of humans lost to tigers [on the Indian subcontinent] in 1800, and found that by the end of the century, approximately three hundred thousand people had been killed, along with 6 to 10 million farm animals.” Though it may seem a remote possibility to us now, during the formation of the human brain the fear of being grabbed by sharp claws, dragged into a dark hole, and eaten alive was not an abstraction.

Men tend to respond to fear and vulnerability with aggression. The philosopher Harvey Mansfield writes, “Men have aggression to spare; they keep it in stock so as to have it ready when it is needed and even, or especially, when it is unneeded and unwanted.”
⁸
Before men ever fought for honor or economic gain or even turf they must have fought for their own children and mates. Monsters, both real and imagined, are bound up with our feelings of insecurity and our responses to those anxieties. Masculine audacity and bravado is the reflex response to vulnerability.

This universal paternal impulse to protect and use whatever aggression is necessary is rehearsed again in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel
The Road
. McCarthy gives us a powerful story about a father trying to protect his son in a postapocalyptic world of roaming cannibals. The father must safeguard his son, lest he become a captive catamite slave whose limbs are harvested by cannibal monsters. Among other things, it is an allegorical story about the need to shelter the good, which is fragile, from the monstrous world.

To a young boy, monsters are exciting and alluring. They are invoked daily as the imaginary foes of the playground. Anyone, I think, who has raised a boy gets this point. When that boy becomes a man, however, he feels keenly, rightly or wrongly, that monsters have become his responsibility, part of his job.
⁹

Creations at which to marvel
.
PLINY THE ELDER

I
N ALEXANDER’S ADMITTEDLY SEXIST PEP TALK
to his troops, we have an expression of a perennial attitude toward exotic creatures, peoples, and lands. Imperialist campaigns like Alexander’s are not for traipsing through strange lands to collect aesthetic oddities and make friends with strangers. They are for coming to subdue, exploit, and civilize the savage world.

Monsters seem to represent the most extreme personified point of unfamiliarity; they push our sense of abnormality beyond the usual anthropological xenophobia. People with customs different from ours are weird, but perhaps different skin colors are weirder still, and people with a dog’s head and headless people with a mouth in their chest, well… Animals are similarly conceptualized on a continuum of strangeness: first, nonnative species, then familiar beasts with unfamiliar sizes or modified body parts, then hybrids of surprising combination, and finally, at the furthest margins, shape-shifters and indescribable creatures.

In Homer’s
Odyssey
, Odysseus and twelve of his men became trapped in a cave with a giant Cyclops named Polyphemus. “He was a horrid creature,” Odysseus informs us, “not like a human being at all, but resembling rather some crag that stands out boldly against the sky on the top of a high mountain.”
¹
Odysseus at first tries to do some fast talking, but the Cyclops is not moved to mercy and breaks off discussion abruptly. Odysseus reports, “With a sudden clutch he gripped up two of my men
at once and dashed them down upon the ground as though they had been puppies. Their brains were splashed upon the ground, and the earth was wet with their blood. Then he tore them limb from limb and dined upon them. He gobbled them up like a lion in the wilderness, flesh, bones, marrow, and entrails, without leaving anything uneaten. As for us, we wept and lifted up our hands to heaven on seeing such a horrid sight, for we did not know what else to do.”
²

Monsters and fabulous beasts like the Cyclopes generally originate in the myths and legends of poetry and allegory.
³
Homer and Hesiod are probably the earliest fountains of Western monster archetypes (e.g., chimeras, Cerberus, Hydra, Minotaur). But these literary creatures evolve and new species are added to the list in the popular tales of travelers. As explorers, soldiers, and traders penetrated strange lands, they absorbed local legends and encountered unfamiliar creatures, bringing all this back to urban Greece and Rome. Additionally, around the time of Herodotus, travel stories and myths were taken up by emerging writers of
natural history
, a budding science of description. These three literatures of monsters and beasts—poetry, travel tales, and natural history—continued to feed each other all the way down to the seventeenth century.

The griffins are an interesting case study. They are common characters in Greek literature; Aeschylus refers to them in his tragedy
Prometheus Bound
(460
BCE
) as “sharp beaked.” In later texts, such as Pliny’s
Natural History
(77
CE
), the gryps or griffins are bigger and winged. In the fourteenth century, in
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
, Mandeville expands the legend further by claiming that “one griffin hath the body more great and is more strong than eight lions, of such lions as be on this half, and more great and stronger than a hundred eagles such as we have amongst us.”
⁴
This monstrous griffin helps us understand how an unexplainable observation can snowball into an elaborate cultural narrative, a narrative that grows so huge as to conceal its original source altogether.

Most scholars since the seventeenth century have uniformly considered the ancient griffins to be purely fanciful combinations of lion and eagle bodies, a product of the overactive Greek imagination. But one researcher, Adrienne Mayor, has argued that these mythical griffins are literary descriptions of real, albeit extinct, monsters.
⁵
These creatures are not pure fantasy, but actually appear to have zoological origins.

The first known use of the Greek word
gryph
, meaning “hooked” like a claw, occurs in the writings of Aristeas in the seventh century
BCE
. Aristeas’s
book
Arimaspea
is now lost but it was popular in the ancient world and chronicled his travels into Central Asia, where he encountered the Scythian people, a Greek term referring to all the nomadic people who lived between the Black Sea and Mongolia. Over two hundred years later we find Aeschylus relying on the
Arimaspea
for scene-setting details in his
Prometheus Bound
tragedy, set in Asia. Aeschylus describes a frightening land where live the Phorcides, old mumbling maids, swan-shaped, having only one eye and tooth to share between them; the Gorgons, three sisters with snakes for hair who kill you if you gaze at them; fierce griffins; and a race of one-eyed nomadic men called Arimaspeans, who mine the region for its rich gold deposits. Herodotus (484–425
BCE
), who traveled through western Scythia himself, also cited Aristeas and tried to corroborate the additional claim that these one-eyed nomadic men were in constant combat with the griffins, who apparently nested in the gold-saturated sands of the region.

For the next six hundred years or so the legend of the griffins expanded and received further nuances from the ancient writers Ctesias, Pliny, and Appolonius. The basic anatomy of this Greek version of the monster, a giant quadruped with a sharp beak, echoes peculiar representations from Scythian art dating back to the eighth century
BCE
. Scythian tombs, originally created during the time of Herodotus and Aeschylus, were excavated in the twentieth century by Russian archaeologists, revealing scores of gold figurines of beaked quadrupeds.