Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (18 page)

To a certain extent, good, or at least neutral, dragonlike creatures found their way into the myths of other cultures. The Moki Indians, who lived in what is today the state of Arizona, worshipped a serpent known as Baho-li-kong-ya. Drawings of this beast often resemble a rattlesnake, which is logical considering where the Moki were living. Baho-li-kong-ya even had horns on its head just like the ancient drawings of Tiamat, but what is fascinating about this Moki creature is that it was also a fertility symbol. There are many snakes and snakelike beings in Egyptian mythology that also were not evil.

In light of the inherent fear that humans have of reptiles, a fear that often transformed these creatures into monsters, it is odd for them to attain a status in some cultures as deities embodying positive aspects of human life. Historians have tried over the years to make some sense of this. One theory centers around the fact that snakes shed their skins as they grow. Of course, we shed our skin too, but our skin cells do not all fall off at once revealing an entirely youthful-looking human underneath. For snakes, this is exactly what happens. Could this have led people to view snakes as somehow ageless and immortal? The idea certainly seems reasonable enough, but there is another possibility.

Snakes are cold-blooded, meaning their bodies are almost always the same temperature as their surroundings. If it is cold, they have difficulty moving because their chilled muscles function sluggishly. If it is extremely hot, they must seek shade or risk overheating. These realities make being warm-blooded, as mammals and birds are, seem like a blessing, but warm-bloodedness comes at an enormous cost. To maintain a constant body temperature, mammals and birds must constantly burn calories, and this means frequent feeding. Humans
have it relatively easy because the diet for most people includes food that is packed with nutrients. Animals like cows and horses, which feed on nutrient-poor foods like grasses, must spend most of their days eating to get the calories they need. Reptiles gain a big benefit from their cold-bloodedness by not having to eat very often at all. Indeed, after a crocodile or snake makes a large kill, it may not need to seek out food again for several months. Because of this, ancient people may have viewed reptiles as somewhat supernatural in their ability to survive without food, raising them up from the role of monster to the role of deity.

At first glance, dragons today seem to qualify as monsters just as they once did, but in large part, such a perception is an illusion. The dragons in the Harry Potter films are mystical beasts that certainly try to harm the protagonists, but they are not the stuff of nightmares. The situation is similar for the dragons found in the films
How to Train Your Dragon, DragonHeart,
and
Eragon.
They are impressive creatures, but audiences do not walk away fearful of dragons coming to eat them. Dragons no longer have the power to invoke fear as they once did.

The fact that dragons are not used as monsters is logical. Audiences know there are no dragons “out there,” and this single fact makes establishing believability, which is crucial for fear to be created, very difficult. Think about it, there are no films that believably present dragons as being alive and posing a threat to people. This is not to say that no films have tried. Rob Bowman’s 2002 film
Reign of Fire
made a valiant attempt at presenting dragons as real and frightening, but they never came across as a viable threat that audiences walked away scared of.
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But dragons are not entirely gone. To a certain extent, the presence of dangerous reptiles in modern films is a continuation of dragons as monsters just as it is a continuation of Medusa.
Lake Placid
and
Anaconda
are, at least partially, modern manifestations of dragons like Tiamat. However, dragons also live on in another form.

In films about fires, like Ron Howard’s
Backdraft,
where the heroes race to fight numerous infernos set by a lunatic arsonist, the blazes function like different living creatures. Some creep, some fly, some are relatively benign, others violent. All play upon a seemingly deep-seated fear of fire, but none does this more effectively than the backdraft.

Backdrafts form when a large fire takes place in a contained space. At first the fire burns fiercely, but as oxygen in the space is consumed, the flames are forced to calm down even though plenty of flammable material remains. The fire is not dead. Quite the contrary, it is very much alive, just waiting for a breath of fresh air to allow it to explode back into a furious holocaust.

In the coal mine and tomb fires that likely led people to believe dragons could breathe flame, backdrafts would not have often (or ever) been involved. Even so, both situations led to the sudden appearance of a fiery ball of death—definitely something worth being scared of.

At the end of David Yates’s
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2,
Harry saves Draco Malfoy from a raging fire inside Hogwarts by grabbing him just as he is about to fall and burn. But this is not an ordinary blaze; it is shown with serpentine traits. A snake’s head initially comes lunging out of the inferno, and at one moment the monster opens up bright orange wings of flame as it takes to the air. A nod to the origins of dragons?

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 Nobody understands the version of the story told on this plate. The writings have all been lost. Presumably Medea (or possibly Athena) cast a spell that made Jason taste so terrible that the monster vomited. But that is just a guess.

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 Sagan also points out that one of the sounds that humans around the world most commonly use to command attention is
sh
and asks if we can realistically view it as just chance that this happens to be a sound made by many snakes.

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 Aside from being a world expert on the structures of stars, Dr. Stothers was a remarkable historian and evolutionary biologist.

47
 Exactly when fire started regularly being wielded by humans is a subject that can lead to fierce shouting matches at paleontological and archaeological conferences, particularly around the bar. Unlike stone tools, which hold up pretty well over thousands of years, the ash and charcoal that are often the only remains of ancient fires are easily destroyed by the elements and rare to find in the fossil record. Thus the shouting.

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 Boom!

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 Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It would be ironic if one of history’s most famous wizards was, in fact, a scientist in disguise.

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 Amusingly, in the Disney film
Pete’s Dragon
, as the little boy Pete describes the dragon he has become friends with, he sings, “He has the head of a camel, the neck of a crocodile, and the ears of a cow. He’s both a fish and a mammal and I hope he’ll never change.” One has to wonder if Disney knowingly borrowed from Wang Fu. Perhaps a remake more faithful to history will one day be made that includes “the eyes of a demon” in the lyrics, but I doubt it.

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 Adrienne Mayor points out in
The First Fossil Hunters
that this was probably true in more ways than one. Dragons’ bones were valuable in Chinese medicine (and still are in some regions). Fossils literally were a form of cash crop. Once farmers realized they had them on their property, they went searching for bones so they could sell them off and boost income.

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 Consider
Jaws
as a comparison. How many people walked away from that film and nearly wet themselves at the idea of going to the beach or taking a sailing holiday?

6

Hauntings—Demons, Ghosts, Spirits

“Are you the Keymaster?”

—Dana Barrett/Zuul,
Ghostbusters

Without a doubt, one of the most disturbing paintings of the 1700s is by the Swiss artist Johann Füssli. The work depicts a beautiful woman lying asleep on a bed. Sitting upon her chest is a demonic creature, staring at her with wicked intent. It was a day and age when monster movies and horror films didn’t exist, but with a work of art as unsettling as
The Nightmare,
who needs Hollywood? The painting tells a story, and a creepy one at that.

The woman in the painting is widely thought to have been Füssli’s beloved Anna Landolt. He and Landolt wanted to marry, but her parents had refused to allow it. Without the ability to sleep in her lover’s arms, Landolt’s lustful feelings draw the attention of a demon that comes to feed on her sexual energy as she rests. Some art historians argue that the painting is, in effect, a warning to parents, presenting the dangers of creating an impediment to love. Others suggest it is
simply making a more general argument that dangerous things can come as the result of dreams. Either way,
The Nightmare
makes one thing very clear: A fear of dreams was present in Europe during the 1700s and it manifested itself in the shape of demons.
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This is very different from the way things once were. The origin of the word “demon” is the ancient Greek word
daïmôn,
which comes from the verb
daïein,
meaning “to distribute.” It was sometimes used during the days of Homer as a synonym for “god” but, more often than not, was associated with entities that distributed people’s destinies. Unlike the gods on Mount Olympus,
daïmônes
were not actively worshipped. They were just poorly defined supernatural beings that
were neither really good nor really bad. Hesiod describes them as the watchers of Zeus who spy on mortals and as assistants to the gods. He also suggests that some people became
daïmônes
when they died. Plato theorizes that they were intermediaries between gods and men that were not gods themselves. They were sometimes associated with bringing dreams to people but were not specifically responsible for nightmares.

The appearance of Satan in mythology changed the role of
daïmônes
such that they started being viewed in a more negative way. Satan, or Ha-Satan, as he is known in the Hebrew Bible, is initially tasked by God to put the righteous believer Job through hardship to test whether he will prove faithful only during times of health and prosperity or at all times. Ha-Satan makes Job suffer terribly, but all of this suffering is brought about by Ha-Satan’s powers alone; there are no servants working for him. However, with the rise of Christianity, Ha-Satan ceased to be an angel who tested the faith of humanity under the instruction of God and transformed into Satan, an enemy of God who commanded legions of twisted minions.

The once neutral
daïmônes
of the world came to be known as demons and started to function as an army of darkness that Satan could command to corrupt mortals in his war. People who were thought to be working with Satan came to be known as witches and wizards, and it was widely believed demons were sent to aid these villainous individuals in their work. These assistant demons, or imps, as they were called, often took mundane animal forms. They could appear as toads, rats, owls, goats, and cats so they could help witches and wizards without being too easily noticed by neighbors.
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By the late Middle Ages, demonology and the myths surrounding it were extremely rich and fears were surging. Like animals, demons of different sorts were treated as species that specialized in tormenting people in various ways, and those that came to be among the best
known were the demons fueling feelings of lust: the succubus and the incubus.

The succubus was a she-demon intent on bending men to her will and siphoning away their souls through sex. The incubus was her male counterpart, a monster capable of corrupting young women, like Landolt in
The Nightmare,
and led these ladies to lives of debauchery. Both names derive from the sexual positions that these demons were thought to take. Succubus stems from the Latin word
succubare,
meaning “to lie under.” Incubus stems from the Latin
incubare
for “to lie on top.”

However, while
The Nightmare
makes it obvious that sexual demons were well known during the 1700s, they had actually been around for hundreds of years. A quick return to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Kings of Britain
and Merlin’s first meeting with the king Vortigern reveals the presence of sexual demons. After Merlin is collected by Vortigern’s scouts, but before he makes his prophecy about dragons dwelling underground, his mother is grilled about how exactly she came to give birth to a child without a father. She responds:

As my soul liveth and thine, O my lord the King, none know I that was his father. One thing only I know, that on a time whenas I and the damsels that were about my person were in our chambers, one appeared unto me in the shape of a right comely youth and embracing me full straitly in his arms did kiss me, and after that he had abided with me some little time did as suddenly vanish away so that nought more did I see of him. Natheless, many a time and oft did he speak unto me when that I was sitting alone, albeit that never once did I catch sight of him. But after that he had thus haunted me of a long time I did conceive and bear a child.