On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (51 page)

24
. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, “Conceptual Metaphor in Everyday Language,” in
Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor
, edited by M. Johnson (University of Minnesota Press, 1981). Also see Johnson and Lakoff’s important
Metaphors We Live By
, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Many people read Johnson and Lakoff as social constructionists who see these deep metaphors as malleable cultural products, liberating us from the deterministic tenor of the evolutionary psychologists. But Johnson and Lakoff are clear that our metaphors of thinking emerge out of our bodily existence, and so it seems but a short step to unify the philosophy of metaphor with the biology of evolution. Even if language (and its deep metaphors) should be studied as an irreducible autonomous reality, the reasons for doing so are largely methodological, and there’s no reason to believe that biology and cognitive linguistics cannot be two sides of the same coin. The monster may eventually turn out to be a discursive entity that
shapes
our thinking and communicating, but also a mental module that has
been shaped
by our evolutionary history.

25
. In “Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representation of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror,”
Other Voices
1, no. 3 (1999), Steven Schneider
argues that Lakoff’s
conceptual
metaphors are more productive starting points than purely
linguistic
metaphors because they allow for the obvious image- or visual-based monster metaphors that we encounter in film and other pictorial media.

1
. This and all other quotations from Alexander’s letter are taken from two versions (a tenth-century Italian-Latin version and an Old English version from the same codex that preserves
Beowulf
) compiled by Richard Stoneman in
Legends of Alexander the Great
(Everyman, 1994). Although these are late versions, they draw on much earlier Greek versions from pseudo-Callisthenes’ third-century
Alexander Romance
.

2
. For compelling arguments against the long-standing acceptance of a scientific exchange of information between Alexander and Aristotle, see James S. Romm, “Aristotle’s Elephant and the Myth of Alexander’s Scientific Patronage,”
American Journal of Philology
110, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 566–75. Romm is doubtful of Pliny the Elder’s claim in book VIII of
Natural History
that “King Alexander the Great had a burning desire to acquire a knowledge of zoology, and delegated research in this area to Aristotle, a man of supreme authority in every branch of science.”

3
. Alexander invaded India in 326
BCE
. His actual letter is lost, and most information regarding it comes from the Medieval Latin and Old English translations. Nonetheless, independent ancient sources (Ctesias from Knidos, Megasthenes, etc.) bear out the fact that many of the assumptions and credulous claims of these later versions are indeed symptomatic of ancient Greco-Roman attitudes. See Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
5 (1942): 159–97.

4
. From book VII of the Zoology section of Pliny’s
Natural History
, translated by John F. Healy (Penguin Books, 2004).

5
. Dennis R. Proffitt, “Embodied Perception and the Economy of Action,”
Perspectives on Psychological Science
1, no. 2 (2006).

6
. The Roman philosopher Lucretius (99–55
BCE
) famously attempted throughout his book
On the Nature of Things
to debunk superstitions. He offered natural materialistic explanations for seemingly supernatural events.

7
. Barbara Ehrenreich,
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War
(Metropolitan Books, 1997),
chapter 3
.

8
. Harvey Mansfield,
Manliness
(Yale University Press, 2006),
chapter 3
. There is also suggestive evidence that specific genes are partly responsible for belligerence in men. At the sixth International Congress of Neuroendocrinology (2006) in Pittsburgh, Dr. Stephen Manuck argued that variations in the genes that regulate serotonin levels are good predictors of male aggression. See “Why Men Are More Aggressive,”
Science Daily
, June 21, 2006.

9
. Some ancient narratives celebrate the female monster killer, such as Atalanta, who kills the Calydonian Boar, but most monster combatants have been male. With the onset of new popular narratives about female monster killers, such as Buffy Summers in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and Ripley in the
Alien
series, one suspects that the traditional gender-based division of labor will change. One wonders, however, whether the biological division of labor (the consequence of androgenic hormones in males) will continue to trump the cultural changes and preserve the age-old masculinity of warriors.

1
. Quotes here are from Samuel Butler’s translation of the
Odyssey
, book IX.

2
. Odysseus and his men escape after blinding Polyphemus with a stake and then strapping themselves to the bottom of the Cyclops’s sheep. When Polyphemus lets his sheep out of the cave to graze, he does not feel the undersides of the animals and fails to catch the men as they escape.

3
. See Margaret Robinson, “Some Fabulous Beasts,”
Folklore
76, no. 4 (1965).

4
. Mandeville himself probably never existed, and his very popular
Travels
were cobbled together from previous (fantastical) travel accounts. In chapter 29 the questionable Mandeville reports, “In that country be many griffins, more plenty than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth, that they be of that shape. But 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 an hundred eagles such as we have amongst us.”

5
. I am indebted to Adrienne Mayor, who read an early proposal of my work, for leading me to this exciting recent research, and for her general guidance on ancient monsters. My account here draws on her book
The First Fossil Hunters
(Princeton, 2000) and her and Michael Heaney’s article “Griffins and Arimaspeans,”
Folklore
104, no. 1/2 (1993): 40–66.

6
. The eggs may have belonged to the therapod Oviraptor found nearby, not the Proto-ceratops.

7
. See book IX, “Creatures of the Sea,” 9–11, and book V, 128, in Pliny’s
Natural History
.

8
. Romans seem to have interpreted the “stone” character of the fossilized remains as the result of an encounter with the Gorgon’s head, which Perseus used to rescue Andromeda from the sea creature. If you look at a Gorgon, you turn to stone.

9
.
The Deified Augustus
, in
Lives of the Caesars
, chapter 72.

10
. Most naturalists of the era, particularly Aristotle, were simply preoccupied with current living creatures, whose numbers and varieties seemed quite enough to engage their investigative energies. The idea of “failed varieties,” however, was certainly available in the ancient world. Lucretius echoes earlier naturalists when he describes monsters who lived long ago but did not survive to the present day. In
chapter 5
of
On the Nature of Things
he says:

And other prodigies and monsters earth was then begetting of this sort—in vain,

Since Nature banned with horror their increase, and powerless were they to reach unto

The coveted flower of fair maturity, or to find aliment, or to intertwine

In works of Venus. For we see there must concur in life conditions manifold,

If life is ever by begetting life to forge the generations one by one:

First, foods must be; and, next, a path whereby the seeds of impregnation in the frame

May ooze, released from the members all; Last, the possession of those instruments

Whereby the male with female can unite, the one with other in mutual ravishments.

This passage seems to suggest that prehistoric creatures (not necessarily species, but individuals) could not survive because they lacked the necessary adaptive traits. In particular, they lacked the respective male and female genitalia necessary to have intercourse.

11
. Thomas Jefferson originally presented the fossil to his colleagues in 1797 but published the description in 1799. “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,”
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
4 (1799): 246–60.

12
. In all fairness to the Stagirite, Aristotle may not have been so credulous about the Bolinthus. The account appears in a text of dubious origin, called “On Marvelous
Things Heard,” in
The Complete Works of Aristotle
, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1995).

13
. The quote is from the more fantastic account (the possibly apocryphal pseudo-Aristotle “On Marvelous Things”), but a more sober version, wherein the animal projects its excrement only eight feet, is found in Aristotle’s
History of Animals
, 9.45.

14
. Robinson, “Some Fabulous Beasts.” In “Marvels of the East,” Rudolf Wittkower also argues that Pliny had significant influence on medieval lore for well over a thousand years after his death.

15
. Augustine,
City of God
, 15.9.

16
. See Pliny,
Natural History
, book VII, for the discussion of “bodily parts that possess special powers”; see book IX for the Ganges eel.

17
. Pliny,
Natural History
, book VIII.

18
. Ibid.

19
. For a detailed discussion of monster hoaxes in antiquity, see Mayor,
First Fossil Hunters
,
chapter 6
.

20
. This nightmarish tale appears in Pliny,
Natural History
, book IX.

21
. But since this passage is part of Hume’s general critique of miracles (or the epistemology of confirming miracles), he goes on to lament, “But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end to common sense.” See “Of Miracles” in
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
.

22
. These reports from Ctesias, Megasthenes, and Pliny himself are gathered in book VII of Pliny’s
Natural History
.

23
. Aristotle describes something called a “Barbary ape” (which was really a Macaque monkey), but he probably never saw a real ape.

24
. See E. E. Sikes’s survey of Greek human origin stories in “Four-footed Man: A Note on Greek Anthropology,”
Folklore
20, no. 4 (1909).

25
. In
The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity
(Princeton University Press, 2004), Ben Isaac accepts the current wisdom that ancients were not prejudiced about skin color, but he finds them positively prejudiced about people who lived in inhospitable geographic regions (i.e., the unpleasant weather of northern Europe produced inferior human beings).

26
. Pliny,
Natural History
, book VI.

27
. Jasper Griffin, in “East vs. West: The First Round,”
New York Review of Books
, December 6, 2007, points out that Greek negative views of Persians were not groundless; it’s just that the accusations against Persians could also be leveled against the Spartans. Griffin says, “The King of Persia referred officially to his most exalted officials and soldiers, the governors of great provinces (’satrapies’), as ‘X, my slave….’ Greeks commented that, in the Persian system, ‘all men were slaves but one.’ But we should not forget that Sparta was a slave-owning and highly military society; all over Hellas, Sparta opposed the rise of democracies.”

28
. The Indian tradition describes ears so big that a person could wrap up in them to sleep. This legend was turned around by Megasthenes and other Westerners and reapplied to Indian races. See Bacil F. Kirtley, “The Ear-Sleepers: Some Permutations of a Traveler’s Tale,”
Journal of American Folklore
76, no. 300 (1963).

29
. Edward Said’s
Orientalism
(Vintage, 1979) has become an important tool for understanding the political agendas of all media representation. While Said refers specifically to the age of European imperialism, many scholars have applied his perspective to other historical eras, with mixed results.