On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  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.”8 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.”9

  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.”10 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.11

  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.12

  PREGNANT WOMEN SHOULD NOT LOOK UPON MONSTERS

  Perhaps the most surprising cause in Paré’s list is the fifth item, the imagination.13 Paré follows his ancient predecessors (i.e., Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Empedocles) in upholding a theory about the role of the mother’s imagination at the moment of conception and in early gestation. If a woman in coitus is exposed to frightening or disturbing or simply strong imagery, through either the senses or memory, the offending image may be impressed on her offspring.14 Paré accepts the reality of a physiological process, one that begins as a disturbing sense impression and ends with a distorted fetus. He offers a few cases to illustrate his point, some of which strain his own credulity and some that seem quite credible to him. Undermining his own embryonic empiricism, he cites the authorities of old. He tells of Queen Persina of Ethiopia, who with King Hidustes mysteriously produced a white baby “because of the appearance of the beautiful Andromeda that she summoned up in her imagination, for she had a painting of her before her eyes during embraces from which she became pregnant.” Likewise we are told of a girl who was born as furry as a bear. Her unfortunate state was the result of her mother’s “having looked too intensely at the image of Saint John [the Baptist] dressed in skins, along with his [own] body hair and beard, which picture was attached to the foot of her bed while she was conceiving.” The potential convenience of this particular explanation is nowhere more evident than in his retelling of a story from Hippocrates. Hippocrates, it seems, saved a young woman from the accusation of adultery “because she had given birth to a child as black as a Moor, her husband and she both having white skin; which woman was absolved upon Hippocrates’ persuasion that it was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed.” A more contemporary example is offered in Paré’s story of a baby born in France in 1517 with the face of a frog. When asked what the cause of this monster might be, the father of the child explained that his wife had been ill with a fever and had taken the curative advice of her friend. The folk cure required the wife to carry a frog in her hand until the frog died, at which point she would be cured of the fever. “That night she went to bed with her husband, still having said frog in her hand; her husband and she embraced and she conceived; and by the power of her imagination, this monster had thus been produced.”

  Based on these cases Paré the medical man offers some advice. Women “should not be forced to look at or imagine monstrous things” at the time of conception or during the early formation of the child (which takes thirty to thirty-five days for males and forty to forty-two days for females). But once the formation of the child is complete, no images or imaginings will have a detrimental effect on the offspring. These sorts of causal explanations may seem ridiculous to us, but they represent a naturalistic turn in the sense that they opened up possible research avenues. There may or may not have been a discoverable physiological mechanism that transmitted disturbing sense impressions to the conceptus, but at least Paré didn’t just throw up his hands and say “the devil did it.” Invoking the imagination also indicates some sense of psychological effects; psychology can lead to very concrete manifestations (e.g., a deeply troubled woman may miscarry). In this respect, Paré seems to foreshadow psychosomatic theories that flourished during Freud’s generation.

  Of course, Paré was not a secular humanist, and devilish demons were quite real for him. He did not have an ironic or literary response to the demo
nic. “Satan’s actions,” he says, “are supernatural and incomprehensible, surpassing the human mind, [it] not being able to explain them, any more than [it can] the magnet which attracts iron and makes the needle turn.” But he goes on to say that we should not fall into a general skepticism about the “principles and reasons of natural things.” The human mind may not be up to the challenge of supernatural spiritual riddles, but let us not give up, he seems to suggest, our attempts to grasp the natural world. Here we find an inconspicuous boundary marker in Paré’s thinking: the natural monsters are appropriate subjects for medical study, but the supernatural monsters exist in a domain that cannot be penetrated properly by science. The proper response to this latter domain is prayer and piety, not scientific exploration. This important concession to the Church, reiterated by most scientists of the following century, helped to create an autonomous domain for previously forbidden explorations of nature.

  MONSTERS AND THE MECHANIZATION OF NATURE

  Thinking about monsters as products of embryological processes was part of a larger paradigm shift in thinking about the causal processes of physical material. The century after Ambroise Paré’s was marked by astounding advances in what we now call chemistry, physics, biology, and astronomy. Nature came to be regarded as a giant machine that could be analyzed in terms of material and moving (or efficient) causes, and any appeals to divine purposes (teleology) seemed increasingly irrelevant for understanding, predicting, and manipulating the physical world.

  Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) helped to bring about this burst of independent science, even though as a forerunner he could not himself benefit much from the shift. He laid greater emphasis on the empirical study of material and efficient causation; he took an agnostic phenomenalist attitude toward any supposedly hidden metaphysical causes; and he explicitly built a safety retaining wall between science and religion. The Bible, he argued, was God’s manual for how to live virtuously, but the book of nature was also God’s gift, a mysterious puzzle for us to exercise our rationality and curiosity. In his letter to the grand duchess of Tuscany he writes, “Since the Holy Ghost did not intend to teach us whether heaven moves or stands still, whether its shape is spherical or like a discus or extended in a plane, nor whether the earth is located at its center or off to one side, then so much the less was it intended to settle for us any other conclusion of the same kind…. I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree: ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.’ ”15

  What did this retaining wall between science and religion mean for monsterology? Simply put, the human body, now conceptualized as an elegant machine, became increasingly anatomized, analyzed, and understood. And the pathologies of that body, the monsters, became an important means by which the new surgeons and physicians could limn the normal laws of nature. Natural monsters came under the new umbrella of a mechanistic worldview, and spiritual monsters (e.g., demons and devils) were sent packing, along with the diviners, priests, and theologians, never to return in any significant way to the pages of the natural philosophers.

  René Descartes (1596–1650) describes his own astonishment at the mechanical nature of the heart.16 In the Discourse on Method he asks the reader to follow his mechanical analysis, but first, “those who are not well versed in anatomy will find less difficulty in understanding what I am going to say if they will take the trouble, before reading this, to have the heart of some large animal cut open before them.”17 Then he offers a detailed description of the heart, its parts, and its mechanisms, demystifying the formerly miraculous organ of life. “The motion which I have just explained,” he insists, “follows necessarily from the mere disposition of the parts of the heart visible to the naked eye, from the heat which one can feel with the fingers, and from the nature of the blood, which one can learn by experiment: just as the motions of a clock follow from the weight, location, and configuration of its counterweights and wheels.”

  Descartes is trying to establish that the entire body is a machine and its behaviors are mechanical. The machine is animated by subtle fluids and vapors, or animal spirits, as they travel through the apparatus. He speculates that the “nature of the network of nerves and muscles of the human body must be to enable the animal spirits within to move its members, as one sees when freshly severed heads still move and bite the earth although they are no longer alive.”18 This gruesome phenomenon demonstrates, says Descartes, that our bodies can move in complex ways, even “without the guidance of volition.” Bodily activity may be more robotic than intentional. “This will hardly seem strange to those who know how many automata or machines can be made by human industry, although these automata employ very few parts in comparison to the large number of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the other component parts of each animal. Such persons will therefore think of this body as a machine created by the hand of God, and in consequence incomparably better designed and with more admirable movements than any machines that can be invented by man.”

  It was a short step from Descartes’ God-made machine to the idea of a Nature-made machine, which had no need of the God hypothesis. And the savant who took that short step was Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751). Descartes had kept God in the picture as the creator of the machine, and he had managed to keep the human soul insulated from the materialist analysis of the body by formulating his dualistic metaphysics. But now La Mettrie, with his radical materialism, did away with both God and soul. His book Homme machine (Man a Machine) reduced human beings completely to mechanical forms and functions. La Mettrie’s writings were so scandalous that he had to leave France; he sought refuge in Holland but eventually had to leave even that bastion of free thought to settle in Berlin under the protection of Frederick the Great. At first his ideas were embraced by other philosophes, including Voltaire and D’Holbach, but his embrace of hedonism in his later writings led his radical French contemporaries to treat him as an anarchist.19 It may also have led him to an early grave after a particularly hedonistic binge with some pâté aux truffe.

  For our purposes La Mettrie is important because there would be no eventual Frankenstein monster without him. Starting from Descartes’ conclusion, La Mettrie goes on to say that “the body is but a watch….a collection of springs which wind each other up,” and “the soul is but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain.”20 He belittles humanity throughout his writings in an attempt to give mankind a more accurate picture of itself, divested of magical spirits and species-centric arrogance. At a time when it was almost unthinkable, La Mettrie argued that other animals, especially the apes, could probably be taught language. “The transition from animals to man,” he said, “is not violent, as true philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal of his own species with much less instinct than the others.” If we taught the “wild man” ape (the orangutan) to speak, “then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman, with as much matter or muscle as we have, for thinking and profiting by his education.” Life is not magically different from the inanimate, and humans are not divinely different from animals.21

  Though scandalous in his own day, La Mettrie’s mechanical approach to biology and cognition eventually became part of the general Enlightenment project to demystify nature and man. The benefit of a scientific approach, philosophes argued, was the elimination of socially divisive superstitions and the recognition of a universal human nature, one that could flourish in the new light of rational social organization. But contained in this optimistic movement was the kernel of its own downfall.

  Francisco Goya’s (1746–1828) 1796 etching Elsueno de la razonproduce monstrous (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) is both an assertion of and a critique of Enlightenment philosophy. The etching shows a man (probably Goya) who has fallen asleep at his writing table
; behind him a writhing group of monsters emerge out of the darkness. Rationalists have claimed it as a statement about the need for constant rational vigilance over the lurking monsters of ignorance and prejudice. Romantics and Counter-Enlightenment figures have seen it as a pessimistic revelation of the inevitability of dark, irrational, and emotional forces in human life. Like the ancient Lucretius, Enlightenment rationalists believed that monsters were not real in any metaphysical sense but simply terrible confusions, misperceptions, and bigotries. Monsters could be eradicated from human psychology and society by good education about the causes and principles of nature. But at the same time that French materialism was declaring rational illumination of the human condition, French society was undergoing the horrors of the Revolution. And subsequent to this, it didn’t help the public relations of French rationalism that so many Europeans found themselves bloodied in the Napoleonic Wars. A Counter-Enlightenment movement began to stress the negative consequences of “too much reason,” too much science and not enough heart.

  FRANKENSTEIN

  The year that Goya etched his famous irrational monsters was the year that Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was conceived. So much has been written about the meaning of Shelley’s Frankenstein that I hesitate to add more, and yet in a book about monsters I can hardly skip it. The Frankenstein creature may be the most famous monster of the past two centuries, and it’s important to situate the wretch in his original context. Frankenstein is often read as part of the Counter-Enlightenment critique of science; there’s good reason for this interpretation because Shelley modified later editions to underscore this stance. But we have to back up, before the critique, and remind ourselves of the novel reasonableness of her generation’s interest in animation.