On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  7. It may be objectionable to treat witch monsters in the medieval section of this book. The fact that so many witch trials occurred into the seventeenth century certainly falsifies the idea that witches were confined to the premodern era. Nonetheless, the witch crazes, regardless of their chronological manifestation, seem to have certain metaphysical assumptions and perspectives that can properly be called medieval. An invisible copresent dimension of spirit beings, which both help and harass, is a foundation of medieval theology. Belief in this reality is probably as strong now as it was then, but I include it here because its beginnings, at least in its monotheistic form, were medieval.

  8. I don’t want to give the impression that all this fear was paranoia. Some of it was well founded. In 1453, for example, the Turks captured Constantinople and began their rapid expansion into Europe and North Africa.

  9. The pamphlet, and other such treasures, can be found in Reprints of English Books, 1475–1700, no. 40, edited by Joseph Arnold Foster, in the regular collections at Chicago’s Newberry Library.

  10. In the quotes that follow, I’ve taken the liberty of updating the English spellings.

  11. Social psychology seems to confirm that interrogation methods of torture lead many innocents to “name” other innocents, and an unstoppable cycle of paranoia and self-fulfilling prophecy follows. In this regard, the witch trials have something in common with the torture prisons of Cambodia, the Stalin-era gulags, and the excesses of China’s Red Guards, among other lamentable purges. In general, the twentieth-century understanding of the hysterical witch period accepts that the accusations and confessions of the time were bogus, containing no kernel of truth. A notable exception is the writing of Margaret Alice Murray, a British anthropologist who published witch trial theories in the 1920s and 1930s. Much maligned in her own day and ours, Murray argued that the strange consistency of witch confessions should be interpreted as confirmation that some underground movement of female-dominated pagan covens did in fact exist. She argued that the rituals, even some of the alleged cannibalism, were real pagan movements operating in the shadows of Christian official culture. Murray treats them as a cult working with a mishmash of local animist and ancient pagan traditions. Her work is largely scorned by academics, but she had some influence on Gerald Gardner’s thinking. Gardner (1884–1964) was instrumental in founding modern Wicca. See Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe (Clarendon Press, 1921).

  12. The seminal work on the ergot hypothesis is Linnda Caporael’s “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem,” Science 192, April 1976.

  13. Historians disagree about the number of witch hunt executions. In Witchhunt in Early Modern Europe (Longman, 1995) Brian Levack puts the number at around 60,000, whereas Anne Lewellyn Barstow, Withccraze (HarperOne, 1995), puts the number around 100,000.

  14. Number 37, “The Divels Delusions,” in Reprints of English Books, 1475–1700, edited by Foster.

  15. Many of the medieval grimoires (magic manuals) warn of the dangers of the “diabolical enchantments.” Benevolent Jewish and Christian magic was popular among intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, and cognoscenti interested in exotica. Good deeds were thought to be possible through magic, but once practitioners had opened the channel to the spirits, they had to be extra vigilant about the dark forces. For example, a fifteenth-century Jewish grimoire, called The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, the Mage, sets forth an esoteric combination of Kabbalah and Greek numerology. The practitioner is warned to “always be on guard, and abstain as from a mortal sin from flattering, regarding, or having respect to the Demon, and to his Viperine Race.” Look out, it continues, for a “Man of Majestic Appearance, who with great affability doth promise unto thee marvelous things. Consider all this as pure vanity, for without the permission of God he can give nothing; but he will do it unto the damage and prejudice, ruin and eternal damnation of whomsoever putteth faith in him, and believe in him.” The Book of the Sacred Magic, translated by S. L. MacGregor Mathers (1900; Dover reprint edition, 1975), chapter 10.

  16. Heinrich Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum, translated by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester University Press, 2007), part I, question 9.

  17. Ibid., part II, chapter 7.

  18. Ibid., part I, question 9.

  19. Here again we find the classic medieval witch logic, so well parodied by Monty Python, in which women under terrible distress and torment are forced to admit to any damn thing in hopes of relief, and then their forced bogus confessions are used against them to justify further ordeals.

  20. Pursuant to this cautionary anecdote of the young man, Institoris asks the following astounding question: “So what are we to think about those witches who shut up penises in what are sometimes prolific numbers, twenty or thirty at a single time, in a bird’s nest or some kind of box, where they move about in order to eat oats and fodder, as though they were alive—something which many people have seen and is reported by common gossip?” Indeed, what are we to think? In a rare moment of humor, the stern inquisitor completes the story by telling of a man who had been robbed of his penis and then instructed by a witch to fish it out of the swarming collection. When he tried to take a big one, the witch asked him not to take that one because it belonged to the parish priest.

  21. Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum, part I, question 11.

  22. It’s hard to imagine a more horrific charge than baby eating, which is precisely why some inquisitors leveled it against the Jews as well. This legend can be added to the others, discussed earlier, that sought to demonize the Jews as monsters. For Institoris, Jews were like witches in another important way. Unlike other heathen, Jews and witches had been exposed to the Christian faith, had understood the teachings of the Gospel, but had then decided to reject it. This was considered worse than being oblivious to the Gospel. It is an old anti-Semitic charge, further nuanced by Institoris’s theological attempt to link witches (demons) and Jews directly.

  23. Some social historians have suggested that this may be a reflection of general patriarchal anxiety about women such as midwives who were independent, learned in folk wisdom, and autonomous when compared to traditional wives and mothers. Often the entire phenomenon is chalked up to patriarchal misogyny. See, for example, Mary Daly’s influential Gyn/Ecology: The Meta-ethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, 1978), wherein she inflates the number of executed female witches to astronomic proportions and then blames the whole mess on male aggression.

  24. While the Malleus Maleficarum offers little clue to the antimidwife campaign, some social scientists in Germany have recently suggested that midwives represented a threat to procreation because they knew the herbal arts of contraception and abortion. In a time when European populations had been decimated by plagues, the Church sought to rebuild its people. Disease, schism, Muslims, and infidels of all stripe seemed to be at the door of Catholicism. Midwives, with their contraceptive “magic,” seemed to the Inquisition to exacerbate the problems, and this may be why they became prime suspects in the witch trials. See Gunnar Heinsohn and Otto Steiger, “Witchcraft, Population Catastrophe and Economic Crisis in Renaissance Europe: An Alternative Macroeconomic Explanation,” University of Bremen, 2004, IKSF Discussion Paper 31.

  25. See Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum, part I, question 4; part II, chapter 4 for discussions of incubi and succubi.

  26. For all the Inquisition’s convictions about the threat of succubi and incubi monsters, they were still plagued with the philosophical problem of an immaterial spiritual substance (having no spatial magnitude) actually moving a material substance (which has spatial magnitude). Because every action occurs from some sort of contact, we are left wondering where the contact point would be between a bodiless spirit and a physical body. The two different metaphysical substances can’t find any meeting ground. Asking a spirit to move a human is like asking the abstract number 4 to move a rock. One half-hearted attempt to broach the problem is to make the demon a carrier of earthly semen rather than a produce
r of spirit semen. In this way, we don’t have the impossibly difficult job of explaining how immaterial spirit seed enters a human womb to produce an actual metaphysical hybrid. Aware of the conundrum, Institoris says that contact between an evil spirit and a human body is not really physical, but only virtualis. But then he seems to gloss over the problem by reminding us that spirits are always running around gathering material seeds of every kind in order to cause unpredictable mayhem. In effect, he simply chooses to press ahead and leave the vexed question behind. Apart from this issue of demon-human interaction, the whole issue of how a spirit substance interacts with a material substance is at the core of Catholic dogma itself. The Savior, after all, is himself a metaphysical hybrid. All the same questions can be asked about how Mary immaculately conceived and how the Christ became a carpenter’s son. And, just so I don’t leave the impression that it’s a strictly religious puzzle, one has to add the continuing scientific problem of mind-body interaction.

  27. Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum, part I, question 1.

  28. The werewolf discussion occurs in ibid., part I, question 10.

  29. He marshals scriptural precedence for this view: Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 32.

  30. The Canon Episcopi is probably a ninth-century Frankish document (sometimes thought to originate in the fourth century), and its short text on witches had become canon law by the time of the Malleus. It characterizes the psychological theory that I’ve been sketching and that Institoris was reacting against. Roughly speaking, witches are just very confused about their own powers and experiences (delusions), but this still makes them dangerous heretics because they tend to infect other innocents with their promises of satanic power, and that betrayal is still real even if the magical powers are imaginary. The Canon Episcopi famously formulated the scenario of groups of women (hallucinating themselves to be) riding through the air for great distances.

  31. Alchemy was a positive practice in Islamic scientia for centuries, but when the texts and ideas flowed into Europe after the expulsion of the Moors it came to be seen as a threatening alternative knowledge base with infidel origins. Alchemy became associated with the black arts and heresy, but ironically many of the research programs of alchemy (e.g., the transformation of natural substances) became the foundations of later chemistry. The Dominicans Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the Franciscan Roger Bacon originally tolerated alchemy, trying to submit its claims to rational criteria. But by the fourteenth century alchemy was outlawed in many places. See Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chapter 1.

  32. The idea that nature is filled with invisible seeds of transformation (rationes seminales) was very useful to theologians like Augustine, who used the concept whenever he needed to explain natural growth, development, or evolution in a monotheistic paradigm of “fiat creationism” that precluded such transformation. Ecclesiastes 18:1 states that all things were created by God simultaneously (qui vivit in aeternum creavit omnia simul), but Genesis gives us a staggered creation over time. Augustine’s idea of germs of forms existing within other forms helped to make consistent the unrolling of creation and the simultaneous miracle of creation. Institoris seems to be drawing on this tradition to help him explain demon creative power.

  33. Institoris points out that such demonic alterations of nature can never violate the ways of nature (e.g., bring a dead man to life), but only speed up, slow down, or mix or otherwise mutate changes that could happen anyway (theoretically).

  34. For detailed discussion of women’s susceptibility to evil, see Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum, part I, question 6.

  35. See ibid., part II, chapter 6.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. For a more detailed version of the story of Linnaeus’s hydra, see Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn, Linnaeus: The Compleat Naturalist (Princeton University Press, 2002).

  2. See Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid (Harvard University Press, 1997), chapter 1.

  3. See Andy Orchard’s fine translation of Liber Monstrorum in the appendix to Pride and Prodigies.

  4. The Liber Monstrorum is a strange Latin text that boldly criticizes many specific beliefs in monsters, but then undercuts its own skeptical posturing by relishing the detailed descriptions of these creatures. It officially takes the epistemic high ground of incredulity, but then can’t seem to get enough of its own taboo subject. The classicist Andy Orchard offers a more compelling interpretation of this monster critique, suggesting that close attention to the text reveals that the greatest criticism is always leveled against non-Christian legends, not monsters per se. It is “the pagans” with “their rumor-filled talk,” according to the author of the Liber Monstrorum, that fill our heads with hydras, gorgons, headless men (Epifugi or Blemmyae), and harpies.

  5. See Aleks Pluskowski, “Apocalyptic Monsters: Animal Inspirations for the Iconography of Medieval North European Devourers,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, edited by Bettina Bildauer and Robert Mills (University of Toronto Press, 2004). For more discussion of the relationship between the bestiary tradition and the rise of natural history, see Stephen Asma, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads (Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters 3, 4. Local animals were given symbolic Christian interpretations in these influential texts, creating layers of metaphysical and moral meaning on top of the observable natural world. Edward Topsell’s (1572–1625) bestiary, for example, explicitly states the purpose of studying animals: “For the knowledge of man, many and most excellent rules for public and private affairs, both for preserving a good conscience and avoiding the evil danger, are gathered from beasts.”

  6. L. Jardine and M. Silverthorne, eds., Francis Bacon: The New Organon (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 2000), book II.

  7. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis and The Great Instauration (Harlan Davidson, 1989).

  8. For a nuanced treatment of Browne’s place in the development of critical natural history, see Kevin Killeen, “ ‘The Doctor Quarrels with Some Pictures’: Exegesis and Animals in Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica,” Early Science and Medicine 12, no. 1 (2007).

  9. Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, book III, chapter 11. In book II, chapter 20 of Alexander Ross’s 1652 Arcana Microcosmi, the more credulous Scottish author tries to undo Browne’s skepticism and reinstall some integrity to the griffin legend. He argues that many other hard-to-believe hybrid creatures exist, so why not the griffin? “Many other sorts of mixt animals we read of, as flying Cats, and flying fishes; and some kinds of Apes with Dogges heads, therefore called Cynocephali.” He makes the classic pro-cryptid move, arguing that there are many unexplored regions in this vast world, and perhaps the griffin lives in these remote lands. But as empiricism grew, Ross became part of the losing side in the battle between credulity and skepticism.

  10. Ritvo, Platypus and the Mermaid, chapter 4.

  11. Madeleine Doran, “On Elizabethan ‘Credulity,’ ” Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no. 2 (1940).

  12. See Mark Burnett, Constructing Monsters in Shakespearean Drama and Early Modern Culture (Palgrave, 2002) for a cultural studies analysis of specific plays and characters. The study is notable for its interesting discussion of the relationship between traditional fairground theater and nearby monster booths.

  13. Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America (Century Publishing, 1984), first journey, chapter 1. All quotes from Waterton are from this source.

  14. Ibid., third journey, chapter 1.

  15. See the Reverend J. G. Wood’s biographical essay on Waterton in Wanderings in South America.

  16. Ibid., fourth journey, chapter 2.

  17. Selections from Sidney Smith’s review can be found in the explanatory index of Waterton, Wanderings in South America.

  18. See James W. Cook, “Introduction,” The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2005).

  19. Quoted in James W. Cook, introduction to gallery 1, “Bar
num’s Serialized Writings,” in The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader.

  20. For more detailed information about the Feejee Mermaid, see Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Cornell University Press, 1999), and A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (Columbia University Press, 1989).

  21. Gallery 4, Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader.

  22. The Feejee Mermaid was an old taxidermy hybrid (possibly of Japanese origin) that first made its way to the United States in the possession of a sea captain, Samuel Barrett Eades, in the 1820s. Captain Eades’s son sold the creature to Moses Kimball, who proved to be Barnum’s great friend and co-conspirator for many years. Kimball leased the monster to Barnum in 1842, and the rest, as they say, is history.