Abominable Science

by Daniel Loxton

  Sea monsters are as old as literature—and for good reason! Imagine the ocean through the eyes of the ancients: endless, dark, and deadly. When brave warriors, traders, and fishermen ventured out over that alien abyss, they could only imagine what vast and terrible dangers stirred below. One thing they did know: sometimes the sea swallowed men. To ancient mariners, explains classical scholar Emily Vermeule, the sea was “more like a tightrope over an open tiger-pit than a safe road home.”6

  Accordingly, the seas of the ancient imagination swarmed with a teeming variety of powerful, malevolent monsters. Many were inspired by true-life animals filtered through folklore, mythology, and the tales of travelers returned from distant lands. Even as these real and folkloric creatures were named, they also blended easily into one another. In particular, the dividing lines between sea monsters, whales, dragons, and snakes were fluid. Think of the biblical Leviathan: a primordial sea monster, yet simultaneously a dragon, but considered by many to be a whale. The book of Job emphasizes the fiery aspects of this vast (if vague) ocean-dwelling monster:

  Out of his mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire leap forth.

  Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke, as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.

  His breath kindles coals, and a flame comes forth from his mouth. (41:11–13)

  Isaiah amplifies this hybrid description, calling Leviathan “the dragon that is in the sea” (27:1).7 At the same time, many scholars argue that Job’s version of Leviathan is based on a real animal, with the whale among the leading contenders.8 (Such a distorted, mythologized view of a real animal would be consistent with the general lack of familiarity with marine life among the relatively land-locked writers of the Hebrew Bible. As archaeologists John K. Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo note, the Hebrew Bible does not record even one species name to identify any particular sort of fish. Even Jonah’s “whale” is identified simply as “big fish.”)9

  Figure 5.1 A ketos depicted on a Caeretan hydria black-figure vase, ca. 530–520 B.C.E. (Stavros S. Niarchos Collection). John Papadopoulos and Deborah Ruscillo note the “cetacean-like flippers . . . plus what looks suspiciously like a whale fin about two-thirds down the body.” (Redrawn by Daniel Loxton, with reference to John Boardman, “‘Very Like a Whale’: Classical Sea Monsters,” in Monsters and Demons in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, ed. Anne E. Farkas, Prudence O. Harper, and Evelyn B. Harrison [Mainz: Zabern, 1987], and a photograph by S. Hertig [Zurich University Collection])

  By contrast, writers and artists immersed in the coastal culture of the ancient Greeks faithfully described many dangerous, delightful, and delicious sea animals in detail. But whales, being relatively rare in the Mediterranean, were as hard to study as they were terrifying. As a result, no clearly identifiable, naturalistic Greek images of whales are known to exist.10 Instead, “sea monster” and “whale” were interchangeable concepts in early classical literature, with the same word, ketos, used for both. Ketos is the basis for the word “cetacean,” but it was not originally restricted to whales: it was an umbrella term for anything big and scary that lived in the sea, including whales, sharks, and tuna (figure 5.1).

  Alongside the merman (Triton) and the hippocamp (a Capricorn-like creature whose body combines the front half of a horse with the back half of a fish, to which we will return), the ketos was one of the three standard sea monster types employed by Greek artists. As creative vase painters and sculptors explored the ketos form over many centuries, several varieties emerged. Many images of the ketos straightforwardly depict very big fish. Other artists imagined ketos monsters as grotesque hybrids: fishes with the heads of powerful terrestrial animals. Once this mix-and-match scheme became common, artists could combine creatures as creatively as they wished.11 By the Hellenistic period (the three or four centuries following the continent-spanning conquests of Alexander the Great), sea monster art had become more light-hearted and fantastic. Artists were happy to try inventive depictions, as archaeologist Katharine Shepard notes: “We find for the first time in the Hellenistic period the sea-centaur, -bull, -boar, -stag, -lion, -panther and -pantheress.”12

  Papadopoulos and Ruscillo describe a third style of ketos illustration, which is much more intriguing from a cryptozoological perspective: “An alternative manner of representing the ketos is as a large serpent-like creature: a snake by any other name. Like the big fish, a suitably massive snake was one, relatively straightforward, way of giving iconographic substance to a massive sea creature that was, above all else, mysterious and frightening.”13 This last sort of fantastic, vertically undulating beast included elements from the mutually blurry notions of dragons, fish, whales, and pythons (among other animals),14 but to the modern eye they scream “sea serpent.” Just look at that vertical undulation! Does this mean that the ancients did have knowledge of a genuine sea serpent 2,000 years before the modern legend emerged in Scandinavia?

  Not so fast. It is very easy for modern audiences to be misled when interpreting out-of-context artworks from other times and other cultures. For example, UFOlogists who see “evidence” of flying saucers in medieval or Renaissance paintings mistakenly project their own expectations onto stylized depictions of clouds, the Holy Spirit, or even broad-brimmed hats.15 As it happens, the long, snaky, vertically undulating tails that make ketos images resemble our notion of sea serpents were not unique to those depictions. The same tails were used just as often for hippocamps and for mermen (figure 5.2). It is worth noting that while neither fish nor serpents move by means of vertical undulation, a wavy or an arched body is extremely handy for indicating sinuousness in profile images on vases or shallow relief sculptures. “Of course,” notes legendary cryptozoological writer Bernard Heuvelmans (one of the coiners of the word “cryptozoology”),16 “most primitive or childish pictures show snakes wriggling in the same way, but this is simply because it needs some skill in perspective to draw the side view of an animal that wiggles horizontally.”17

  Figure 5.2 Herakles wrestles the river deity Akheloios on an Attic red-figure vase attributed to Oltos, ca. 520 B.C.E. (Redrawn after London E437, British Museum, London)

  Is there reason to think that artists modeled the ketos on a genuine serpentine animal? No. The ketos may be widespread in classical art, but it cannot be used as evidence for the existence of a cryptid. As art historian and archaeologist John Boardman explains in an influential overview of the ketos, it is a wasted effort to speculate about “our beast’s relationship to real or imagined sea monsters since we can show that his creation is an artistic amalgam not much troubled by what swam or was thought to swim in the Mediterranean.”18 Moreover, it is clear that images of the ketos changed with the fashions among artists—a pattern more consistent with the depiction of imagined creatures than real animals.

  But consider the opposite: What if art inspired the notion of the sea serpent? The universality of vertical undulation as an artistic solution for portraying wiggly movement in static two-dimensional media (and the rarity of vertical undulation in nature) hints that the Great Sea Serpent of modern legend could owe something to art. We will return to the influence of art, but first let’s explore the efforts during the classical period that we would call “science” today. Classical artists may not have recorded evidence for the existence of the modern sea serpent, but what of those ancient thinkers who attempted to accurately describe the animals of the air, land, and sea?

  Sea Serpents in Classical Natural History

  The cryptozoological hypothesis that immense sea serpents literally exist has an Achilles’ heel: extremely little demonstrated support in the historical record before the Enlightenment (when sea serpents suddenly burst into prominence in Scandinavia). The pioneering book The Great Sea-Serpent, for example, was perfectly up front about the failure to identify sightings from antiquity. Author Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans wrote off the few possibilities he was aware of as misidentification errors and simply declared that he would “review only reports of no earlier date than
the year 1500” C.E.19

  Was Oudemans too hasty? It is unambiguously the case that the sophisticated scholars of classical Greece and Rome did, in fact, preserve accounts of sea monster sightings. For example, classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor has identified dozens of ancient references to allegedly real aquatic monsters.20 But did these authorities describe creatures that are recognizably “sea serpents” in the modern sense? To qualify as sea serpents, creatures must (minimally) live in the sea and look like serpents. Some classical texts describe marine monsters that are not serpents. They include a giant man-eating sea turtle21 and some clear references to whales (such as the orca enclosed in a harbor and battled by boats as entertainment under the Roman emperor Claudius).22 Others describe serpentine creatures that did not live in the sea (such as a giant snake that allegedly fought Roman soldiers at a river in North Africa).23

  Oudemans briskly dismissed the argument that the animals mentioned by Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, and other classical natural historians were sea serpents, considering them pythons, eels, and known species of sea-adapted snakes. This cavalier approach may seem hard to justify, but I think that he was correct: despite some serpent-like versions of the ketos in art, and despite many ancient references to sea monsters in general, classical history and literature can offer little to help the case for the sea serpent in particular.

  Consider Aristotle. His meticulous History of Animals (350 B.C.E.) is often cited in support of the sea serpent, but this is a stretch too far. The most frequently quoted passage refers simply to “some strange creatures to be found in the sea, which from their rarity we are unable to classify.” Fishermen apparently described some of these unidentified rarities as “sea animals like sticks, black, rounded, and of the same thickness throughout.”24 This representation may sound suggestive to those sufficiently willing to cherry-pick, but it is vague to the point of meaninglessness. Another passage is much more clear—in that it clearly does not describe a sea serpent:

  In Libya, according to all accounts, the length of the serpents is something appalling; sailors spin a yarn to the effect that some crews once put ashore and saw the bones of a number of oxen, and that they were sure that the oxen had been devoured by serpents, for, just as they were putting out to sea, serpents came chasing their galleys at full speed and overturned one galley and set upon the crew.25

  Both Aristotle and Oudemans understood that this was an exaggerated, hearsay description of Africa’s native pythons. Such stories of land-based, big snakes were common and had nothing to do with sea monsters. Yet, they sound so tempting! As Bernard Heuvelmans’s respected book In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents explains, this hyperbole has led to the widespread misuse of “various stories of gigantic snakes, but living on land, which many authors have tried hard to include in the sea-serpent’s dossier.”26

  As with stories of whales and sea monsters, ancient Greek lore about pythons was intertwined (and often interchangeable) with that of dragons. Consider an example from Greek epic poetry. When the legendary hero Jason approaches the grove of the Golden Fleece, the last challenge he must face is a vast serpent (figure 5.3):

  Directly in front of them the dragon stretched out its vast neck when its sharp eyes which never sleep spotted their approach, and its awful hissing resounded around the long reaches of the river-bank and the broad grove…. Women who had just given birth woke in terror, and in panic threw their arms around the infant children who slept in their arms and shivered at the hissing. As when vast, murky whirls of smoke roll above a forest which is burning, and a never-ending stream spirals upwards from the ground, one quickly taking the place of another, so then did that monster uncurl its vast coils which were covered with hard, dry scales.27

  It is not surprising that Greek stories feature land-based mega-serpents. The Greeks had contact with some of the planet’s largest snakes, but not such close contact as to easily distinguish folklore from biology. In modern Africa, large pythons range widely below the Sahara (and may have been encountered in North Africa’s Mediterranean regions in classical times, as Aristotle reports). The African rock python (Python sebea), in particular, which grows to lengths of 20 feet or more, is a “monster” even before the magnifying power of hearsay. Rock pythons occasionally hunt humans for food, with the largest specimens capable of swallowing an adult whole.28

  Figure 5.3

  The serpent guardian of the Golden Fleece regurgitates Jason, as Athena watches, on a red-figure cup painted by Douris, ca. 480–470 B.C.E. (Redrawn after Vatican 16545, Vatican Museum, Rome)

  The armies of Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great conquered far to the east, invading India in 326 B.C.E. There, Alexander’s officers reported seeing snakes as large as 24 feet long and heard claims of snakes many times larger.29 By the time the Roman military commander and naturalist Pliny the Elder compiled his Natural History (ca. 77–79), stories of Indian mega-snakes had grown to describe “dragons”30 fond of hunting elephants—indeed, of “so large a size that they easily encircle the elephants in their coils and fetter them with a twisted knot.”31 (By the Renaissance, the dragon-versus-elephant idea had been applied to African pythons as well. Edward Topsell wrote in 1608 of the “enmitie that is betwixt Dragons & Elephants, for so great is their hatred one to the other, that in Ethyopia the greatest dragons have no other name but Elephant killers.”)32

  Looking over this literature, Heuvelmans correctly concluded that classical tales “do not refer to the sea-serpent, even in the widest sense, but to other creatures which have nothing to with the case.”33 This absence is conspicuous when contrasted with the way that classical knowledge of other, known sea animals expanded and improved over time. Aristotle and other natural historians eventually hammered down an accurate understanding of whales, distinguishing these animals from other sea monsters with the term phallaina (the root of the Latin word baleaena and the English term “baleen”). By the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle could describe how whales breathe air through a blowhole instead of gills, bear live young, and even provide milk for those young. No comparable understanding emerged for any sort of sea serpent. This suggests that there were no genuine sea serpents for classical informants to observe.

  THE HIPPOCAMP: GRANDFATHER TO THE GREAT SEA SERPENT

  Cryptozoology has tended to overlook what I believe to be the pivotal classical example of a sea serpent–like creature: the hippokampos or hippocamp (figure 5.4). An imaginary mer-creature, the hippocamp combines the foreparts of a horse with a looping, coiled tail inspired by fish or dolphins (like the Capricorn that many people know from astrology, whose foreparts are those of a goat). Hippocamps appeared first on vases, coins, jewelry, sculpture, and other artworks from ancient Greece and Italy, where they were often used as a purely decorative element. In the 2,500 years that followed, they became a fixture in European art and literature—especially in heraldry. For example, a hippocamp appears on the coat of arms of Belfast, Ireland.

  Developed by the Greeks, embraced by the Romans, and passed from country to country during the Middle Ages, the image of the hippocamp slowly mutated into something more than a decoration for vases. Over time, this fantasy creature became an allegedly real cryptid. In my opinion, the modern myth of the Great Sea Serpent (including the recent version, Cadborosaurus) is a cultural invention descended from the artistic tradition of the hippocamp.

  Figure 5.4

  Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, rides a hippocamp on Attic black-figure pottery, ca. sixth century B.C.E.

  Figure 5.5

  The classical hippocamp and the modern cryptid Cadborosaurus share a general body plan, as well as such specific anatomical details as a mane and whale-like tail. (Various artists have regularly depicted both creatures with between one and several humps or tail arches.) (Illustration by Daniel Loxton)

  It is not hard to spot a family resemblance.34 Compare the typical hippo-camp with a modern composite drawing of Cadborosaurus (figure 5.5). These creatures are a direct, one-to-o
ne anatomical match—from the tips of their whale-like flukes, to their pectoral limbs, to their horse’s manes.35 Here is a clear answer to some of the peskiest questions about the sea serpent: Why the preposterous vertical arches? Why the mane of a horse? Why the head of a horse (or, in some variants, a cow, sheep, or camel)? It is a puzzle that bothered me as a kid and has bothered me throughout my career as a skeptical investigator. Why would sea serpents look so much like horses? It turns out that the answer is simplicity itself. Like Jessica Rabbit in the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, sea serpents have their shape because they were, literally, “drawn this way.”

  The horse-headed hippocamp motif first appeared in Greece during the Orientalizing period at around the same time as the Triton (or merman) and the ketos-type sea monster. It is important to emphasize at the outset what hippocamps were not. They were not gods. They were not characters in myths. Most important, they were not believed to be real animals. The classical world did have a lively tradition akin to cryptozoology. Serious scholars like Aristotle and Pliny the Elder attempted to fold into natural history the fantastic creatures described in rumor, legend, and travelers’ tales from distant lands. Dragons, unicorns, and griffins fit into this tradition, as do ferocious ketos sea monsters. Even mermen were reportedly spotted by eyewitnesses, but hippocamps were not.