Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters

by Matt Kaplan

  Aside from appearing as the basilisk that petrifies the students of Hogwarts in Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the ever-feared snake is consistently present alongside the villain Voldemort in the form of Nagini, his companion. Nagini is dangerous, of seemingly human intelligence, and intriguingly… female. Moreover, in David Yates’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, Nagini is revealed to be able to take the form of a human woman so she can lure Harry into cramped quarters in an old house where he can be more effectively ambushed. Once Nagini has Harry where she wants him, she transforms, grotesquely, into her snake form and attacks. Harry is petrified with fear and barely survives. The snake’s attack is one of the scariest moments in the film. Medusa in modern form?

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  25 When wishes show up in the literature of other civilizations, the people who make them typically wish for riches, visions of the future, or eternal youth. Not the Greeks. No, Minos wished for a bull. Go figure.

  26 Don’t ask.

  27 Continental crust is defined by its chemistry, not by whether it is above or below water. It can have water on top of it; this just doesn’t happen very often.

  28 This is, of course, relative. Aeronautical engineers get excited by planes that can break the sound barrier. In contrast, geologists get all excited when they find crust moving at a rate faster than your fingernails grow. An easier crowd to please.

  29 We’re talking a real wrath-of-God-type event, the sort of thing that would turn even an ancient Richard Dawkins into a believer.

  30 There is the added fact that the bull, which started the entire Minotaur mess, was given to King Minos by Poseidon, the god of both the ocean and earthquakes. Mere coincidence?

  31 In some parts of the world, the mineral pyrite, more commonly known as fool’s gold, can accumulate inside bone and transform it into a glittery replica of its original form. One has to wonder if the discovery of such transformed bones inspired the story of Midas, the mythical king whose touch could transmute objects into gold.

  32 You didn’t think it was just happenstance that the first antagonist in the Bible was the serpent in the Garden of Eden, did you?

  33 Snake venom varies a lot. Some snakes, like most of the vipers that inhabit Europe, deliver a bite that, with prompt first aid and basic medical care, causes only local tissue damage and leaves patients feeling numb and sick for a while. Other snakes, like the tiger snakes that inhabit the island of Tasmania, have venoms that kill within hours if antivenin is not administered quickly. Both would have probably proved lethal in an age when any serious weakness would have left humans vulnerable to predation.

  34 Color blindness is a genetic condition that commonly disrupts the ability to differentiate between the colors red and green. Intriguingly, research led by the primatologist Amanda Melin at the University of Calgary suggests that people who are red-green color-blind are particularly adept at spotting people who are wearing camouflage in forested settings. She and her team argued in the journal Animal Behaviour that this “disorder” may have once been beneficial to ancient humans who were hunting prey that was camouflaged. One has to wonder if it might also have played a role in helping them notice cryptically colored snakes on the forest floor.

  35 Who also happened to be Andromeda’s uncle.

  36 Nuptial gift?

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  4

  The Mysterious Fathoms—Charybdis, Leviathan, Giant Squid, Jaws

  “You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be monsters.”

  —Captain Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

  At sea, leaving sight of the land is always unnerving. As the shore slips away and the black waves grow choppy, there is a peaceful solitude that goes hand in hand with a sense of foreboding. Of course, on modern vessels there are often radios, life rafts that automatically pop open if the boats are struck by rogue waves, and emergency beacons that will alert rescue teams if the ship goes down, but even so, these essential bits of safety equipment do little to assuage a primal fear of vulnerability associated with the sea. For ancient mariners, the ocean was a powerful and dangerous force.

  It is fair to ask whether fear of the ocean is as irrational as fear of the dark. The fear of darkness stems from apprehension about nocturnal predators, but the fear often felt when walking through a darkened bedroom is unwarranted today, since not many people have a threat of nocturnal predators lurking by their nightstands. In contrast, there is something real and substantial about fears of open waters.

  The main cause of death in people left adrift is hypothermia-induced drowning. In most parts of the world, the ocean is far colder than the toasty 98.6° F (37° C) that the body needs to survive, and there is no way to generate enough heat when submerged to keep treading water for very long. Even in seemingly warm waters, like those off the Greek coast, temperatures are cooler than the core body temperature and sap the body of its heat. After a while in the water, a swimmer’s arms feel like planks of wood, the muscles lock, and he sinks into the dark depths where he drowns.

  Life vests change things a bit. Instead of dying by drowning, death tends to occur by actual hypothermia. The body at first burns nutrients to generate heat for itself, but this is a lost cause. If the adrift individual were cooling down in a shallow bath, there might be some hope for the body to heat the surrounding water and fend off the cold, but not in the limitless ocean. Drifting people, even those in wet suits, inevitably lose all their heat. Their temperatures plunge, their respirations and heartbeats come to a halt. With no blood flowing, organs fail and they die.37 It is a grim way to go.

  Few monsters better represent fear of the water and all of its life-quenching properties than the fiendish Charybdis. Literally a living whirlpool that has a taste for human flesh, Charybdis is famously featured in Homer’s Odyssey. As the hero Odysseus sails on from his visit to the sorceress Circe, she tells of dangers ahead.

  She explains he must pass through a narrow strait with the bizarre Scylla on one side and Charybdis on the other. “Charybdis sucks the dark water down. Three times a day she belches it forth, three times in hideous fashion she swallows it down again. Pray not to be caught there when she swallows down; Poseidon himself could not save you from destruction then.”

  Due to the dangers presented by the living whirlpool, Circe warns that it is better to lose six men than his whole crew and advises Odysseus to sail close to Scylla. In the end, this is exactly what he does: Scylla feeds, and Charybdis gets no further description.

  Certainly a basic fear of water and drowning played a role in the creation of Charybdis, but the fact that a whirlpool is specified suggests that the Greeks actually knew what oceanic whirlpools were. That whirlpools are real was made painfully obvious to most people in the modern world shortly after the catastrophic tsunami struck Japan in 2011. As the waters that rushed inland receded, they collided with incoming waters. Like two surging rivers flowing next to one another in opposite directions, these rushing waters started to spin where they met and created a huge vortex, sucking ships into its center. Could the Greeks or their ancestors have seen something similar and been led to imagine there was a monster dwelling in the water?

  As mentioned earlier in “It Came from the Earth,” fossils of marine organisms scattered among terrestrial deposits along the coast of Greece make it clear that the Mediterranean was the site of historic tsunamis. Unfortunately, whirlpools created by tsunamis leave no fossil evidence, so it is impossible to know for certain if they actually did occur. However, since we know that tsunamis were striking the ancient Greek coast and since the Odyssey specifically describes a whirlpool monster, it does not seem like much of a leap to suggest that the Greeks, or their recent ancestors, saw at least one huge whirlpool that scared them senseless and made its way into their myths.

  But even this examination of Charybdis’s origin might be too simplistic. Homer specifically points out that the monster vomited forth water three
times a day and sucked it back down again three times a day. This is odd, since tsunami-formed whirlpools are one-time events that ultimately vanish, as the Japanese tsunami-formed whirlpool did. What Homer’s description suggests is a whirlpool formed by tidal activity.

  Reasonably strong whirlpools of this sort—where water rushing out with the tide from one location encounters water rushing in with the tide from another—do exist in a few places along the coasts of Scotland, the United States, and Japan. Just as with tsunami-formed whirlpools, these interactions create a vortex. However, these whirlpools strengthen and weaken on a set schedule that runs like clockwork with the tides. Since there are typically two high tides and two low tides per day, it is a bit baffling that Homer describes Charybdis as sucking in water, presumably through a vortex, three times a day. However, in some parts of the world, including the Mediterranean Sea, there can be unusual numbers of tides per day, with six (three high and three low) a possibility. Alternatively, by saying “three times a day,” Homer may have simply been referring to tides noticed during “daytime,” in which case it would be common for at least one of the whirlpool formations at tidal sites to take place during the dark of night and thus not be seen.

  Exactly which real-world tidal whirlpool Homer was considering when describing Charybdis is a difficult question to answer since the existence of whirlpools elsewhere in the world would have been unknown to the Greeks, and most regions of the Mediterranean do not have tides of any significant strength. A naval chart produced by the Italian government in 1881 includes a tiny whirlpool drawing just south of Sicily’s Capo Peloro. It is labeled “Charybdis” and marked as a hazard. Another chart, created in 1823 by Captain W. H. Smyth of the Royal Navy, places a whirlpool drawing with the “Charybdis” label in exactly the same place. Yet another, made in 1810, places the monster slightly farther north. Was legend leading people to mark the monster on maps even if no real monster was there? Or were real navigational conditions once so terrible in the area as to warrant the making of a monster?

  Plan of the Faro, or Strait of Messina, by Captain W. H. Smith, R.N. 1823. British Library.

  Today, British admiralty charts mention whirlpools as regularly forming in the Strait of Messina, which separates mainland Italy and Sicily. Known locally as garofali, these whirlpools are actually tidal in nature because, while tides in the Mediterranean are very weak, the narrow strait amplifies the mild tidal effects that are present there. This amplified tide also runs across an unusual submarine ridge that allows it to sometimes drag up cold, dense water from deep below. After being dragged up and moved a short distance on the surface by the tide, this cold water quickly sinks back down to the depths and buoyant warm water swiftly rushes in to fill its place. This process is responsible for the creation of whirlpools. Moreover, the British admiralty specifically identifies one whirlpool, near Torre Faro on Sicily, as particularly large and permanent, and states that it is widely believed to be the Charybdis of Greek lore. What is odd is that this “Charybdis” is listed as hazardous only to small watercraft during the most extreme tides. How could something so minor have been viewed as a monster?

  One possibility, suggested by modern oceanographers, is that a major earthquake of 7.2 magnitude on the Richter scale took place in 1908 in the Messina region, killed between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people, and altered the submarine ridge such that less deep water was brought to the surface. And if a recent major quake could change the bathymetry of the area and lead to the weakening of a whirlpool that eighteenth-century sailors thought worrying enough to note on charts as a monster, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether older earthquakes reduced the whirlpool’s intensity long before even they saw it. A combination of geological clues and human records indicates that a series of powerful earthquakes hit the area in 1783. Were these earthquakes the first to weaken the Charybdis of ancient history, or had the monster already been weakened by even earlier earthquakes? For all we know, Homer may not have been exaggerating at all. Tides in the area could have once brought up so much cold water from the deep that they produced a whirlpool large enough to present a major threat to vessels of all sizes.38

  Yet Charybdis is rare among sea monsters by being composed of water and killing people by drowning them. Far more often the danger presented by the ocean takes shape in the human imagination as something physical and predatory. Really, when left adrift in dark waters of seemingly limitless depth, there is nothing more horrible than feeling something swim just past the soles of your feet or, worse, having that something swim in for a bite. And it is from this fear that the legendary and vile Leviathan comes.

  Biblical fears

  Huge, hulking, and powerful, Leviathan is staggeringly different from Charybdis in having a physical form capable of swimming long distances and causing tremendous destruction. Unlike Charybdis, which occupies only two lines in the Odyssey, the biblical description of Leviathan in the book of Job is considerable:

  Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight of him is overpowering…

  I will not fail to speak of his limbs, his strength and his graceful form.

  Who can strip off his outer coat? Who would approach him with a bridle?

  Who dares open the doors of his mouth, ringed about with his fearsome teeth?

  His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together;

  each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.

  They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted.

  His snorting throws out flashes of light; his eyes are like the rays of dawn.

  Firebrands stream from his mouth; sparks of fire shoot out.

  Smoke pours from his nostrils as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.

  His breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from his mouth.

  Strength resides in his neck; dismay goes before him.

  The folds of his flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable.

  His chest is hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone.

  When he rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before his thrashing.

  The sword that reaches him has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.

  Iron he treats like straw and bronze like rotten wood.

  Arrows do not make him flee; slingstones are like chaff to him.

  A club seems to him but a piece of straw; he laughs at the rattling of the lance.

  It is an unusually long description for a monster, but it is very much worth taking apart to understand how humanity moved from conjuring up a living whirlpool to a creature like this.

  Consider “His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.” While the image of an animal with shields for skin is vivid, it is hard for the mind not to wander to thoughts of reptiles when reading something like this. Whether Leviathan’s skin is inspired by the large, hard scales of the crocodile or the scutes on a sea turtle’s shell is tough to tell from the description. But anyone paddling along the Nile would have had a chance to tangle with crocodiles of substantial size, and anyone sailing near the Egyptian coast would have likely seen the backs of sea turtles making their way through the water. From just this description of Leviathan, it would seem that such reptile encounters found their way into the biblical texts.

  At first glance, the description of sparks of fire shooting out of Leviathan’s mouth seems the stuff of pure fantasy, but then follows, “Smoke pours from his nostrils as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.” The critical thing to correct, of course, is that smoke does not actually come from a boiling pot. What is meant here is probably steam, though this makes little sense since the only features in the natural world that produce steam are geothermal in origin, and it would be difficult to mistake a volcanic eruption or a geyser for a sea monster. But steam and mist look awfully similar when seen from a distance, and whales, when they exhale through their blowhole
s, could easily be mistaken for releasing steam by early sailors who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get close enough to feel that the steam was actually cool to the touch.

  The possibility of a whale inspiring the Leviathan myth is supported by other parts of the biblical description. For example, “When he rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before his thrashing” seems to be an account of a whale breaching from beneath the waves. And the arrows, clubs, and slingstones being unable to harm Leviathan further support this idea, since whales have incredibly thick skins and usually require harpoons to be killed.

  Several whale populations might have inspired these elements of Leviathan. It might seem sailors would have to leave the Mediterranean and head out into the Atlantic to see anything bigger than a dolphin, but this is not true. Even though whales are not often seen by locals today, there are a few whale populations that have adapted to survive in the Mediterranean. A population of fin whales, large and docile animals that passively feed off of plankton much as blue whales do, live in the region and are seen from time to time. More intriguingly, there is a sperm whale population, the huge carnivorous whale species featured in Moby-Dick, living off the shore of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. Modern biologists’ realization that the whales of Zakynthos are sperm whales came as quite a shock, since male sperm whales are well known for making incredibly long migrations between the near-freezing waters found at the poles and the warm waters near the equator. As it turns out, the male sperm whales near Zakynthos don’t migrate at all but instead stay in the warm Mediterranean water with the females and young of the population throughout the year.39

  These whale populations were probably present between 1500 and 500 BC, when Leviathan took shape in biblical writings, since lots of pottery from that time depict monsters that mix whale characteristics with those of reptiles, hinting that the artists of these works had at least caught glimpses of whales. Moreover, archaeological studies have revealed a whale shoulder bone that was used as a chopping board in an ancient Greek marketplace around 900 BC, roughly a hundred years before Homer. While it is possible that the bone was collected from the coast of the Atlantic and brought to Greece, it is more likely that it was part of a whale’s body that washed up locally.