On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (55 page)
Read On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Online
Authors: Stephen T. Asma
5
. Both Catholics, Chambers and Tolkien were friends and might be said to offer a uniquely Catholic perspective, one that celebrates rather than ignores the issues of evil, on early English literature.
6
. Obviously in Christianity there is a parallel narrative that sees the suffering of Jesus as the ultimate monster killer redeeming the world from sin through his suffering. But although this is a familiar version to us now, we must recognize that it made little sense to the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean and northern Europe. The idea that one “wins” (righteousness) by “losing” (undergoing suffering) was paradoxical to the cultures of strength, loyalty, and power.
8
. “Alexander the Great’s Journey to Paradise,” in
Legends of Alexander the Great
, edited by Stoneman.
9
. Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
, translated by Judith Norman, in
Fifty Readings in Philosophy
, edited by Donald Abel (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Some careless
readers have interpreted Nietzsche’s distinction between slave morality and master morality in racial terms. This reading is rendered incoherent when Nietzsche explains that both forms of morality, vying for dominance, can exist within each person: “In fact, you sometimes find them [master and slave morality] sharply juxtaposed—inside the same person even, within a single soul” (aphorism 260).
10
. Sam Keen,
Fire in the Belly
(Bantam Books, 1992),
chapter 8
.
CHAPTER11
. Perhaps the more popular “new man” fusion of the pagan and the Christian is the
simpler
fusion. The monster-killing hero is simply baptized and made into a saint. St. George is a monster killer who, like almost every other monster killer, saves innocents from doom. But now he, and other similarly talented saints, do their monster killing in the sanctified context of missionary work. Christianity may have all the merciful and peaceful tendencies in it that believers (like Tolkien) respect and skeptics (like Nietzsche) scorn, but both sides forget that Christianity was a
mythos
before it was an
ethos
. The majority of medieval folk culture would have been less interested in “turn the other cheek” proverbs and more interested in stories of Christian
power
, the supernatural efficacy of Christianity and its God to ameliorate the problems of life.
8
1
. Even while I wrote this chapter a story about a botched exorcism made the daily news. In July 2007 in Phoenix, Arizona, police responded to a report of an exorcism on a young girl. When police arrived they found the girl’s grandfather choking her, and they used stun guns on him.
The 3-year-old girl and her mother, who was also in the room during the struggle between 49-year-old Ronald Marquez and officers, were hospitalized, police said. The relative who called police said an exorcism had also been attempted Thursday. “The purpose was to release demons from this very young child,” said Sgt. Joel Tranter. Officers arrived at the house Saturday and entered when they heard screaming coming from a bedroom, Tranter said. A bed had been pushed up against the door; the officers pushed it open a few inches and saw Marquez choking his bloodied granddaughter, who was crying in pain and gasping, Tranter said. A bloody naked 19-year-old woman who police later determined to be Marquez’s daughter and the girl’s mother was in the room, chanting “something that was religious in nature,” Tranter said. (Associated Press, CNN.com, July 29, 2007)
2
. Anthony’s marvelous episodes have also fueled the pictorial tradition, from the medieval period to the present. Paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Matthias Grunewald, and Salvador Dali, for example, have helped to keep Anthony’s tribulations in the popular imagination. Anthony’s battle with monsters comes to us via his famous biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria (ca. 293–373). Athanasius chronicled Anthony’s life in a work titled simply
Vita Antonii
, or
Life of Anthony
.
3
. Anthony had a younger sister whom he placed in a nunnery, where she could preserve her virginity.
4
. All quotes from the
Life of Anthony
are taken from Rev. H. Ellershaw,
Select Writings of Athanasius
, in
Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
(New York, 1957), series II, vol. IV.
5
. Anthony offers more evidence of the weakness of evil spirits when he tells the famous gospel story about Christ’s exorcism of a man named Legion. This man was
possessed by many demons, and when Christ drew them out of the man, the evil spirits actually
begged
Christ to enter a herd of swine. He granted this transfer, and the swine then ran straight into the lake and drowned themselves. Anthony asks his monks why, if demons are powerful, they have to ask permission and beg for such trivial mischief.
6
. Centuries later Aquinas was still refining Christian demonology and giving nuance to the ideas first formed by St. Anthony. In his
Summa Contra Gentiles
Aquinas considers whether demons are inherently evil. He offers some standard theological and scriptural ways of thinking about demons and monsters, but he also gives a more philosophical argument for thinking that demons are not all bad. The wider popular culture believes demons to be inherently evil beings that intentionally seek the pain and suffering of others as their only real goal and purpose. But Aquinas argues that demons are confused and weak-willed and accidentally evil, but not essentially evil. When those demons tortured St. Anthony, for example, they were motivated by their (admittedly selfish and wrongheaded) sense of good. Like other cases of evil and sin, the suffering of St. Anthony is the result of a “false judgment” rather than a “bad will.” Properly speaking, for Aquinas, there is no such thing as a bad will really, only a confused will. By definition, a willful choice is always toward a good, so a bad will, one that
always
and
by nature
chooses bad rather than good, makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.