In the previous post there was discussion of the likely origins of various monsters, whether real or imagined. Humanity’s traditional predators, now vanquished for the most part, probably supplied the material for some of our earliest nightmares. With the advance of civilization and its subjugation of the wilderness, familiar predators and other creatures became intermixed in fanciful creations and amalgamations of animal forms. These overlapped with cryptids, those mysterious organisms that exist in the corners of our eyes, just out of reach of capture and documentation. The Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, Chupcabra and their cousins thrive in the remaining districts of unknown terrain, both in reality and in our minds.
As
human civilization became more aware of itself, its own monstrosity, which had
been projected outwards for millennia, became internalized. Modern creatures of terror and horror often take
a human form, and are typically a reflection of our own divided, depraved
souls. In this sense “Man is the measure
of all things” as Protagoras once said, “of things which are, that they are,
and of things which are not, that they are not.” Humanity has long endeavored to be its own
gauge of beauty, order and knowledge as well as of horror and despair. (The result of this hubris is not
infrequently that same horror and despair.)
As our
minds expand with knowledge and awareness, hitherto unsuspected regions of
darkness are illumined—at least their edges. The future creates new unknown
territories to explore and populate with horrible creatures: outer space, the impact of worldwide
instantaneous communication, human genetic engineering, religious extremism—to
name just a few. The form of the
monstrous expands beyond the merely human to take amorphous, shifting,
indeterminate shapes—the kind of nightmares that H.P. Lovecraft envisioned.
This is
not to suggest there is a necessary
chronological or historical sequence of “monsterological development”—from
man-eating lion to Yog-Sothoth. All
along this continuum there are archetypal beasts that are likely to reappear
over time whenever conditions are right.
“They all died vast epochs of time before man came,” as Lovecraft writes
in The Call of Cthulhu (1928), “but
there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again in
the right positions in the cycle of eternity.”
What
follows is a rough model of monstrosity, a means of conceptualizing and
classifying these creatures along
various parameters. The image of the
monstrous changes over time: it becomes more or less like a traditional
predator, more or less human in appearance and power, more or less familiar as
a fellow life form. A key assumption
here is simply that monstrosity involves a deviation from the ideal human
physical and social form, as defined by the culture in which it
originates.
The
progression is not strictly linear, not always moving forward. Monstrosity moves back and forth along a
continuum, but always away from a center or average, which is the ideal human
form. In a sense, monstrosity, plotted
on a graph, might look like a statistical “bell curve”, with standard
deviations marking off the boundaries of increasing terror. (Chronologically, the chart is read bottom to
top.)
A Continuum of Monstrosity
Other
continua are certainly possible.
Because The R’lyeh Tribune
focuses on early twentieth century horror, science fiction and fantasy it is
likely that more contemporary teratogenesis
has been overlooked. Further development of this model would involve assignment
of examples from movies and fiction to the various subheadings, a task I leave
for now to my readers.
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