From the Vault: The First Monster

Humans love monsters, but when did we first dare to dream up bestial hybrids and chimerical horrors? In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick consider the 35-40 thousand-year-old Löwenmensch statues. Who created these images of lion-headed men? What do they represent and what do they reveal about human cognition? (Originally published October 27, 2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
it's Saturday. It's October. It's time to go into the vault,
and this time we were going in for our exploration
of the First Monster. This was originally published on October.
I remember really enjoying this episode. Yeah, this one, This
one really gets into some fun territory and is I

(00:27):
think legitimately creepy at times when we try we look
back and we just try and consider these what maybe
the first monsters that humans ever dreamed up? And where
this combination of bestial and human body parts comes together
and what it means. So let's get right to it.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Stuff to Blow

(00:47):
your Mind on the First Monster. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot com. Hey you
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course it's October,

(01:07):
so we are still doing some of our favorite stuff
of the year. Monster content. That's right, God, did I
just say content. I'm the monster. I'm the content creating monster.
Let's think of it as is monster cargo, monsters cargo.
I think that we're delivering to the listeners years, yeah,
to create a cargo cult of our listeners. So I

(01:28):
was wondering, just recently, you know what is the oldest monster,
Because as you go back in time, monsters become in
a way, they become less uniquely scary, and they become
more elementally scary. They become less like I don't know,
the Girl in the Ring and all that kind of

(01:49):
recent popular monster fad stuff, and they become more like
a dragon or a beast with a bull's head or something.
And so I was wondering, like, you know what, what's
the earliest thing in recorded history? There there are some
things in ancient Sumerian, Assyrian Babylonian texts. I just wanted
to read one sort of monster passage I came across

(02:11):
from an ancient Assyrian text called the Seven Evil Spirits.
This is translated into English by R. C. Thompson in
nineteen o three, and it's this ancient Assyrian poem. It
goes raging storms evil gods. Are they ruthless demons who
in Heaven's vault were created? Are they workers of evil

(02:31):
are they? They lift up the head to evil every day,
to evil destruction, to work of the seven. The first
is the south Wind. The second is a dragon whose
mouth is opened that none can measure. The third is
a grim leopard, which carries off the young. The fourth
is a terrible shibou. The fifth is a furious wolf

(02:54):
who knoweth not to flee. The sixth is a rampant
thing is ill and which marches against God and King.
The seventh is a storm, an evil wind, which takes vengeance. Well,
that those that al sounds remarkable, But I'm instantly thinking
some of those are just animals. Like the wolf is
just like a dumb wolf, Like it's just not smart

(03:16):
enough to run away. Right. I wonder about the grim leopard.
The grim leopard sounds kind of monstrous because it carries
off the young. Grim seems to that that implies some
kind of human affect. Yeah, well, you know, I guess
you get into definitions of monster. Right. Is a monster
something that is a combination of things? Is it something
that is entirely unreal or is it just something real

(03:38):
that is exaggerated in size? Yeah, well, I mean if
it's an evil creature that works destruction upon the earth
and marches against God and King. I'd say that's probably
a monster or people, you know, But I feel like
we're we're actually already too late, because we're muddling around
in recorded history, and you can go much deeper. So

(04:00):
in August of nineteen thirty nine, a group of archaeologists
were doing field work at a Stone Age cave site
in southern Germany. And the cave was called Stottlehol which
means stable cave, and it was at Hollenstein near vogel Herd.
At this cave site, the researchers uncovered this massive collection
of ivory fragments, broken pieces made from the tusks tusks

(04:24):
of a Pleistocene mammoth and now it's Ice Age mammoth
of Europe, wooly mammoth. Unfortunately, something happened. Just a matter
of days after this initial discovery. World War two broke out,
not a great time to be digging in southern Germany,
and so the dig had to be quickly abandoned and
the dig was filled in and the broken pieces of

(04:44):
the mammoth ivory were laid in storage for decades, and
then about thirty years later, a German archaeologist named Joachim
Han started trying to fit the ivory shards together playing this.
You know, if you've ever seen these games, the three
D jig saw puzzle game him of artifactor reconstruction. It
looks like a nightmare of trying to see how all

(05:04):
these things because obviously some pieces are missing. It's like
trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with half half the puzzle. Uh.
And so we had more than two fragments, and he
discovered that the pieces of ivory were originally part of
the same Paleolithic figurine. It was a statuette about thirty
one cimeters long, which is just over a foot, and

(05:26):
it was carbon fourteen dated to somewhere between thirty five
and forty thousand years old. And once the pieces were
put together, it became clear that you could still make
out representative features, features that appeared to be both human
and non human. And this is the central image I

(05:46):
want to talk about in today's episode. This is the
figure that would come to be known as the loan Minch,
which is German for the lion man. And if you
want to see an image of the Loan Ninch, we
will have a picture of it on the landing page
of this episode it's stuff to blow your behind dot
com it Uh, it's it's rather regal looking. Yeah, well
I would say it's regal like it's it's got this
upright posture, and it does look very stately, but also

(06:09):
in the spirit of the grim leopard of Assyria. It's
kind of grim. It's got this kind of like there
is no pity in the lionman's face. No, no pity.
I just looked in closer at it, and I don't
see I don't see a shred of pity, like it
would pass your sentence and and not not heed your tears. So,
after this original reconstruction and the following decades, there was

(06:30):
this long, multi stage process that led to the final
reconstruction of the artifact in fuller and fuller detail. So
in the nineteen eighties there was a paleontologist named Elizabeth
Schmidt who added more pieces from additional re excavations of
the site, and she corrected some errors and previous reconstructions,
and the clear impression of this feline head began to emerge.

(06:52):
And then in the two thousands and other archaeologists named
Klaus Joachim kind returned to the Stytle Cave to uncover
more original piece is and it led to this amazing
version of the artifact that you can go see today.
I think it's usually at the Oom Museum in Germany,
but I believe it is currently on loan at the
British Museum. In fact, I believe it was the British

(07:13):
Museum tweeting about the acquisition that acquisition the loan that
made me think about doing this episode. So the lionman,
he stands like a human in this two footed bipedal posture,
back straight with human arms straped down to the side,
human torso maybe lion ish kinds of legs, but this
proud menacing head of a big cat. And you've got

(07:38):
to wonder. So this is thirty five to forty thousand
years ago there, long before recorded history. Nobody was writing
down what they were thinking. There apparently was no written language.
So what did this figure mean to the Stone Age
people who made it? Yeah, I mean, for the most part,
we can only we can only guess. We can certainly
look to more increasingly more complex ideals that came afterwards.

(08:01):
But you look at it and you think, was this
is this a deity. Is this a punishing creature? Is
this I've seen the term master of animals thrown around
in interpreting similar alleged figures from cave paintings and another
ancient remains. Yeah, there is a sort of intuitive sense
in which you could see an ancient person seeing an

(08:23):
apex predator like a lion or any any kind of
big cat as some sort of god of the wilderness
that would have power over other animals because it is
at the top of the food chain. But it's a
serious question to imagine why people wouldn't make this artifact,
because making an artifact like this would have been an
extreme sacrifice. Uh. These would have been people, I think

(08:45):
very likely living not always very far from the edge
of starvation. Uh. And an artifact like this took resources,
It took time, it took energy, It wore down your
sharp flint tools and the carving process. In fact, there
was a in recent years there was an ex peerman
by a guy named Wolf Heine that I watched a
video of online. And this guy specializes in replicating ancient

(09:06):
artifacts using the methods and tools that would have been
available to the people who made them. And his reconstruction
of the low and minch using these flint carving tools.
He says it took more than three hundred and seventy hours.
And in this video, if you sit and watch it,
like the unbelievable laborious nous of the project begins to

(09:27):
sink in. You just watch him going over and over
this ivory tusk with this piece of flint. And when
you look at the guy's hands, I started to feel
how working this flint rock over the ivory for hours
and hours would just turn your fingers into hot ground beef.
Just terrible. Yeah. And and to your point, these were
people that lived on the edge. They were they were wanderers.

(09:48):
They had not reached the point in the ascension of
human civilization where you had specialists who could set aside
time to create something like this. Uh. And if they
created something like this at obviously wasn't going to be
just a toy for a child to play with. It
was something important, right, And there are signs in the
artifact itself that seemed to signify that it had cultural importance, right. Yeah.

(10:10):
The surface of the original artifacts seems to have been
smoothed from excessive handling, as if it were passed around
in a ritual for instance, Right, he said, yeah, so
it looks like this is something that was handled a lot.
It's got that worn down feeling to it um And
this is one reason that the Lowan bench is often
cited is perhaps the earliest evidence that exists of religious beliefs. Now,

(10:32):
who would the people that made this artifact have been, Well,
it was almost certainly modern humans living in the area
at the time. But but it's also worth noting that
modern humans and the under dolls um lived in this
area at this at the same time they coexisted. And uh.
I did find a quote from a Jeffrey Brantingham, an

(10:54):
archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he
says that he doesn't think it's far fetched to think
that Neanderthal's uh, you know, could have made similar items.
But for the most part, everyone seems to be on
board with the idea that these were modern Homo sapiens
that created these artifacts, anatomically modern except not quite so

(11:15):
hunched over from watching YouTube, although right, uh yeah, but
there may be reasons to think that other members of
this this ancient culture or this you know, ancient what
would you call it, sort of a loose idea of
a culture if it was mostly small bands of people
rather than cities or nations, but that whatever, the people
of this time period were made artifacts like this in general,

(11:38):
because this isn't the only one, right, Yeah, that's right.
In two thousand three, another line was discovered in southwestern
Germany or what is now southwestern Germany, and this one
has carbon day to do around the same time period.
So by by some estimates, it kind of depends who's
doing the math and who's you know, doing the figure
in But by some estimates, these are the oldest statues

(11:58):
and the oldest examples figurative art. However, we do have
the Venus of the Whole Fells and uh, and by
some estimates this takes the title. But the estimates here
like thirty five thousand and forty thousand years ago, so
we're kind of placing it in basically the same time period.
They were just discoveries, key discoveries made in two thousand

(12:19):
and two thousand and sixteen. If you've if you've looked
at a lot of like really ancient human artifacts, you've
probably seen images of these. Uh. The venous images are
essentially a feminine figure like you know, kind of kind
of a round feminine figure with without a head or

(12:40):
or very little detail provided outside of like breasts and belly. Yeah. Yeah,
It's often seen as having the what we're perceived as
the feminine figures exaggerated, so it would be in large
breasts and large tips and stuff like that. And for
that reason people often look at this and say that
they think it had some kind of fertility significance. Right now,

(13:01):
you know where in depending you can go back and
forth over which one could be older than the other.
It seems like they likely existed at the same time.
But the key difference here is that while the venus
is a depiction essentially of the feminine form of something
that exists of a human being right uh, that exists
in the real world, the loan mench is the human
fused with the beast. And in the words of Clive Gamble,

(13:24):
and archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, as quoted
in Nature quote, they depict the animal world in a
semi realistic way. It shows early man moving from his
immediate world to an imaginative world. Now this is interesting
because yeah, you have to imagine that I don't know,
there's no way to get inside, say a chimpanzees head

(13:46):
or a dog's head to some other mammal. But if
these animals have any kind of imaginative capacity, and there's
no proof, really, I guess that they have any kind
of ability to picture objects that are not in front
of them. If they do, you kind of have to
assume that they're sort of literal right that they'd be,
that they would be putting together ideas of images that

(14:07):
are from their direct experience. Yeah, I mean so in
this case, I mean, one example that comes to mind,
one possible and perhaps nitpicking idea, is that what if,
say thag, the member of your tribe, what a fag
likes to take a deer head or or a big
cat head, and he likes to just kind of hollow

(14:29):
that sucker out or get the skin, and they just
put it over his own head, and he's famous for this,
and he's so famous for this that one decides to
create a statue of it. Like, that's the only scenario
I think in which you could you could make the argument.
I don't see anybody making that argument, but I feel
like that's the only example you can make an argument
for this being an image of a thing that was

(14:50):
as opposed to an image of a thing that was not.
Let me throw a twist on your example, though, So
maybe Fag does put on the head dress or you know,
the remains of some of the predator, and to simulate
that in that sense, would that not be becoming another
kind of creature at least in symbol? That's true? Yeah,
I mean, I mean you can certainly make the argument

(15:10):
that that if that did that and bothered to put
the beast's skin over his head, that you know, he
is pretending to be something else or or participating in
an experience that makes him feel as if he's something else.
So yeah, it all kind of amounts to the same thing,
doesn't it. Right. So, whether it's Thag inspiring this this
lionman carving, or whoever carved it depicting some kind of

(15:32):
being that they had never seen in nature, what's going
on is a kind of fusion into unreal creatures. And
according to Jill Cook, a curator at the British Museum
who has a good blog post about the Loan Minch
for the British Museum's acquisition, the Loan Mench is the
oldest known representation of a creature that does not exist

(15:52):
in nature, not necessarily the oldest piece of art, but
the oldest evidence of fantasy, quite literally, the world's oldest monster.
Now by monster, of course, we've got to clarify the
way we use the term, I mean an imaginary creature
that does not occur in nature, not necessarily a bad
or evil creature. So this isn't to say that the

(16:13):
people who imagine the loewen men should necessarily would have
thought of it as antagonistic. Though I feel pretty strongly
that even if whatever this being was was treated with reverence,
I suspect it would have been the kind of awe
in the classic sense of awe, not like oh, here's
my friend the lionman, but like a solemn blend of
wonder and fear. Well, if you try and imagine what

(16:35):
life was like at the time, I mean, every every
day would have a certain amount of uncertainty. You're you're
depending upon your ability to find the food, to follow
the patterns that lead to food, to to hunt prey
that will feed and clothe you through the harsh winter
months especially, so there's a certain amount uncertainty. There's a
certain amount of chaos and therefore we you know, you

(16:58):
might expect to find those elements in imagine beings. Yeah,
I can see that. So let's look at the ingredients
of this imagine being. Obviously it is one part human.
We know about the the upright bipedal human pretty well.
But what is the head of this creature and possibly
the inspiration for the muscly legs. Yeah, this is this
is a great question because I imagine a lot of

(17:18):
people are thinking, Okay, southern Germany lions. Lions are in
Africa and and or India, so what are they doing
in Europe. Well, given the time frame in the location,
experts believe that we're seeing a human or humanoid body
with the with the head of a now extinct cave lion.
Cave lion. Yeah, now, I think that's that's interesting, isn't

(17:39):
it though, because you have a partial likeness of one
extinct animal in the very tusk of another ivory. Yeah,
and it's created by a species that probably played a
role in the extinction of both species. Oh, I hadn't
thought about that. Yeah, there's there's actually there's not a
lot of evidence for lion hunting, but a two thousand

(18:00):
extin Spanish study published in p. Los One. They looked
at fossilized cave lion toe bones and they found human modifications,
possibly made with stone tools that were made for skinning.
So they think that the ancient peoples might have hunted
them for their pelts. But of course we know even
if they didn't directually hunt these lions, they could have
contributed to their extinction by encroaching on their habitat, by

(18:22):
competition for large fauna and food sources. Now, there were
different varieties of cave lion. One was found in America
and there were two in Eurasia. There was a Panthera
leo of Fossilus, and this was first. This one first
appeared in Europe seven hundred thousand years ago and evolved
into Panthera leo Spellia. And this cave lion is the

(18:46):
one that continued on. That's the one we're seeing here.
And this is the one that they went on to
go extinct, probably by fourteen thousand years ago. But so
thirty five to forty thousand years ago when this thing
was made, they were still around. Yes. Now I've also
read I don't know how much stock we can put
in this, but I've also read in the past that
some people think it may have survived in the Balkans

(19:08):
up to two thousand years ago, But again I don't
know to what extent we should buy into that. Then
they get into cryptic territory, the grim leopard of the Balkan. Yeah,
but to be clear, Panthera leo Spellia was probably the
largest cat that ever lived. It was probably twenty five
larger than modern lions and also bigger than today's largest tigers.

(19:30):
So we're talking up to eleven feet six inches or
three point five meters in length. That is a crazy thing,
because something you might not have experienced if you haven't
been to a zoo recently. I noticed that I don't
really have a correct vision in my head of how
large the big cats are, like a lion or a tiger.
I think of them as I don't know, like maybe

(19:52):
large the size of a great Dane or a little
bit larger. I really but if if you go to
a to a zoo and you get like it up
against the glass where these things are, you realize like, oh,
oh man, this is like as big as a horse.
These things are gigantic. Well they're they're I mean, they're
smaller than a horse, but but it seems like a horse,

(20:13):
but it does seem that big if you're in the
right position to observe them. For instance, here at Zoo Atlanta.
I go to the zoo a lot with my son,
and sometimes we get there early. And when you get
there early, sometimes you're the only person close to the
lion enclosure and they're still kind of active because it's
the morning. And I've had some really creepy experiences walking

(20:33):
up there with my you know, small snack size child
next to me. Delicious, Yeah, And the way the lion
looks at you, you just feel this this primal feeling,
and you get a sense of what this this beast
is and how I'm supposed to view this beast outside
of the artificial confines of the zoo environment. Isn't it
funny that we've got spider fear but we don't have

(20:55):
lion fear. Well, it might be very different if you
live in proximity to lions, But I feel no natural
fear about lions in the same way I do when
I see the image of like a spider crawling towards
my face. Well, I usually don't, but I feel like
in these moments, I'm willing to buy that there's something
they're like, like there's something situationally and environmentally that has
to be in place and such. It's so standing, you know,

(21:17):
beside a small child in in a situation where the
lions attention is on me. It's very creepy, and I
can I can buy into an idea that there's something
ingrained in me to to to fear them. It is
terrifying itself to fear the predatory gaze, like when you
when you just see the eyes of the creature that's
large enough to eat you and maybe wants to. That

(21:40):
comes through a lot in one of our favorite books
to talk about in here in Blind Site by Peter Watts,
where he talks about the vampires gaze. Uh, you know,
they usually keep their eyes covered because people like they
wear the sunglasses because if they don't, people can just
constantly feel themselves being looked at as prey. So it's
it's easy for I mean, it's it's relatively easy for

(22:00):
us to lock eyes with a predator like the lion
if you go to zoos and whatnot. But but try
to imagine living in this ancient time like the rare
situations where you would make eye contact with this creature
and lift to tell about and how powerful that would be.
Like that that would have to play a role in
the creation of of this lion man. You can imagine

(22:22):
it was a religious experience, like if you came face
to face with a cave lion and did not die,
that this would make you feel like you had entered
a higher plane of existence, you had communed with some
with the grim leopard of the skies. Yeah. Now, of
course it's worth noting that this this may have been,
This may well have been the first lion man lion
humanoid hybrid in human beliefs, but we would go on

(22:47):
to have many more. Of course, some of the some
of the key examples of the Egyptians had several or
at least four may He's pequette segment and tef nut.
And then in Hindu is Um you have Nara Sima,
which literally means manline in Sanskrit. I've seen people online
commenting that they believe that the lowand minch is and

(23:10):
is a depiction of Nara Sema. Huh, Well, I mean,
it's it's essentially like visually the same idea. It is
that it is a humanoid with the lions head, and
this is in Hinduism. It's an avatar of Vishnu and
it's often seen. It's often depicted slaying the demon Harran
yak a shippoo, and it's always a grizzly scene in

(23:31):
which the lion avatar with its multiple arms is if
this rating like ripping this this human oid demon apart
at the stomach. I'm looking at an image right now.
It is. It is rough, yeah, in trails flailing and
you know their in trails wrapped around the god's head.
It's it's it's wonderful. Now. The vision of the lion

(23:53):
headed man in the Lowan mench is, as we said,
it's kind of stately, it's kind of serene, it's kind
of pit list, but it's not doing anything overtly threatening.
It's more like that that distant predatory gaze that it
makes you uneasy. This depiction is roaring, it's got the
teeth beard, it's ready to bite you in half. Now,
there of course creatures in the myth and legend that

(24:17):
are the reverse of the lion man. Oh yeah, how
about the sphinx, right, it's the exact opposite body of
a lion with the head of a human. Yeah, and
you have you also have similar scenarios with of course,
the manticore, the chimera, and some depictions of of dragons
are essentially lion headed entities. Now, another creature that came

(24:38):
up for me in my research, and this is one
I didn't I didn't know much about, and luckily this
is one that actually nobody knows a whole lot about.
It's still rather enigmatic. But the leonto Cephaline a creature
of myth Reism, which is a mystery religion centered around
the god Mithress in the Roman Empire from around the
first of the fourth centuries se. Mythriyism is great because

(25:01):
it's got all these intriguing artifacts and artistic descriptions, but
people are not descriptions depictions from the ancient world, but
we don't know that much about it, where there's a
lot of mystery about what the content of this religion was. Yeah,
and this is a great example of it, because you
have a naked man with a lion's head. He's winged,
has like four wings. It looks like there's a serpent

(25:22):
entwined around him, much like a caduceus, and it's. Yeah,
it's it's. It's also the lion's head seems like it
might be screaming or crying aloud and anguish. It's it's
been their additional cryptic details in the image as well,
but uh, it's very poorly understood. Well, whatever it's, it's
a lot of its secrets have have been lost to time.

(25:43):
Can you imagine if that happened to existing religions today? So, like,
imagine you are an archaeologist of the future and you're
digging through our artifacts of the twentieth century and you
can find some religious art, some religious art, I guess,
and some very is depictions and descriptions of what's going
on and say Catholicism or modern Hinduism or something like that,

(26:07):
but you're mostly unable to discern what the like textual
contents of the religion were. Wouldn't that be fascinating, like
trying to piece it together? Yeah? Yeah, I mean you
could probably are probably various examples of just fashion shoots
and popular imagery from today. And if you didn't know
what the various icons were, I mean, how would you
figure it out? What's this hand sign that jay Z

(26:29):
is making in this image? What does it mean, you know,
it must have some kind of religious significance. Now, speaking
of no earlier, you mentioned what happens when Thag puts
on the the like lion head on top of his head,
and does that represent itself as some kind of alternate
creature or are we just looking at Thag wearing his clothes.

(26:49):
There is some debate about whether other ancient depictions of
hybrid creatures are in fact hybrids, or whether we're looking
at somebody wearing an animal garment, right, yeah, yeah, Like
what instantly comes to mind is is something that is
at times referred to as the Hornet God, which of
course I like, but also known as the Sorcerer. Nice.

(27:13):
So this one is from the Sorcerer. The most famous
sorcerer here is from a cavern known as the Sanctuary.
And this is from a cave in France, the Cave
of Troy fresh ri Age, and this is from around
estimates thirteen thousand BC. Now the cave itself discovered was

(27:33):
discovered in nineteen fourteen, so it's it's interesting how a
lot of these discoveries are occurring in the early part
of the twentieth century. And the cave was found to
feature mostly cave art of animals, but also a couple
of these half human half animal figures. And the dominant
figure is the small humanoid again that is known as

(27:53):
the Horned God or the Sorcerer. And it's this humanoid
figure loosely with with with the head of of an animal,
looks like with it with antlers, with the head of
a stag or an elk or something like that. Robert, Yeah,
and uh. And the interpretations vary sometimes again there's this
masters of animal argument, or that it's a divine figure

(28:16):
priest and archaeologist Henry Bruel drew and the sketch of
the figure, and I have to say it looks a
little bit more elaborate than the the actual photographs. So
I think sometimes, you know it a lot of it
falls to interpretation, you know, how do you make sense
of this image? And I've also read some some criticism

(28:37):
of of interpretations of the Sorcerer, saying that look, what
we could be looking at here just just it is
just the result of overlaps between depicted forms or cases
where one image was painted over by another. Now that
being said, you can you can make those kind of
criticisms regarding some of these cave paintings. But the lion

(28:58):
man is most deaf. Only a line, right, there's no
room for like, oh goodness, I went to just carve
this image, to painstakingly spend four hours making this image
of a fag here, and then I accidentally gave him
a lion's head. It's just it's not gonna happen, right.
So when I was reading about this whole thing the

(29:19):
other day, about the loan manch, I thought, Okay, he
might be the oldest known evidence of a monster on earth,
but it's probably not the first monster that ever existed
in somebody's imagination. And then it hit me, at some
point in time, there had to be a first monster.
There had to be the first time a human or

(29:40):
maybe some other previous animal human ancestor, was able to
form a mental picture of a horrifying creature that was
not just some known predator or even some known predator
made a little bit bigger, but an unholy being that
did not exist in nature. You know, the clause of
a crab on the of a lion or something. Yeah,

(30:01):
I mean there's a there's a cognitive step involved here.
This is there's a cognitive first step that is that
you can't just gloss over, you know, because even you know,
if you were to drag in say that you know
the content of the bicameral mind episodes that we did,
you know, even in that case where you have have
you know, something drastically different taking place with the human mind,

(30:24):
it would still need to draw that image from somewhere
right right, Yeah, it would have to get put together somehow. Yeah,
so at some point the bicameral mind would have to stop.
Suddenly it's not just speaking through humans or animals, but
it is speaking through a human animal hybrid And what
is causing that? Where does that come from? As much
as I love it, we we can't keep coming back
to the bi cameral mind because people are going to

(30:44):
start to think that, yeah they are, but but I
know people, people, listeners, minds are going there. So I
had to I had to dip in for a second. Well,
I appreciate you doing that, Robert, but I still hold
out my skepticis on the bicameral mind. But yeah, so
I want to come back to this question for the
rest of today's episode. Are there any clues about where
this first monster came from? Obviously, it's lost to prehistory.

(31:06):
We can't know when that happened and what the monster
consisted of, but we might be able to look at,
or at least suppose some things about human monster creation,
monster fear that we give us ideas about the circumstances
in which this monster might have arisen. And I guess
we'll start on that journey when we come back from
a break. Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, what is

(31:30):
a monster? Well? You know, I love this question because
the answers tend to vary depending on who's thinking hard
about monsters. Give me Jessup's answer first, and Jessup has
a more literal interpretation of these things. But uh, one
example that I love is that the idea that the
word monstrosity originates from the Latin uh monster ary, which

(31:54):
means to show or illustrate a point. This is a
good point. I mean, very often, if you think about
monster legends, they come with the moral, don't they. Yeah,
Or there's some idea wrapped up in it, like I'm
afraid of this, but why this thing exists? But why?
And he can very you know, it can involve various symbolism,
it can involved just very simple metaphorical extrapolations. But yeah,

(32:20):
very often there is a there's a message, there's an
idea there, And you know, I think this falls in
line with what St. Augustine had to say about monsters.
He said, the monster is part of God's plan, an
adornment of the universe that can also teach us about
the dangers of sin. But other medieval commentators also they

(32:41):
just define a monster is a thing that's against nature. Now,
for people who believe that nature was thoroughly populated with monsters,
what gave them the like? What made the distinction? Right?
It's against nature, but nature is full of them? Where
did that come from? Well? I mean the other thing,
of course, is that even how can it be if
it's it's if it's against nature, but it's also it's

(33:02):
made of nature. I mean, that's one of the whole
things we've been hitting so far, is it's a cave
line plus a man. It's a combination of things that exists.
So it's not just whole cloth, you know, because I
mean virtually no monster out there is completely removed from
our biological world. Most of them have some analog in

(33:23):
in the natural world, and there's there's something to be
said there about our connection with nature. I mean, even
when people try to come up with monsters from the
outer dark, some kind of you know, the cosmic kind
of monsters, there's still it's like, well, it's a human
with a squid head and it's really big. Yeah, Or
you're just struggling to come up with something that doesn't
have an analogy in nature, right, Or if you think

(33:43):
you've created something that has no analogy in nature, you're
just recreating like a Cambrian era organism that you just
didn't know about. Hey, if you haven't listened to our
Cambrian Monsters episode, you should go back to the I
guess it was last week or whenever this air is.
Check out the Cambrian monster mash though, as were some
monster with the monsters. Now, speaking of of monsters, particularly

(34:05):
sea monsters, thirteenth century theologian Thomas of contemporary he devoted
an entire book to see monsters and another to the
fish of the sea. So his dividing line here, but
you know what goes in which book? This is answering
my question, right, nature is full of monsters. How can
you tell what the monsters are? Yeah? Yeah, his answer
would be what it all comes down to. Rarity in size.

(34:27):
That's what's make that's what makes a sea monster. Um
so so like blue whales would be ce monsters, Yeah,
because they're just so big. It's I mean, it's quite
literally monstrous, and it's it's essentially rare, especially I guess
if it's yeah, if it's like an apex predator, so
like a megalodon would have been a sea monster. They

(34:47):
didn't exist at the time, right, or you know, or
say a horse is a rather large creature, but it's
not a rarity, so you know, it's not a monster.
But if you had a dog the side of a
size of a horse, that would be a rarity. That
would be an Okay, I feel like this is a
really dumb and unimaginative I don't think that's good at all. No,

(35:07):
it doesn't really help us out here. But regardless of
how you define monsters, we of course have countless monsters,
and not just of course the ones that we've dreamt
up to, you know, recently to entertain us. Though I
think that in many cases we're not simply entertaining ourselves
with monsters. We are we are creating something that speaks

(35:28):
to two deeper fears that speaks to, you know, some
level of anxiety about our lives or the modern world.
And of course religion and myth and legend folklore are
just just totally populated with creatures that are that are
hybrids of various forms. Yeah, I like what you said
that we I think I've said this on the show before,

(35:48):
but one reason. Sometimes people ask me, like, what what
do you like about horror movies? I mean, they're so dumb.
It's true that the horror genre has a lot of
really really bad movies in it, But think horror movies
are interesting because even when they're bad, they sort of
show you something. They're instructive about the anxieties of the

(36:09):
age in which they're produced, and they they tap into
something primal about what our what our deepest fears are,
what's occupying occupying our minds when we're in the dark alone.
And I like that about them. I like, even when
they're not good stories and they're not told well, they're
still instructive about the society and the people that made them. Well,

(36:30):
a lot of it comes down to symbols, right, if
you can have somebody who has no clue what they're doing,
And if you're taking existing symbols and you're combining them
one way or another, you're going to inevitably make a statement.
You may be completely deaf to that statement, completely blind
to that statement, but that's often when it's the most interesting.

(36:50):
Like oh, my goodness, you accidentally created something brilliant. Uh,
Like you made that the killer's mask, and you you
didn't even think about all of the ramification of of
that symbol. Yeah, what does it mean that the killer
wears a hockey mask? Yeah? Or a baby mask or
a or you know, an obviously store bought ghost face mask.
I mean, you can you can kind of go wild

(37:11):
with any of these these examples, and uh and and
try and tease out a big academic paper on what
the what the meaning of the film is. Obviously it's
that hockey will kill us all in the end, fear
of Canadians. I think, yeah, all right, Well, to keep
chasing this question about where the first monster might have
come from, I think maybe we should take a detour
and look at this one paper that I found that

(37:33):
that I thought was really interesting. It doesn't directly answer
the question we're talking about, but it comes really close
and goes along similar pathways of thinking. And it's a
paper by a scholar called Steven T. Asthma, and the
paper is titled Monsters on the Brain and Evolutionary Epistemology
of Horror published in Social Research and International Quarterly, And

(37:54):
that's a social science journal that has a lot of
different social science genres in it. And basally, what Asthma
is trying to do in this article is trace what
the biological origins of the experience of horror are and
I think if we look at that, that might provide
some insights about where monsters could emerge in our anthropological history.

(38:17):
And Asthma starts with an interesting question one that's very
common with all kinds of studies about behavior. Our fear
responses modular or conditioned. In other words, are our fear
responses and our monster fears instinctual, born into us or
they just learned and conditioned by culture and experience. And

(38:38):
just to rephrase from the beginning, I think one thing
we can eliminate is that it's quite obvious that at
least some of our fears are conditioned or learned, Like
there is no way you were born with a fear
of airplanes. That's not part of your revolutionary heritage. So
though you might have, you know, you might have an
inborn fear of heights, you could see how that could
be part of evolutionary herit not like silver machine is

(39:00):
filled with other humans barreling through the sky. Right, So
there might be instinctual elements that go into that fear,
but the fear itself, the content there, is clearly conditioned
or learned. But the real question is are any of
our fears modular or instinctual or are they all conditioned
or learned. So Asthma kicks off this favor by by

(39:21):
pretty much stating the obvious fear exists in our bodies
and minds. Fearful stimulized stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. So
perhaps you'll freeze in the face of fear, maybe you'll flee,
maybe you'll you'll suddenly have this burst of bravery, you'll
turn around and fight. But the object of terror gives
us a physical jolt, and it demands reaction. And he

(39:42):
also points out that there's a strong hormonal component entailing
the corticotropin releasing hormone or c r H, cortisol and adrenaline.
Asthma points to a study in fact, in which scientists
inserted a gene in mice that makes CRH, resulting in
more fearful mice, or removing it to make quote an

(40:03):
extremely fearless mouse. I would I would venture to say
that both prospects are horrifying. So Asthma argues that these
are all old brain systems. So this is the basement
of horror, and we advanced organisms. Well, we have an
entire haunted house built atop these ancient brain stem ruins. Okay,

(40:23):
I like this analogy you're going with. Yeah, you have
all the limbic emotional circuits here. You can think of
this neural mammalian haunted house containing seven key rooms. You
got your fear room, your care room, your lust room,
your rage room, your panic room, your your seeking room,
in your playroom. In each room commands specific neural pathways

(40:43):
through the brain pipes, wriggling around and diving down into
the haunted ruins beneath. So we'd be saying that when
you have these different types of affective reactions, so like
you're engaged in play behaviors or you're engaged in lust
behaviors or fear behaviors, they don't look the same the brain.
They take different avenues through your different brain regions and
excite different types of tissue. Now, the million fear is

(41:08):
rooted in the amigola, and we can talk about some
direct evidence of this later, but this is a pretty
well evidenced proposition, right, And we can think of this
is a haunted laboratory, and it's probably right next to
the memory lated haunted library of the hippocampus, and they
work together to enable conditioned learning. Right, So the amygdala

(41:30):
is what regulates fear, and the hippocampus supplies the information
content of the fear uh and the and this is
condition learning. So the simple version is, let's say somebody
puts you in a lab and they keep showing you
episodes of TV shows, and every time they show you
an episode of Seinfeld you get an electric shock and
it goes for the duration of the episode. You will

(41:50):
probably develop a conditioned seinfeld phobia, which is an avoidance
or aversion reaction to Jerry Seinfeldt's face. And this is
this is a standard accounting of how conditioned fears are developed. Alright,
So we have our haunted house here. What's a haunted
house without a few ghosts and the ghosts come to
us via evolution. This is what ASMA refers to as

(42:13):
the heritable disposition a levels of fear or timidity. Now,
refer back to what you mentioned a minute ago, which
is those mice, right, You can you can inherit different
levels of fear disposition, So you can have these really
brave mice that you artificially select for, or these really
scared mice that you artificially select for. But also, could
the contents of our fears be heritable? That's sort of

(42:34):
part of the question. We're asking, not just how likely
you are to become afraid, but what you're afraid of?
Can you get that from your parents through your genes? Well,
there's some there's some interesting supporting evidence for this. And
I imagine a number of you have encountered videos online
of cats reacting to cucumbers. You know, they turn around,
they see a cucumber, they freak out the ideas that

(42:55):
they have this this uh, this ingrained response to something
that is snake like. And they have been experienced experience
to show similar reactions in chimps as well. Uh. We
also see this along with spider fears in humans. Yeah,
one example showing this was in the nineteen forties, the
psychologist Donald Hebb found that even infant chimpanzees were terrified

(43:16):
of images of snakes, even if they'd never been exposed
to images of snakes before. Now there's an interesting update
to that, which is that heb found that chimps weren't
just afraid of snakes, but of any quote. And this
is Asthma's wording extremely varied morphology, as they encountered so
like really odd shapes that weren't part of their normal

(43:36):
day to day life. But for more evidence of of
the brains conditioning toward reaction to snakes, I found one
recent study. It was about neural pathways for evolution of
rapid detection of snakes and it was by Van le
Quan at All and it's called Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological
evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes in

(43:58):
p N A s U. And basically it found that
there are neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar
that responds selectively to snakes, seeming to indicate that there's
something hardwired in the primate brain to cause this rapid
detection of snakelike shapes as opposed to images of other

(44:19):
things like monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometric shapes. And
so Asthma in his paper he wonders, quote some of
our deep seated monster fears may be rooted in real
predators or environmental threats from our prehistory. So we're talking
about cognitive model shaped in the Plistocene era, genetically engraved

(44:42):
archetypes that continue to resonate, Uh, you know on up
into modern times. Now you can totally see why that
would be the case. Right, It's clear that some types
of fears could be adaptive. Uh, if you are born
with a natural fear of lion shaped things, you're probably
going to survive have more often than people not born
with the fear of lion shaped things. Right. And so

(45:05):
the question is, is is the image of a snake or
a spider or anything that conforms to a to a
common part of monster imagery somehow encoded deeply in your biology.
Is it an inherited fear response that you get from
threats faced by your ancestors, or are these all things
we learned to fear from culture and experience. So Asthma

(45:26):
site some lines of thinking against heritable fear content. Like,
one thing he asks is how does the content itself
get transmitted? You know, like, if you're afraid of snakes,
how could that image of a snake literally come down
through the generations. Now I'm not sure I buy that
objection so much, because I do think it seems likely

(45:49):
that we can inherit some types of image re recognition.
I mean, here's one example. If you can't inherit any
kind of image re recognition from your parents, how would
animals know what visual cues to look for in mating?
You could say with humans, you could say, well, maybe
it's all culturally conditioned and that's how But what about

(46:10):
non human animals, what about non social, non human animals?
There seem to be I would think that you can
transmit some types of imagery across generations through heritable predispositions.
And of course it's important to wonder what kind of
content is actually getting transmitted here. Yeah, and that's one
objection that Asthma doesn't really go into is deeply, but

(46:33):
I think actually does matter why snakes and spiders, like
I can think of animals that are generally much much
more dangerous and probably much more dangerous to our direct
ancestors on the African savannah than spiders and snakes, and
yet they don't inspire nearly the same visual revulsion, Like
a hippopotamus is ten thousand times more dangerous than the

(46:55):
average snake or spider, and yet it does not present
as a universal phobia. You don't see humans all over
the world being terrified of hippopotami. Yeah, so, or at
least it's certainly not outside of a direct contact with them,
like environmental contact with them. Yeah, unless you've learned to
be afraid of them because they're actually dangerous. Otherwise, I
think we all have that point growing up where we're told, oh,

(47:17):
actually hippos are exceedingly dangerous, and they're more dangerous than
the crocodiles. Yeah, as always take that with the caveat
that we don't want to demonize animals, So those are wonderful, right,
don't go killing hippos. I can't watch enough hippo videos
on line of their of what of their their viral
explosive defecation. No, well that I think that's a fabulous
topic as well. There's a lot to that actually, Um,

(47:39):
I've read papers about the way that they spin their
tails to distribute the fecal matter and the different theories
as to why. I mean, it gets into parasides and leeches.
It's fabulous stuff. But their babies are super cute, That's
what I'm getting at. You ever watched the baby babies
someone with their their their mom's amazing. Yeah, they'll grow
up to bite your legs off, but they're they're very

(48:01):
cute as babies. But yeah, no demonization of hippos. Don't
go killing hippos or anything anyway. But back to Asthma. Okay,
so we do have these potential pitfalls and the idea
that our fears are predatory fears are inherited directly and
biologically from our parents. But Asthma thinks he sort of
has a solution to this dilemma, right, Yeah, he gets

(48:23):
into this topic of specific versus generic pattern recognition systems.
So he points to the universality of snake and spider
phobias as we've been discussing, but also to studies by
ethologists Wolfgang Schleet who he carried out these experiments where
he took bird chicks and he exposed them to fly

(48:44):
over silhouettes of both hawks and goose and geese the
hawk caused fear, but seemingly not the goose. But if
they were exposed to repeated hawk fly over shapes very
earlier in the development, they feared the goose but not
the hawk. So it's it's curious. So you basically it

(49:06):
was about what they were exposed too early on. And
by the way, I have to add the fact these
were turkey chicks, your your butterballs were being experimented on
a little bit in infancy. By the way, I love
that idea of of fearing the goose. I think we
should we should incorporate that into our discussions of fear.
If you have an unfounded fear, you can say, oh,
you're really fearing the goose on that one. So that's

(49:27):
like when you're afraid of something that isn't really dangerous,
but it's because you had a bad experience with it
as a child. Yeah, I mean, but you know, as
we're discussing the development of fears, like that's kind of
that's how we work. That's how you survive in the wild.
You the person who fears the lion that is not
there has a better chance of surviving than the person
who does not fear the lions. That may be there.

(49:48):
It's true you'd rather have false positives than false negatives.
I should correct myself there, because fearing the goose wouldn't
be that you had a bad experience with the goose,
would be that you never had an experience with a goose.
Un Thus, you're afraid of them because they don't they
don't fit into your your picture of the world. Maybe
it's a good expression for like when your kid won't

(50:08):
try some new food or something's like, stop fearing the goose.
Don't just go for it, baby, tryan Oh, I should
stop laughing at my own jokes. Okay. Uh. So slights
work focused on replications of older experiments originally carried out
by Lorenz and ten Bergen in the nineteen thirties, And

(50:29):
to quote from Asthma, this is quote corroborating Hebb's idea.
Remember Donald Hebb from earlier idea that some discrepancy between
a new perception and previous background stored experiences causes the
fearful response. Remember how the chimps were frightened by any
unfamiliar morphology shapes they weren't familiar with. So Asthma continues quote, Theoretically,

(50:52):
one could condition an animal to be unresponsive to snakes
and hawks but utterly terrified of fluffy bunnies. So this
is Asthma's position. Um, he's sort of working towards this thing. Well,
let's let's let's get there on our own time. Yeah.
He says that all of this makes sense though if
you look at it in the light of Darwin. Right,

(51:12):
he's talking about the generic conditioning idea, right, Yeah, because
he talks about the quote fearful reaction to categorical mismatch. So,
as Asthma puts it, quote, the local environment will condition
the infant animal, and then the cognitive development will lock
in the categories, creating a software program that recognizes some
animals and mismatches novelties. So Asthma is sort of proposing

(51:36):
a hybrid model of the origins of fear imagery. Not
necessarily that it's that it's received imagery from your ancestors,
and not necessarily that it's all learned in life, but
it's one that combines elements that are automatic and instinctual
along with elements that are modifiable and learned. Yeah. He
calls it a quote content free recognition system. And so

(51:56):
the basis of this is that we whatever we are
exposed to an early childhood becomes part of our okay category,
and whatever we're not exposed to become as part of
the fear category. Exactly, And in fact he points to
a specific study. This is the studies, uh that we're
conducted by Mary Ainsworth in the nineties seventies, the strange

(52:18):
situation experiments, and uh, these these backed up the notion
that there's a window of opportunity for template formation and
it closes after six months. This is great, This is
part of the freaking out your children genre experiments. Everything
is stored as normal in those first six months, the
argument goes, and only after that are the new experiences

(52:40):
initially stored a strange and novel and judged in light
of existing templates. That's why if you encounter a child
that is less than six months, they're looking at everything
the same. You're not going to get those shifty baby
eyes and those shifty toddler ized till later, you know,
because we've all encountered those kids that like instantly distrust you.
They look at you and you can tell they distrust you.

(53:01):
You're like, what are you doing? Yeah? I just got here?
What are you basing this on, and they're basing it
on the template that they have. You were not in
that template. So this would seem to back up his
idea of the fact that there's a sort of content
free recognition system. Uh. And it also would would help
answer this question of how come infants, if this is
the case, don't become terrified of every new image they

(53:23):
encounter right right now, it's it's uh, it's worth noting.
Asthma in all this, he points out some of the
obvious that many of our monsters are hybrids of threatening creatures,
and specifically he points out the alien face hugger because
this is essentially a spider and a snake fused together
into one awful crab like entity. You know, is the

(53:46):
worst parts of the spider and the worst parts of
a snake and the worst parts of an oyster. Well yeah,
once you start cutting into it, for sure, but there's
no worst part of an oyster. It's all good. Uh.
So Asthma says that this what we have here is
the phylogenetic memory of ancient danger and monstrous hybrids allow
us to to further strengthen, augment, and transmit those fears, right,

(54:08):
and that would seem to go to this like instinctual
fear read but Asthma has this other interesting hypothesis. He
discusses about what what contributes to what makes spiders and
snakes specifically scary, And this might answer some of my
problems with why them and not hippopotamus? Is uh, if
you assume that babies are generally carried and kept off

(54:29):
the ground outside for their first six months of life,
they won't be seeing many spiders or snakes, but they
will be able to see people and other larger, non
threatening animals. So Asthma seems to think this sort of
fits the category violation model. That would make sense. Yeah,
I don't see a lot of adults even today taking

(54:50):
their baby well, I mean uns you're taking to the zoo,
I guess. But even then they're not they're encountering them
in the zoo. And I've already talked a little bit
about the differences between encountering an anim in the wild
and encountering them in an artificial environment right now. Of course,
another way to violate these categories is to present beings
with totally nonsensical ontologies, creatures that could never be conditioned

(55:12):
in a natural environment. Or sorry that you could never
be conditioned to accept in a natural environment because they
don't exist in a natural environment. Here, maybe the origin
of our hybrid monsters, our lion headed humans, and the
grim sentient leopards and other beasts. All right, well, on
that note, we're going to take a quick break, and
when we come back we will return to our discussion

(55:34):
of ancient monsters. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're
back now. Asthma invokes a concept in his paper invented
by the philosopher Nuel Carrol, which is called category jamming,
and in his two thousand three book The Philosophy of
Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, Carol makes a distinction
between what he calls the monsters of myth and the

(55:56):
monsters of horror. I thought this was pretty interesting. So
he writes about, how, you know, there might be fearsome
creatures in the world of myths, but they are not
quote unnatural, and they can be accommodated by the metaphysics
of the cosmology that produced them. All right, So this
idea is that, say, the medusa, is that if you
take the meduce and you put it in our real world. Yeah,

(56:18):
it's breaking all these laws of physics and nature. But
the Medusa encountered within the world of Greek myth, Well,
then she's just part of this world, like she's not
breaking any laws exactly. But then he says, quote, the
monsters of horror breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed
by the positive human characters in the story. That is,

(56:40):
in examples of horror, it would appear that the monster
is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world. I like
this because this is a distinction. I feel very much
like there are different kinds of monsters, and they even
the same monster, could be more or less terrifying given
different context. Next, and so it makes me think back

(57:02):
to the Loan Mench, which one was the Loan Mench.
Was this a monster of myth that existed within some
kind of epic poem that these people, you know, recited
orally or something like that, something outside the world that
could be accommodated by its own cosmology. Or was this
the monster of horror, something that haunted the woods beyond

(57:23):
the cave. Yeah. To glimpse this creature, or to imagine
glimpsing this creature, is it to see something broken in
the world or something that is just part of its
fabric and we have no way of knowing. Yeah, though
clearly I think if it is part of that broken
vision of the world, then there is a stronger fear
element to it. It's not part of a fantasy. It

(57:45):
is a fantastical deviation from your day to day life.
But Carol also writes about this idea that monsters are
jamming of categories. He says, quote monsters are repelling because
they violate standing categories and another quote also elsewhere, um quote.
If what is of primary importance about horrific creatures is

(58:06):
that they're very impossibility visa v our conceptual categories is
what makes them function so compelling lee in dramas of
discovery and confirmation, then their disclosure, insofar as their categorical
violations will be attached to some sense of disturbance, distress,
and disgust. Consequently, the role of the horrific creature in

(58:28):
such narratives where their disclosure captures our interest and delivers pleasure,
will simultaneously mandate some probable revulsion. That is, in order
to reward our interest by the disclosure of the putatively
impossible beings of the plot, said beings ought to be disturbing, distressing,
and repulsive in the way that theorists like Douglas and

(58:49):
there is referring to Dame Mary Douglas predict phenomena that
ill fit cultural classifications will be So the idea is
that creatures that holate our culturally established categories of existence
we will find repulsive and distressing. And this is definitely
a very common way of explaining horrific creatures, right, the

(59:11):
category confusion model. There's a lion, there's a man, but
a man with a lion's head that just that breaks
all the rules. It's the thing that should not be
exactly Yeah, but then again, I have so on one hand,
I'm attracted to this theory, and I find that lots
of horror creatures very much seemed to fit this theory.
But at the same time, I wonder, is it really

(59:33):
possible that our experience of monster horror could be so
thoroughly cognitive, because like, comparing these categories like this established
by culture that really would seem to be like it
takes some kind of thought, Right, do you really have
to think about a monster to find it scary? No?
I mean, like we've been discussing with something like like Jason, say,

(59:56):
Jason Vories from the Friday of their tenth series. You
don't have to think very hard in those films to
find Jason terrifying. Though there's there's plenty of stuff going
on to make you feel tearor right down to the
music and uh and and and other forms of priming. Uh.
But if you if you tease it apart, you can say, yes,
this is an unnatural thing. It's what it's depending on

(01:00:18):
your interpretation, is either a dead person that's walking around
killing people, or at the very least, it is an
unrealistically relentless and unstoppable humanoid killer. And it's equally terrifying
no matter how much thought you put into it. Right,
and that whenever I feel monster fear, the initial pang
of monster fear definitely feels deeper than cognitive category analysis,

(01:00:42):
Like I don't feel like I'm comparing anything in my mind.
It hits me on the same level as like, you know,
seeing something flying at my face. Anyway, Well, we'll come
back to the cognitive elements in a minute. I wanted
to discuss one other tangent that's really interesting that asthma
goes on, that might provide some kind of light on this.
I loved his section about horror blindness. Oh yeah, I

(01:01:04):
don't think i'd ever read about this before. So here's
how to get into it. A question that might help
us understand the origin of monsters is why do we
keep creating them? Like? Why can't we stop making monsters
even if they make us feel the putatively negative emotion
of fear. Well, I think that they're kind of like cocktails, right, Like,
there's a there's a basic reason that humans consume alcohol,

(01:01:28):
and there's a basic reason humans consume various other elements
that have specific tastes. But we can't stop coming up
with new combinations, a new novel, combinations that will give
us the same and then in increasingly varied experiences based
on that original. We like to fear, and so we're
going to continue to to tweak what makes us feel

(01:01:50):
that that tear? But do well? Okay, So that's one theory.
You could say that we like to fear. Yes, I
think there's another possibility, which is that we don't actually
like to fear. We like something else that comes with fear.
That fear has sort of a secret hidden cousin. Whenever
the fear pathways in the brain are ignited. There's something

(01:02:11):
that happens along with that, and that's the thing we like,
and we mistake it for its cousin, the fear, the
main emotion. So let's look at an example and see
what we think. One way to study the biological roots
of horror monster, or of monster fear, would be to
look at the behavior of a person who is incapable
of feeling that fear, and strangely enough, such a person

(01:02:33):
does exist, Asthma points to the case of this person,
known in the scientific literature only as s M, who
is a woman with horror blindness. SM has a brain anomaly.
She has a focal bilateral amygdala, allegians, and because the
amygdala is so bound up so important in generating the
brain's fear response, these allegions mean that SM has an

(01:02:54):
extreme fear deficiency, sometimes characterized as the complete inability to fear,
and researchers have tested her with all kinds of fear
inducing stimuli like haunted houses, horror movies, snakes and spiders,
and these experiments showed that for SM, what would normally
be horrifying stimuli were indeed attention grabbing, but did not

(01:03:16):
cause avoidance behaviors in fact, and they found that this
combination of attentional arousal, the attention grabbing nature of it,
and the lack of fear response tended to manifest itself
as something like an attraction. So this study was there's
one study by Justin S. Feinstein at All called the
Human Amygdala and the Induction UH and the Induction and

(01:03:39):
Experience of Fear and Current Biology INN. And what they
what the researchers did is they took SM to a
haunted house put together at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which
is an abandoned medical facility in Louisville, Kentucky. And I
want to read a quote about what happened when they
went with s M through this facility, which had people
addressed as monsters jumping out and scaring. They said, quote,

(01:04:02):
the hidden monsters attempted to scare SM numerous times, but
to no avail. She reacted to the monsters by smiling, laughing,
or trying to talk to them. In contrast, their scare
tactics typically elicited loud screams of fright from the other
members of the group more than showing a lack of fear,
SM exhibited an unusual inclination to approach and touch the monsters. Ironically,

(01:04:28):
SM scared one of the monsters when she poked it
in the head because she was quote curious as to
what it would feel like. Oh, you're not supposed to
touch the actors that a haunted attraction. SM should have
known that, well, apparently she didn't. Now I thought this
was really interesting because what they're saying is that in
this condition where you don't have the normal avoidance behaviors,

(01:04:48):
because you've got a deficiency of fear, if you're amygdalus
damaged and you can't feel fear, things that would normally
make you fear aren't just neutral. It's not like I
don't care about that. You you find yourself attracted to it.
It's like you love it, you want to touch it. Well,
I mean I totally buy into that, because I mean,
there are plenty of examples, I think in our own
lives where we see like a really cool monster design

(01:05:11):
in a film or a book or some art and yeah,
we're not thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so afraid right now.
We think, oh man, that's pretty gnarly, that's pretty cool. Yeah,
And so I think that maybe what's going on with
fear now I I accepted that the opposite could be true.
It could be true that in some way the fear
itself is satisfying, is thrilling, is fun well, and of

(01:05:32):
course the after effect of the monster not killing you,
you get that that surge of relief as well, the
endorphin and the adrenaline rush. Yeah, there's that hormonal element
to it as well. But yeah, I do think that
part of what the appeal must be is what's happening
with s M. Here. It's that she's only getting the
good half of the horror feeling. She's not feeling the fear.

(01:05:54):
But when we experience horror in the good way and
the pleasurable way that makes us keep returning to it.
It's what's whatever is happening with her. They're except not
tempered by by the normal kind of avoidance response we
would have. So essentially what's being proposed is that is
that fear and arousal are separate things, but they're deeply linked.

(01:06:15):
And and in in SMS case, she is attracted to
the novelty of it. It is the novelty of this
thing that is a hybrid creation or just an unreal
entity that doesn't match up with the existing expectations. Right,
She's being excited by the neural pathway that says, look
at this, this is worth your attention. You should pay
attention to it. But she's not getting the part that says,

(01:06:37):
get the hell away. Interesting Now, on the other hand,
if you think this condition of having a fear deficiency
sounds great, like like you're like, I wish I had
an amygdala religion, Uh, think again. Asthma reports that researchers
have repeatedly had to prevent sm from putting herself in
actual danger because the fear that would have prevented her

(01:06:57):
from endangering herself was simply not operative. Of in the
same way, you might not enjoy pain, but you wouldn't
actually want to have the condition that prevents you from
feeling pain because pain is very useful for survival. Well,
I mean that matches up with touching the actors at
a haunted attraction, Like it shows like a lack of
boundaries and understanding of those boundaries. I mean, not that

(01:07:19):
the the actor is going to physically attack you, but
you know she's she's breaking certain rules and expectations there.
So yeah, I wonder what role these types of arousal
play in what led somebody in the ice age to
create a lionman figuring. I mean, assuming that this figure
had some kind of fear or all inducing uh significance.

(01:07:42):
We don't know that it did, but you think, you know,
monsters usually have some kind of fear inducing properties. If
that's what was part of the attitude towards this creature.
Could it be that it was created for this attentional arousal,
this feeling of like this isn't part of what I
normally see, you know, the stimulation of the imagination. Yeah,

(01:08:03):
I mean, what if what if this thing was crafted
and as it was passed, it passed around like they
were just feeling the novelty of it. They were and
maybe you know, engaging with with certain feelings of fear
that came out of it. But they didn't have, say,
a whole cosmology built up around it. Maybe it didn't
have a name or a purpose in the in the

(01:08:25):
magical world around them, but it was it was almost
like like doing shots of espresso. You know, it's it's difficulse.
It's simplifying here, it's but it's it is very difficult
to try and put ourselves in in the mind of
of of such people. Yeah, No, I mean I think
that's worth considering. Like, we tend to assume it had
something like what we would think of as a sacred

(01:08:46):
or religious significance right now, where you'd you'd participate in
a ritual with it. But what if it was much
more like us watching a horror movie or going to
a haunted house. I think that's not impossible. Yeah, I mean,
it's kind of like say an image of of of
the Hindu God that we were talking about earlier, Narasima, Like,

(01:09:07):
you can look at that image without knowing anything about Hinduism,
anything about the story that's being told, anything about the
you know, the various symbols that are at play here,
and you can still have a very this or reaction
to it. You kind of a you feel something when
you look at it, uh, And then you can you
can feel something rather different when you have this additional

(01:09:28):
information about it. So it could be that maybe the
lionman was part of a religious ritual or religious belief,
but it could also just be that for some people
who had a shallower engagement, it was just a thrill.
It was just facing the monster again, because how many
we have so many unreal things in our world. We
have so many monsters to turn to. But imagine living

(01:09:49):
in a world where there's one unreal thing, There's one
unreal image that's it, and you get to touch it
once a week. That's given me the creeps man a
world with only one months her. Yeah, all right, Well,
I want to get on one more aspect of Asthma's
paper before we finish out today. He actually talks about
a bunch more stuff in his paper, like the second
half of it is all about like xenophobia and the

(01:10:13):
social implications of monster fear, And I want to talk
about one more idea that he goes to, which is
that monster horror is not just cognitive recognition but also
an affective emotional state. So Asthma writes, quote, the emotion
slash cognition complex in horror is a yannis faced experience,
partly imperative as in I should run away, and partly

(01:10:35):
indicative that creature is part man and part snake. According
to some philosophers of mine, like Ruth Milliken, this yannis
faced and representation is strongly coupled together in lower animals mice,
for example, simultaneously recognized cats as a kind of thing
in a category and as dangerous, So that's the fear

(01:10:55):
affect I should run away. Humans, on the other hand,
can decouple the two pathways indicative and imperative, and fear
can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures and perceptions.
So here's where he's getting into the monster generative capacity.
It's like, we've got these monster recognition pathways in the brain,

(01:11:15):
but they're made for natural predators, and once we've got
the power to put imaginative content on them, they can
still be used in the same way. And in this way,
Asthma seems to think, monster fear is caused by a
system of what's known as quote somatic markers. Essentially these
trainable neural pathways that can be filled with emotional content

(01:11:37):
based on experience. One more quote of his quote. The
point is that these emotional responses are not instincts in
the sense of prewired or genetically engraved responses. The affective
systems are ancient in the sense that they have many
homologies with non human animals, but in our individual lives
their idiosyncratically assigned and have significant plasticity. So you can

(01:11:59):
fill up with whatever monsters happened to catch your fancy.
And and the idea here is that imaginative monsters have
this adaptive survival value. I mean, we talked in uh
not to go again to the bi cameral mind episode.
But one thing that apart from the whole bi cameral
mind hypothesis just taking out the whole all of the

(01:12:20):
bi camerality, one thing Julian Jaynes talked about was that
he thought that the primary adaptive benefit of consciousness is
that you could run simulations in your mind. When you've
got conscious thought, you've got this mind space where you
can experiment with things. And uh, Ultimately, Asthma talks about
fear of monsters being a similar thing, monsters in your

(01:12:42):
mind can provide a kind of mental training simulator, a
place to work out emotional and behavioral responses to danger
within the safety of the imagination. But because horror images
have such strong access to our emotional reactions, he says,
and this is an interesting bridge. They don't just train

(01:13:03):
our behaviors, they train our values, which gives them great
power for good and ill in conditioning our moral judgments
and opinions. This takes us back to St. Augustine right
that monsters instruct a point. Stories about monsters so often
have a moral or they teach some virtue. They tell
you what you should do in a certain situation and

(01:13:24):
condition your responses to it. And they're much more effective
than normal teaching and instruction because they get at you
emotionally that you know that you don't have to be
lectured about what you should do. If you see an
illustration within a monster story, you just feel emotionally what
you should do. Yeah, Because on one hand, they're simply saying, hey,
kids don't go swim in that creek without the adults around.

(01:13:48):
And then there's hey, kids don't go swimming that creek
without the adults around, because there's electric turtle man drown you,
you know. And yet we see that, of course time
and time again in folklore's where there is some sort
of ow creature who will drown you if you swim unattended. Yeah,
And so I think this could be a very plausible
explanation for the emergence of monsters in human history, that

(01:14:11):
they could have emerged around the same time as language
as a social cohesion technique and as a social value
instilling technique. They're they're there to get people to believe
things that would be hard to convince them to believe
just by telling them. I like that. Yeah, I shouldn't
go off the path. I shouldn't mess around with somebody

(01:14:32):
else's spouse. I shouldn't you know all these things? Because
why because a monster will get you if you do. Yeah.
So many monsters are tied to boundaries. Cross the boundary
and face the monster. Yeah so so Yeah, I guess
that's the end that we We don't have ultimately the
answer about when the first monster arose, But I think
it's very plausible that they could have their their roots

(01:14:54):
in social teaching. Yeah, I think so. I think I
feel like we've given we've given everybody some tremendous food
for thought in trying to unravel the meaning of that
lion headed figure and what what it meant to people
then and what the idea of monster of the monster
has continued to mean for people in all subsequent generations.

(01:15:16):
So what do you think, mab what what could the
lionman have been teaching was the low and men's uh
a story about how don't go in strange caves? Or uh? Yeah,
I mean, I guess I'm will based on things I've
read in the past, I'm more inclined to give it
sort of a chaotic vibe, you know, like thinking of
it in terms of ancient gods of the hunt and whatnot,

(01:15:39):
that that this is some sort of an entity that represented,
to whatever extent they were able to really think about it,
this is a figure that represented the uncertainty of the
wild world they lived in. Now, was it chaotic good,
chaotic neutral, or chaotic evil? I think just chaotic neutral.
Like the world has a certain amount of chaos in it,
and some days you're gonna go to the cave and

(01:16:00):
there's gonna be and you will face the lionman and
then you know, maybe you'll lock eyes with it and
walk away, but maybe not. Some days you eat the
loan mench and some days the loan mench. It's you, amen, partner.
All right? Well, on that note, hey, if you want
to see an image of this fabulous statue and maybe
some of these other critters we've talked about, head on

(01:16:22):
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(01:16:46):
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(01:17:07):
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