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 and Joe 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?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works 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, so we are still doing
some of our favorite stuff of the year. Monster content.

(00:23):
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
its monster cargo. Let's kress cargo. I think that we
are delivering to the listeners years, yeah, to create a
cargo cult of our listeners. So I was wondering just recently,
you know what is the oldest monster, Because as you

(00:47):
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 recent popular monster
fad stuff, and they become more like a dragon or
a beast with a bull's head or something. And so

(01:09):
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 from an
ancient Assyrian text called the Seven Evil Spirits. This is
translated into English by R. C. Thompson in nineteen o three,

(01:30):
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? 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.

(01:51):
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 four is a terrible shibou.
The fifth is a furious wolf who knoweth not to flee.
The sixth is a rampant thing. This is the illusion
which marches against God and King. The seventh is a storm,

(02:15):
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 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.

(02:35):
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 that is exaggerated in size. Yeah, well,
I mean, if it's a an evil creature that works
destruction upon the earth and marches against God and King,

(02:58):
I'd say that's probably a monster or people. But I
feel like we're actually already too late, because we're muddling
around in recorded history and you can go much deeper.
So 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 Stottlehole,

(03:19):
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 of a Pleistocene mammoth and now it's Ice Age
mammoth of Europe. Wooly mammoth. Unfortunately, something happened. Just a

(03:42):
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 the mammoth ivory were laid in storage for decades,
and then about thirty years or a German archaeologist named
Joachim Han started trying to fit the ivory shards together

(04:06):
playing this. You know, if you've ever seen these games,
the three D jigsaw puzzle game of Artifactor Reconstruction, it
looks like a nightmare of trying to see how all
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 hundred fragments, and
he discovered that the pieces of ivory were originally part

(04:27):
of the same Paleolithic figurine. It was a statuette about
thirty one centimeters long, which is just over a foot,
and 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

(04:51):
human and non human. And this is the central image
I want to talk about in today's episode. This is
the figure that would come to be non and as
the Lowan Lynch, 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 at stuff to Blow
you behind dot com. It Uh, it's it's rather regal looking. Yeah, well,

(05:14):
I would say it's regal like it's it's got this
upright posture, and it does look very stately, but also
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.

(05:37):
So after this original reconstruction and the following decades, there
was 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,

(05:59):
and the clearer pression of this feline head began to emerge.
And then in the two thousands and other archaeologist named
Klaus Joachim Kind returned to the Stytle Cave to uncover
more original pieces 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.

(06:21):
In fact, I believe it was the British Museum tweeting
about the acquisition that or acquisition the loan that made
me think about doing this episode. So the lion man,
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,

(06:44):
menacing head of a big cat, and you've got 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

(07:05):
can only we can only guess. We can certainly look
to more to increasingly more complex ideals that came afterwards.
But you look at it and you think, was this
Is this a deity? Is this a punishing creature? Is
this a I've seen the term master of animals thrown
around in interpreting similar alleged figures from cave paintings, and

(07:27):
another ancient remains. Yeah, there is a sort of intuitive
sense in which you could see an ancient person seeing
an 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 would make this artifact,

(07:49):
because making an artifact like this would have been an
extreme sacrifice. Uh. These would have been people, I think
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 experiment by

(08:10):
a guy named wolf Heine that I watched a video
of online. And this guy specializes in replicating ancient 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,

(08:33):
like the unbelievable laborious nous of the project begins to
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

(08:55):
people that lived on the edge. They were they were wanderers.
They had not reach 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, it 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

(09:16):
artifact itself that seemed to signify that it had cultural importance. Right. Yeah.
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. So, 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 mench is often

(09:37):
cited is perhaps the earliest evidence that exists of religious beliefs. Now,
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 neander dolls um lived in this area

(09:58):
at this at the same time the coexist. This did
And uh I did find a quote from Jeffrey Brantingham,
an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and
he says that he doesn't think it's far fetched to
think that Neanderthals. Uh you know, could have made similar items.
But for the most part, everyone seems to be on

(10:19):
board with the idea that these were modern Homo sapiens
that created these artifacts. Anatomically modern, yes, except not quite
so hunched over from watching YouTube all day, 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

(10:40):
people rather than cities or nations, But that whatever, the
people of this time period were made artifacts like this
in general, 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 was carbon day to do around the same
time period. So by by by some estimates, it kind

(11:02):
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 and the oldest examples of 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

(11:23):
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 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, uh,

(11:45):
kind of kind of a round feminine figure with without
a head or or or very little detail provided outside
of like breasts and belly. Yeah. Yeah. It's often seen
as having the what we're perceived us the feminine figures exaggerated,
so it would be in large spreads, in large tips
and stuff like that. And for that reason, people often

(12:06):
look at this and say that they think it had
some kind of fertility significance. Now you know where, 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,

(12:27):
that exists in the real world, the loan mention is
the human feuged with the beast. And in the words
of Clive Gamble, 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

(12:48):
is interesting because, yeah, you have to imagine that, I
don't know, there's no way to get inside say a
chimpanzees head or a dog's head, is 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

(13:09):
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 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

(13:30):
what if say thag, the member of your tribe. What
a fag likes to take a deer head or a
or a big cat head, and he likes to just
kind of houllow 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

(13:52):
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 as opposed to an image
of a thing that was not. Let me throw a
twist on your example, though, So maybe Thag does put
on the headdress or you know, the remains of some
other predator, and to simulate that in that sense, would

(14:14):
that not be becoming another kind of creature at least
in symbol? That's true? Yeah, I mean you can certainly
make the argument that that if Thag 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 has something else. So yeah, it all kind

(14:35):
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 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

(14:55):
blog post about the Loan Mench for the British Museum's acquisition,
the loan Mench is the oldest known representation of a
creature that does not exist 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.

(15:17):
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 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,

(15:38):
not like oh here's my friend the lionman, but like
a solemn blend of wonder and fear. Well, if you're
try and imagine what 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 fee eat and can

(16:00):
clothe you through the harsh winter months especially, So there's
a certain amount of uncertainty, there's a certain amount of chaos,
and therefore we you know, you 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

(16:22):
head of this creature and possibly the inspiration for the
muscily legs. Yeah, this is This is a great question
because I imagine a lot of 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 we're
seeing a human or humanoid body with the with the

(16:44):
head of a now extinct cave lion cave lion. Yeah. Now,
I think that's that's interesting, isn't it though, because you
have a partial likeness of one extinct animal in the
very tusk of another. 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

(17:06):
there's actually there's not a lot of evidence for lion hunting.
But a two thousand sixteen 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, uh,
that ancient peoples might have hunted them for their pelts.
But of course we know even if they didn't directly

(17:28):
hunt these lions, they could have contributed to their extinction
by encroaching on their habitats, by 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 Panthera leo fossilus, and this was first. This
one first appeared in Europe seven hundred thousand years ago

(17:51):
and evolved into Panthera leo spellia, and this cave lion
is the one that continued on. That's the one we're
seeing here, and this is the one that 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

(18:11):
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 up to two thousand years ago. But again I
don't know to what extent we should buy into that
that may get into cryptic territory, the grim leopard of
the Balkan. Yeah, but to be clear, Panthera leo spellia

(18:32):
was probably the largest cat that ever lived. It was
probably twenty larger than modern lions, and also bigger than
today's largest tigers. 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

(18:56):
my head of how large the big cats are like
a lion or a tieer. I think of them as
I don't know, like maybe large the size of a
great Dane or a little bit larger really, But if
if you go to a to a zoo and you
get like right 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

(19:19):
they're I mean, they're smaller than a horse, but but
it seems like a horse. 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

(19:41):
had some really creepy experiences walking 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

(20:04):
fear but we don't have 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.

(20:26):
It's so standing, you know, 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 that there's something ingrained in me 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

(20:48):
and maybe wants to. That 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 cover 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,

(21:09):
it's it's relatively easy for 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

(21:31):
this lion man. You can imagine 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,

(21:56):
but we would go on to have many more. Oh
of course, some of the some of the key examples
of the Egyptians had several or at least four may
Hee's pequette segment and tef nut and then in Hinduism
you have Nara Sima, which literally means manline in Sanskrit.
I've seen people online commenting that they believe that the

(22:18):
loan mention is and is a depiction of Nara sema. H. 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
Haran yak a shippo, and it's always a grizzly scene

(22:41):
in which the lion avatar with its multiple arms is eviscerating,
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
intrails wrapped around the god's head. It's it's it's wonderful. Now.

(23:02):
The vision of the lion headed man in the loan
bench is as we said, it's kind of stately, it's
kind of serene, it's kind of pitiless, but it's not
doing anything overtly threatening. It's more like that that distant
predatory gaze that 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

(23:26):
and legend that 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 are essentially lion headed intoities. Now another creature that

(23:48):
came 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 Lee onto Cephaline a
creature of Mythriyism, which is a mystery religion centered around
the god Mithrists in the Roman Empire from around the
first of the fourth centuries. Ce Mithraism is great because

(24:12):
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 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 entwined

(24:33):
around him, much like a caduceus. And it's yeah, it's it's.
It's also also the lion's head seems like it might
be screaming or crying aloud in 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. Can

(24:54):
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 various depictions and descriptions of what's going on
and say Catholicism or modern Hinduism or something like that,

(25:17):
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

(25:39):
is making in this image? What does it mean? You know,
it must have some kind of religious significance. Now, speaking
of now, 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.

(26:00):
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,

(26:23):
So this one is from the Sorcerer. The most famous
sorcerer here is from a cavern known is 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 E. Now the cave itself we discovered,
was discovered in nineteen fourteen, so it's it's interesting how

(26:46):
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 the Horned God or the Sorcerer, and it's this
humanoid figure loosely with with with the head of a

(27:10):
of an animal. It's like with it with the handlers
with the head of a stagg or an elk or
something like that. Rob yeah and uh. And the interpretations vary.
Sometimes again there's this masters of animal argument or that
it's a divine figure. Priest and archaeologist Henry Bruel drew

(27:30):
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, 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 of of interpretations of the Sorcerer saying
that look what we could be looking at here just

(27:53):
just it's just the result of overlaps between depicted forms
or cases where one image was pain it 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 Man is most definitely a line, right. There's
no room for like, oh goodness, I went to just

(28:15):
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 not gonna happen, right.
So when I was reading about this whole thing the
other day, about the loan manch, I thought, Okay, he
might be the oldest known evidence of a monster on Earth,

(28:37):
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
maybe some other previous animal human ancestor was able to
form a mental picture of a horrifying creature that was

(28:59):
not 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 body of a lion or something. Yeah,
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,

(29:23):
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,
it would still need to draw that image from somewhere
right right, Yeah, they would have to get put together somehow. Yeah,
So at some point the bicameral mind would have to stop.

(29:43):
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
start to think, yeah, they are. But but I know people, people, listeners,
minds are going there, so I I had to dip
in for a second. Well, I appreciate you doing that, Robert,
but I still hold out my skepticism on the bicameral mind.

(30:06):
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. We can 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

(30:29):
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. All right, we're back. So, Robert,
what is 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

(30:52):
jessep 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 monsterr ary
which 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,

(31:13):
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 vary, you know, it can involve various symbolism,
it can involved just very simple metaphorical extrapolations. But yeah,
very often there is a there's a message, there's an
idea there, and you know, I think this falls in

(31:36):
line with what St. Augustine had to say about monsters.
He said that 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
just defined a monster is a thing that's against nature. Now,
for people who believe that nature was thoroughly populated with monsters,

(31:59):
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
made of nature. I mean, that's one of the whole
things we've been hitting so far, is it's a cave
lion plus a man. It's a combination of things that exists.

(32:20):
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
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

(32:41):
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
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

(33:03):
Cambrian Monsters episode, you should go back to the I
guess it was last week or whenever this airs. Check
out the Cambrian Monster mash. Those were some monster with monsters. Now,
speaking of of monsters, particularly 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

(33:26):
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 inside, that's what's mad. That's what makes a C monster.
Um so, so like blue whales would be C monsters. Yeah,
because they're just so big. It's I mean, it's quite

(33:47):
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 CE monster. They
didn't exist at the time, right, Or you know, we're
saying 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

(34:08):
size of a horse, that would be a rarity, that
would be a monster. I feel like this is a
really dumb and unimaginative I don't think that's good at all. No,
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

(34:28):
up to, you know, recently to entertain this though, I
think that in many cases we're we're not simply entertaining
ourselves with monsters. We are we are creating something that
speaks 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

(34:49):
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,
but one reason times 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 I think horror

(35:11):
movies are interesting because even when they're bad, they sort
of show you something. They're instructive about the anxieties of
the 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

(35:32):
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. 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

(35:52):
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. Yeah, 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
ramifications of of that symbol. Yeah, what does it mean

(36:13):
that the killer wears a hockey mask? Yeah? Or a
baby mask or a or a you know, an obviously
store bought ghost face mask. I mean, you can you
can kind of go wild 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 the hockey will kill us all
in the end, fear of Canadians. I think, yeah, all right, Well,

(36:35):
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 that I thought was really interesting. It doesn't
directly answer the question we're talking about, but it comes
really close. It goes along similar pathways of thinking. And
it's a paper by a scholar called Stephen T. Asthma,
and the paper is titled Monsters on the Brain and

(36:58):
Evolutionary epistem all Legy of Horror published in Social Research
and International Quarterly, And that's a social science journal that
has a lot of different social science genres in it.
And basically, what Asthma is trying to do in this
article is trace what the biological origins of the experience

(37:18):
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. 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

(37:39):
our fear responses and our monster fears instinctual born into
us or they just learned and conditioned by culture and experience.
And 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

(38:03):
though you might have, you know, you might have an
inborn fear of heights, you could see that could be
part of evolutionary here, but not like silver machines filled
with other humans or 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

(38:27):
or learned. So Asthma kicks off this favor by by
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

(38:49):
us a physical jolt, and it demands reaction. And he
also points out that there's a strong hormonal component entailing
the cortico trope in 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

(39:13):
quote an 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. Like this analogy you're going with, Yeah, you

(39:36):
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, and each room commands specific neural pathways
through the brain pipes wriggling around and diving down into

(39:58):
the haunted ruins beneath. So we'd be thing that when
you have these different types of affective reactions, say like
you're engaged in play behaviors or you're engaged in lust
behaviors or fear behaviors, they don't look the same in
the brain. They take different avenues through your different brain
regions and excite different types of tissue. Right now, the
million fear is rooted in the amigdola. And we can

(40:21):
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 late and haunted library of
the hippocampus, and they worked together to enable conditioned learning. Right, So,
the amygdala is what regulates fear, and the hippocampus supplies

(40:43):
the information content of the fear uh and the and
this is conditioned 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 probably develop a conditioned seinfeld phobia, which is

(41:04):
an avoidance or aversion reaction to Jerry Seinfeld'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 the heritable dispositional levels of fear or timidity. Now,

(41:26):
refer back to what you mentioned a minute ago, which
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 part
of the question. We're asking not just how likely you

(41:47):
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
they have this this uh, this ingrained response to something

(42:09):
that is snake like, and they have been experienced experiments
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
of images of snakes, even if they'd never been exposed

(42:29):
to images of snakes before. Now there's an interesting update
to that, which is that have 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
day to day life. But for more evidence of of

(42:50):
the brains conditioning towards reaction to snakes, I found one
recent study. It was about neural pathways for evolution of
rapid detection of snakes and it was by uh vanle
quant at All and it's called pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological
evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes in
p n A S. And basically it found that there

(43:12):
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 things
like monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometric shapes, and so

(43:33):
Asthma in his paper, he wonders, quote if 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
archetypes that continue to resonate, uh, you know on up

(43:57):
into modern times. Now, you can totally see why that
would the case. Right, It's clear that some types of
fears could be adaptive. If you are born with a
natural fear of lion shaped things, you're probably gonna survive
more often than people not born with the fear of
lion shaped things, Right, And so The question is, is
the image of a snake or a spider, or anything

(44:19):
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 sites some lines
of thinking against heritable fear content, Like, one thing he

(44:41):
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 that we can inherit some
types of image re recognition. I mean, here's one example.

(45:04):
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 non human animals, what about
non social non human animals? There seem to be I

(45:25):
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 I think actually does matter why snakes

(45:46):
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 average snake or spider, and yet it

(46:08):
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 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, actually hippos are exceedingly dangerous and they're

(46:30):
more dangerous than the crocodiles. Yeah, as always take that
with the caveat that we don't want to demonize animals
that are wonderful, right, don't go kill in hippos. I
can't watch enough hippo videos on life 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, I've read papers about the

(46:52):
way that they spin their tails to distribute the fecal
matter h and the different theories as to why. I
mean it gets into parricide and leeches. It's fabulous stuff.
But their babies are super cute, That's what I'm getting at.
You ever watched the obi with their their their mom's. Yeah,
they'll grow up to bite your legs off, but they're
they're very cute as babies. But yeah, no demonization of hippos.

(47:14):
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
into this topic of specific versus generic pattern recognition systems.

(47:39):
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
over silhouettes of both hawks and goose and geese. The

(48:00):
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 it's it's curious. So you basically it was
about what they were exposed to early on. And by
the way, I have to add the fact these were

(48:20):
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 like
when you're afraid of something that isn't really dangerous, but

(48:41):
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,
that has a better chance of surviving than the person
who does not fear the lions that may be there.
It's true, you'd rather have false positives than false negatives.

(49:03):
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
try some new food or something's like, stop fearing the goose.
Don't just go for it, baby, And oh I should

(49:28):
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
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

(49:53):
fearful response. Remember how the chimps were frightened by any
unfamiliar morphology shapes they weren't familiar with. So, Asthma continues, quote,
theoretically 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

(50:14):
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, 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

(50:37):
in the categories, creating a software program that recognizes some
animals and mismatches novelties. So Asthma is sort of proposing
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

(51:00):
along with elements that are modifiable and learned. Yeah, he
calls it a quote content free recognition system. And so
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

(51:21):
a specific study. This is the studies, uh that we're
conducted by Mary Ainsworth in the nineties seventies, the Strange
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

(51:44):
is stored as normal in those first six months, the
argument goes, and only after that are the new experiences
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 a shifty toddler rized till later, you know,

(52:06):
because we've all encountered those kids that like instantly distrust you.
They look at you and you can tell they distrust you.
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

(52:27):
answer this question of how come infants, if this is
the case, don't become terrified of every new image they
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 or hybrids of threatening creatures,
and specifically he points out the alien face hugger because

(52:47):
this is essentially a spider and a snake fused together
into one awful crab like entity. You know, it's the
worst parts of the spider and the worst parts of
a snake and the worst part of an oyster. Well yeah, yeah,
once you start cutting into it, for sure, but there's
no worse part of an oyster. It's all good. Uh.
So Asthma says that this what we have here is uh,

(53:10):
the phylogenetic memory of ancient danger and monstrous hybrids allow
us to to further strengthen, augment, and transmit those fears. Right,
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

(53:33):
problems with why them and not hippopotamus? Is uh, if
you assume that babies are generally carried and kept off
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

(53:53):
fits the category violation model. That would make sense. Yeah,
I don't see a lot of ADU even today taking
their baby. Well, I mean, un once 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 animal in
the wild and encountering them in an artificial environment right now.

(54:13):
Of course, another way to violate these categories is to
present beings with totally nonsensical ontologies, creatures that could never
be conditioned 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 are lion headed humans

(54:35):
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 of ancient monsters. Alright, we're back now. Asthma invokes
a concept in his paper invented by the philosopher Nol Carol,

(54:56):
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 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

(55:17):
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 them meduce and you put
it in our real world, yeah, 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.

(55:40):
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, in examples of horror,
it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character
in our ordinary world. Yeah. I like this because this
is a distinction. I feel very much like there are

(56:02):
different kinds of monsters, and they even the same monster
could be more or less terrifying given different context. And
so it makes me think back 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,

(56:24):
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 the cave. Yeah. To glimpse
this creature, or to imagine glimpsinginess 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

(56:47):
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 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

(57:11):
quote also elsewhere, um quote. If what is of primary
importance about horrific creatures is 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 they are categorical violations will be attached to

(57:32):
some sense of disturbance, distress, and disgust. Consequently, the role
of the horrific creature in 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.

(57:54):
Said beings ought to be disturbing, distressing, and repulsive in
the way that theorists like doug list and there's referring
to Dame Mary Douglas predict phenomena that ill fit cultural
classifications will be So the idea is that creatures that
violate our culturally established categories of existence we will find

(58:15):
repulsive and distressing. And this is definitely a very common
way of explaining horrific creatures, right the 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

(58:37):
creatures very much seemed to fit this theory. But at
the same time, I wonder, is it really 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

(58:58):
about a monster to find it scary? No? I mean,
like we've been discussing with something like like Jason, say,
Jason Varies 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 terror, right down to the

(59:18):
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, depending on 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

(59:41):
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, Like I
don't feel like I'm comparing anything in my mind. It
hits me on the same level as like, you know,
being something flying at my face. Anyway, Well, we'll come

(01:00:03):
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
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

(01:00:27):
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,
and there's a basic reason humans consume various other elements
that have specific taste. But we can't stop coming up
with new combinations, a new novel, combinations that will give

(01:00:50):
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 make says feel
that that tear but do well. Okay, So that's one theory.
You could say that we like to fear. I think
there's another possibility, which is that we don't actually like
to fear. We like something else that comes with fear.

(01:01:14):
That fear has sort of a secret, hidden cousin. Whenever
the fear pathways in the brain are ignited, there's something
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

(01:01:35):
of horror monster or of monster fear would be to
look at the behavior of a person who's incapable of
feeling that fear. And strangely enough, such a person 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 anomally. She
has focal bilateral amygdala aleegions, and because the amygdala is

(01:01:58):
so bound up so in horton and generating the brain's
fear response. These lesions mean that SM has an 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,

(01:02:18):
and these experiments showed that for SM what would normally
be horrifying stimuli were indeed attention grabbing, but did not
cause avoidance behaviors. In fact, 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

(01:02:39):
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 Experience
of Fear in 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

(01:03:00):
an abandoned medical facility in Louisville, Kentucky. And I want
to read a quote about what happened when they went
with SM through this facility, which had people addressed as
monsters jumping out and scaring, they said, quote, the hidden
monsters attempted to scare sm numerous times, but to no avail.
She reacted to the monsters by smiling, laughing, or trying

(01:03:21):
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,
sm scared one of the monsters when she poked it
in the head because she was quote curious as to

(01:03:44):
what it would feel like. You're not supposed to touch
the actors that are haunted attraction 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, because you've got
a deficiency of fear, if you're amygdalas damaged and you
can't feel fear, things that would normally make you fear

(01:04:05):
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 in a
film or a book or some art, and yeah, we're
not thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so afraid right now.

(01:04:27):
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, of course
the after effect of the monster not killing you, you
get that that surge of relief, the endorphin and the

(01:04:49):
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 that she's only getting the good half of the
horror feeling. She's not feeling the fear. But when we
experience horror in the good way and the pleasurable way
that makes us keep returning to it, it's what's a

(01:05:10):
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. And
and in in SMS case, she is attracted to the
novelty of it. It is the novelty of this thing

(01:05:32):
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, get the
hell away. Interesting. Now, on the other hand, if you
think this condition of having a fear deficiency sounds great,

(01:05:54):
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 from endangering herself was
simply not operative. In the same way, you might not
enjoy pain, but you wouldn't actually want to have the

(01:06:15):
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 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

(01:06:38):
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
on inducing uh significance. We don't know that it did,
but we think you know, monsters usually have some kind
of fear on inducing properties. If that's what was part

(01:07:02):
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, 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

(01:07:24):
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 magical world around them, but
it was it was almost like like doing shots of espresso.
You know, it's difficulse, it's simplifying here, it's but it's

(01:07:45):
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 or religious significance right now, where
you'd you'd ha paid in a ritual with it. But
what if it was much more like us watching a

(01:08:05):
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 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

(01:08:27):
can still have a very this or reaction to it.
You can have 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 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

(01:08:48):
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 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 monster.

(01:09:11):
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 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

(01:09:36):
the emotion slash cognition complex, and horror is a Yannis
faced experience, partly imperative, as in I should run away,
and partly 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,

(01:09:58):
for example, simultaneously recognize cats as a kind of thing
in a category and as dangerous, so that's the fear
affect I should run away. Humans, on the other hand,
can decouple these two pathways indicative and imperative, and fear
can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures and perceptions.

(01:10:18):
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,
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

(01:10:39):
system of what's known as quote somatic markers. Essentially these
trainable neural pathways that can be filled with emotional content
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

(01:11:01):
homologies with non human animals, but in our individual lives
their idiosyncratically assigned and have significant plasticity, so you can
fill them 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

(01:11:21):
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
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

(01:11:42):
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
mind can provide a kind of mental training simulator, a
place to work out emotional and behave yeal responses to
danger within the safety of the imagination. But because horror

(01:12:05):
images have such strong access to our emotional reactions, he says,
and this is an an interesting bridge. They don't just
train 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

(01:12:28):
often have a moral or they teach some virtue. They
tell you what you should do in a certain situation
and condition your responses to it. And they're much more
effective than normal teaching and instruction because they get at
you emotionally. They you know, 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

(01:12:51):
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.
And then there's hey, kids don't go in that creek
without the adults around because there's electric turtle man, we
will drown you, you know. And yet we see that,
of course time and time again, in folklore's where there
is some sort of foul creature who will drown you

(01:13:12):
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 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

(01:13:32):
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 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.

(01:13:54):
So so, Yeah, I guess that's the end that we
we don't have ultimately the answer about when the first
monster rose, But I think it's very plausible that they
could have their their roots in social teaching. Yeah, I think. So.
I feel like we've given we've given everybody some tremendous
food for thought in trying to unravel the meaning of

(01:14:16):
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.
So what do you think, mab What what could the
Lionman have been teaching? Was the loan mens uh a
story about how don't go in strange caves? Or uh? Yeah,

(01:14:36):
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,
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

(01:14:59):
wild world they it 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 into the cave and
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

(01:15:20):
loan mench, and some days the loan Mench it's you, amen, partner. Alright. Well,
on that note, hey, if you want to see an
image of this fabulous statue and maybe some of these
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(01:16:02):
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(01:16:29):
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