Speaker 1: You're listening to an air wave media podcast.
Speaker 2: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 3: A giant, very creature Part eight park Maps in Luckness,
Speaker 3: a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake in the
Speaker 3: Highlands of Scotland. It's a creature known as the Luckness
Speaker 3: monster monster.
Speaker 1: A few weeks ago we had on Chet van Duzer
Speaker 1: talking about sea monsters on medieval maps. I really enjoyed
Speaker 1: the conversation and I joked that we'd like to have
Speaker 1: them on again to talk about monsters on land maps.
Speaker 1: And then a few days after that episode went live,
Speaker 1: I got an interesting email from today's guest. He's an
Speaker 1: art historian who specializes in monsters, and he's written a
Speaker 1: book about monsters on medieval maps, The Terrestrial Kind. I
Speaker 1: felt like we could have talked a lot longer. He's
Speaker 1: done a lot of scholarly work on both monsters from
Speaker 1: a historical perspective and from a sociological perspective. Hopefully you'll
Speaker 1: enjoy the conversation what he has to say as much
Speaker 1: as I did. I'm Blake Smith. This is Monster Talk,
Speaker 1: the science show about monsters, and to paraphrase pulp fiction,
Speaker 1: we're about to get medieval.
Speaker 3: On your monstertle.
Speaker 1: All right, So tonight we're talking with Asabmittman, an associate
Speaker 1: professor of art history at the California State University in Chico.
Speaker 1: He's the co author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval
Speaker 1: England and Inconceivable Beasts, The Wonders of the East, and
Speaker 1: the Beowulf Manuscript. He co edited a research companion to
Speaker 1: Monsters in the monstros and as if that weren't enough.
Speaker 1: He's also the president of mirk STAPPA, which stands for
Speaker 1: Monsters the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through
Speaker 1: Scholarly Theory and Practical Application. Hey, so welcome to Monster Talk.
Speaker 1: And I have to say, after reading your TV it
Speaker 1: seems like you're being on the show was pretty much inevitable.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks very much for having me. I'm happy to
Speaker 2: be here.
Speaker 1: So how did you get involved in the serious academic
Speaker 1: research of monsters.
Speaker 2: Well, I fell into it more or less by accident.
Speaker 2: I was doing one of those I had one of
Speaker 2: those experiences that we tell our students we don't actually
Speaker 2: have that good research doesn't result from brilliant aha moments
Speaker 2: where things all suddenly fit together like they would in
Speaker 2: a movie, but that is actually what happened. I was
Speaker 2: working on medieval maps, which is the other main thing
Speaker 2: I work on, and maps and monsters go together fairly
Speaker 2: well and kind of stentated by and I didn't really
Speaker 2: know what to do with it. And I was simultaneously
Speaker 2: taking a course on Japanese is aight oh period woodblock printing.
Speaker 2: And I had gone to the library at Stanford to
Speaker 2: find some sources for this Japanese art paper, and the
Speaker 2: library where they have the Asian collections there are shelved
Speaker 2: in Chinese and Japanese. There's no English language reference points
Speaker 2: to be had, and so I was wildly in the
Speaker 2: wrong section and I wound up taking out a book
Speaker 2: on eighth century China instead of eighteenth century Japan. And
Speaker 2: I was looking back and forth. It had a map
Speaker 2: in it, and the map looked very different formally from
Speaker 2: the English one. But the longer I looked at it,
Speaker 2: the more I realized they basically functioned the same way,
Speaker 2: and that people had been I thought misunderstanding the English
Speaker 2: maps all this time by thinking about them as linear
Speaker 2: instead of as radial. In this Chinese map was just
Speaker 2: a series of four rectangles concentrically placed, and the central
Speaker 2: one was something like the princely Domains. Normal culture puts
Speaker 2: itself right at the heart of the map, and then
Speaker 2: next one was the zone of the Allies, and then
Speaker 2: the zone of the Allied Barbarians, and then the last
Speaker 2: ring of the map, the outermost edge of the world,
Speaker 2: was labeled the zone of cultureless Savagery. And that's got
Speaker 2: to be as evocative a label as has ever been
Speaker 2: on any map. But that's actually how the medieval English
Speaker 2: maps work as well, except for a key difference, which
Speaker 2: is that instead of having England at the center, they've
Speaker 2: Jerusalem at the center in England.
Speaker 1: Just gonna say, that's also how Atlanta's laid out, which
Speaker 1: is very common.
Speaker 2: But what makes the English one so odd is that
Speaker 2: England is out in that zone of cultureless savagery. It's
Speaker 2: out in the margins, surrounded if you look around the
Speaker 2: edges of that map, and a lot of others, completely
Speaker 2: surrounded by various kinds of monsters. And so then I
Speaker 2: started investigating the monsters on the maps, and then I
Speaker 2: started investigating the monsters off of the maps, and found
Speaker 2: that anywhere you look in any kind of medieval culture
Speaker 2: you will find monsters. They are not a sideline, not
Speaker 2: a weird and peripheral phenomenon. They are everywhere, in every
Speaker 2: kind of book you can imagine, and any kind of
Speaker 2: architecture you can think of, in any kind of decorative art, everything,
Speaker 2: they are there. They're in every kind of literature you
Speaker 2: could look for. They were really central to how medieval
Speaker 2: people understood themselves in the world, and so the more
Speaker 2: I got interested in that, the more I got interested
Speaker 2: in monsters on their own. That's neat.
Speaker 1: So have you run into a lot of academic pushback
Speaker 1: for focusing on this topic.
Speaker 2: I have less so lately, which I take as a
Speaker 2: sign of some great success. But when I first started
Speaker 2: doing this in graduate school, people would say, oh, what
Speaker 2: are you working on? And you're supposed to say something
Speaker 2: like I'm doing a Deridian spin on fucause analysis of
Speaker 2: the you know whatever, you know. You were supposed to
Speaker 2: be doing something that sent it very serious and within
Speaker 2: academic can finds very traditional. And I would say, I'm
Speaker 2: writing about monsters, and it took me years to figure
Speaker 2: out how to say that without it sounding like a joke.
Speaker 2: People would laugh, because no, no, no, no, I'm really
Speaker 2: that's really what I do. I'm writing about monsters. That's
Speaker 2: that's my dissertation. It's really what I'm trying to do.
Speaker 2: And you know, I did come across various forms of
Speaker 2: pushback against that. The most interesting one was when I
Speaker 2: was out. I was actually on a job interview. This
Speaker 2: was several years ago, and I given my lecture, which
Speaker 2: was on the monsters that are in the Beowulf manuscript,
Speaker 2: which has lots of monsters. Most people don't know we
Speaker 2: are in there. And then I was at the luncheon
Speaker 2: where they have the appearance of informality, but in fact
Speaker 2: it's all still part of the interview, and one of
Speaker 2: the committee members said, so, where do you see yourself
Speaker 2: in twenty years, And of course I had no idea
Speaker 2: where I'd be in twenty years, but my off the
Speaker 2: cuff answer was I would like to be the head
Speaker 2: of the world's first institute for monster studies. And they
Speaker 2: all looked pretty miserable about that. Well, okay, this is
Speaker 2: going poorly. And then after that a member of the
Speaker 2: department who was not on the committee, asked me to
Speaker 2: come to speak with him in his office, and he
Speaker 2: leaned across his table and he said to me, listen, Aesa,
Speaker 2: you got to drop all this monster stuff and start
Speaker 2: doing real scholarship. And in the context of a job interview,
Speaker 2: what do you say, you know? I said, well, I
Speaker 2: think it is real scholarship and many people working on
Speaker 2: it as an important tradition, et cetera. So but I
Speaker 2: I was flabbergasted. I was floored by what struck me
Speaker 2: as a very narrow minded conception of what scholarship is,
Speaker 2: which is to say that scholarship should be defined by
Speaker 2: the subject of study, not the approach or the quality
Speaker 2: of the results, Whereas I would say every subject matter
Speaker 2: is worth study. There aren't subjects that are uninteresting. Whatever
Speaker 2: you study, if you know enough about it, you will
Speaker 2: conclude it is the hingepin around which all global culture turns.
Speaker 2: And monsters do this just as well as anything else.
Speaker 2: And all right, they're also really fun and interesting. I agree.
Speaker 1: I read that in your introduction, and I thought that
Speaker 1: was a really telling and a story, I guess, a
Speaker 1: story that I had a lot of sympathy for because
Speaker 1: it's funny. Everybody accepts monsters, I think culturally, but as
Speaker 1: a as a form of entertainment or as a sort
Speaker 1: of what an existential thing to be a afraid of.
Speaker 1: I don't know how many people think there are real
Speaker 1: monsters anymore. Some do, I mean, especially in you know,
Speaker 1: part of what this show does is research cryptozoology. But
Speaker 1: for me, I'm an English major who kind of came
Speaker 1: to be a science junkie kind of later in life.
Speaker 1: And the show has often straddled the line between hard
Speaker 1: science and liberal arts. So it seems like your research
Speaker 1: probably went the same way. How have you fallen in
Speaker 1: that spectrum and how does your work go towards that
Speaker 1: in that way?
Speaker 2: Well, I am very much on the humanities end of
Speaker 2: the spectrum. I I'm married to a scientist, and so
Speaker 2: I've had a lot of vicarious scientific instruction. My original
Speaker 2: childhood goal was to grow up to be Jacques Cousteau,
Speaker 2: but then I took chemistry and gave that up. But
Speaker 2: I've come to these really from the perspective of art history,
Speaker 2: literary history, cultural studies, and so my main interest really
Speaker 2: is in how cultures have used monsters. It was one
Speaker 2: thing to wonder whether they're real or not real, and
Speaker 2: I've written about that a bunch of times in a
Speaker 2: bunch of different ways. Because it's the first thing I
Speaker 2: always get asked by people as, oh, well, did medieval
Speaker 2: people really think there were monsters? And so I've grappled
Speaker 2: a lot with that. Ultimately, it's not the question that
Speaker 2: animates my interests, but I think it's important enough that
Speaker 2: I've turned to it several times.
Speaker 1: So let's define a monster for this conversation. What is
Speaker 1: a monster?
Speaker 2: It's a fabulous question, and it's one that I really
Speaker 2: should be able to answer with a nice, pithy response
Speaker 2: after working on them for twelve or fifteen years.
Speaker 1: We've got forty five minutes, So do your best.
Speaker 2: I'll do my best. Well. The thing is that it's
Speaker 2: a term that shifts in meaning dramatically from period to period,
Speaker 2: and from place to and even from context within a
Speaker 2: single period of place, from context to context. What most
Speaker 2: people have discussed it in relations to cultural history have
Speaker 2: done is they've looked at the use of the term
Speaker 2: at particular points in history. So, for example, we can
Speaker 2: see how various early medieval theologians wrote about the word monstraw,
Speaker 2: which is what we get the word monster from in English.
Speaker 2: And so there are sort of two competing etymologies that
Speaker 2: they come up with Augustine and Augustine of Hippo says
Speaker 2: that monstraw comes from damnstrare, that is, to demonstrate or
Speaker 2: to show, and he uses a series of puns to
Speaker 2: essentially say God put monsters on the earth to show
Speaker 2: his infinite power, his ability to break the laws of nature.
Speaker 2: It's not that they didn't think there were laws of nature,
Speaker 2: but they thought, you know, a person with a dog's
Speaker 2: head was outside of the laws of nature and yet
Speaker 2: possible because of the infinite power of God. Etymologies of
Speaker 2: Latin words to understand God's plan for the universe. Says
Speaker 2: that no, no, it doesn't come from day MONSTRAI. It
Speaker 2: comes from monare, which means to warn, and he says
Speaker 2: they're warnings from God against sin. So this is how
Speaker 2: the question has been tackled by a lot of people
Speaker 2: who've written about this. They say, all right, in this
Speaker 2: period people thought that. In that period people thought something else.
Speaker 2: So you get into the early modern period and the
Speaker 2: monster becomes more of a focused on scientific Early scientific
Speaker 2: analyzes prodigal births, you know whether two headed calf or
Speaker 2: a two headed person born, and how to grapple with these?
Speaker 2: Are they portents of divine vengeance or are they the
Speaker 2: result of imperfect conditions in the womb? And these sorts
Speaker 2: of things come to be debated. But one thing I
Speaker 2: found that nobody seemed to have really done in the
Speaker 2: scholarship that I was looking at is say, when we
Speaker 2: use the term, what do we mean? And I think
Speaker 2: it's really important because I've come to think what most
Speaker 2: of us mean by monster. Not the cryptozoological community, and
Speaker 2: not Augustine and isidor, but the average modern lay person
Speaker 2: when they say monster, they think something big and scary
Speaker 2: and dangerous that does not exist. How do we know
Speaker 2: what the difference is between something horrifying, terrifying, and real
Speaker 2: and something horrifying, terrifying and not real. What I came
Speaker 2: to conclude is that for something to be a monster
Speaker 2: to me anyway, it has to not only be big
Speaker 2: and scary like a rabbit dog, and not only big
Speaker 2: and dangerous like a great white shark or a Tyrannosaurus
Speaker 2: X or something, but it also has to somehow fundamentally
Speaker 2: destabilize our understanding of the world. And a rabbit dog
Speaker 2: doesn't do that unless its behavior is such that it's
Speaker 2: well outside of anything that a rabbit dog ought to
Speaker 2: do if we you know, I spent a long long
Speaker 2: time since I think I've seen the movie and not
Speaker 2: read that novel. But you know, if the dog was
Speaker 2: punching in the code to the security system to kill
Speaker 2: the people, then it would rise to the level of
Speaker 2: being a monster, because that would be a moment of instability,
Speaker 2: when we would feel like our understanding of how the
Speaker 2: world works is now inoperative.
Speaker 1: You know that that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I think a lot about the.
Speaker 1: Metaphorical impact of what a monster is, and it seems
Speaker 1: like to me, again this is coming from being an
Speaker 1: English major, but the metaphor of a monster almost always
Speaker 1: represents this sort of perfect outgroup metaphor, right, And we
Speaker 1: spend so much time, whether we're cognitive it or not,
Speaker 1: breaking everybody up into in group outgroup segmentation.
Speaker 3: More monstrutal.
Speaker 1: A brief editorial interruption here. While this episode's focused on
Speaker 1: monsters and medieval maps, it seemed to be plagued by
Speaker 1: another monster, the nefarious Grimlin. After interviewing ASA, I discovered
Speaker 1: that nearly all of the original interview had turned into
Speaker 1: digital garbage. ASA generously came back to re record the
Speaker 1: missing portions, but even then we had difficulties and part
Speaker 1: of the interview broke up into hundreds of useless files.
Speaker 1: I did manage to get most of it back. What's
Speaker 1: missing here is a brief exchange about the ideas of
Speaker 1: race and science. We discussed the origins of racial ideas,
Speaker 1: the horror of eugenics, and how science got that wrong,
Speaker 1: and finally we came back to the question of could
Speaker 1: science and education usher humanity out of the kind of
Speaker 1: in group outgroup thinking it causes so much strife and
Speaker 1: horror and modern times. I return you now to that
Speaker 1: discussion where the technology was able to restore the recording.
Speaker 2: The term race itself actually doesn't come into use. It's
Speaker 2: a sort of neologism of I think the fourteenth century
Speaker 2: that's invented to talk about hunting dogs and only then
Speaker 2: makes its way to talking about nobility, so we hear
Speaker 2: about a noble race. So, for example, French nobility are
Speaker 2: one race and French peasantry are a separate race. And
Speaker 2: so it's only later that race comes to be even
Speaker 2: applied to say the distinctions that people might see between
Speaker 2: Africans and Europeans, saying.
Speaker 1: I think science is pretty clearly demonstrated that people are
Speaker 1: all the same species that there's really no difference between us.
Speaker 1: You know, these sort of cultural differences are way more significant,
Speaker 1: I think than any concept of race, or that seems
Speaker 1: to be the case anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the American Anthropological Society has a wonderful statement on race,
Speaker 2: and it's very clear on the completely culturally constructive nature thereof.
Speaker 1: Are these ideas out moded in modern culture?
Speaker 2: Would that they were? Right? I mean, you know, the
Speaker 2: Middle Ages had its wild men, which were these hairy,
Speaker 2: semi human guys who lived out in the forest and
Speaker 2: were both sort of loved and feared and hated all
Speaker 2: at once. Sound familiar to someone who works on Bigfoot, right.
Speaker 2: The Middle Ages had its sea serpents. We've still Gottenssi
Speaker 2: and Champy and so on, right, exactly. Well, the Middle
Speaker 2: Ages had lots of ideas about Jews, and modernity has
Speaker 2: not shifted a ton from that. Lots of the very
Speaker 2: negative tropes are still active. I think the most common
Speaker 2: of pejorative used to describe Jews in the Middle Age,
Speaker 2: it is probably the most common, is perfidious, which means
Speaker 2: sort of like willfully refusing belief. They thought that Jews
Speaker 2: understood that Jesus actually was the Mesiah, but stubbornly stoneheartedly
Speaker 2: refused to change their traditional ways, which doesn't make a
Speaker 2: whole lot of logical sense. But you know, we shouldn't
Speaker 2: really try and find the logic and racism, I guess.
Speaker 2: But all it takes is a quick Internet search to
Speaker 2: find that all of the tropes about Jews are still
Speaker 2: quite operative. And I've actually got two sort of two
Speaker 2: stories I could tell about that. One is a classroom
Speaker 2: episode that I had. This was a couple of years
Speaker 2: ago now, but I was teaching my Medieval Art survey
Speaker 2: and we had spent about a month discussing monsters, and
Speaker 2: we'd looked at the Wonders of the East, and we'd
Speaker 2: looked at Santa Gustin, and we'd looked at Jerome, all
Speaker 2: of these interesting texts, and we've read lots of sort
Speaker 2: of theoretical approaches to monsters and the monstrous, trying to
Speaker 2: get sort of conceptualization of how the Middle Ages constructed
Speaker 2: monstrosity and viewed monsters, which is one way that they
Speaker 2: conceived of what theorists often referred to as the other. Right,
Speaker 2: these are something who is not the norm, someone who
Speaker 2: is outside of whatever the sort of dominant cultural paradigm
Speaker 2: is right. So we've been talking about monsters and sort
Speaker 2: of this whole setup on otherness, and this was all,
Speaker 2: in a way a setup so that we could go
Speaker 2: on to talking about other kinds of otherness in the
Speaker 2: Middle Ages. And the next three units were Saracens, that's
Speaker 2: medieval Christian concepts about Muslims, Jews, and then women who
Speaker 2: were also turned into monsters in medieval rhetoric in many ways.
Speaker 2: And so we were spending i don't know, a week
Speaker 2: or two on images of Jews. And we'd read a
Speaker 2: wonderful book by Deborah Strickland called Demons, Saracens, and Jews
Speaker 2: Making Monsters in the Middle Ages, and it makes this
Speaker 2: wonderful argument about how in the Middle Ages they felt
Speaker 2: that the Bible was fixed, you couldn't muck around with
Speaker 2: the text. But medieval Christians had switched how they viewed
Speaker 2: the contents of the New Testament, because when it was written,
Speaker 2: the Romans are the bad guys, right, clearly, Yeah, But
Speaker 2: later on, let's say, around the rule of Charlemagne, the
Speaker 2: Carolingian period, so you know, eighth century into the ninth century,
Speaker 2: the Romans come to be rehabilitated. We get the first
Speaker 2: dawnings of the idea of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne
Speaker 2: is crowned Emperor of Rome. They decide they like the Romans,
Speaker 2: so the Romans can't be the bad guys anymore. So
Speaker 2: they look in the book and they find a different
Speaker 2: bad guy. Those bad guys turn out to be, of course,
Speaker 2: the Jews, who are often just described as the Jews,
Speaker 2: this kind of monolith.
Speaker 4: And so, so what they did in the images in
Speaker 4: the manuscrips, because they couldn't change the text, they turned
Speaker 4: the Romans in the images into Jews.
Speaker 2: So conscious Pilate, for example, comes in the images to
Speaker 2: be a caricature Jew. And you can probably envision what
Speaker 2: the caricatures look like. They tend to be, you know,
Speaker 2: the most dominant feature is giant hooked noses, but they're
Speaker 2: also represented in certain other codified ways, for example, always
Speaker 2: in full profile, almost always, which exaggerates the view of
Speaker 2: the nose. And so, because they couldn't change the text,
Speaker 2: they changed the images. And it's a very subtle way
Speaker 2: of doing that. But thereby they make the Jews again
Speaker 2: and again into quote unquote the killers of Christ. And
Speaker 2: this is a trope that remained very, very common throughout
Speaker 2: the Middle Ages. So we were going over all this
Speaker 2: in class and I had on screen it absolutely horrifying image.
Speaker 2: It's the most extreme anti Semitic, maybe the most extreme
Speaker 2: image I know from medieval manuscripts. It's from Assalter, which
Speaker 2: is the book of the Psalms, and it has a
Speaker 2: section in it of the passion of Jesus, which is
Speaker 2: the period of his arrest and torture and eventual execution
Speaker 2: by crucifixion. And I had this image up which had
Speaker 2: the arrest of Christ. So this is the moment when
Speaker 2: Judas kisses him as an active betrayal to identify him
Speaker 2: to the Roman soldiers. But all the Roman soldiers are
Speaker 2: represented as Jews, and they are represented as horrifying the caricatured, yes,
Speaker 2: with the giant noses, but also huge bulbous heads and
Speaker 2: giant sort of goggle eyes that are rolling back in
Speaker 2: their skulls, and enormous razor fangs, and they're holding weapons
Speaker 2: that are made of giant bones with nails sticking out
Speaker 2: of them. They are absolutely monstrous and horror And I'm
Speaker 2: explaining that, and this is one woman in my class
Speaker 2: who was looking angrier and angrier. Now She's looked kind
Speaker 2: of displeased with everything I've said all semester. But finally
Speaker 2: she couldn't take it anymore, and she just burst out
Speaker 2: interrupted me in the middle of the class and said,
Speaker 2: I don't see what you're trying to get at. I
Speaker 2: wanted to say, lady, I'm not trying to get at anything,
Speaker 2: you know, but she said, I don't suit what you're trying
Speaker 2: to get at, because first off, that is what Jews
Speaker 2: look like more or less. Wow. And anyway, she continued,
Speaker 2: they did kill Jesus.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And then she went on to shriek out the biblical
Speaker 2: passage that in every translation I've ever seen from the
Speaker 2: Latin reads, and they said take him, take him away
Speaker 2: with him. And what she shouted out was and they
Speaker 2: said kill him, kill him, crucify him. I later looked
Speaker 2: up and it comes from a sort of discray d
Speaker 2: translation which the head of the American Bible Society has
Speaker 2: argued may convince ignorant readers that the acts of the
Speaker 2: Pharisees in the first century are equatable with the acts
Speaker 2: of all the Jews throughout all the time. And there
Speaker 2: she was my student as a as an exemplem of
Speaker 2: that notion. And yeah, I mean this was this was
Speaker 2: shocking and and and horrifying and really quite disturbing. And
Speaker 2: actually so she disappears for about a month, no word,
Speaker 2: don't know what's going on, and then she shows up
Speaker 2: in my office with some absolutely banal question like was
Speaker 2: that paper supposed to have end notes of footnotes? I forget,
Speaker 2: you know, and I didn't know what to even say.
Speaker 2: I wanted to say, can you just leave? You know, right,
Speaker 2: well it's it's footnotes, you know. And then she turned
Speaker 2: to leave, and then she turned back and she she's said,
Speaker 2: you know that thing that every racist in the history
Speaker 2: of the world has ever said. She lean and kind
Speaker 2: of whispered like this was, you know, something intimate between us,
Speaker 2: she saying, you know, you know I wasn't talking about you, right, wow, Banks, No,
Speaker 2: I feel so much better. You only meant my parents
Speaker 2: or parents or my friends growing up or you know,
Speaker 2: my kid, not me. So not that's fine. It's totally fine.
Speaker 2: I feel much better now. But yeah, So these medieval tropes,
Speaker 2: these medieval biases and prejudices live with us today unquestionably,
Speaker 2: and by no means it's merely anti Semitism, that's a
Speaker 2: very common one. But anti Islamic tropes from the Middle
Speaker 2: Ages are still very active and you can find them
Speaker 2: in contemporary American media with great frequency. But so are
Speaker 2: tropes about Africans about Eastern people's the most common group
Speaker 2: of monsters, probably from the Middle Age, from the ancient
Speaker 2: World and the Middle Ages, is a group called the
Speaker 2: Wonders of the East. And they thought the East was
Speaker 2: what they called the East was like India and Ethiopia,
Speaker 2: which was sort of a generic term for North Africa.
Speaker 2: And the tropes that they had about the East, so
Speaker 2: to speak, which was this India North Africa section, were
Speaker 2: that it was this land of sort of decadence of
Speaker 2: wealth and sort of looser sexuality and morality. It was
Speaker 2: a place of great danger but also great temptation and possibility,
Speaker 2: which are exactly the tropes that are used in modernity
Speaker 2: to refer to the Far East. It doesn't even matter
Speaker 2: that it's a different East. They just take the same
Speaker 2: tropes and apply them to wherever the East happens to
Speaker 2: be in any particular time or place. So, yeah, these
Speaker 2: things don't go away, it seems to me often I
Speaker 2: feel like you know, anything that somebody ever wrote down
Speaker 2: in a manuscript a thousand years ago is just sort
Speaker 2: of there for all of us for eternity.
Speaker 1: It's just too bad that we can't seem to quite
Speaker 1: educate ourselves, or teach ourselves, or train ourselves, or better
Speaker 1: ourselves out of the I think very harmful modality of thought.
Speaker 2: Well, And what I would love to think is that
Speaker 2: if we could actually educate everybody, it would all go away.
Speaker 2: And while I think education does help, there are plenty
Speaker 2: of very well educated people. I'm sure it's true in
Speaker 2: the cryptozoology community that there are plenty of very educated
Speaker 2: people who are out there looking for Bigfoot and Messi
Speaker 2: and so on. But I think there are plenty of
Speaker 2: very well educated people who also holds all of these
Speaker 2: you know a thousand and two thousand year old biases
Speaker 2: as deep seated parts of their worldview with a sort
Speaker 2: of blinkerde quality, whereby they are knowledgeable and literate in
Speaker 2: all sorts of venues, but for this one, where they
Speaker 2: have a certain wall around.
Speaker 1: Well, we better talk about your book a little.
Speaker 2: Certainly, the basic way that medieval cartography works a great
Speaker 2: common way of conceiving the world in the Middle Ages
Speaker 2: was that they knew it was round, but they still
Speaker 2: viewed it as having by they the educated people, geographers, theologians,
Speaker 2: these folks were well aware that the world was a sphere,
Speaker 2: but they still conceived it as having a center, and
Speaker 2: that center was Jerusalem. And this came from biblical passages.
Speaker 2: The Psalms say God performs the work of salvation in
Speaker 2: the middle of the earth. The book of Ezekiel says this.
Speaker 2: The Lord God said, I have placed Jerusalem in the
Speaker 2: middle of the people, and around her are the lands.
Speaker 2: And some early Christian and early medieval theologians followed up
Speaker 2: on this. So, for example, Jerome, who's very influential theologian,
Speaker 2: writes that Jerusalem is situated in the midst of the
Speaker 2: peoples of the earth. So he reads the passage in
Speaker 2: Ezekiel and takes that to be literal that there is
Speaker 2: a center point Jerusalem is it. And this becomes more
Speaker 2: literal in some other texts. For example, some medieval pilgrims
Speaker 2: coming from Ireland and England leave us texts where they
Speaker 2: talk about the center of Jerusalem and the very center
Speaker 2: is a place called Compas, and that's where God placed
Speaker 2: the point of his compass to draw the circle of
Speaker 2: the earth. And this is one of those wonderful cases
Speaker 2: where instead of man following something that God did, man
Speaker 2: takes something that he did and has that be the
Speaker 2: thing that God does. So medieval cartographers had for a
Speaker 2: while been making maps by putting a compass point in
Speaker 2: Jerusalem and then using the other end to draw the
Speaker 2: circle of the world. And so then retrospectively they decide, ah,
Speaker 2: that's how God drew the world. And then that becomes
Speaker 2: literalized in this place compass in the center of Jerusalem,
Speaker 2: which they thought that there was a column there which
Speaker 2: at noon would cast no shadow because the sun would
Speaker 2: be straight overhead and it was right in this dead center.
Speaker 2: So the center is Jerusalem, and this is the sort
Speaker 2: of perfect and holy core of the earth. And then
Speaker 2: as we work out in radial bands, we go through
Speaker 2: sort of the main biblical locations which are around that,
Speaker 2: so that would be everything from Mount Sinai to Bethlehem
Speaker 2: and so on. And then we work out further and
Speaker 2: we get into these kind of normal medieval places like
Speaker 2: Italy and Germany at France, and then we get to
Speaker 2: the very furthest edge of the world and this is
Speaker 2: where the monsters tend to be clustered, not exclusively, but
Speaker 2: the greatest concentration of monstrosity is really at the edge
Speaker 2: of the world. And this makes sense from a medieval perspective,
Speaker 2: which views the world not as the result of plate
Speaker 2: tectonics and continental drift and migrations of animals and evolution,
Speaker 2: but rather as a kind of static product laid out
Speaker 2: by God, where location on the Earth's surface can be
Speaker 2: equated to location within a divine plan that speaks about
Speaker 2: the salvation of peoples.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: At the edge we find an enormous array of monsters,
Speaker 2: sort of particularly concentrated in the section between the Nile
Speaker 2: River and the ocean, which runs around the edge of
Speaker 2: the world. And what we get there are often the
Speaker 2: creatures I mentioned before, these wonders of the East, which
Speaker 2: are a group of creatures that derive out of classical sources. Herodonus,
Speaker 2: who's referred to as the Father of History, as the
Speaker 2: sort of the first major ancient Greek historian, he gives
Speaker 2: us an account of them, which he's actually gotten from
Speaker 2: some other authors whose works are now mostly lost, but
Speaker 2: he passes them on to Pliny, the first century Roman
Speaker 2: author who puts them into his natural history text, which
Speaker 2: has chapters on rocks and on trees and on various peoples,
Speaker 2: and it's got a couple of sections on monsters, which
Speaker 2: are quite wonderful. And they get passed on into the
Speaker 2: Middle Ages in various forms and in various languages, most
Speaker 2: notably in the Latin tradition. But they get translated into
Speaker 2: Old English, which my friend and colleague Susan Kim and
Speaker 2: I we very recently published a book on the Wonders
Speaker 2: of the East in the Bayolf Manuscript, and this is
Speaker 2: an Old English or Anglo Saxon version of that text.
Speaker 2: But what these creatures are are a lot of them
Speaker 2: are semi human hybrid creatures. So for example, the sinocephale,
Speaker 2: which are people with dog's head. Sino dog right canine
Speaker 2: is the from that same route, so the sinocephalie cephalae
Speaker 2: means head. These were fire breathing, giant dog aheaded people
Speaker 2: eating creatures. Some people call them cannibals, But if you
Speaker 2: call them cannibals, you've accepted their humanity right off, which
Speaker 2: I think is an ambiguous determination. So they are headless people.
Speaker 2: There are also people with one arm, people with one leg.
Speaker 2: The wonderful skia pods have one giant foot on which
Speaker 2: they run very swiftly, and which they use to shield
Speaker 2: themselves from the hot equatorial sun. So we basically get
Speaker 2: three main types, four main types of monstrous peoples in
Speaker 2: these one of these would show up around the edges
Speaker 2: of the world. We get hybrids like the dog headed
Speaker 2: people and centaur and fawns and bird headed people and
Speaker 2: so on. We get creatures characterized by excess. The maritime
Speaker 2: Ethiopus have four eyes. There are giants. We get creatures
Speaker 2: who deviate from normative humanity as defined in the Middle
Speaker 2: Ages by lack so schiopods with one leg, cyclopses with
Speaker 2: one eye. And then finally we get ones who differ
Speaker 2: primarily in behavior, which are in ways some of the
Speaker 2: more interesting. I mean, the images of them don't tend
Speaker 2: to be quite as exciting as the images of headless
Speaker 2: people or dog headed cannibals. But for example, there are
Speaker 2: a group of people called the Homo Dubie who eat
Speaker 2: raw fish. Weird. Yeah, I'm actually planning to have sushi tonight.
Speaker 2: But the dietary laws are a very major way by
Speaker 2: which societies define themselves. Think for example of kosher regulations
Speaker 2: for Jews or halal regulations for Muslims. Food taboos are
Speaker 2: very important. Many Americans eat meat but would look quite
Speaker 2: askance at what, let's say, while sitting down to have
Speaker 2: chicken and turkey, would look quite a scance at someone
Speaker 2: who is eating canary and parrot. Right, So, food taboos
Speaker 2: are a very important way that people separate out others
Speaker 2: from themselves in group and out groups sort of relations.
Speaker 2: And so some of the groups are defined that way.
Speaker 2: Others are defined by sexual practices. So, for example, there's
Speaker 2: one group who show up in this rather interesting and
Speaker 2: problematic text called the Travels of the Book of John
Speaker 2: Mandevil The Travels of John Mandeville, who is a fake,
Speaker 2: a fictional English knight from Saint Albans, whose text claims
Speaker 2: to be a true account and has all sorts of
Speaker 2: interesting ways by which it tries to trick the reader
Speaker 2: into thinking it is true, and it was taken as
Speaker 2: literal truth. And in fact, Columbus had that as his
Speaker 2: bedside reading all the way on his voyage across the Atlantic,
Speaker 2: and I think deeply impacted how he viewed the quote
Speaker 2: unquote Indians he found because it's a text about a
Speaker 2: European who goes to India and finds all sorts of
Speaker 2: horrible monsters there. And so Columbus anticipated finding horrible monsters
Speaker 2: and found real people, mistook them from monsters, claims, for example,
Speaker 2: to have found cannibalism, which he probably did not, claims
Speaker 2: that he kept hearing about one eyed, dog headed people
Speaker 2: on all sorts of islands. And you know, once you've
Speaker 2: conceived of people through this paradigm of monstrosity, of course
Speaker 2: killing them off becomes not merely neutral in terms of morality,
Speaker 2: but can often be seen as a moral good right
Speaker 2: ridding the world of horrible monsters. So the book of
Speaker 2: John Mandevi has a group that is wife swapping communists.
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, so they hold all property in common
Speaker 2: and share their wives with one another. The men share
Speaker 2: their wives with one another in common. And so again
Speaker 2: there's no indication that these people have any kind of
Speaker 2: physical deviation from Europeans, who are always sort of the
Speaker 2: prototype in these texts, I sort of The unvoiced assumption
Speaker 2: is that, for example, if a text says this is
Speaker 2: a person with no head, or this is a person
Speaker 2: with a dog's head, the assumption being made by say
Speaker 2: a medieval English reader is this is a person who
Speaker 2: looks like an Englishman but has no head, who looks
Speaker 2: like an Englishman but has a dog's head. So the prototype,
Speaker 2: the unvoiced prototype, is always the cell. And of course
Speaker 2: this carries on today. Right. Why do aliens almost invariably
Speaker 2: have two arms and two legs and two eyes and
Speaker 2: one nose in one mouth? Right, Because even when we're
Speaker 2: trying to envision the thing from as far away as
Speaker 2: we can imagine, what we wind up doing is distorting ourselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, we've talked about that on the show before.
Speaker 1: They sure can you imagine? I mean, if you look
Speaker 1: at the world, I mean, just the life on Earth,
Speaker 1: we're not the prototype.
Speaker 2: We're not We're not the template of life.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at Beatles, good lord, yes, right, yeah.
Speaker 2: What's his island? Biogeography Qualman David Kwalman argued that I
Speaker 2: think it was David Pualman argued that if there is
Speaker 2: a creator God, he really had a thing for Beatles.
Speaker 2: He did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I made the joke one time that, you know, as
Speaker 1: Adam was naming the animals, he you know, he'd named
Speaker 1: them and then.
Speaker 2: He got to the beatles.
Speaker 1: Is that you've got to be joking, right, Actually.
Speaker 2: There's some very interesting medieval images of Adam naming the beasts.
Speaker 2: Because you get your you know, your sort of generic
Speaker 2: quadruped kind of things, the sort of antelope looking things
Speaker 2: and deer and horses and cows, and you get your
Speaker 2: birds and your fish. But you also when some of
Speaker 2: them get unicorns, centaurs, griffins, and so when they have
Speaker 2: this sort of moment of creation in the garden to beaten.
Speaker 2: Some of them, anyway, are picturing the monsters that we
Speaker 2: think of as already a part of this creation of God.
Speaker 1: When I think about monsters in medieval art, one painting
Speaker 1: comes to mind, and that's Hieronymous Batches Garden of Earth
Speaker 1: the Delights, which is just such a bizarre painting to me.
Speaker 1: When I look at I see something like the medieval
Speaker 1: twilight zone. I don't know how to describe it. It's
Speaker 1: just fantastic. Have you looked at that? What is that about?
Speaker 1: What's going on in that painting?
Speaker 2: I have? It is the most remarkable painting. I am
Speaker 2: a professional looker at paintings, right. This is what I
Speaker 2: do for a living and with my life, and it
Speaker 2: is the most remarkable painting I've ever seen in person.
Speaker 2: I saw it about a year and a half ago.
Speaker 2: It's in the Prado and it is breathtaking and astonishing
Speaker 2: and luminous. It's sort of late for me in terms
Speaker 2: of research. I've actually written a tiny bit about it,
Speaker 2: but it is a phenomenal example of the deployment of monstrosity.
Speaker 2: And the way it works is it's an altered well.
Speaker 2: It's set up like an alter pace. Nobody knows what
Speaker 2: it was for. We know very little about Hornymous Bosh.
Speaker 2: We don't have any of diaries from him, letters, anything
Speaker 2: like that. We don't have a contemporary who wrote about him.
Speaker 2: We know that he married the rich lady who lived
Speaker 2: in the big castle overlooking the town of Sertoginbash, from
Speaker 2: which he gets his surname. Horonymous is just Jerome, so
Speaker 2: he's Jerry Bosh from Bosch. But so it's an eighteen
Speaker 2: foot wide triptych. So that's a hinged three panel painting
Speaker 2: and if you close the panels two side wings, what
Speaker 2: you see is an image of the creation of the world.
Speaker 2: I think it's the third day of creation and the
Speaker 2: earth is weird. It's spherical, but it's sort of cut
Speaker 2: in half in the middle, and so what you see
Speaker 2: is a kind of flat earth, but then with a
Speaker 2: half sphere of ground beneath it, and then a kind
Speaker 2: of glass dome over the top, so it almost looks
Speaker 2: like a sort of terrarium. And it's cold and it's gray.
Speaker 2: It's all in shades of gray called grisette. And God
Speaker 2: is there, but there's this tiny figure so floating away
Speaker 2: into the top left corner of the painting, as if
Speaker 2: he's kind of removing himself from his creation. He doesn't
Speaker 2: seem very thrilled with what's going on. And this is
Speaker 2: before he's even created people. And if this thing functioned
Speaker 2: like an altar, that's what people would have seen most
Speaker 2: of the time. Most altarpieces were kept closed most of
Speaker 2: the time and opened for a feast days and so on.
Speaker 2: But we don't know what this thing was, and it's
Speaker 2: very hard to envision that it hung over an altar anywhere.
Speaker 2: But when you open it up, what you get is
Speaker 2: this astonishing iatis clamorous scene, or the three scenes. The
Speaker 2: painting takes its name the Garden of Earthly Delight. From
Speaker 2: the central panel. The left panel is the Garden of Eden,
Speaker 2: and we see a very youthful looking should be God
Speaker 2: the Father, but a figure that looks much more like
Speaker 2: Christ introducing Eve to Adam. And Adam is kind of
Speaker 2: reclining underneath a rather exotic tree, which is probably the
Speaker 2: tree the Tree of Knowledge, and Eve is modestly falling
Speaker 2: to her knees by his reclining side. So that's the
Speaker 2: first panel, and all around our wonderful animals is an
Speaker 2: elephant with a monkey on its back, and a giraffe,
Speaker 2: as well as lots of rather creepy things. There's a
Speaker 2: three headed bird, there's a unicorn fish. There's a sort
Speaker 2: of duck billed merman floating in a blackpool reading a book.
Speaker 2: There's a sort of nasty high grid creature eating a fraud.
Speaker 2: There's a cat that's caught some kind of grotesque creature
Speaker 2: and is eating it. So things are not quite as
Speaker 2: they should be in the garden where you know the
Speaker 2: lionized animal end and everything should be perfect. There's all
Speaker 2: sorts of scenes of animals killing and eating one another,
Speaker 2: and strange, horrifying creatures lurking all throughout it. Then we
Speaker 2: go to the center section, and it is this sea
Speaker 2: of naked figures, and they're sort of self consciously willfully
Speaker 2: supposed to be a global array. So there are dark
Speaker 2: skinned figures who are caricatured in terms of their facial
Speaker 2: features as African figures, so they're supposed to be I think,
Speaker 2: the entire world. And they're having all sorts of associations
Speaker 2: with one another, many of them obliquely or overtly sexual.
Speaker 2: There's a man who seems to be having sex with
Speaker 2: a gigantic strawberry. There's a couple clearly getting it on
Speaker 2: inside a giant muscle shell. Are people groping one another
Speaker 2: inside giant clear berries, and on and on and on
Speaker 2: and then the right panel is a hell scene, and
Speaker 2: it's a freakish and terrifying hell scene, not your usual
Speaker 2: just standard demons pulling in people with flesh hooks or something.
Speaker 2: It's it's a much more sort of specific and nuanced
Speaker 2: vision of a hell. So for example, there's a gambler
Speaker 2: and he's nailed to a card table. There's a hunter,
Speaker 2: but he's been killed and strung up by a giant
Speaker 2: rabbit which is carrying him on his spear like his quarry.
Speaker 2: There's a man, presumably lascivious in life, who's being molested
Speaker 2: by a fat pig that's dressed in a nun's habit,
Speaker 2: and on and on and on and on. Now the
Speaker 2: basic setup, from a distance it looks like a very
Speaker 2: sort of normal setup where what you have in many
Speaker 2: medieval tripticks is a last judgment scene. This is when
Speaker 2: at the end of time the souls are judged. The
Speaker 2: good people go to Heaven, the bad people go to hell.
Speaker 2: So you have a nice scene Heaven to the left,
Speaker 2: the bad scene Hell to the right, and in the
Speaker 2: center is a scene of judgment. What that does is
Speaker 2: it presents viewers with two possibilities. You can, you know,
Speaker 2: if you were good, you get to go to the
Speaker 2: left side, which it's on the left, because Christ is
Speaker 2: usually in the center painting or often in the center painting,
Speaker 2: and it would be his right side, that's his good side,
Speaker 2: his dextra side literally and his left side literally his
Speaker 2: This one doesn't work that way because it's not Heaven's is.
Speaker 2: We've got the beginning to our left. And if we
Speaker 2: read up, I think his caricature of our world, this
Speaker 2: sort of orgy of sex and greed and sort of
Speaker 2: exuberance of life sort of heedless and hedonistic, and then
Speaker 2: the right therefore becomes a future scene. So you go,
Speaker 2: everybody goes from the Garden two our current world, and
Speaker 2: then it would see him. Because there's no heaven to
Speaker 2: be found in this image, everybody goes to hell, and
Speaker 2: so yeah, bash for all of the sort of fun
Speaker 2: that looking at his paintings are, and they're incredibly enjoyable
Speaker 2: to look at. I think they're very pessimistic, very dark images.
Speaker 2: They do not hold out a lot of hope for humanity.
Speaker 1: How did they survive?
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of the bashes. This is the way
Speaker 2: they wound up in Spain. So the Netherlands, where he
Speaker 2: was from, became a Spanish colony, and the Spanish king
Speaker 2: E Phillip the Second, i think, seems to have been
Speaker 2: very fond of Northern Renaissance painting, that's the period that
Speaker 2: we refer to these, and so he had a lot
Speaker 2: of them brought to Spain where they were preserved in
Speaker 2: royal collections. And so in the room with this with
Speaker 2: the Garden of Earthly Delight, there are maybe a half
Speaker 2: dozen other Bosh paintings, including his wonderful haywayan triptych which
Speaker 2: functions similarly, where you have in the center painting our
Speaker 2: world full of all sorts of wonderful monsters and demons,
Speaker 2: but the demons in that image are actually dragging the
Speaker 2: people across the divide of the frame into the hell
Speaker 2: scene to the right, so it goes straight across from
Speaker 2: image to image. There and the Tabletop of Seven Deadly Sins,
Speaker 2: which is an incredible work of art. It's actually a tabletop.
Speaker 2: It's displayed horizontally in the gallery, and it has around
Speaker 2: the edges the seven deadly sins, which in mine l
Speaker 2: art are very often depicted as these sort of very
Speaker 2: grand personifications. So greed might be a figure with sort
Speaker 2: of claw like grasping hands reaching for a bag of
Speaker 2: money or something like that, but for Bosh, they're really ordinary,
Speaker 2: humble kinds of sins. So Anger is two drunk guys
Speaker 2: outside a barroom brawling with each other. Vanity is a
Speaker 2: woman alone in her bedroom looking at herself in the mirror,
Speaker 2: and in this center of it is a giant eyeball
Speaker 2: that must be I don't know, two feet across, and
Speaker 2: in the center of the eyeball is Jesus risen from
Speaker 2: the tomb after the resurrection, and you can see he's
Speaker 2: showing the wounds that he got during the crucifixion, and
Speaker 2: written around the iris it says in Latin cave cave
Speaker 2: deus videt, which is beware, beware, God sees. So what
Speaker 2: I take that as is that God doesn't only see
Speaker 2: like grand vast sins. He sees the tiny, petty little
Speaker 2: sins when you're alone in your room. So yeah, again,
Speaker 2: a very pessimistic perspective, I think, and a fairly nasty one.
Speaker 2: I tend to envision him though this is sort of
Speaker 2: all in my head, you know, but I envisioned him
Speaker 2: up in his wife's castle, sort of looking down with
Speaker 2: scorn at the populace below him.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine dining at a table that had gluttony
Speaker 1: as one of the sins.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, and there is a scene of gluttony on it,
Speaker 2: and then it's a very heavy set man. It's a
Speaker 2: sort of scene of squalor in this sort of poor
Speaker 2: person's hut. But there's a very large man who's eating
Speaker 2: an entire roast fowl of some kind, and there's a
Speaker 2: skinny guy who's guzzling presumably wine or beer right out
Speaker 2: of a sort of a piece of crockery, and so
Speaker 2: there are all sorts of scenes of gluttony in there.
Speaker 2: I don't know that it was ever a dining table.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure. It's in beautiful condition, so it's hard
Speaker 2: to envision how it was ever used, if it was
Speaker 2: ever used. But that's sort of a puzzle we have
Speaker 2: with all of this stuff. Who on earth would have
Speaker 2: wanted these things and where would they have ever? Well,
Speaker 2: it's good that he had a patron, so yeah, well,
Speaker 2: and yeah, he seems to have been very wealthy, so
Speaker 2: he didn't have to go out and get obviously not
Speaker 2: obvious commissions anyway. I mean one of the other Northern
Speaker 2: Renaissance paintings they have there is a Roje Vanderbiden painting
Speaker 2: a glorious scene of the depositions when Christs taken off
Speaker 2: the cross, and if you look, it has this beautiful
Speaker 2: little tracery that like like you'd see like the stonework
Speaker 2: in between a medieval glass window, you know, up in
Speaker 2: the corners of it painted in there. But the tracer,
Speaker 2: I feel it closely, is in the shape of crossbows.
Speaker 2: Because the thing was paid for by the archer's guilt.
Speaker 2: Bosh's work as far as I know, doesn't show any
Speaker 2: indication of patronage like that. So yeah, it's it's not
Speaker 2: clear who bought these things and why, but they are
Speaker 2: astonishing and the amount of vivid creativity that shows up
Speaker 2: all throughout them, it's really breathtaking to look at.
Speaker 1: Well, I have to say A said that the talking
Speaker 1: to you has just been delightful. I think we have
Speaker 1: to stop, or I'll just keep asking questions for the
Speaker 1: rest of the day. Let me ask you a couple
Speaker 1: of quick ones though, So what are you working on
Speaker 1: now or like, what can we see next from you?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm working actively on representations of Jews on medieval maps,
Speaker 2: which nobody's really done anything with. I'm also working on
Speaker 2: a project with my Collaboratorsism Kim on an astonishing work
Speaker 2: called the Frank's Casket, which is a whalebone box about
Speaker 2: the size of a tissue box, a cigar box from
Speaker 2: early Anglo Saxon England, probably from the North, that has
Speaker 2: on it scenes from Germanic Roman and Judeo Christian mythology,
Speaker 2: text in Old English and in Latin, in ruins in
Speaker 2: Roman letters, a riddle and a code.
Speaker 1: Wow, it sounds like something from a Dan Brown novel.
Speaker 2: Oh it is. Yeah, I've actually thought about writing a
Speaker 2: novel about this work where yes, it would be the
Speaker 2: key to unlocking the whatever the Illuminati secrets to the
Speaker 2: presence of the Holy Grol.
Speaker 1: So I guess the final question we'd like to ask
Speaker 1: our guests is what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 2: I got lots I love. I do love the Headless Blemys,
Speaker 2: but I think my favorite is actually a fairly obscure
Speaker 2: one known as the Donestra, who shows up in the
Speaker 2: Wonders of the East and is The text says that
Speaker 2: he is a soothsayer from the head to the navel,
Speaker 2: which is a fortune teller. It's a fortune teller from
Speaker 2: the head to the navel. And the other part is human,
Speaker 2: it says, which is puzzling in and of itself, because
Speaker 2: a soothsayer is presumably human. So he's half human and
Speaker 2: also half human ah, which fascinates me. But he knows
Speaker 2: all the languages of the world and can speak to
Speaker 2: people and knows the names of their relatives. So he
Speaker 2: calls to people to go, hey, you, I know your
Speaker 2: uncle Bob, come talk to me, and you go and
Speaker 2: talk to him. He talks to you for a while,
Speaker 2: and then he eats you entirely up except for the
Speaker 2: head over which he weeps, and so this sets him
Speaker 2: up as a kind of it seems, I think, at
Speaker 2: first blushed, like a sort of psychologically conflicted monster, right,
Speaker 2: and why is he crying? And one wonderful monster. Scholar
Speaker 2: Jeffrey Cohen has written a great piece on this, and
Speaker 2: he argues that essentially the doneestra has eaten a person,
Speaker 2: and therefore, since you are what you eat, has sort
Speaker 2: of recovered a bit more humanity and therefore has come
Speaker 2: to regret this act of eating a person. Another skullar
Speaker 2: Tom Tyler has written rather differently about this and argues
Speaker 2: that the tears are holdover from a different medieval monster,
Speaker 2: which is to say, the crocodile. You know, the crocodile tears, right,
Speaker 2: this expression crocodile tears are false tears. But I think
Speaker 2: most modern folks don't know the origin stories of that,
Speaker 2: which is that in the Middle Ages, the myco back
Speaker 2: to the ancient world. I'm not sure, but they thought
Speaker 2: that crocodiles loved to eat people, but loved our brains
Speaker 2: most of all, but that our skulls were too thick
Speaker 2: for them. To crunch through. Conveniently, though, they're tears which
Speaker 2: weren't really tears, they were ocular secretions. Right, We're acidic,
Speaker 2: like the blood of the Zeno morphe from Aliens, and
Speaker 2: so they would quote unquote cry these acidic tears onto
Speaker 2: the skulls of their human victims and therefore be able to
Speaker 2: break through their skulls and eat their brains. So this
Speaker 2: is another possibility for what those tears over the head are,
Speaker 2: and again its at I love this creature first off
Speaker 2: because it's I think it's just a great story, but
Speaker 2: also because I think it gets at a number of
Speaker 2: the most important functions that monsters have that presses on
Speaker 2: definitions of humanity, how much or how little we can
Speaker 2: identify with things that are unlike us. It's present over
Speaker 2: in the East, this far and distant location which the
Speaker 2: West has defined itself against since the ancient Greek period,
Speaker 2: and so I think it's an incredibly potent and rich
Speaker 2: creature and is also the cover image for my book
Speaker 2: on the onond disease.
Speaker 1: So well, you know, we did an episode on cannibalism,
Speaker 1: and I guess universally studies on cannibalism have shown that
Speaker 1: the brain is supposed to be one of the best
Speaker 1: parts to eat, which.
Speaker 2: I'll bear that in mind. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't care for it, but I know that
Speaker 1: it is apparently full of fat and sugar.
Speaker 2: Well, just down the road from where I teach up
Speaker 2: here in Chico State are a town just down the
Speaker 2: road from us is Marysville. And of course you'd think
Speaker 2: it was named for you know that Mary, but it's not.
Speaker 2: It's named for Mary Donner, one of the survivors of
Speaker 2: the Donner Party, and it suits it to a tea. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 2: is there a Donner's Diner? There really should be, but
Speaker 2: unfortunately there's not. That's too bad.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for joining us on Monster Talk.
Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate it very much. It was a lot
Speaker 2: of fun.
Speaker 1: Monster You've been listening to Monster Talk, the science show
Speaker 1: about monsters. I'm your host, Blake Smith, and today we
Speaker 1: heard an interview with Asa Mittman discussing monsters from medieval maps.
Speaker 1: You can find links to Ace's books, as well as
Speaker 1: interesting links about the art we discussed it the show
Speaker 1: notes at monster talk dot org or skeptic dot com.
Speaker 1: Monster Talk is an official podcast of Skeptic magazine. The
Speaker 1: views and opinions expressed on the show are those of
Speaker 1: myself and my guests and do not necessarily reflect the
Speaker 1: opinions of the Skeptic Society or Skeptic Magazine. Coming soon,
Speaker 1: we've got episodes on the Jersey Devil and some very
Speaker 1: interesting information about the Warrens, the ghost hunting couple portrayed
Speaker 1: in the recent film The Conjuring. So stay tuned. Do
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Speaker 1: best way to do that. Monster Talk theme music is
Speaker 1: by Peach Deealing Monkeys. Thanks for listening.
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