It could be said, then, that the dragon — like other monsters and mythic figures — is a product of the cognitive fluidity that underlies the mythic imagination. The shape of the snake, for example, could furnish not only the body of the mythic dragon but the neck of the hydra; the beak of the raptor could replace the face of the big cat and also be combined with its paws. For example, the griffin has the body parts of a lion but the face and wings of an eagle. And so on. Whatever the particular form the monster may have taken within a specific geographical area, its essential features would clearly have identified it as a very dangerous creature even to those unfamiliar with local fauna.
Monsters were used as a means of imbuing sacred or dangerous geographical areas with taboo and explaining the source and cause of lethal natural disasters, such as typhoons, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and so on. But the basic function of the monster was to give fear a face, to graphically capture the dread that is bred into us by millions of years as a prey species that was stalked and sometimes eaten by huge and terrifying carnivores. This same claim is made today by some cryptozoologists.
Another fertile source of mythic monsters is the bone yard. The reptilian or serpentine characteristics given to many mythic monsters may reflect the fact that fossilized skeletons, often reduced to an undulating backbone and neck, look like a snake.
No one has done more to illuminate the relationship between fossils and mythmaking than Adrienne Mayor, who has documented hundreds of instances during the last two thousand five hundred years when fossil bones provided the scaffolding for elaborate mythmaking, as frightened people sought to give meaning to the startling animal remains they happened across. To cite just one example, the Thunder Bird of Native American mythology may have something to do with discoveries of Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons.
The mythologizing process probably did not start with the Greeks and Romans or even with the appearance of the modern brain. Homo erectus also must have tried to explain the frightful skulls and bones it came across.
In fact, the hyper predator detection system of early humans would have prompted them to interpret the bones as the remains of creatures still alive and possibly lurking somewhere in the environment. The tens of millions of bones that accumulated ever since the first skeletal creatures swam in the sea provided our forebears with constant provocations to imagine the existence of monstrous predators.
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Meet the people trying to help. That tends to activate the disgust emotion. When a culture is about to go to war it demonizes or monsterizes the other group. That requires casting them as uncivilized and disgusting. You target their sexual hygiene, for example. You target them as objects of disgust. You see that in the ancient world. You see it through the medieval period and all the way up to the present, in the way we cast our enemies.
Religion never just builds a pantheon of gods. It always builds the gods as the response to a threat structure, which is going to be a monster story of some kind. This must be part of an adaptive strategy for building fictive kin groups. From the point of view of evolution, casting others as monsters would have been extremely adaptive and helpful to your own survival as a group. Nature was not a warm and fuzzy place.
Some of these horror stories were helpful in getting you to be nervous about real predators—both non-human animals and human predators. The traditional werewolf story was very strong in Europe. That makes sense because wolves in northern Europe, as they evolved, were a predator for Europeans. The animal that you can become, or that you should be afraid of, is the local predator.
A classic example is from St. He knows monsters are supposed to be living in Africa and the East. This includes Cyclops; the cynocephali, the dog-headed men; and the blemmyes, which had no head, but their face appears in their chest.
From the modern liberal point of view, having disgust toward strangers is a terrible thing. When they teach Frankenstein in high schools, they teach it as a way to show that you create aggression and violence by not welcoming difference into your group. The monster is not evil. What the monster needs is a hug, understanding, and rational negotiation.
And philosophy has no other point of departure than this. One is from the ancient Greeks, who had a notion of monstrous desire. You could have a desire in you that was so overwhelming that it would alienate you from yourself. The reason why Medea kills her children, the reason why this person slays that person, or love drives you insane, is because Eros made you do monstrous things.
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Estimated reading time Time 4 to read. From sea snakes to the Loch Ness monster It is not surprising that ancient voyages through unknown and hostile oceans gave rise to all sorts of myths about sea beasts.
Source: Ellis, R. Monsters of the Sea. Robert Hale Ltd. Credit: Johann Jakob Scheuchzer As several authors have suggested, the mythology of dragons has probably also been fuelled since ancient times by the discovery of dinosaur fossils and other extinct animals whose origin could not be determined.
Mermaids and mermen, our aquatic cousins Another pattern that is repeated in different cultures is that of the mermaid and merman, those half-human half-fish cousins of ours.
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