Regular Episode
#026 – On Monsters
The conversation ranges across evolutionary psychology, theological problem-solving, Darwin’s early notebooks, body-plastination exhibits, and the fine line between a monster and a god. It is, as the hosts note, a genuinely scholarly treatment of a subject that usually gets the Wikipedia-copy-paste treatment.
😱 The Roots of Fear — Hardwired or Habit?
Asma opens by acknowledging that he still can’t shake his dread of deep, murky water — even while knowing intellectually that the lake is safe. The discussion turns to evolutionary psychology and whether phobias like arachnophobia represent hardwired neural modules. Asma cites work suggesting that highly venomous spiders in the African savanna and Serengeti may have served as the original selective pressure for a near-universal spider fear — a hypothesis that is difficult to falsify but not unreasonable.
He offers an alternative framing drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp: rather than discrete fear modules, the brain has broad affective systems that can be triggered and “locked in” by environmental factors during periods of neural plasticity. Under this view, the specific content of a phobia is culturally and environmentally shaped, even if the underlying fear circuitry is ancient.
🐕 Dog-Headed Saints and the Cynocephalus Tradition
One of the episode’s more surprising disclosures: in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, St. Christopher is depicted as a cynocephalus — one of the dog-headed men believed to inhabit lower Egypt, North Africa, or India. The tradition runs from the ancient Greek writer Ctesias through Pliny the Elder and deep into medieval literature. In the Eastern Church’s version of the Christopher story, the saint originates from the land of the dog-heads, receives the gift of human speech through the Holy Spirit upon his conversion, and uses that miraculous power to go out and make converts. (The hosts, naturally, wonder about the pre-conversion social customs.)
🏛️ Museum Specimens, the Uncanny, and Why We Stay
Asma’s earlier book 📚 Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads 💵 introduced him to the teratology collections of institutions like the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons and the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. He draws on philosopher Noël Carroll‘s argument that “cognitive mismatch” — things that violate our categorical boundaries (human / not-human) — produces a peculiar simultaneous attraction and repulsion.
The same dynamic applies to plastination exhibitions like Body Worlds: the specimens are undeniably us, yet utterly alien. Asma invokes Freud’s concept of the uncanny — not as a wholesale endorsement of Freudian theory, but as a useful label for that specific psychological register where the familiar and the foreign collide. The same phenomenon, he notes, shows up in video game design: avatars that approach-but-don’t-quite-reach human likeness trigger discomfort, a phenomenon now widely called the uncanny valley.
⛪ Demons as Rules Lawyers: Medieval Theology and the Malleus Maleficarum
A highlight of the episode for Blake: Asma’s close reading of the Malleus Maleficarum (1487), the witch-hunters’ handbook compiled by Heinrich Institoris (Kramer). Beyond its notorious instructions for identifying and prosecuting witches, the text grapples with a genuine theological puzzle: how can demons and devils exercise power if God is the prime mover of all things? Institoris’s answer is that demons cannot actually break natural law — but they possess extraordinarily detailed knowledge of how natural processes work, allowing them to manipulate circumstances within those rules. Blake’s observation: this makes demons and witches the ultimate rules lawyers of the universe.
The broader theological arc Asma traces is the transition from polytheism to monotheism in the West: as divine powers consolidated into a single omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God, evil and monsters stopped being simply “the other side” and became a problem of theodicy. Why does an all-good, all-powerful God permit monsters to exist and demons to torment people?
🧬 Darwin, Monstrous Births, and the Redefinition of Deviance
Before arriving at natural selection, Charles Darwin briefly entertained the idea — apparently discussed with Richard Owen during their work together at the Hunterian Museum in the 1840s — that monstrous births might serve as launching pads for new species. Darwin’s M and N notebooks from the 1830s–40s show him working through and ultimately rejecting this “saltation” hypothesis: interviews with animal breeders convinced him that gross deformities were almost always deleterious and reproductively sterile.
What Darwin’s eventual theory did accomplish, Asma argues, was a conceptual revolution in the meaning of monstrosity itself. Before Darwin, a monster was defined as a deviation from the norm — aberrant, wrong, outside nature’s plan. After Darwin, deviation from the norm is precisely how nature works. As Darwin himself noted, we are all, in a sense, a little monstrous — variation is the engine of life, not its failure.
👹 Monsters, the Other, and the Function of Dehumanization
The conversation takes a more sobering turn when Asma discusses how the logic of monsterization is applied to human out-groups. Ancient Greeks and Romans routinely placed fantastic or monstrous creatures at the edges of their maps — often coinciding with actual foreign peoples like Indians or Africans. The mechanism, Asma argues, has never gone away: we still reach for monster imagery to dehumanize enemies, making them easier to fight and kill. He cites the 2006 film 🎬 300 💵 as a contemporary example, noting how its Persian antagonists are rendered literally inhuman through special effects — a creative choice that attracted pointed criticism given the geopolitical context of its release.
On the flip side, Asma acknowledges that not all monsters are terrifying: creatures like Bigfoot, Ogopogo, and Champ occupy a very different cultural space — plush toys, local mascots, objects of wonder rather than dread. He spent time in Cambodia and Laos and draws parallels to Southeast Asian animistic traditions, where tutelary spirits inhabit trees and rivers, require regular offerings of whiskey and lotus flowers, and are generally benign neighbors — unless you forget to leave the whiskey out on a full moon.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears 💵 by Stephen T. Asma
– 📚 Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads 💵 by Stephen T. Asma
🔗 Related Links
– Cynocephaly (dog-headed peoples in ancient and medieval tradition)
– Malleus Maleficarum — Wikipedia overview
– Teratology
– Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
– Mütter Museum, Philadelphia
– Jaak Panksepp — affective neuroscience
– Uncanny valley
– Saltation (evolutionary biology) — the “monstrous birth” theory Darwin considered and rejected
– Ogopogo and the First Nations traditions of sacrifice at Okanagan Lake
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
THIS WEEK on MonsterTalk, author Stephen Asma (Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago) speaks about his comprehensive book surveying Western monster-lore.
Is humankind’s fascination with monsters broader than any single cause? Asma’s On Monsters examines hundreds of legends — and their cultural, psychological and social implications.
In this episode
- the roots of fear
- the fascination some find with birth defects
- the saint who had a dog’s head
- when humans become monsters
- how Darwin impacted society’s perception of monstrous births
- are body exhibits making monsters of the natural?
- demons as rules-lawyers
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
Blake Smith
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