Let’s start with the blade-wielding clowns lurking in American woodlands (And not only there: One even showed up in my adopted hometown in rural Slovenia). Yes, I know that this is a fad, stoked by over-enthusiastic fans anticipating the new film version of Stephen King’s It, but it is outrageously creepy. Citizens are fleeing in terror and calling the police, and evil clowns are being arrested.

Monsters might be scary, but we humans need monsters—because they are far less frightening than the unknown. Our need isn’t new; it has been a consistent characteristic of humans since time immemorial. The recent discovery of a lost 16th century illustrated manuscript filled with illustrations of mythical apocalyptic beasts, now known as “The Book of Miracles,” is a case in point.

73 BC, Golden balls.

 
The near-vanished manuscript came to scholarly and popular attention when it was auctioned in 2007 in Munich to British fine art dealer James Faber. In 2014, Taschen released a facsimile of the book, presented in an artfully designed box. The original, whose author and illustrator are unknown, was published in 1550 in Augsburg, Germany and contains 169 strange, wonderful, and monstrous watercolor and gouache illustrations. They depict purported miracles of the natural world, with strong reverberations from the “Book of Revelation,” with its descriptions of allegorical monsters.

1496, Tiber monster.

 
In “The Book of Miracles,” the First Beast of Revelation, for instance, is an ocean-dweller with seven heads and ten horns, the feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion, and the body of a leopard. The Great Dragon also has seven heads and ten horns—and a tail that can sweep a third of the stars out of the sky.

It is revealing that “The Book of Miracles” focused on the supernatural at a time when Europe was ripe with all too real monstrosities: Plague, war, lawlessness, massacres, bloodshed between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps there was some combination of comfort and escapism in shifting focus from the imminent dangers at the door to otherworldly signs and wonders.

The sea monster and the beast with the lamb’s horn.

 
Of course, these monsters were plausible concerns for some of the contemporary populace. The manuscript provides what appears to be a “factual” account of reported miraculous events: A sort of 16th century eyewitness bestiary, with dates and locations, and an artist’s strikingly modern interpretation (if you had told me these were painted by Rousseau, I might have believed you).

1533, Dragons over Bohemia.

 
We have, for example, a 1496 appearance of the “Tiber monster” shown with the torso of a woman, a bearded man’s head for a rump, the right leg of a horse, the left leg of a rooster, a dragon-headed tail, and what looks like a kangaroo’s head (though the historian in me is guessing that it’s not). A 1531 earthquake at Lisbon is depicted as a whale (though it more closely resembles an angry seal) emerging from billowing blue-white waves. In 1533, it seems that a swarm of snake-like dragons was spotted over Bohemia, while several undated creatures are also featured, including a “sea monster and beast with the lamb’s horn” and a “beast from the bottomless pit,” both likely drawn from Revelation (though it’s tough to tell: I’m pretty sure the biblical sea monster had seven heads and ten horns).

The beast from the bottomless pit.

 
You may have sensed a theme. Monsters of old are not created wholesale from scratch, but are patchworks of existing, real creatures sewn together like Frankenstein’s creation. This method echoes Hieronymus Bosch’s famous hellscapes, populated by hybrid human-animal or multiple-animal creatures. And it is part and parcel with Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, or the uncanny—beings or beasts or places that straddle the boundary between two opposites, a liminal zone, part of the dream world, part of the real.

Celestial swordsman, castle and army over Strasbourg.

 
We like to think of ourselves as so enlightened that monsters have become our playthings. But the truth is that we need them. Even today. Perhaps not as we once did, but as an integral part of how we process life, and particularly the bad things.

Consider how much easier it is to think of modern human monsters, like Hitler or Stalin, as two-dimensional cartoon super-villains—so evil we don’t even consider humanizing them by thinking of them as people with feelings and origins, cuddled by mothers and teased by schoolmates, maybe, until evil grew from decency. It is easier to pen them up, dismissing them as outliers and inhuman monsters, than to admit that they are just a hair’s breadth away from us.

The post Even the Ghastliest Monsters of Old Were Better Than Real-Life Horrors appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.
—Traditional Nursery Rhyme, Yorkshire, UK

Ours was a safe neighborhood. Postwar cinderblock cottages stood unlocked in the shade of date palms that in summer cluttered our yards with vinegary, fermenting medjools and at trimming time offered their branches to boys for secret forts and clubhouses. Older children ran wild until evening dinner call, extending their explorations far afield to distant canals and vacant lots, disobeying their parents by ditching their toddler siblings who, somehow, always found their way home.

When the sun went down, the world changed: Elongated shadows trembled on concrete sidewalks, inchoate shapes lurked in dark alleys, eldritch rustlings shook the oleanders, bogeys and bugaboos squatted in the drear corners of fenced yards, and nameless terrors crouched like gargoyles in the tops of trees. Malevolent phantasms swooped low, and things went bump in the night.

Such horrors were irresistible to the imaginations of nine-year-old boys. After dinner we would sneak outside, daring to confront the night in rites of passage that put our bluster and moxie to the test. Our most dangerous adversary was the Booger Man who wandered abroad in search of wayward children who stayed out after dark. It was said that he wore a black trench coat and a broad-brimmed hat that hid a face no one had ever seen. Venturing into the neighborhood’s most isolated enclaves, we invoked him in games that ended with imagined sightings and full-scale retreats to the safety of brightly lit front porches.

Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim tells us that children find a symbolic resolution of their fears in traditional fairy tales, where the monstrous is clearly delineated and escape is assured in Happily-Ever-After endings. Certainly, we were no strangers to the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen, but our truest monsters in the Phoenix, Arizona of 1959 were those in our imaginations.

The Booger Man was one of these, but in time he proved too much an abstraction, lacking the intimate presence necessary to all ghouls who strive to terrorize the young. He was a faceless shadow lurking in the shrubbery and nurturing a dark agenda of “getting” whoever came within reach of his long, grasping hands. What he did when he got you was uncertain, for he was slow and easy to escape—no one, to our knowledge, had ever been gotten.

Literary great, and master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe personified our propensity for courting the unthinkable. In the Imp of the Perverse, he made us consider a malevolent goblin who whispers in our ear tempting us to stand on the edge of a cliff and consider the consequences of jumping. We may never follow through, but the exhilaration of pushing the envelope of sane thinking can lead us into the sublime. A supreme heightening of the emotions can be achieved though the contemplation of the horrific, said the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke.

After a time, our encounters with the Booger Man no longer took us to this place, but we found a successor who himself had pushed the envelope, and paid a dire price for his hubris.

In the late 1950s, the Kiva Theater in Old Town Scottsdale supplemented its usual fare of European art films with Saturday afternoon children’s matinees. On one of these Saturdays, after crawling through the aisles in search of fallen change and throwing melted M&M’S on the heads of unsuspecting viewers in the front rows, we watched First Man into Space, a science fiction/horror flick cheesy in premise and execution but filled with possibility for young adventurers who played games with the night.

It told the tale of a test pilot who flew higher than any man had flown before. Losing control of his craft, he bailed out into a suspicious cloud of extraterrestrial particles. Encrusted in meteor fragments and hideous to behold, he survived his re-entry and roamed the countryside in search of human blood. First, he broke into blood banks but afterwards pursued the citizenry, killing several before being brought down by clever scientists.

That night, the Booger Man went on sabbatical and First Man into Space made his debut. As with the rituals that called forth his predecessor, we sought him out in the neighborhood’s darkest recesses, wary of the moment when one of us would be possessed by the tortured soul of the test pilot who had disobeyed his superiors and ventured into the unknown. In our imaginations, the boy who had chosen to host our newest tormentor morphed into a vile, misshapen thing that lurched and clawed and slavered like a rabid dog. Arms outstretched, he came for us, and with a collective shriek of “First Man into Space!” we scattered once again for the sanctuary of our well-lit homes.

First Man into Space, like the Booger Man, faded into memory as we approached adolescence. But for a while he gave shape to our fears where his faceless counterpart fell short. Being “gotten”—the horrific consequence of succumbing to the temptations of Poe’s imp—was palpable in the bloodlust of an irradiated zombie with a backstory and a physical presence in a possessed victim. He joined a distinguished cadre of childhood terrors, such as La Llorona, the ghoulish Weeping Woman who abducts and drowns children who get too close to water, or the Mogollon Monster, the devourer of Boy Scouts who wander too far from their campsites after dark. Like the venerable English bogey Raw Head and Bloody Bones, they all were hideous, immediate, and supremely threatening—in other words, perfect for the dark play of children.

The allure of shadowy places and the creatures that inhabit them doesn’t end with childhood. Today the Booger Man’s cyber-cousin Slender Man lurks in both his home on the internet and the waking world, challenging millennials to participate in the dialogue between belief and disbelief that characterizes the urban legend.

Legend tripping—the visiting of haunted houses, cemeteries, and other locales connected to extraordinary or supernatural happenings—has long been popular with teens and young adults. If those of us who have left our childhood behind approach such experiences with an uneasy, obligatory cynicism, we would do well to think back to the joy of the screaming retreat to the safety of the front porch, and, when contemplating the question of “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties,” hedge our bets by invoking the last line of a traditional Scottish prayer: “Good Lord deliver us.”

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