there were monsters once

Monsters are easy to understand as projections of the human mind and therefore as representations of some fear; however, the modern understanding of everything psychologically is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, monsters were taken at face value. If they stood for anything, it was only within their own worldview. When monsters were truly believed in, they were not seen as windows into the human mind but as a disruption of the natural order.

For the highly supernatural thought of the human past, the monster was seen as an affront to the divine or as a punishment from the divine. In earlier thinking, drawing on ancient myths, monsters were an explanation for what we would today call natural disasters: earthquakes, typhoons, forest fires, etc. Furthermore, they were not believed in the way we would describe belief today, holding something true by faith despite reality, but because everything in people’s experience spoke in favor of their existence. This is a paradigm shift that few people have noticed, conditioned as we are to the modern scientific worldview. Ancient peoples were not superstitious in the way we imagine.

A truly superstitious person is a remnant of a previous paradigm that has outlived a new and replacement paradigm. In a very real sense, the ancient beliefs cannot be considered superstitious, since, given the dominant worldview of their time, they were actually quite logical.

This is somewhat difficult for the modern mind to grasp: the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational is largely a modern construction and woefully misguided. The irrational is something truly rare, at any time. The human mind is by its very nature a pattern seeker, so rationality, the connection of cause and effect, is present in every human being from the beginning. What this means is that people in the past cannot consistently be called irrational. When we use the word irrational to label people who do not share the dominant worldview, it is similar to when other people in the past used the word heretic. In other words, we are wearing blinders based on cultural bias to label other people. The people of the past were not irrational. What this means, of course, is that monsters were once real, but they aren’t anymore.

In general, people have always been rational, and even their most extravagant beliefs have some rational basis behind them. This is so because all reason is built on premises, and these we generally receive without question from our societies, in the same way that other peoples in other times received theirs from theirs. Our modern worldview is based on materialism, therefore our reasoning must follow a materialistic pattern. That this was not always the case should be obvious to even the most casual student of history. Not long ago, the dominant worldview was religious, so all observed phenomena had to be interpreted through a specific set of assumptions.

This, of course, led to profound absurdities, although it should be noted that modern materialism has also led to some pretty extreme absurdities, such as the silly meme theory. It must be understood, however, that these absurdities are not irrational but the logical conclusions of pushing their particular premises to their limits. People have always been rational, but reason has its limits; that is, the premises from which you are working.

When monsters really existed, the dominant worldview was what we now call animism: the belief that everything that existed possessed desire, sentience, and intentionality. Therefore, if the wind tore the roof off your house, the logical and rational conclusion would have to be that the wind was upset with you. Bear with me for a moment. Suppose your neighbor walked up to your mailbox and proceeded to kick it until it broke, what would he think? Overcoming your own emotional reaction to the event, the only logical conclusion would be that your neighbor is upset with you.

It would be truly irrational, when you saw him stomping on your property, for you to think, “Gee, what a nice guy, he must really like me.” This is just logic. However, all logic is based on premises, and for human beings the most basic premise is our own emotional model: this is how we know, for example, that people do not vandalize our property because they mean well to us. Under animism, if the wind is understood as a person and blows your roof off, what is the logical conclusion?

The monsters are, of course, something slightly different from the early products of animism, an aberration if you will. When people encounter forces that can harm them, their natural reaction is to destroy them, appease them, or flee from them. Those things that people can destroy, they stop fearing; those they can appease, they call gods; those who must flee, they call monsters. Those who cannot be appeased or run away from becoming demons.

From a psychological perspective, all of this is very easy to understand as projections of the human mind in interaction with nature. From a state of unconsciousness pushed into a state of full consciousness, our only point of reference is ourselves. We interpret everything we encounter through the model of our own consciousness and emotional matrix. So everything is a person because we are people. However, as we know that not all people have good intentions towards us, the same goes for the forces of nature, some of them are simply unpleasant. And in the same way that we deal with people, we deal with nature. Sometimes we tried to fight it, building dams, casting spells, calling on mystical forces from beyond to help us control it, other times to appease it, offering sacrifices, performing rituals, praying, and sometimes we just ran away. Until the modern era, all methods of dealing with nature were based on dealing with other people. The gods were modeled on dealing with kings or fathers; demons in dealing with psychopaths; and monsters on how to deal with dangerous anomalies.

While we can understand this intellectually based on our own modern paradigm, we do our ancestors a great disservice by ignoring reality as they experienced it. It is easy for us to say that all monsters are projections of unconscious fears because we live in a time where what gave rise to those fears has been conquered or reinterpreted through a different model. When a baby dies, for example, we do not claim that Lamatsu, the mother of all vampires in the Sumerian religion, killed the child; instead, we say it was something called germs. We too, like the ancients, have our own rituals to keep the monsters away: we wash our hands with soap, brush our teeth, etc., to keep germs at bay. Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between what we do and what the ancients did to keep our own particular monsters at bay; that is to say, that what we do really works. However, what I am trying to convey here is that the monsters were not the product of feverish, hysterical minds, but rather logical conclusions given the premises people were working from.

We are in a higher position than our ancestors because we are built on them. However, our superiority is cultural, therefore tenuous, and not intrinsic. We are not better people as such, although culturally I sincerely hope we are. Human history is really the history of perception. At first we see ourselves in nature, and wherever we look we find intention; then, as time goes on, we see each other a little less in nature; until finally we reach a point where we don’t see ourselves at all in nature; we call this objectivity. This has been largely achieved not by reason but by overcoming fear and insecurity, which are the true parents of all monsters.