Why We Make Monsters

A human face joined to the body of a bull; a woman with serpents for hair; a supernatural being assembled from human limbs, animal claws, wings and scales. Monsters are rarely made from the wholly unfamiliar. More often, artists begin with the recognisable world and rearrange it, combining familiar bodies into forms that could never have existed in nature.

Such creatures have a long history in art, although even the word monster presents difficulties. A figure that appears monstrous to us may once have been understood as a god, demon, guardian or protective presence. Nor does a composite body necessarily imply something frightening or malign. Hybridity could express supernatural power, while beings considered dangerous did not necessarily look strange. The categories are ours as much as theirs, and they do not travel easily between cultures.

This makes monstrous imagery unusually revealing, but also unusually easy to misread. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's influential 1996 essay “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” proposed that monsters should be understood as cultural bodies, shaped by the particular fears, desires and conflicts of the societies that produced them. His argument has become foundational to the field of monster studies. For the historian of objects, however, there is another question worth asking. Before deciding what a creature represents, we can look at what people actually did with its image: where they placed it, who encountered it, what they believed it could accomplish.

Guardians at the Gate

At the entrances to the Northwest Palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud stood colossal human-headed winged bulls and lions. Carved in the ninth century BCE, these supernatural guardians, conventionally known as lamassu, combined several kinds of power within a single body. One surviving bull, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stands more than three metres high. Its enormous animal body carries wings and a carefully modelled human head, crowned with a horned headdress identifying the figure as divine.

It is a creature best understood in movement. Seen directly from the front, the bull appears to stand still on two legs. Walk alongside it and four legs appear to carry the animal forward. To achieve both effects, the sculptor gave it five legs. What looks anatomically impossible when the sculpture is considered in isolation makes sense within the architecture for which it was designed: the image changes as the visitor approaches and passes it.

Its position was equally deliberate. Assyrian palaces were populated by protective supernatural imagery, and smaller magical figures could be buried beneath floors, particularly around entrances and other points considered vulnerable to harmful forces. The great stone guardians at palace doorways operated on a monumental scale. They protected the building, but their colossal size, costly material and supernatural bodies also belonged to the visual language of Assyrian kingship.

Seen today in a museum, a lamassu can easily become an extraordinary example of ancient imagination. At Nimrud it was something more specific: part sculpture, part architecture, part supernatural guardian, encountered at the moment a visitor entered the king's world.

Dangerous Images

Elsewhere in first-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, supernatural danger was addressed through objects small enough to be held or worn.

Lamashtu was a female demon particularly associated with dangers surrounding pregnancy and infancy. Her surviving images combine human and animal features: a broadly anthropomorphic body with clawed feet and other animal characteristics. On an obsidian amulet now at the Met, her image appears alongside an Akkadian inscription and objects associated with rituals intended to counter her power. More than sixty amulets connected with Lamashtu survive, suggesting how established such practices became.

The presence of the demon on a protective object is significant. Representing something dangerous did not necessarily invite that danger. An image could also help identify, contain or repel it.

This becomes still clearer with Pazuzu. His surviving images are deliberately formidable: staring eyes, bared teeth and a body assembled from human and animal parts. Mesopotamian sources associated him with destructive winds and illness, yet his image was also used for protection, particularly against Lamashtu. Small bronze heads could be worn as pendants or placed close to women during childbirth. One example in the British Museum was probably suspended for precisely this purpose.

The apparent contradiction disappears once these objects are considered within their own system of supernatural power. Pazuzu did not need to be benevolent in order to protect. His dangerous nature was precisely what could make him effective against another dangerous being.

There is an important material difference between this object and the Assyrian guardian. The lamassu confronted danger at the boundary of a palace; Pazuzu could operate close to an individual body. Both made supernatural protection visible, but at radically different scales and within very different kinds of human experience.

The Face of Medusa

The history of Medusa presents another variation on the dangerous image.

Early Greek representations can look remarkably unlike the beautiful, serpentine-haired woman familiar from later European art. In Archaic images, the Gorgon may have staring eyes, an open or grimacing mouth, protruding tongue, tusk-like teeth and sometimes a beard. Yet one feature of her appearance is particularly persistent: Medusa frequently faces outwards.

This is unusual enough to matter. Figures in Greek art often turn towards one another or participate in the world represented around them. The Gorgon's gaze repeatedly meets that of the person looking at her.

Her severed head, the gorgoneion, travelled widely across Greek material culture. It appeared on architecture, pottery, armour, jewellery and other objects, and was closely associated with Athena's aegis. The most common interpretation of the motif is apotropaic: the terrifying face helped repel danger. It is a persuasive explanation, particularly where the image appears on protective objects or architecture, although the extraordinary longevity and variety of the gorgoneion make a single explanation for every appearance difficult to sustain.

Medusa's face also changed. From the fifth century BCE onwards, Greek artists increasingly softened the grotesque characteristics of the Gorgon. She could become youthful and conventionally beautiful without ceasing to be Medusa. Other hybrid and dangerous beings underwent comparable transformations in Greek art.

This gradual change is useful because it exposes the limits of treating monstrosity as a matter of appearance. Medusa did not stop being dangerous when artists made her beautiful. Her identity resided as much in story, recognition and context as in any particular arrangement of features.

It also reminds us that monstrous bodies are artistic constructions. Myths may describe extraordinary beings, but artists still have to decide how those beings will look. They choose which parts remain human, which become animal, whether terror should be grotesque or beautiful, and how a supernatural power can be made present in paint, clay, bronze or stone.

The Problem with Monsters

The Egyptian god Bes makes the difficulty of classification particularly clear.

Bes can look decidedly strange to modern eyes. He is generally shown frontally, with a compact human body and leonine characteristics, and may appear brandishing weapons. Yet his image belonged above all to protection. Bes was associated with domestic life and particularly with women and children, including childbirth; his image appeared on household and personal objects rather than being confined to monumental religious settings.

There is little historical value in calling him a monster simply because his body looks unusual to us. Doing so risks replacing an ancient Egyptian category with a modern visual judgement.

The problem applies more broadly. Monster, demon, guardian, hybrid and god are not interchangeable descriptions. Neither can we assume that the boundaries between human, animal and supernatural were understood in the same way everywhere. A body that appears to violate the natural order from one point of view may, within another system of thought, be an entirely appropriate way of representing supernatural power.

Appearance alone can therefore take us only so far. A strange body begins to make historical sense when we know where it was encountered and what was expected of it: whether it stood at the entrance to a palace, hung against the body, appeared in ritual or looked out from the surface of a vessel. Removed from those settings, a supernatural creature can easily become an example of ancient fantasy. Put back into them, it becomes part of a lived world.

Imagining the Impossible

There remains a compelling visual problem behind many of these objects. How does an artist give form to a being for which there is no equivalent in ordinary experience?

One answer, repeated in very different places and periods, has been to work with what is already known. Human and animal bodies provide a vocabulary from which unfamiliar beings can be assembled. Wings confer capacities the human body does not possess; claws, horns and teeth can intensify physical danger; the strength of an animal body can be joined to a human or supernatural intelligence. The resulting creature is impossible as a whole while remaining legible in its parts.

Recent scholarship and exhibitions have drawn particular attention to the importance of such composite beings. The Met's Creatures of Myth and Imagination, for example, brings together supernatural hybrids from medieval Europe and the Americas while insisting upon their very different cultural meanings. Hybrid creatures might guard boundaries, mediate between earthly and supernatural realms, participate in ritual or embody cosmological ideas. Formal resemblance does not amount to equivalence.

That distinction is essential to any cross-cultural history of monsters. A human-headed winged bull in Assyria and a Gorgon in Greece share the formal principle of bringing normally separate things into a single body, but this does not make them expressions of the same belief. Comparison becomes useful when it sharpens difference rather than smoothing it away.

Cohen described the monster as provoking a “category crisis”: the monstrous body refuses to fit comfortably within the systems used to classify the world. There is something persuasive in this when applied to composite creatures. Human and animal characteristics can occupy the same body; earthly forms can describe supernatural beings; protection and danger may reside in the same figure. But the historical question remains more precise than the theory. Which categories are being crossed, and did those categories matter to the people who made and encountered the image in the same way that they matter to us?

This is why fear, although important, is an inadequate explanation for the history of monsters. Lamashtu was feared and Medusa could be terrifying, but fear does little to explain why Pazuzu was worn for protection or why colossal composite beings stood guard at the entrances to an Assyrian king's palace. To understand such creatures only as embodiments of anxiety is to flatten the very different worlds from which they came.

Their strangeness could serve many purposes. It might repel danger, express supernatural power, protect a vulnerable body, proclaim royal authority or give visible form to a being otherwise known through story, belief and ritual. Even the same image could move between meanings as it travelled across objects, places and centuries.

Monstrous imagery is valuable as historical evidence for precisely this reason. These creatures preserve more than fantasies of what might lurk beyond the limits of the known world. Their bodies contain decisions about power and vulnerability, about the relationship between human beings and animals, and about what the supernatural could look like when brought into material form.

The lamassu at an Assyrian gateway, a Pazuzu pendant worn close to the body and a Gorgon staring from the surface of a Greek vessel do not belong to a single, continuous history of “the monster”. Each must first be understood within its own world of meanings and practices.

Seen together, however, they reveal a problem to which artists have returned repeatedly: how to make visible a being that ordinary experience cannot supply.

The creatures may be imaginary. The worlds that required them were not.