On Monsters

"The 'monster' comes to embody Frankenstein's inner monstrocity-aspects of himself which he finds dangerous or unacceptable."-Sarah Kember "NITS and NRTS."

Below from Monsters by John Michael Greer:

"The word 'monster' comes from the Latin monstrum, "that which is shown forth or revealed." The same root also appears in the English word "demonstrate," and several less common words (such as "remonstrance") that share the same sense of revealing, disclosing, or displaying. In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth.

This may seem worlds away from the usual modern meaning of the word "monster"-a strange, frightening, and supposedly mythical creature-but here, as elsewhere in the realm of monsters, appearances decieve. Certainly, monsters are strange, at least to those raised in modern ways of approaching the world. As we'll see, too, monsters have a great deal to do with the realm of myth, although this latter word (like "monster" itself) has older and deeper meanings that evade our modern habits of thought. The association between monsters and terror, too, has practical relevance, even when the creatures we call "monsters" fear us more than we fear them.

The myth, the terror and the strangeness all have their roots in the nature of the realm of monsters and the monstrous-a world of revelations, where the hidden and the unknown show furtive glimpses of themselves. If we pay attention to them, monsters do have something to reveal. They show us the reality of the impossible, or of those things that we label impossible; they point out that the world we think we live in, and the world we actually inhabit, may not be the same place at all.

On Meaning of the Monstrous

For thousands of years, monstrous beings have been a source of revelations of this kind. In earlier times, in fact, monsters and what they showed forth were seen as matters of very great importance. Monsters were news, and not just for the reasons that draw crowds to monster movies and UFO sighting areas nowadays.

To the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, the appearance of any strange being waas a message from the hidden realms of existence, and needed interpretations by skilled professionals. ...the appearance of monsters could be read and understood by the wise, and used to cast light on future events, the unknowns of the present, and the always-mysterious purposes of the gods and goddesses.

...The monkish chroniclers of medieval times noted sightings of werewolves and mermaids in much the same spirit that leads modern newspapers to report the doing of such equally mysterious entities as the Gross National Product. The appearance of a monster was news, not just because of what the monster was, but because of what it meant-in other words, what it showed forth about the universe and humanity's place in it." -John Michael Greer

Below from David D. Gilmore "Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors." :

"...I have always believed-perhaps based more on intuition than anything else-that the endless fascination with monsters derives from a complex mix of emotions and is not simply reducible to the standard Freudian twins of aggression and repression. The point of this book is to show that for most pepole monsters are sources of identification and awe as well as of horror, and they serve also as vehicles for the expiation of guilt as well as aggression: there is a strong sense in which the monster is an incarnation of the urge for self-punishment and a unified metaphhor for both sadism and victimization (after all, the horrible monster is always killed off. usually in the most gruesome manner imaginable, by humans.) We have to address this issue of dualism, of emotive ambivalence, in which the monster stands for both the victim and the victimizer."
-David D. Gilmore

Who are the monsters in your neighborhood?