The New Teratology
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's own Research Professor of Radical Parabiological Intervention steps out of the lab to deliver an inspirational lecture to new students of Teratological Engineering.
The English word monster is derived from a Latin root meaning “an omen or warning.” The implication here is that the arrival of a creature with a freakish or frightening appearance was originally merely bad news—a sign of divine disfavor. As in, “I discovered that one of my best heifers just gave birth to a two-headed calf. What could it possibly mean? Which god have I offended, and how?”1
So not only do you have to worry about the monster itself and what it might do if you don’t take care of it, you have to worry about what the very presence of the monster signifies. I suppose much of a Roman farm or household budget could end up going to offerings to cover priestly research if there were a lot of deformities in the stalls or birthing beds in the days prior to the perils of inbreeding being clearly understood.
What I’m saying is that there’s an underlying science of semiotics to teratological engineering. So when you’re designing a monster, first you have to work out what message your design is intending to convey—and then you can get to work trying to find the best way to convey that message.
There’s a huge opportunity here. Much of the universe we live in lacks any coherent meaning. Tragedy strikes indiscriminately, without direction, reducing the pantheon to lonely Tyche, called blind by her detractors, when what they really mean is uncaring and relentlessly adhering to her own designs that we can only perceive stochastically.
It has always been up to sentient creatures to provide meaning in a meaningless universe, hasn’t it?
Let’s start with the monster you’re designing.
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Semiotics first.
Every era of every culture has their traditional monsters for their traditional stories. The spirits of offended or neglected ancestors can be fairly popular in civilizations where family bonds are held in high esteem and family identity is stronger than individual identity. The weeping woman who cries because her own children were taken from her, who takes the children of other mothers to console herself or kills them for the consolation of spite, is also popular. In these monsters we have misfortunes visited upon us for disrespect of elders and cultural traditions and a clear symbol for postpartum depression and the monster that grief can make of any of us.
The islands of southeast Asia and the neighboring continental coast give us lovely needle- or razor-toothed vampire babies, born dead but hungry for blood from the breast instead of milk, symbolizing the selfish greed of every infant—and what we secretly think of such greed—and the sublimated desire to escape their demands. And of course the spirits of every holy place that only turn into monsters when the place is defiled, whether by carelessness or malice—a mirror reflecting the monsterdom that is greedy, irreverent, exploitative humanity.
In the twentieth century, western Europe and North America fastened onto a number of monsters from eastern Europe and imported African traditions—werewolves and vampires, both distilled from victims of rabies infections, but the former symbolizing unrestrained rage and the latter symbolizing unrestrained lust, and the soulless undead zombi laborers too broken to their condition to be able to resist any demand made of them. These individual laborers later became distorted by the ideals of the late twentieth century to represent the hordes of unthinking masses—the perfect foil for the supposed last remnant of rugged individualist freethinkers/free agents that all Westernized individuals feel themselves to be in their hearts—that they will stop at nothing to tear down and convert to more iterations of their own damaged, decaying, featureless and futureless selves.
Sometimes monsters lose their meaning. You can tell when this happens, because then they serve no purpose except for a general threat for which there is no moral or ethical or karmic burden when it is destroyed. Or perhaps they cease being a threat as well and are just a kind of strange-looking person or animal, providing not much more than an atmospheric element. This is what a monster becomes when it has nothing more to say. Once they have degenerated enough they might even get to become heroes.
The chief monsters of early Western twentieth century literature were humans with an essential element of human culture most frequently referred to as soul removed so that a portion of beastly nature shone through. It amuses me to see in this what appears to be the first modern glimpse of the revelation that soul, what most people consider to be the core of humanity itself, is learned behavior. Children are born without it and acquire it with the rudiments of self control, via empathy and (as some would have it) fear of punishment and conscious delay of gratification, gleaned along with all the other elements of culture, like language and adoption of role models and memorization of advertising jingles.
This lesson of the nature of the soul was learned briefly, for just a moment, and then it was lost, drowned out by those who continue to claim that a soul grows like a juicy berry out of a microscopic beating heart, sprouting there immediately at the fertilization of the ovum, waiting to be plucked and eaten by whichever god can lay claim to it.
But anyway. It makes far more sense to see the soul as the lid on the bubbling cauldron, the door and bars on the cage, the collar, the leash, the gloves over the claws, the mask over the fangs. At the very basic layers, anyway. A more refined soul includes compassion, mercy, and reciprocity—the core of the rules of hospitality and the Golden Rule itself. This aggregate veneer is what’s missing when we see someone’s actions and judge them to be soulless. This is the layer of culture that is damaged or missing in those who find themselves with the capacity to be a predator or a parasite and unable to resist the appeal of monsterdom.
Later in the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, the most prevalent monsters became simply soulless humans with no immediately discernible differences from the ordinary sort. Predators and parasites, psychopaths and sociopaths, narcissists, charming manipulators and cynics. And communicably so—eager to demonstrate to the populace at large how richly the universe rewards those who emerge from their suffocating, swaddling soul-cocoons and let their fangs and claws grow, eager to show how the protection of a soul is made redundant by the insulation of disposable wealth and political power and celebrity, extending their protection to cover sycophants and toadies even while demonstrating again and again that those same toadies are nothing more than ablative shielding—disposable, expendable armor—against the consequences of heinous actions. They’d even publish manuals and textbooks to teach others to follow in their footsteps.
It’s hard to make a mere werewolf seem terrifying when you can point to scarier monsters in the newspapers. When they have names and addresses and skyscraper offices and constituents. What shines through the gaps in the soul of the modern monster isn’t rage or lust or even greed, or at least not just greed, but the entire “perpetual toddler” package of selfishness and irrational terrors and juvenile whim and the need for constant attention and reassurance, amplified via the force multipliers of enormous amounts of liquid cash and power and fame.
This calls to mind the idea of the goblin changeling—the human baby stolen from the crib and replaced with a monstrous duplicate that never matures and just gets more and more demanding of food and attention and resources. I don’t think it’s actually related in any direct way, but possibly it’s a good case for parallel evolution.
Fortunately every monster has a weakness. For narcissists, it’s humiliation. You might want to right that down.
The semantic message of the modern monster is clear. It’s all about the failures of any form of justice—divine or otherwise—and social constraints and equity. The message is this: If these monsters are allowed to exist, a fair and just world cannot.
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To get back to the main topic, the science of teratology—and there is one—is primarily a medical study of deformation and its causes, derived from a Greek root, τέρατ-, with the same semantic content as the Latin, including the assumption that a monster is, first and foremost, a sign or a warning. Teratology concerns itself with identifying and determining the mechanism of function of substances that trigger teratogenesis—an interference in the natural processes of growth and development that causes death, malformation, retardation of growth, and functional defect. This list seems a bit truncated to me, given the possibilities of non-cancerous accelerated growth and associated hypertrophy as well as interference in the processes of healing and regeneration.
Teratology seems much worried over factors that interfere with the processes of juvenile growth and development when the actual processes themselves could conceivably also be accelerated or re-triggered in adulthood by teratogenesis once development would generally be assumed to have been completed. Further, there is no discussion of outcomes that could be beneficial to the individual affected—at least in the short term, seeing that society treats individuals with apparent differences harshly. It’s rarely a good thing to be noticed as identifiably different.
And of course the current medical study of teratology is entirely physiological. I can assume that there is a completely disconnected study of abnormal development in the study of childhood and developmental psychology, and that there is nearly no modern formalized study of abnormal moral, ethical, organizational, or metaphysical development beyond what’s necessary to attempt to increase the volume and frequency of what goes into the offering plate when it’s passed. What I’m trying to say here is that there is room for an interdisciplinary study of monsterdom that would benefit from sharing metaphors.
I also have to take issue with the fact that any study of teratology—even the ones that seek to induce malformations in the study subjects—do so solely to understand the mechanisms by which malformations are caused with the clear aim of prevention in mind. This is a flaw of medicine in general. Right at the front of the Hippocratic Oath is the declaration that one should “first, do no harm.”
This is short-sighted and frequently misinterpreted. Every surgeon knows that tumor removal frequently starts with cutting healthy tissue and risking the introduction of infectious agents. Every clinical psychologist knows that therapy causes tears of rage and misery. The probing of diseased and damaged thought processes, the excising of badly formed emotional scar tissue, etc., is harmful before it can be healing. It’s rare that any kind of medicine causes no harmful side effects. On balance, therefore, the aim of the oath is that the benefit to the individual should outweigh any harms.
Most doctors have worked this out. Frequently an individual’s prospects are improved in the long term by intentional harm. This is the theory behind amputation, of course, which is absolutely the radical introduction of a defect—viewed by many to be monstrous—in order to attempt to prevent a worse outcome for the individual.
My concern extends beyond the individual, however, and beyond the current interpretation of physical and mental health, which is where this whole discussion starts to part ways with the medical. It is a failure of imagination not to be able to picture a kind of induced monstrosity that could be harmful to the body and mind but beneficial to the soul or spirit. It is a failure of imagination to not see that the monstrosity of an individual, while indeed terrible for that individual, might be beneficial to the society in which the monster is embedded.
Sometimes a society has no other way of receiving and recognizing a critical message that, once received and processed, would improve the state of wellbeing of that society beyond the harm done to the individual or individuals who embody the message.
This is difficult math, painful math, disgusting and disheartening math, but, as is the case with math, the answer is clear once you’ve done the work.
It is necessary that we, as a culture, receive the message of every monster. Only after a monster’s message has been delivered may we do away with the monster, or cure it, without causing worse harm.
And if there is a message that society needs to hear, sometimes we must create the monster that delivers it.
Most who understand the purpose of monsters—the need, of a society, for monsters—are content to wait for the gods themselves to send the necessary messages. This makes sense for a number of reasons. One is that the condition that makes the message necessary is the same condition that makes the message possible and, given an infinite amount of time, everything possible is inevitable. No one has to get their hands dirty if you just wait long enough. But second, it requires a monstrous kind of thinking to be able to perform the math—and the actions that the math requires—without feeling the burden of disgust and guilt and shame.
We can tell by observation and analysis that Tyche feels no weight of disgust nor burden of shame for anything she does. But we can also tell that she’s never in a hurry and has no sense of poetic timing. We could wait, yes, but we could do better, frequently, by not waiting. We intervene in her affairs all the time because we can, because we must, because it delights us. Obviously it is permitted.
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The perfect monster for the moment is the one whose very existence reveals the falsity of a popular misconception. When people see the monster, their visceral responses of fear and disgust are due to the monster being an impossibility, being something entirely inconsistent with their worldview. Once the monster’s message is delivered, however, those who have seen it must come to terms with the fact that their worldview is what’s wrong, and that the monster, by existing, reveals that its existence is permitted, and that any phenomenon that should have prevented its existence is somewhere on the spectrum between myth and bullshit.
Human culture, of which soul is a small component, transmits a number of misconceptions that have become part of humanity’s foundational beliefs. Each one of these misconceptions is an opportunity for a monster to manifest in order to provide correctional instruction. Nothing short of the presence of a monster will provide the realization that the misconception is suspect and needs reexamining.
Here are some realizations that humanity seems to be in perpetual need of:
No matter how holy or evolved or special people feel that they must be, humans are animals made out of meat. Tasty, tasty meat.
Our ancestors may not have been right about everything, but they learned some lessons the hard way and we’re fools if we throw away everything they learned just because we think we’re smarter.
Many of the things we accept (usually from our ancestors) as the natural order are weird and arbitrary and scientifically incorrect and any idiot who can look past a few preconceptions can see how detrimental those customs can be.
Hoarding is a disease that makes everybody sick.
Hungry people are beasts. Frightened people are beasts. Desperate people are beasts. Impoverished, outcast people tend to be hungry and terrified and desperate. Thus, we can prevent people turning into beasts by acts of compassion and charity.
Grief and pain also turn people into beasts. Sometimes there is no way to prevent this, since grief and pain come to everyone eventually. Sometimes all we can do is understand.
Short of a number of coarse physical differences, any person can become, under the right conditions, any other person. Often against their will or without their realization. No one has an impenetrable core identity. There is no bone in the brain.
We are adapted to live in a natural environment as it existed before we started meddling with it. If we change and abuse that environment too much, without a care for the environment itself as a living phenomenon that must support itself as it supports us, it will cease to support us.
As much as we want to think that there is a balance between light and dark, between heat and cold, and that we thrive on the balance point, the universe is hugely more dark than it is light and hugely more cold than it is warm, and our balance point is nowhere near the center. That balance is strange and rare and precarious, and there’s nowhere to run if that balance shifts underneath us.
As much as we want to think that Good and Evil are forces and that there is a balance between the two and that we exist as individuals and as a society somewhere on the balance point, “good” is merely empathy and compassion, within reach of all but the medically damaged, and “evil” is merely glee at someone else’s agony, which is also in reach of everyone under most circumstances. But the default response, what everyone calls indifference, in fact is the active, conscious suppression of both compassion and glee when we see someone else in need—the suppression of compassion because we don’t want to spare the effort or resources or look like a chump anyone can squeeze, and the suppression of glee because we don’t want to look or feel like utter bastards. There isn’t a spectrum. Glee and empathy can both happen at the same time. “Indifference” doesn’t lie anywhere between them, but far off to the side where concerns about the self lie. Anything that could show us how fearful and self-absorbed “indifference” is would be a hell of a monster.
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Let’s say you’ve chosen a message. How do you create the monster to deliver it?
My first advice is to look around. There are plenty of larval monsters out there already, their incipient monsterdom invisible to the populace at large because it couldn’t possibly exist. Once you know the message that your monster should convey, it will no longer be invisible to you. It may take you a while to find it, but—just do the usual things hunters and naturalists do. Determine the locations they would be likely to haunt. Put out bait. Sit and wait. Set a trap.
Find it. Feed it. Offer a little encouragement. Then a lot of encouragement. This is the process of teratogenesis. Once you know what message your monster is supposed to deliver, it will be obvious what malformations—physical, mental, cultural, organizational, or spiritual—will best enable your monster to drive the point home. Give the whole process as much thought and care as it deserves and stay available to kick things along when they get stuck.
It’s as much an art as a science. Every individual will be different, so your techniques must adapt. It might take several tries to get a successful enough monster out of your lab, and then several more before you can establish a self-sustaining breeding population. But this is a process where you will learn better by trial and error, by making mistakes and correcting them.
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Perhaps it would be best if I were to give you a concrete example. Here goes. This is it.
Seriously, this is it. This, this missive, this is the example.
The message is that we don’t have to—have never had to—wait for any natural process to provide a monster to deliver a message that humanity desperately needs to see or hear or understand. The messages are stacking up to the point that we need a postal service to handle their packaging and delivery. We need a new kind of monster that is a maker of bespoke monsters so that there will be a steady stream of monsters until that day when monsters are no longer needed.
This lesson is the monster that delivers that message, and you—or at least some among you—are the monsters that will be the designers and breeders of monsters, now that you know that it’s possible. Now that you know that it’s necessary. Now that you know that you won’t be able to stop thinking about it until you get to work.
Maybe not today. Maybe not for a long time, until the memory of this message pops back up, finally ripe, perhaps the next time you see an unexpected monster and take a moment to understand its message. But you will remember, and some part of you that has been working on monster designs the whole time will surface and get to work.
The sooner you get to work, the better.
Janus. Clearly.