Free On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma Page B

through the eyes and it travels on to the mind. This process transmits to the
inside
of a person a little image or replica (material in nature, but very subtle matter) of an
outside
material thing. This theory of perception is quite far from our notion of light bouncing off objects and entering the retina, to be reorganized in the back of the brain by the visual cortex. But it’s still an impressive way to solve the riddle of how we get representational information.
    These gossamer webs, which are constantly radiating off objects, do not stop impinging on us when we go to sleep. In fact, their infiltration into our senses and then our minds while we’re sleeping is the atomistic explanation for dreaming. But while we sleep, Lucretius claims, we cannot separate the true images from the false because our intelligence is dormant. When we dream of our dead father, it is because some leftover image film, floating free of its deceased source object, has drifted into our senses. On this account, monstrous hybrids and fantastical creatures are common “perceptions” because separate gossamers, from separate animals,have mingled and conjoined while floating through the air. A horse gossamer and a man gossamer have mingled their atoms accidentally, and when they are received by the perceiver they are confused as one. As Lucretius explains:
The Cerberus-visages of dogs we see,
And images of people gone before—
Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago;
Because the images of every kind
Are everywhere about us borne—in part
Those which are gendered in the very air
Of own accord, in part those others which
From divers things do part away, and those
Which are compounded, made from out their shapes.
For truly from no living Centaur is
That phantom gendered, since no breed of beast
Like him was ever; but, when images
Of horse and man by chance have come together,
They easily cohere, as aforesaid,
At once, through subtle nature and fabric thin.
In the same fashion others of this ilk
Are created. And when they’re quickly borne
In their exceeding lightness, easily
(As earlier I showed) one subtle image,
Compounded, moves by its one stroke the mind,
Itself so subtle and so strangely quick. 27
    In one deft move Lucretius and the atomists were able to eliminate the superstitions of belief in monsters and portentous dreams, but also acknowledge their real experiential basis. Confused phantom images (hybridized creatures, dead people, etc.) were actually entering our senses (because the air is thick with a metaphysical mist of images), but people were misinterpreting these as objectively real. Like Aristotle, however, Lucretius failed to have much impact (despite turning atomism into a
poem
) on the everyday culture of the ancient world. Shortly after Lucretius, Livy was still giving great weight to omens, dreams, and monsters, and this trend continued right through to the fourth century CE in the form of popular books of omens. 28

4
Monstrous Desire
     
A multitudinous, many-headed monster
.
PLATO
    W HILE HIKING THE BANKS OF THE ILISSUS RIVER , Socrates discussed the monstrous side of human desire with his friend Phaedrus. 1 It was a regular topic for Plato and for many Greek artists and intellectuals. Classicism is usually characterized by cool-headed reason, symmetry, and order, but just beneath this calm surface is a writhing mess of Dionysian reality.
     
    In the dialogue named for him, Phaedrus asks Socrates if he believes in mythical tales of Gorgons, hippocentaurs, and so on, and the sage holds forth on the various debates and disputations surrounding the credibility of myths. Ultimately he says, “I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.”
    Unlike the scientifically minded ancients discussed earlier, Socrates had no interest in