When you think of monsters, you might imagine the dragons coiled menacingly atop hordes of gold, the lion-headed chimaeras of ancient mythology, or the lurching bulk of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation. Monsters are things that don’t exist except in the realm of stories and fairy tales - they are the stuff of make believe. We tell tales of bogey men to scare children into behaving, or indulge ourselves with the escapism of fantasy films. After a couple of hours the monster is gone, the film is over, and the brightly-lit, monster-free world returns? Not quite.
What is going on in the world right now with the global COVID-19 pandemic shows just how prevalent monsters still are, even though we might like to think that science has everything taped. The thing is, monsters are not things that exist externally, they come from inside our minds, they are integral to the way that we see the world. And there are plenty of monsters haunting us at present.
Traditional monsters, or monsters in stories, are usually ‘out there’. They come from distant times and places, exotic lands beyond everyday experience or long ago from which they cannot reach us. They are safely encapsulated in books, films, and stories, media that we can choose to indulge in or put down at a moment’s notice, shutting the monsters away. Maps used to be drawn with lands beyond the known world filled with all manner of fantastical things: dog-headed men, cannibals, phoenixes, or vast sea beasts cavorting across the waves. Medieval cartographers labelled unknown regions with ‘hic sunt dracones’ – here be dragons – signalling that these were mysterious places, where the things beyond nature stalked. If they did stray too close, they were rapidly excised, as in the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its hysterical rash of public executions.
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