Every culture, it seems, has monstrous mash-ups in their folklore and religion. Composite creatures appear in our earliest literature and turn up in Upper Paleolithic cave paintings. The sphinx in Giza, half-human and half-lion, is at least 4,500 years old. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 B.C.), heroes Gilgamesh and Enkidu battle a hybrid monster named Humbaba, described as having a lion’s head and hands, but a scaly body. Vishnu, in India, manifests as a fierce lion-man monster, Narasimha, in several Hindu texts. Ganesha, son of Shiva, is humanoid with an elephant head. The many Greek hybrid creatures—centaurs, satyrs, mermaids, Pegasus, Hydra, griffins, chimeras—are constantly resurrected in Hollywood. Literature over the last two millennia, from Beowulf to Tolkien to Rowling, has added countless composite creatures and shape-shifters. More recently we have regular hybridizing of humans and computers.
So why all the taxonomic mashing and mixing? Humans have an innate or an early developmental folk taxonomy of the world, according to psychologist Dan Sperber and anthropologist Pascal Boyer. We have a way of organizing the world into predictable categories for easy understanding, cognition, and manipulation. Even as small children, we seem capable of grouping people, birds, bugs, trees, and fish together into kinds—similar within their category but dissimilar across categories. Not only do kids tend to see whales as “fish,” but early natural history made this error too. Our folk taxonomy concerning whales reveals the unsophisticated quality of our natural classifications; if it swims in the water and looks like a fish, it’s a fish. To give our brains credit, however, our pre-scientific ancestors didn’t need a more nuanced understanding of whales, and we had as much knowledge about them as was probably necessary for survival. [...]
Category violations strongly arouse the human mind. When our expectations about the world—“humans have two arms,” “snakes don’t fly”—are disrupted by Vishnu, with dozens of arms, or flying snakes in the form of dragons, the images grab our attention and become cognitively “sticky.” They stick in our memories, recall very easily, and spread throughout the social group. Hybrid monsters, in other words, make excellent memes. Richard Dawkins first argued that while memes were cultural fragments or cognitive units, they were analogical to genes in the sense that they spread through populations without conscious design or purpose. Unnatural ideas or images survive and spread well because they surprise us, making them harder to forget or ignore. [...]
Emotional associations are built into our folk taxonomy. While category mismatches arouse our curiosity and improve memory retention, hybrids that carry strong emotional associations (like arachnophobia) will be especially sticky. Effective horror (and religion) has figured out symbols and stories that unconsciously trigger our primitive emotions. As cultural theorist Mathias Clasen argues in his book Why Horror Seduces, similar monsters and horror stories work well on people of very different cultural backgrounds. Horror has universal power. In part, this is because human cognition is universally governed by those folk taxonomy categories, so violations will arouse anyone from Manhattan to Morocco. But more important are the universal emotional systems that link natural predator fear and dread with cultural images.
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