There were monsters once
Monsters are easy to understand as projections of the human mind and, therefore, as representations of some fear; however, the modern understanding of everything psychologically is a recent phenomenon. For most of human history, monsters were taken at face value. If they represented something, it was only within their own worldview. When monsters were truly believed, they were not seen as windows to the human mind, but as a breakdown of the natural order.
To the highly supernatural thought of the human past, the monster was seen as an affront to divinity or as a punishment from divinity. In the previous thinking, based on ancient myths, the monsters were an explanation of what today we would call natural disasters: earthquakes, typhoons, forest fires, etc. Furthermore, they were not believed in the way we would describe belief today, holding that something is true in faith despite reality, but because everything in people’s experience spoke in favor of their existence. This is a paradigm shift that few people have noticed, conditioned as we are to the modern scientific worldview. Ancient peoples were not superstitious as we imagine.
A superstitious person is truly a holdover from a previous paradigm that has survived a new and replacement paradigm. In a very real sense, ancient beliefs cannot be considered superstitious, as given the dominant worldview of their time, they were actually quite logical.
This is something difficult for the modern mind to understand: the dichotomy between the rational and the irrational is largely a modern and woefully misguided construction. The irrational is something truly rare, at any time. The human mind is by its very nature a pattern finder, so rationality, the cause-effect connection, is present in every human being from the very beginning. What this means is that people from the past cannot be consistently called irrational. When we use the word irrational to label people who do not share the dominant worldview, it is similar to when other people in the past used the word heretic. In other words, we are using cultural bias-based blinders to label other people. People of the past were not irrational. What this means, of course, is that monsters were once real, but are no longer.
In general, people have always been rational, and even their most outlandish beliefs have a rational basis behind them. This is so because all reason is built on premises, and we generally receive these without question from our societies, in the same way that other peoples in other times received theirs from theirs. Our modern worldview is based on materialism, so our reasoning must follow a materialistic pattern. That this was not always the case should be obvious to even the most casual history student. Not so long ago, the dominant worldview was religious, so all observed phenomena had to be interpreted through a specific set of assumptions.
This, of course, led to profound absurdities, although it should be noted that modern materialism has also led to some rather extreme absurdities, such as the silly theory of memes. It should be understood, however, that these absurdities are not irrational, but the logical conclusions of pushing their particular premises to the limit. People have always been rational, but reason has its limits; that is, the facilities from which you are working.
When monsters really existed, the dominant worldview was what we now call animism: the belief that everything that existed possessed desires, sensibilities, and intentionality. Therefore, if the wind blew the roof off your house, the logical and rational conclusion would have to be that the wind was upset with you. Bear with me for a moment. Suppose your neighbor walked over to your mailbox and proceeded to kick it until it broke, what would you think? Overcoming your own emotional reaction to the event, the only logical conclusion would have to be that your neighbor is upset with you.
It would really be irrational, when you saw him trampling on your property, to think, “Wow, what a nice guy, he really likes me.” This is just logical. However, all logic is based on premises, and for human beings the most basic premise is our own emotional plane; This is how we know, for example, that people don’t vandalize our property because they mean well to us. Under animism, if the wind is understood as a person and rips off your roof, what is the logical conclusion?
Monsters are, of course, something slightly different from the early products of animism, an aberration so to speak. When people encounter forces that can harm them, their natural reaction is to destroy, appease, or flee from them. Those things that people can destroy, they cease to fear; those whom they can appease, they call gods; those to whom they must flee, they call them monsters. Those whom they cannot appease or escape become demons.
From a psychological perspective, all of this is very easy to understand as projections of the human mind interacting with nature. From a state of unconsciousness pushed to a state of mindfulness, our only point of reference is ourselves. We interpret everything we encounter through the plane of our own consciousness and emotional matrix. So everything is a person because we are people. However, as we know that not all people have good intentions towards us, the same goes for the forces of nature, some of them are simply unpleasant. And in the same way that we deal with people, we deal with nature. Sometimes we try to fight it: building dams, casting spells, appealing to mystical forces from beyond to help us control it, at other times to appease it, offering sacrifices, performing rituals, praying, and sometimes we just ran. Until the modern era, all methods of dealing with nature were based on dealing with other people. The gods were inspired by dealing with kings or parents; demons about dealing with psychopaths; and monsters on how to deal with dangerous anomalies.
While we can understand this intellectually based on our own modern paradigm, we do our ancestors a disservice by ignoring reality as they experienced it. It is easy for us to say that all monsters are projections of unconscious fears because we live in a time in which what gave rise to those fears has been conquered or reinterpreted through a different model. When a baby dies, for example, we do not claim that Lamatsu, the mother of all vampires in the Sumerian religion, killed the child; instead, we say it was something called germs. We too, like the ancients, have our own rituals to keep monsters away: we wash our hands with soap, brush our teeth, etc., to keep germs at bay. Don’t get me wrong, there is a difference between what we do and what the ancients did to keep our own monsters at bay; In other words, what we do really works. However, what I am trying to convey here is that the monsters were not the product of hysterical and feverish minds, but rather logical conclusions given the premises from which people were working.
We are in a superior position than our ancestors because we rely on them. However, our superiority is cultural, therefore tenuous, and not intrinsic. We are not better people as such, although culturally I sincerely hope that we are. Human history is really the history of perception. At first we see ourselves in nature, and wherever we look we find intention; then, as time goes by, we see each other a little less in nature; until finally we come to a point where we don’t see each other at all in nature, which we call objectivity. This has been largely accomplished not by reason, but by overcoming fear and insecurity, which are the true parents of all monsters.