Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and their Meanings
by Natalie Lawrence
Genres: Non-fictionPages: 368
Rating:
Synopsis:The hydra rears its many heads in a flurry of teeth and poisonous fumes. The cyborg lays waste to humanity with a ruthless, expressionless stare.
From ancient mythology to modern science fiction, we have had to confront the monsters that lurk in the depths of our collective imagination. They embody our anxieties and our irrational terrors, giving form to what we don't wish to know or understand. For millennia, monsters have helped us to manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and to deal with the challenges of being human.
In Enchanted Creatures, Natalie Lawrence delves into 15,000 years of imaginary beasts and uncovers the other-worldly natural history that has evolved with our deepest fears and fascinations. Join Lawrence on a tour of prehistoric cave monsters, serpentine hybrids, deep-sea leviathans and fire-breathing Kaiju. Discover how this monstrous menagerie has shaped our minds, our societies and how we see our place in nature.
Natalie Lawrence’s Enchanted Creatures is a fairly entertaining read, an attempt to dig into why humans imagine monsters, and what various kinds of monsters mean to us and what they say about us. It’s unfortunately one of those books where the research is marred by bizarre mistakes; the most basic check on Google would yield the info that the Goblin King in Labyrinth is called Jareth, not Jared, for instance.
When that kind of easily-verifiable fact is wrong, it really casts everything else into doubt. There is a bibliography with some references, which is somewhat reassuring, but… Jared? I know that’s wrong and I’ve never even seen Labyrinth.
Or there’s a section where she refers to Circe as one of several snake women who’ve had modern novels written from their point of view. What? Circe isn’t associated with snakes (as far as I’ve ever heard).
The more I think about it, the more it falls to bits — how can any conclusions be supported when this stuff is randomly mentioned without actual evidence? If you want me to accept that Circe’s a snake-woman in some way, then we need the evidence.
Rating: 2/5
Too bad. Though Circe is indeed often depicted with snakes, though her sister Angitia has more connections with them than she has.
It’s telling that for example I searched the wikipedia entry on snakes [edit: Circe’s, I mean, and searched it FOR the word snakes], and it only mentions the word three times, and all reference modern art… Not that Wikipedia is the ultimate arbiter, but if there was enough evidence to consider Circe a “snake-woman”, you’d think it’d come up there.
And Circe’s own Wikipedia article only mentions snakes or serpents twice, in reference to 20th century depictions. Snakes don’t appear in the ancient sources https://www.theoi.com/Titan/Kirke.html but I suppose snakes might make an appearance whenever snakes are associated with sorcery, but that’s in conjunction with other things (eg toads and bats and whatnot). Is she getting mixed up with Medea, who *is* associated with snakes thanks to her chariot?
That’s what I meant, in my original post — that I searched Circe’s entry for snakes. I just typed nonsense because brain’s dead.
I don’t think there was a mix-up with Medea, but since I returned the book to the library, I can’t say for sure.
The Circe/snake confusion is new to me to me. I wonder if it’s a bit of cross-myth bleedover given the role of the Serpent in the Biblical story of the Fall.. That, or the author was just thinking of Medusa somehow…
Medusa (and Eve) are both discussed separately!
Yikes, the subtitle caught my interest so too bad to hear there’s not much to back it up.
It was a pleasant enough read, but stepping back to think about it further definitely gave me pause…