- Platon (1920) Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

November 1648 was a trying time for Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law and Parliamentarian general. He had tried being moderate, he had argued for a constitutional monarchy, but Charles just kept trying to escape from the Isle of Wight, and now the monarch’s correspondence had been intercepted, showing that Charles saw every concession and negotiation as a means to buy time and get back to his followers. With grim determination, Ireton put forward his Remonstrance of the Army and watched as Parliament refused to discuss it - then his troops adopted it. Ireton and his men subsequently undertook the only successful coup d'état in British history, using soldiers to physically block unsympathetic members of the Commons from entering the chamber, creating a hand-picked Parliament which would agree to do the unthinkable and execute the king. While this turmoil raged, the scholar and future librarian of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Thomas Smith had written to a friend complaining about his colleagues

most men of parts here have their thoughts so taken up with Platonisme, or other high aery speculations of Divinity or Philosophy that they will scarce vouchsafe to cast a glance on such a new invention for any thing which is not in their way or in their aime

It might seem a ridiculous triviality to quibble about academics reading Plato during a brutal civil war, military intervention and regicide - but Smith was writing to man named Samuel Hartlib, and Smith’s irritation was that Platonism was suffocating the nascent experimental philosophy movement, and Hartlib was a man poised to change the world forever.

We’ll return to Hartlib and Cambridge shortly, but not before we’ve established our aims here. In my last essay we explored the influence of Plato throughout history, specifically his influence on what we could call subversive politics - assassinations, secret conspiracies and societies, utopian plans and schemes. This time I want to continue on this theme, but looking at how Plato’s ideas have been used to stabilise, support the status quo, enact genuine real world change and form the bedrock of state power and authority in multiple different ways.

Act One - Steering the Ship. Chartres, Calvinism and Cambridge

If Eriugena had ruffled feathers with his Christo-Platonism in the ninth century, one could be forgiven for thinking Plato was not a welcome sight within the various bloomings of medieval philosophy. Renaissances aplenty appear all over the place - the Carolingian Renaissance, the Ottonian, Northumbrian and Visigothic Renaissance and the 12th-century Renaissance, to name but a few - the latter associated with Gothic architecture and the transmission of Aristotle and Euclid from Islamic Spain and Byzantium. Aristotelian philosophy would eventually be digested by Christian Europe through the heroic scholasticism of Aquinas, although this story is vastly more complicated than it appears. Neither Aristotle nor Plato had been preserved since antiquity with strict and rigorous boundaries, both had blurred one into another through the entanglement of Neoplatonic thinkers, Syriac Christians, anonymous texts translated into Arabic and then into Latin, Byzantine monks and the Muslim conquests of Egypt and Spain.

Only one of Plato’s texts, Timaeus, was available in Europe through the medieval period. This dialogue had been translated into Latin first by Cicero, then by one Calcidius in the 4th century AD, a scholar of formidable intellect but no biography. We still today have no idea who he was. Calcidius’ Timaeus is truncated, stylised and complete with a heavy commentary of his own

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Calcidius’ work on Plato’s Timaeus, which consists of a partial Latin translation and commentary. So many links in the extensive commentary tradition of the Timaeus are no longer extant. We have snippets from Crantor, a mere allusion to a possible commentary by Posidonius, part of a translation by Cicero, allusions to Adrastus’ commentary, a commentary by Theon of Smyrna that deals only with the mathematical issues, and a mere shadow of Porphyry’s commentary, to name but some …

… Moreover, Calcidius presents one of those very rare cases of a Latin philosophical commentary. As the knowledge of Greek started to wane at the end of Antiquity, Calcidius became one of the main channels through which Plato’s legacy was transmitted to the Middle Ages. Indeed, his work is one of the four master-texts of that era, together with Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy, Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, and Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury.

-Calcidius on Plato’s Timaeus (2020) Gretchen Reydams-Schils

We already saw in the last article how Eriugena’s Platonism was received by the church authorities, but by the 12th century scholarly networks were much wider than royal courts. What has become known as the ‘Chartres School’ (ca. 1114-1150), a circle of innovative translators and proto-scholastics founded by Bishop Fulbert at Chartres Cathedral, can today claim the mantle of leading Plato’s first proper synthesis into medieval theology, cosmology and science. The school boasted such luminaries as Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury, Thierry of Chartres, William of Conches and Bernardus Silvestris - men who tutored future kings, conducted diplomacy for the Pope, wrote books which synthesised all the available knowledge of the time and met the challenge of pagan cosmology and newly available Greco-Arabic texts head-on.

In short, the Chartrians used the Timaeus to argue that the created world is a rationally ordered, mathematically proportioned cosmos that human reason can progressively understand. Thierry’s Hexaemeron reads Genesis through the Timaeus, identifying the Holy Spirit with the Platonic world-soul, whilst Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia used classical allegories and metaphors to explain the creation of the universe, drawing on Plato’s metaphysics. The thinkers at Chartres took from Plato some crucial principles - the visible universe is a unified, undivided whole, this universe is a copy of an ideal form, the creation of this universe demonstrates the goodness of its maker. Rather than subversion and heterodoxy, Plato functioned at Chartres and in the subsequent spread of its ideas, as a stabilising, order-discovering metaphysical authority, capable of armouring Medieval Christendom against the threats of pagan antiquity and the contemporary Caliphate.

To Cambridge and Calvinism then, some 500 years or so after Chartres. The war to see either King or Parliament triumphant is not where anyone would expect to find Plato, but by the 1640’s we already see scholars complaining of his influence. We know the victors of history by their spoils, names like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke and Isaac Newton fly the flags of liberal individualism and the new scientific method. We are less familiar with names like Henry More, Benjamin Whichcote, George Rust, Ralph Cudworth, Viscountess Anne Conway or Joseph Glanvill - not because they ‘lost’ per se (there was anything but two clear sides), rather because of the tendency of historians and chroniclers to retroactively create simple narratives.

Plato was already available to English scholars through the humanistic and Renaissance channels of European universities and intellectual circles. His rise in philosophical discourse came primarily through thoughtful Puritans, in particular those reared and nurtured at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. The college functioned as both a shelter and a breeding ground during its first century, having been established by Sir Walter Mildmay in 1584 - Elizabeth’s Chancellor of the Exchequer - who intended it to be an Anglican-Puritan training centre: “I have set an acorn, which when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof”. Emmanuel’s Puritan children moved to adopt Plato as the battles of the 17th century raised the stakes for the nation. Charles’ defeat at the hands of Parliamentary forces encouraged all factions to press home their advantage, crystallising into the dogmatic Calvinist wing of Westminster Assembly at one pole and the amorphous, shifting blob of antinomian radicals, mystic prophets, Familists, Behmenists, Legatine-Arians and other nonconformists we could dub ‘enthusiasts’ (to use a term from the period) at the other.

In this febrile atmosphere it was Whichcote, Cudworth, Smith, More and their circles who saw the dangers of their own theological position and reached for Plato to grab the reigns. The Calvinist position of an arbitrary sovereign who consigned souls to salvation or damnation via an inscrutable decree looked unjustifiable and Plato offered a step down - a cosmos ordered by an innate rational goodness rather than by raw will alone, with divine reason lit in every receptive mind - the ‘candle of the Lord’. Against predestination they found and explicated moral striving, against unknowable judgement they put forth the eternal and immutable truth grounded in God's own nature. Plato provided an ancient balm to temper the heat of dogma and zeal, looking across years of iconoclasm, violence and fraternal bitterness the philosopher offered the cool of reason. In the fevered 1640’s Platonism functioned as a genuine steadying force, a plea for tolerance and a few rational fundamentals against both Calvinist certainty and radical enthusiasm.

To understand what happened to the Cambridge Platonists is to dive into the outrageously complex theological and philosophical discourses of those years. With hindsight there are roughly two positions which ‘win’ out - the experimental movement, anachronistically the ‘Scientific Method’, culminating in the Royal Society, and the more theologically tolerant stances (sensu lato) of Anglican latitudinarianism deriving from Richard Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists. This tolerance fed into the functioning of the Restoration era Church of England such that Cambridge ‘latitude’ was the dominant mood for the next century or so, helping keep an even keel between hard-line Calvinism and the passionate inner light of the enthusiasts. Platonism as a doctrine was easily attacked from every angle, and only Henry More ever dared call himself a Platonist - it was ‘airy’ speculation to the Baconian-Hartlib experimenters and a form of Pelagian heresy, crypto-papist Arminianism to the Calvinists. Some Platonists were also fascinated by the nascent scientific approach, just as they were devout Christians. More’s 1653 treatise An Antidote Against Atheism exemplifies their gathering rearguard position, in which he presents ‘hard evidence’ of divination, sorcery, magical powers within the English populace, whilst also condemning excessive enthusiasm. I’ll end with a wonderful footnote on the matter I found in the essay Reconciling Theory and Fact: The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’ in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists by David Pailin:

Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (1653) refers, among other matters, to reports of ‘Coskinomancy’ (or divination) and charms, ‘supernatural effects’, bewitchings and sorcery, and happenings at meetings of witches. According to More, the Fellows of Queens’ College, Cambridge preach an annual ‘Anniversary Sermon’ at Huntingdon to keep fresh the memory of the discovery of witchcraft at Warbois. I gather that this sermon is no longer preached.

Act Two - Shaping Souls. Tory vs Prussian Hellenism.

The two previous examples of Chartres and Cambridge were cases of politico-theological disputes leaning on Platonic philosophy. The next two are far more concerned with the actual process of shaping and moulding human souls, in line with a new vision. These are questions of who gets to rule, how to rear those guardians and how should they be identified.

Plato’s influence in England could not have fallen further than during the 18th century. The Cambridge scholars passed, one by one, into history and left behind no institutional Platonism, no mechanism for generational preservation. More dies in 1687, Cudworth in 1688, the philosophical faculty of the English-speaking world is swiftly claimed by Locke. Cambridge itself pivots to mathematics and Newton, whilst Oxford stays Aristotelian. The excesses and violence of the Civil War tarnishes Neoplatonism, which now reeks of mysticism and sinister priests. The deists and Unitarians then blame Plato for the state of contemporary Christianity. Joseph Priestley’s An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) attempted to perform a radical surgery on the whole edifice and excise Plato entirely, diagnosing the Trinity, grace, body-soul dualism and much else as Platonic cancers. This line of thought became highly influential in the Enlightenment years, probably best summed up by Plato’s greatest enemy - Thomas Jefferson - who described his version of Priestlean-rational-deism as the ‘euthanasia of Platonic Christianity’.

Priestley did not invent this critique though, in Germany Lutheran orthodoxy had already moved to condemn Plato’s influence a century prior. The theologian Ehregott Daniel Colberg had written the two-volume Das Platonisch-Hermetisches Christenthum (1690-91) in which he identified in the contemporary mystical movements such as the Rosicrucians, Quakers, Anabaptists, followers of Jacob Böhme (amongst others), a strain of Schwärmerei or fanaticism/enthusiasm ultimately derived from Alexandria and Pythagoras and Plato. The philosopher’s star would wane in Germany until the publication of Johann Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae in 1744, setting Plato on his rehabilitation arc through the Göttingen school, Christian Gottlob Heyne and Johann Winckelmann - the direction of German Hellenism cast against the French love for stately Roman classicism.

Jumping to Britain, 1840. The economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that the nation had two great thinkers - Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and founder of Romanticism. Few today know Coleridge as a political Platonist, but in 1829 he had written On the Constitution of the Church and the State, arguing that Britain’s parliamentary monarchy contained an ideal form of government. Coleridge represented a now-forgotten form of British idealism, dubbed ‘Germano-Coleridgian’ by Mill, concerned with the deep, spiritual roots of the nation as represented by “Sidney, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift, Wordsworth” and opposed to the cold calculating machine-logic of the progressives (Bentham, Locke, Hume, Paley, Pitt). Coleridge saw a role for a national clerisy, a secular and broad community of learned individuals like philosophers, poets, scientists and scholars. They would be tasked with cultivating the minds, morals and spiritual connection of the people. Unfortunately, no such class formally existed in the early 19th century, but there was a man determined to make one.

Benjamin Jowett was an extraordinary scholar. He took up his undergraduate studies at Oxford’s Balliol College in 1836, two years later - before he had even graduated - he was appointed a Fellow of the university. He went on to became Regius Professor of Greek in 1855, working on St Paul’s Epistles and his lifelong project of translating Plato. He became Master of Balliol in 1870 and published his translation of the dialogues the following year, establishing his version of Plato as the standard English text for the next century. Jowett was not content with simply reading Greek in private, as he wrote to Florence Nightingale in 1873 (despite a failed proposal of marriage to Nightingale, they maintained correspondence for many years):

I should like to govern the world through my pupils.

The 1850’s saw the confluence of several thorny political issues in Britain, in particular the questions of how to govern at home (including Ireland), how to govern their colonial subjects - especially in India - and how to select for the most capable men. To cut down an otherwise interesting story, Jowett became a crucial lobbyist during the 1850-54 years which saw the reformation of the Indian civil service (ICS) and the introduction of a public exam to select new candidates for the job. Jowett and Charles Trevelyan pushed for Oxford to become the major source of young men, and worked for the exams to skew towards the classics. As one recent thesis noted:

many famous later-Victorian colonial figures educated at Oxford (especially Jowett’s Balliol), from Charles Henry Pearson and Alfred Milner to Cecil Rhodes and George Curzon, would see themselves as ‘a quasi-platonic set of guardians at home and abroad.’ Clearly then, Kent’s cursory argument that after the Republic was introduced to the Greats curriculum ‘the Noble Lie, with its classic reconciliation of elitism and egalitarianism, became part of the intellectual furniture of the “men of gold” sent out by Jowett’s Balliol to govern the Empire,’ is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In this context and that of the evidence discussed throughout this article, it is unlikely that the Noble Lie, such a potentially useful concept for ruling elites, did not at least have some influence on the Oxford and ICS curriculums.

-Meritocratic Claims, Elitist Intentions: Oxford and the Indian Civil Service Examinations, 1853-55 (2014) Daniel Roberts

These Balliol students, through Jowett’s moulding of the college as a training centre for Anglican-Platonic ‘Guardians’ or ‘benevolent rulers’, certainly came to see themselves in that vein many decades later:

It is the opinion of Philip Mason that in our period the men of the ICS ‘were chosen and trained on Plato’s principles as Guardians who would rule in the light of their own vision of the Good and the Beautiful’. And the Oxford Greats course, with its broad approach and its particular emphasis on philosophy certainly went some way to bringing these principles to life…

…the lifestyle and ethos of Indian civil servants, with their elite sobriquet of ‘the heaven-born’ and their tendency to live apart, not only from the Indian population, but also from other Britons in India, may, in some ways, have resembled those of the Guardians

-The Indian Civil Service, Classical Studies, and an Education in Empire, 1890–1914 (2023) Heather Ellis

As Plato became useful for the expanding British empire and her governance, so the philosopher once again reappeared in Germany, this time during the disruption of the First World War. Winckelmann’s decision to graft Greece onto German culture had been a fork in the road, and the downstream ramifications of Schleiermacher, Hegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Bildung educational philosophy and especially Kant - led to three versions of Plato on the eve of Alfred von Schlieffen’s fateful manoeuvre: Paul Natorp's Platos Ideenlehre, a form of neo-Kantian argument that Plato’s philosophy anticipated modern idealism and scientific epistemology; the pedagogical Plato of the Stefan George circle (which we covered in the last article) and the increasingly political Plato from the brilliant mind of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Wilamowitz for short).

Wilamowitz was one of the most important classical scholars of all time (Prussian, born 1848 - died 1931), publishing works on Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristotle. He ran the still-extant Inscriptiones Graecae project to translate and publish all the known epigraphs and inscriptions across the Hellenic archipelago, as well as famously feuding with Nietzsche after the publication of the latter’s work The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Wilamowitz produced a two-volume work on Plato in 1919, written in German rather than Latin or Greek - a precise, scientific book that nonetheless thinly disguises the author’s own personal identification with Plato, moving between remorse and anger that contemporary scholarship is so dry and bloodless, then claiming Plato as a stymied politician who turned to philosophy as a means to explore his ambitions further. Platon was attacked by members of the George circle, although their differences were not that great. However, Wilamowitz’s personal and psychological Prussian aristocratic lament was far from the only mode in which Plato was put to use during those years. As Jowett had his Balliol pupils, so Wilamowitz had his disciples, one of whom was poised to take his Berlin professorship in 1921.

Werner Jaeger was one of those men, like many great Russian composers, who was born into old, aristocratic Europe and died in the new, democratic United States after the Second World War. A student of Wilamowitz, Jaeger was also a superlative scholar of the Greek world, and also believed (like Stefan George, like his old teacher) that Greece and Plato was the tonic for a society being torn apart by factionalism, ideology and conflict. He went beyond writing angry books though, founding his own movement - Der dritter Humanismus, the Third Humanism - so named the third after the Italian Renaissance and die Goethezeit, the Age of Goethe. This ‘new’ humanism had self-aware ambitions from the very beginning, principally seeking to rear New Germans within an ideal polis through the Platonic framework of paideia. Jaeger was not shy about melding this whole process into the State, an ‘ethic’ of the State - complete with Hegelian undertones - as he clearly said during a 1924 lecture:

Die griechische Staatsethik im Zeitalter des Plato

I would translate this as ‘Greek political spirit/ethic in the age of Plato’. Crucially both Jaeger and Wilamowitz, despite differing in certain aspects of their interpretation, emphasised Plato as a political thinker. The more abstract Neo-Kantian Plato gave way to a Weimar-era Plato who sought to push back the disintegrating forces of modern liberalism, atomisation and strife. This Plato looked for political solutions to cultural disunity - even as blood was flowing on the streets and new forms of art were being birthed, adherents of an older Prusso-German Hellenism hatched plans to shape future souls in the name of the polis.

I don’t want to dwell too long on the Nazi period, the foil of every political article ever - but we should mention that the Weimar Plato was succeeded not by a Third Humanism Plato, but a Third Reich Plato. Stefan George’s circle of thinkers and artists generated at least 26 monographs of Plato during his time, one of which - Kurt Hildebrandt, a doctor and Hellenist - went on to write multiple, idiosyncratic works on Platonic philosophy and modern political revitalisation. In his 1933 book Platon. Der Kampf des Geistes um die Macht (Plato: The Struggle of the Mind/Spirit for Power), Hildebrandt attempted to fuse Plato with Nietzsche, combining a kind of ‘spiritual racism’ and eroticism with the George circle’s intense passion for Plato as a founder, leader and political visionary. The book had a mixed reception even amongst the circle, with its complex, strange arguments triangulated between himself, Nietzsche and Plato:

Callicles represents the Herrenmoral (Master Morality), and some are happy to argue that he shares the same thoughts as Nietzsche. After all, one finds Callicles is a “a man all along.” A bad sign of how Germans treat their great Men! … As it turns out, the best of this Herrenmoral is approved by Socrates-Plato, whereas Callicles, far away from Nietzsche’s mind (Geist), sought Power as mere means to satisfy bestial cravings.

-Hildebrandt 1933, 134

Ultimately the view that the Greeks and Germans shared a special bond, an argument laid out over centuries, combined with the esoteric racial and vitalistic philosophies of Hildebrandt and his friends, Jaeger’s desire to create a new kind of German soul in the fire of Hellenic humanism and Wilamowitz aristo-psychological despair at the state of German modernity all looked like suspicious Nazi nonsense to a thinker like Karl Popper. Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies buried the use of Plato as a political thinker for several generations, even into the present. He assessed Plato’s thought as totalitarian, elitist and a seedbed of dangerous ideologies which pushed for social engineering and class stratification. The dust of the Second World War was not just physical, but the metaphysical destruction of Plato as a serious political and religious thinker. Germany had been under the spell of irrationalism, Hegelianism, Marxism and Platonism, and the results spoke for themselves - no more, thus spoke Popper.

Act Three - There is no God but God, and Plato is his philosopher-king

Al-Farabi and the Ayatollahs

Up until this point we’ve seen some fairly shadowy and minor, not unimportant, but not world altering instances of Platonic philosophy in action. In this section we’re going to briefly trace the history of Plato and Islam, then to see how it all came together in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Some have written that while Christendom always looked to Aristotle for its classical inspiration - the Islamic world looked to Plato. The Abbasid Caliphate (AD 750-1258) inherited an empire with numerous Hellenised minorities, the intellectual firepower of the Sassanian Gondishapur Academy and no rival Academy in the Greek world. From the mid-eighth to the late-tenth century Baghdad became the centre of a huge state-sponsored translation movement, aimed at assimilating Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac and Persian texts into Arabic thought. Very little of Plato was translated, none directly, but what was had no political opponent, since Aristotle’s Politics never arrived in Baghdad. Later Neoplatonic Greek works were better known - and Neoplatonism seemed to fit well into a theological system defined by its insistence on an absolute singularity of divinity: a pure, whole, oneness of being - tawhid or توحيد.

Muslim Neoplatonists like Al-Kindi borrowed from later Greek thought, despite numerous textual errors (Plato arrived through Galen; the so-called ‘Theology of Aristotle’ turned out to be Plotinus, and nobody to this day knows who actually wrote the highly influential Liber de causis - perhaps Proclus, but the text arrived in the West as an Arabic translation of Aristotle, Albertus Magnus decided it was written by a Jewish author named Ibn David). Another supposed Neoplatonist was the Persian Abu Bakr al-Razī, an esteemed physician but sadly a philosopher largely lost to history, his beliefs exist today almost entirely through his enemies’ descriptions of him.

The pivotal figure though is Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi (roughly AD 870 - 950), an Islamic polymath of such power that he became known to posterity as the ‘Second Teacher’, the first being Aristotle. Al-Farabi took the Republic‘s philosopher-king concept and refitted him onto the structure of Islamic thought, producing the idea of a virtuous city ruled by a supreme figure who could combine perfect reason with prophetic insight. Interestingly he never explicitly named Mohammed as an example of this figure, but it became an assumption amongst Islamic scholars that he surely meant God’s last messenger to be the exemplar.

Where al-Farabi managed to build this virtuous city from the accessible-yet-second-hand Plato, another Plato circulated alongside Galen and certainly reached more readers: today he is called the ‘Pseudo-Platonica’, the misattributions, forgeries and mistakes which were more influential than the real deal, including wisdom literature, alchemy and magic. One fantastic example is the 9th century Book of Laws or Kitab al-nawamis:

The reception of the Arabo-Islamic Mediaeval world to The Laws of Plato ‒ the title of one of the later and most complex of Plato’s dialogues ‒ took two very different paths. On one side, the Arabic version or adaptation of Galen’s synopsis of Plato’s Law (Kitāb al-Nawāmīs li-Aflāṭun); on the other, Plato’s Laws became a way to label a certain form of ‘natural magic’ (sīmāʾ) that involves the manipulation of natural substances to obtain mesmerizing special effects.

-Hallucinations and Smoke Screens: The Pseudo-Platonic ‘Laws of Nature’ (Nawāmīs) and Their Transmission (2023) Lucia Raggetti

To be absolutely clear, the Arabic world did not receive any Plato directly. Galen’s summaries and descriptions of Platonic works were the building blocks, along with later Neoplatonic Greek thought - but the Pseudo-Plato took on a life of its own. This Book of Laws likely came from a polytheistic astral cult based in the city of Harran, long associated with magic, Abraham, Marduk, Cyrus and moon worship. The preface of the book contains a falsified lineage, claiming to be a translation of Galen’s Plato by the Arab Nestorian Hunayn al-Ibadi. The book was then anonymously translated into Latin in Spain sometime during the 12th century, circulating under the name The Book of the Cow. The scholar and bishop William of Auvergne noticed in 1220 that the book was not a faithful rendition of Plato, as did the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola - who described it as

full of detestable dreams and nonsense ... no less alien to Plato than these dreadful things are alien to Plato's decency and wisdom

-The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages (2002) Dag Nikolaus Hasse

I emphasise this text only as a good example of the process of Plato’s reception into Islam. The pseudo and occultic Plato became a sage in an ancient line of revealed wisdom alongside Hermes and Pythagoras, gaining the honorific ‘divine Plato’ which fitted him better than it fitted Galen’s dialogues. In the 12th and 13th centuries these two forms of Plato merged. Scholars have described the result as a new ‘Arabic Platonism without Plato’. The Persian mystic Suhrawardi is a clear example: he placed Plato among those blessed with divine illumination, those who had walked the path of inner light - a roster which included Zoroaster and practitioners of Islamic and pre-Islamic esotericism. Suhrawardi was executed by a son of Saladin, Al-Malik, for heresy and blasphemy.

Yet again, as in Europe, esoteric movements found Neoplatonism useful - this time it was the structure which appealed to those occultic and mystical strains of Islam. Since the Neoplatonic cosmos descends from the ‘One’ through Intellect and Soul in graded stages, and access to the truth is graded in the same way - this lends itself easily onto a community organised around initiation and hidden knowledge. Ismaili thinkers from al-Sijistani to al-Kirmani tried to link the cosmic hierarchy to the hierarchy of the imam and his missionaries, and interpreted scripture looking for an inner meaning (batin) that only the initiated could reach. The Brethren of Purity’s (Buyid Dynasty secret society located in Basra) epistles also used the same approach as a course of instruction for their system of anonymous fellowships. Later the mystical philosophy running from Ibn Arabi to Mulla Sadra absorbed the concept of emanation and the ‘perfect human being’ and introduced it into Sufi and Twelver Shi’ist thought.

The arguments over Neoplatonism within Islam aren’t the main focus here - by and large, those attempting to provide a rational, metaphysical account of Islam have fallen back on Neoplatonic thought, even when trying to throw it out (see Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya). Anyone who asserts that God is one, singular, unchanging, everywhere, unlike anything else, and creator of everything - that person must either use the most developed and sophisticated philosophical system available to explain the logical consequences or something else. Neoplatonism offered the most developed vocabulary for holding transcendence and presence together, hence why Aquinas, Maimonides and Avicenna all drew on it independently.

Political Platonism however certainly quietened down as philosophers and scholars worked through internal disputes, then managed the external disaster of the Mongol invasions. After Averroes, few writers ever tried to design a city. Instead, the philosopher-ruler survived as the ideal prince of handbooks and guides, a line that runs through Tusi’s Nasirean Ethics, Davani's Akhlaq-i Nasiri, Kınalızade’s Ahlâk-ı Alâî and others, spread out as they were through Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal polities. Plato provided the foundational archetype of a well-ordered soul and its mirrored well-ordered city, virtues and concepts which merged comfortably with Islam’s external, legalistic sharia vision of the Good.

After the 13th century Neoplatonic ideals and politics became concentrated in the Persianate world. Its Shi’i theology was a natural fit - the Imam mediates between God and the world, and Shi’ism already examined scripture for secret inner meanings. Tusi’s Avicennian philosophy was integrated into Twelver theology and the Sunni world moved on without it. The Safavids made Iran Twelver Shi’i after 1501, building institutional educational networks that ensured Islamic Neoplatonism never faded into obscurity - Sadra was retained in the curriculum well into modernity, something of a fateful decision for the country.

Tehran, 1979. Over a thousand years had passed since Al-Farabi attempted to merge Plato and Islam. Ruhollah Mostafavi Khomeini was just shy of 80 years old, but he was a man who personified in his every action the severity and intellect required to become a marja-e taqlid (a model for imitation) for the Shia world. Khomeini had done his time in the seminary at Qom, emerging with a novel solution to the problem of Shi’ite political power: Twelver Shi’ism holds that the twelfth imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi, is hidden from the faithful until the End Times - requiring Shias to decide for themselves how to relate to earthly authority. For Khomeini it was clear that a millennia of quietism had led the faithful into an intolerable position, one where the Pahlavi Shahs were undermining clerical authority, enfranchising women and redefining what public life looked like in the secular image of the West.

Khomeini was exiled for his outspoken opposition to the Shah. In Najaf he lectured on his solution - wilayat al-fiqh - the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist.

the ruling jurist in the thought of Khomeini mirrors the philosopher-king mystic of the Neoplatonic tradition who achieves the necessary qualifications of rule from his contact with the divine intellect through contemplation and mystical practices. For instance, Vanessa Martin underscores the importance of mystical elements in Khomeini’s political doctrine, and Abbas Amanat claims that Khomeini’s thought has “an unmistakable mystico-philosophical core that was colored by Shi’ite legal trappings.” In the same vein and more forcefully, Hamid Dabashi describes the ruler of Khomeini’s regime as the “philosopher king in the Platonic understanding of the term”

-Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State (2019) Rasoul Namazi

His lectures in exile were compiled into a book called Islamic Government: Jurist's Guardianship (Ḥokūmat-i Eslāmī Wilāyat-i Faqīh). This text was only shared with his inner circle until after the Revolution was secured, Khomeini insisted beforehand that he and his followers were fighting for democratic reform. In reality what Khomeini was building went far beyond reform, or even a simple reactionary theocracy.

When he devised the Islamic Republic of Iran, he constructed something with a distinctly Platonic architecture: a Supreme Leader, the man considered most learned in divine law, who was placed above the ordinary functions of the state, alongside a Guardian Council of jurists who could vet every candidate and scrutinise each proposed law against the ideal. Plato’s philosopher-king was twisted into a real theological and political office. The Nocturnal Council of the Laws, a body of elders who guarded the regime’s foundations, became a true committee with the power to disqualify. Very few if any ancient political philosophers have a claim on shaping a modern state so directly.

Of course, Khomeini’s Platonism was one strand amongst many, which included the Marxist energy to confront and revolt; Islamic modernism’s willingness to reinterpret scripture in the face of the world as it is; Islamic militant ideologies such as Qutbism and Navvab Safavi’s Fada’iyan-e Islam, and global Third Worldism, from Algerian independence to Latin American liberation theology. Scholars have pointed out the intense contradiction within Khomeinism, that the revolutionary spirit of politicised Shi’ite absolute jurism represents a profound break with a thousand years of Shia history - in the name of preventing blasphemous innovations within Islam, and creating a purified, traditional vision of Islamic life in Iran.

Khomeini knew philosophy, and his ideal of Islamic government under the ulama relied heavily on the Platonic notion (probably meant ironically by the original Platonic Socrates of The Republic) of a specially educated “guardian” class led by a “philosopher-king” wise enough to know transcendent truth and able with that knowledge to produce and maintain a perfect government that would safeguard all national and spiritual interests. This was Shiism reduced to a strange (and, as it would turn out, violent) parody of Plato.

-The Shia revival : how conflicts within Islam will shape the future (2006) Vali Nasr

Of all the political movements we’ve seen so far, the impact of Plato in 1970’s Iran (however small relative to the theology) was probably the most profound for world history. Shi’ite and wider Islamic history has been forever changed, geopolitical events such as the horribly brutal Iran-Iraq War, the American invasion of Iraq, the current Iran-American conflict, the Salafi-Wahhabi Saudi axis reaction, the position of Afghanistan and Pakistan-India relations are all testaments to the Ayatollah and his vision.

Postscript

In April 2022 CBS News published an online editorial, aiming to show their readers ‘behind the curtain’ on the Ukraine-Russia War. Their focus was on the Russian writer and thinker Aleksandr Dugin, a figure who slots nicely into the role of Rasputin-Wormtongue-King’s Advisor - a bearded man often called something like ‘Putin’s brain’ or ‘Putin’s philosopher’. Despite the breathless panic of CBS, Dugin is nothing of the sort and would be better described as a marginal esoteric writer with a talent for online self-promotion. Through his dozens and dozens of books Dugin has developed a syncretic philosophy of geopolitics, drawing on names like Evola, Carl Haushofer, Heidegger and Alain de Benoist to build his ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ position - a stance defined in opposition to the Anglo-American Atlanticist world order, as he sees it.

Amongst his list of influences, Dugin counts a French scholar called Henry Corbin (1903-1978). Corbin was a philosopher and theologian who turned to Islamic Neoplatonism and Iranian Shi’ite esotericism as a means of escaping the oppressive materialism of the West, in particular the work of al-Suhrawardi and the Illuminationism of ancient Persia. Dugin has made great use of Corbin’s Neoplatonic thought, re-interpreting and raising it from its original individual perspective to one of geopolitics - especially Corbin’s mundus imaginalis (a world of intermediate imagination) and ‘existential-semantic time’: the former a metaphysical realm between the spiritual and reality, the latter a conceptual description of how civilisations approach time differently. Dugin has used these and other Neoplatonic ideas to help promote and defend his vision of a Russian state which ascends far above the profane West, with ambitions verging on the apocalyptic, intertwined with dreams of a Third Rome, Byzantium, a Neo-Mongolian collective, Orthodox priests blessing tank shells and drones, Islamic Neoplatonism as the ‘Light-Logos’ Apollonian alternative to Western nihilism.

Dugin is indeed a great admirer of Iranian Neoplatonic philosophy, particularly the Illuminationist (isharqi) philosophy of Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191), several of whose works Dugin has translated from Persian (Persian is the only Eastern language he can read fluently)…

… He posits that Iranian civilization, rooted in an Aryan ethos characterized by a metaphysics of light and a struggle against darkness, fundamentally differs from the Semitic civilizations, which include both Arab–Islamic and Judaic traditions. He argues that the Iranians subtly transformed Arab Islam by infusing it with their “solar” Aryan spirit, primarily through the esoteric dimensions of Shi‘ism and Sufism…

… In Iran, the group of intellectuals who express interest in Dugin and see him as a Heideggerian philosopher—including Hojjat al-Islam Abdol Hossain Khosrowpanah and Gholamreza Avani—inherit a much older Heideggerian legacy. Iranian twentieth-century intellectuals like Ahmad Fardid (d. 1994) and Jalal Al-e Ahmad (d. 1969) used Heideggerian categories to coin the influential notion of gharbzadegi (“Westoxication”)…

… Dugin refers to Fardid and his disciple Reza Davani Ardakani, emphasizing how they successfully integrated Heideggerian philosophy into the framework of Shi’i Neoplatonism. He highlights their synthesis in which Heidegger’s concepts of Ereignis (“event of appropriation”) and Der letzte Gott (“the Last God”) were reinterpreted through Shi’i eschatology.

-Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world (2025) Gasimov & Laruelle

Dugin is in some way the perfect end to our story here, not because he embodies a new Ayatollah or Stefan George or Benjamin Jowett, but because his relentless energy for synthesising, lumping and integrating areas of esoteric thought joins together Western and Islamic Neoplatonism, neatly wrapping up where we started. Political Plato has never been as popular or as influential as his philosophical and religious variants, but I hope these three case studies have shed some light on three very different times, places and motivations - Chartrian theology, Calvinist statecraft, imperial management, civil identity and conflict, revolution, social engineering and secret societies - medieval France, early modern and modern England, Imperial to Weimar Germany and contemporary Persia.

Reading List

Kaldas SM. The Cambridge Platonists and Early Modern Philosophy: Inventing the Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge University Press; 2024.

Reydams-Schils, G. Calcidius on Plato's "Timaeus": Greek philosophy, Latin reception, and Christian contexts. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Hedley, D and Hutton, S (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, Springer, 2008

Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Gasimov, K., Laruelle, M. Eurasia and eschatology. Dugin’s antiliberal resonances in the Muslim world. Stud East Eur Thought 78, 377–399, 2026.

Namazi, Rasoul. Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State. Iranian Studies, vol. 52, no. 1-2, 2019.

Gutas, D. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society, London and New York: Routledge, 1998

Das, Aileen R. Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Bonazzi, M. Towards Nazism: On the Invention of Plato’s Political Philosophy. Comparative and Continental Philosophy 12:3, 2020.

Hutton, S. British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2015.

In 1225 Pope Honorius III stood in the cathedral at Sens and addressed the Synod. The target of his ire was the Irish scholar John Scottus Eriugena, and his work Periphyseon, all copies of which were to be tossed into the fire across Christendom on pain of excommunication. Eriugena wasn’t to know this, he died sometime in the 870’s AD, having spent his life pioneering the Carolingian Renaissance at the court of Charlemagne’s grandson Charles the Bald. It might be apocryphal that Eriugena was killed by one of his own pupils at Malmesbury, after spending his latter years at Oxford university - but it is certainly true that Periphyseon was lost until 1681, when the antiquarian Thomas Gale found it amongst the dusty archives of that university’s library. Again, it was immediately sanctioned and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

The secret Germany was a phrase steeped in meaning. Stauffenberg had taken it from the circle around the poet Stefan George, an esoteric brotherhood that schooled its initiates in a vision of spiritual aristocracy, pedagogic devotion and rule by the well-formed and worthy few. The Circle’s reading list was centred around two names: one was Hölderlin, the other was Plato. Peter Hoffmann, the historian of the Stauffenberg brothers, concludes that they understood themselves as heirs to a Platonic state, charged with making the ideal real.

The crime of the Periphyseon, and of Eriugena, was that it presented a brilliantly erudite synthesis of Neoplatonic and Christian thought. While Carolingian theological concerns pointed towards locating a stable orthodoxy, Eriugena was almost alone in north-west Europe in speaking Greek, thus able to import Platonised, mystical philosophy from writers such as Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius. Accused of pantheism, pandeism and “impious novelties” by Pope Honorius III, the book was described in his letter to the heads of monasteries and churches throughout Europe as “teeming with the worms of heretical perversity”.

The regime Stauffenberg died trying to destroy had its own copy of Plato on the shelf. A year earlier, a translation of the Republic had appeared in Germany with a swastika on the cover. German classicists had spent decades recasting Plato from a metaphysician into a political philosopher whose ultimate ruler was an effective Führer of the people. Jaeger’s Paideia sought to ‘form’ human beings through a state pedagogy rooted in Plato and Günther read Plato as a ‘pure-blooded’ Nordic - the ancestor of eugenic state policy. One stated aim was to create a ‘Third Humanism’, the thinking being that after the distance of the Renaissance and the moribund Goethean approach, the Dritte Humanismus could revitalise the classics and create new citizens, moulded in the values of antiquity.

Anyone who dips their toes in philosophy or political theory encounters some version of Plato - the Cave, the Forms, his alien Republic. He is considered the father of European intellectual thought, all else is a footnote as they say. This somewhat neutered vision is at odds though with the actual history of Plato’s ideas as they came down to us. His legacy is complex and multi-layered, and really there are multiple kinds of Plato, each book its own cosmos. The Plato of The Republic in particular has a history of inspiring all kinds of sedition, subversion, utopian plans and conspiracies. It also has a history of bolstering the forces of conservative defense and state power - whatever it is that Plato does to people, it goes further than pushing them in a particular direction. Better to say, I think, that it creates an intensity for whatever they already believed.

The first to explore is Plato’s reputation as a subversive, The Republic as a manual for overturning the established order - hence why insurgents and revolutionaries keep returning to it. This first essay is a gander at some of these, whether they deserve this legacy or not. The second to follow will focus on how Plato was used to shore up existing power, to create real projects which have had a lasting impact over millions of people to this very day, and schemes that defy classification - creating new souls, both radical and elitist.

An Academy for Assassins

Let’s imagine a prestigious university in the current year, a Cambridge or Yale, their philosophy department. Its charismatic and infamous head gives lectures outside in the open air, attracting the best and brightest with a unique style and clarity of vision. Then let’s imagine that a wave of political assassinations across the country and further afield begins to land the institution in a different spotlight, as one after another it is revealed that the assassins themselves were all trained under the same philosopher and justify their actions with his ideas. That’s the situation Plato’s Academy found itself in.

Chion of Heraclea studied under Plato in Athens, soaking up the teaching on virtue and the soul. He went home to Heraclea Pontica and stabbed the tyrant Clearchus to death at a religious festival. His fellow students Python and Heracleides, also Academy men, assassinated Cotys - king of Thrace - and were honoured for their actions in Athens. The ancient sources present these examples as men simply acting on what they had learned, men who understood killing a tyrant as a form of philosophical duty they contracted in the classroom. As an aside the tyranny at Heraclea didn’t collapse - Clearchus was succeeded by his brother, the assassins were ruthlessly hunted down.

Dion of Syracuse was Plato’s friend, his host on the disastrous Sicilian visits, his most devoted disciple. He had taken to heart the Republic‘s conviction that a state should be governed only by those who know the Good, so in 357 BC he attempted to supply Syracuse with just such a government, landing with a mercenary army and taking the city. The Syracusans had expected a liberator, so they couldn’t fail to notice they had swapped one tyrant for another. Dion opened his tenure with the murder of a political rival, then was himself assassinated a few years later. The man who arranged it was an Athenian named Callippus - another member of the Academy.

Zooming back we can see that the Academy had accidentally started a new tradition, one that other schools would continue. By melding intellectualism, an ethical imperative, a sense of entitlement and a potential imagined better future, the Academy produced a new character type - the educated killer who acts on the authority of a book.

The best known of these killers was perhaps Brutus. Although popularly associated with Stoicism, his real allegiance was to the Academy. He studied under Antiochus of Ascalon, who had made it his life’s work to revive Plato’s original teachings. Plutarch says Brutus championed the Academy above the other philosophical schools. He justified the killing of Caesar by libertas, by the memory of the Tarquins, by the ancestral Brutus who had expelled the kings. Like any real flesh-and-blood human being, Brutus was a multitude of things and influenced by many - but to anyone tracing this line from Plato down through the centuries, we have another political assassin closely connected with the Platonic Academy.

Fifteen centuries later the young Florentine Pietro Paolo Boscoli, a republican who had loved Savonarola and hated the restored Medici, joined a ramshackle plot to kill Giuliano and Lorenzo in 1513. The whole squalid affair was a mess, the game given away by a scribbled list of names. Boscoli was arrested and beheaded at the Bargello at dawn alongside his fellow conspirator Agostino Capponi. A bystander named on the same list, Niccolo Machiavelli, was tortured and then released. Boscoli’s last confession was written down by one Luca della Robbia and is easily one of the strangest and most confusing in the history of political murder. Boscoli apparently wanted to die as a Christian, but he found himself tormented and unable to feel God’s grace because his head was too full of Brutus. He had marinated himself so thoroughly in the ancient republican martyrs that on the scaffold he could not swipe them aside and find God, he begged his confessor to help him clear his mind of the pagans so he could meet his death as a believer.

Boscoli was no more a pure, committed Platonist than Brutus was, his heroes were Roman and his tyrannicidal justifications came largely from Thomas Aquinas. The man who actually worked hardest to license the spasms of Renaissance regicide was a Spanish Jesuit called Juan de Mariana. He too argued from scripture and from natural law. He did know his Plato though, and used Plato’s portrait of the tyrant alongside other intellectual streams. Mariana’s 1599 treatise De rege et regis institutione was blamed for the actions of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV of France who stabbed the monarch to death in 1610. Ravaillac was a solitary religious fanatic, but the French authorities pointed to the Platonic-Scholastic works of Mariana, the threat of the Jesuits and on June 8, 1610 the Parlement of Paris issued an official decree condemning De rege. Copies of Mariana’s book were handed over to the public hangman and publicly burned in front of the Parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral, hardly a surprise given the author’s support for the slaying of Henry III and implicated involvement in the regicide of his successor.

Later Plato-inspired or aware works which looked to the murder of a supposed tyrant included: George Buchanan’s 1579 De Jure Regni apud Scotos, which philosophically justified the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots; John Milton’s 1649 tract The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which defended the execution of Charles I - arguing for popular sovereignty, natural human equality and the right to depose or kill tyrants and Algernon Sidney’s political treatise Discourses Concerning Government (1681-1683), which argued that legitimate rulers serve the public good, a text later used by the Crown to convict him of treason following the Rye House Plot of 1683. This line of argument for tyrannicide was broken after 1945, when Karl Popper redefined Plato as part of the soul of fascism, rather than an inspiration for liberty - but we get ahead of ourselves.

Castles In The Sky

Not every reader of the Republic wanted to stab their leaders - many read the text and became inspired to build the ideal city instead, which turns out to be its own very distinctive kind of trouble-making.

The first to try this was Plotinus, the great mystic of the third century, whose entire philosophy pointed away from politics toward the soul’s ascent to the One. Late in his life he persuaded the emperor Gallienus to let him refound a ruined town in Campania as a philosophers’ city, governed by Plato’s laws, to be called Platonopolis. The court intervened and the project sadly crumbled away - even the most otherworldly and dreamy Platonist in history, given a sympathetic emperor and a spare ruin, could not resist one attempt at a city on the hill.

After that the ideal city became a literary touchstone for writers and thinkers of all stripes. Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of Henrician England, imagined an island where private property was abolished, where houses were reassigned by lottery every decade and gold so despised it was made into chamber pots and the chains of slaves. How exactly More came to read Plato’s long-forgotten text shows us how Plato came back to Europe in the first place. The Timaeus had never left, Eriugena had been sharpening his vision of Christian cosmology against these dialogues under the Carolingians. The Republic would have to wait until Petrarch, Salutati, Boccaccio and Dante laid the foundations of Greek literacy in the West, then for Byzantine scholars and pioneers such as Manuel Chrysoloras and the endlessly fascinating Georgios Gemistos Plethon to build the bridge and write the first translations. Gemistos Plethon deserves his own article, a scholar of such brilliance he was described as the reincarnation of Plato himself by his pupil Cardinal Bessarion. He also developed his own highly idiosyncratic form of Zoroastrian-inspired paganism towards the end of his life.

Cardinal Bessarion and another Byzantine intellectual, George of Trebizond, locked horns over how the Christian West should understand Plato, and whether Plato’s or Aristotle’s ethical vision of life was more conducive to the good life in Christ.

Among the acrimonious retorts to which Gemistos’ manuscript gave rise it was not published until 1532, some eighty years after his death - Georgios Trapezuntios’ defense of Aristotle in 1455, Comparationes phylosophorum Aristotelis et Platonis, which in turn elicited Bessarion’s Platonic counteroffensive, created the greatest stir in that close circle of scholars living in Italy. Written in Latin, Trapezuntios’ apologia (though it, too, was published posthumously) reached a larger number of readers than Gemistos’ Greek treatise. It used heavy ad hominem arguments against Plato’s person and derided the hollowness of his rhetoric. Trapezuntios found the Trinity in Aristotle, while he contested Plato’s supposed belief in the immortality of the soul. From the Phaedrus he drew inferences about the indecency of Plato’s love life and then leveled a barrage against the most vulnerable sections of the Republic, which dealt with the role of women and their “prostitution.” The Laws showed Plato corrupting the youth in drunken debauches, rousing their lusts with exercises in the nude in which both sexes participated. Trapezuntios denounced Plato for glorifying sins of the flesh and encouraging gluttony. And he mocked him for trying to preserve his wretched little state with inadequate means: Restricting offspring to two would have led to catastrophic depopulation in the event of plague. Trapezuntios’ tract in large measure determined the subjects around which discussion of the moral and political works of Plato would revolve for many years.

-Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), Frank E. Manuel & Fritzie P. Manuel

To cut a much longer story short, Medici patronage of Greek manuscript sourcing and translation led to Marsilio Ficino producing an authoritative Latin version of Plato’s entire corpus in 1484, Platonis Opera Omnia. Ficino’s Plato stood for over a century as the foundational resource throughout Western Europe, reaching Thomas More despite his own skill in reading and writing ancient Greek. The less savoury aspects of Plato’s vision had to be smoothed over and explained away, but even the Christianised, chaste and ascetic Plato was more radical and inflexible than Aristotle - a thinker who always allowed for human change throughout life and forgave the drives for sex and greed. Aristotle also championed true and loving friendships as foundational for a virtuous polity. More’s 1516 Utopia followed the acceptable Plato line, and became the most important of all European utopian movements with the most impact, not least by gifting the name ‘utopian’.

We need to carefully excise Plato from the wider set of utopian thoughts during the Renaissance and early modern period. More’s vision of a perfect city was certainly inspired in no small part by Plato, but northern Europe was being utterly transformed in the bubbling, boiling tempest that was Protestant utopianism, and this drew on more than ancient Greece. Anabaptists, Zwickau prophets, Batenburgers, millenarian preachers and spontaneous communes, Hutterites, Dissenters and Diggers. Much of this was popular Biblical primitivism in nature, disinclined to glance at a translation of Neoplatonic heresies - but the more elite and learned within the Reformation certainly utilised Plato in some interesting ways. The Protestant and potential founding figure of Rosicrucianism, Johann Valentin Andreae, built his own eternal polis with words, dubbed Christianopolis (1619), a walled city run by the learned. Francis Bacon wrote New Atlantis (1626) in which the land of Bensalem is governed by a college of scientists he called Salomon’s/Solomon’s House. Although inspired by Plato, Bacon’s pioneering experimental natural science and empirical methods dismissed the philosopher’s metaphysics, but kept the institutional shell - the founders of the Royal Society partially adopted Salomon’s House as their model, Plato had leapt off the pages into the real world.

The man who took it the furthest however was Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar in Calabria who knew his Plato and detested Aristotle. Campanella was an extraordinary character, a child prodigy of immense intellectual ability and a complete inability to fall in line with the conformities of his day. Plagued by doubts and despair over the state of his church, he gained admirers in some circles but was dogged by accusations of atheism and heresy all his life. In 1599 Campanella organised an armed conspiracy to overthrow Spanish rule in Stilo and install a communitarian Christian society, in line with the apocalyptic Joachim of Fiore. The plot was betrayed and Campanella was tortured, interrogated and only narrowly escaped execution by convincing his interrogators he was insane, and spent 27 years in Neapolitan dungeons. He wrote The City of the Sun during his imprisonment, a highly detailed vision of his ideal city, drawing from More and Plato.

The Secret Circles

We’ve seen Plato’s attraction to idealistic assassins and intellectual utopians, but Plato also draws those who prefer silence and secrecy. This strand of his influence runs underground, through brotherhoods and initiates and doctrines held in reserve, some of which surely history has never come to know.

We return to Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine scholar who helped reintroduce Plato to Western Europe and later abandoned Christianity altogether. His vision of the imperial world required a refreshment from the ancients, such as the Byzantine empire restructuring itself as a Hellenic cultural power - complete with Helots, a barter system and native-born military power. Later he created his Nomoi or Book of Laws proposing to build a new society on Plato’s principles. This new society would revert to a revived pagan polytheism, complete with liturgy and a reformed calendar. He kept the book secret, shared only with his inner circle, knowing full well that advancing the cause of Zeus would cost him everything. When he died and the manuscript surfaced, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios Scholarios, read enough to grasp what it was and burned it. We only know of its existence because some fragments survived, including an index and refutations. Gemistos’ philosophy was too idiosyncratic to flesh out here, readers are encouraged to find out for themselves, the book included references and syntheses of Zoroastrianism, Stoicism, the Olympian gods, reincarnation and the spiritual orderliness of bees.

Another literary-political secret circle was founded centuries later around the poet Stefan George, whose circle of disciples in early twentieth-century Germany cultivated an esoteric cult of spiritual aristocracy and pedagogic devotion. As with Plethon, Plato was near the heart of the project. They spoke of a ‘secret Germany’, the hidden nobility of the worthy few throughout time which the circle felt was their heritage to protect and sentiment to carry forward. The brotherhood’s private Platonic ideal produced a would-be assassin, many extremely competent intellectuals and a legacy of works covering Shakespeare, Frederick II, Winckelman and many others.

A different version played out in America, where the emigrant philosopher Leo Strauss taught his graduate students that the great texts were written on two levels, an exoteric surface for the public and an esoteric teaching for the few. His views on Plato’s Republic were nuanced, arguing for a subtle approach when approaching strange or bizarre sounding ideas - that the truths Plato was trying to transmit came wrapped in irony, playfulness and obfuscation. Strauss appeared to some as endorsing the ‘noble lie’ of Plato (a lie or myth/fantasy that elites use to keep their society functioning harmoniously), introducing institutional paranoia and mistrust amongst commentators. This became increasingly prominent as some of his students, and even their students, ended up in and around government. The legacy of Strauss’ influence has led to numerous waves of panic: in 1985 M.F. Burnyeat described him as a ‘Sphinx without a secret’ , in Peter Minowitz’s 2009 book Strassophobia, he opens with just some of the choice quotes about how the American ‘thinking’ class received his work:

Was he an “obscurantist authoritarian” (Sidney Blumenthal) who conveys “a pervasive and obfuscatory theoretical dogmatism” (Richard Wolin) that exudes “German windbaggery” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)? An “utterly mad historian of political thought” who unleashed “paranoid theories of textual interpretation” upon the academic world (Robert Paul Wolff)? The “éminence grise” who inspired neoconservatives to “forfeit no deceit, no calumny, no subterfuge” in opposing “every sign of postcolonial political autonomy” in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East (Stanley Aronowitz)? A “sworn enemy of freedom and democracy” who dwelled in “the most fearful depths of depravity” and promoted the “fascistic glorification of death and violence” (Shadia Drury)? A “right wing fundamentalist seeking to undermine liberal freedoms in the U.S. and instigate an old world ‘war culture’ at the core of U.S. foreign policy” (Jim George)? Or an enthusiast for acquisitiveness who believed that “unlimited appropriation without concern for the needs of others is true charity” and who opposed “any restraint on individual liberty” (Will Hutton)? A fanatical elitist who declared that “the entire Western world” (except for himself) was “depraved and diseased” and that the lives of most people are “utterly valueless and unjustifiable” unless they serve to “make philosophers more comfortable and secure” (Stephen Holmes)? An ex-Trotskyite devotee of “Jewish Bolshevism” (David Duke) who insisted that “religion is nothing more than a lie that ‘breeds deference to the ruling class’” (David Luban)? Or a believer who “viewed the status quo as an expression of divine will” (Brent Staples)

Although fear of Strauss’ web of thought reached a dramatic peak during the G.W Bush administration and the Iraq War, with its murky aims and objectives and the documented circle of ‘neo-conservative’ players around the Presidency, it has yet to die down: in July of this year, the online magazine UnHerd ran a piece entitled The deep-state cult of Leo Strauss: The esoteric philosopher has powerful disciples. The truth here might simply be that, in any relatively open liberal society, frank discussion of the noble lie and esoteric politics breeds conspiratorial thinking.

The most famous Platonic brotherhood of all is arguably the Florentine Platonic Academy, certainly one of the most contested and mysterious. If there’s one family guaranteed to provoke conspiracy and speculation, it’s the Medici. When Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the Medici Bank in 1397 he had no way of knowing his son, Cosimo de’ Medici, would go on to patronise some of the most important works of the entire Renaissance. Cosimo spent a fortune commissioning artists and scholars, including Donatello; Fra Angelico; Filippo Lippi; Andrea del Castagno; Benozzo Gozzoli; Filippo Brunelleschi; Michelozzo di Bartolomeo; Niccolò Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini. His funding and oversight of the first public library, at San Marco, housing Niccoli’s vast collection of humanist and classical works, was a landmark achievement for the era - giving new scholars and intellectuals access to ancient works. It seems strange today, to imagine the ultra-wealthy financing projects such as the translation of Roman and Greek texts, but these were the fuel for the furnace of the Renaissance. Amongst the developments we take for granted are listed new styles of architecture, poetry, painting, sculpture, the creation of opera, commedia dell’arte, humanism, naturalism, the man-of-genius, new forms of scientific knowledge, engineering and medicine - to name but a few.

One of Cosimo’s investments was in a young scholar named Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Ficino, as we’ve already seen, went on to produce the first complete translation of Plato - but he also gathered around himself and Cosimo an informal group of immense power. Peering into the murky disputed world of Ficino and Cosimo is a challenge, some say they re-founded the Platonic Academy, while others insist this was a loose assembly of friends and scholars who read together. It seems Ficino’s love for Plato went beyond the normal bounds of curiosity however:

The passages from these authors illustrate Ficino’s growing interest in Plato and the Platonists. Even where, as in the tract to Michele Mercati of ca. 1455, he relied on Aristotelian categories, he described the studies as those “which Plato ordered.” His enthusiasm for Plato was now great—too great, as we said in the last chapter, for his scholastic mentor and a friend of Lorenzo Pisano, the Florentine cleric Antonio degli Agli. In Agli’s De mystica statera of about 1455 (or a few years later), Agli warns Ficino to adhere to the “mystical balance” of divine law and to “leave Plato and others of his sort” behind…

… Too often, Agli wrote, men seek after the beauty of the world and not that of their own soul. For if you, “Marsilio,” could only perceive that “you were born for greater and more difficult undertakings,” you would then strain to become and be recognized as a “son of God,” not a “Platonist.” And if you do not step back, with Plato you will be hurled “into outer darkness.” Through this world ruled by desire, passion, and love, Ficino looked beyond these theological and scholastic admonitions toward the “Platonic” and philosophical truths. And he would use philosophical guides wherever he found them. (If you are going to quote Plato to me, Agli told Ficino, you may as well quote Epicurus and Brahmins! )

-The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (1988) Arthur M. Field

The historian James Hankins has since argued that there was no Platonic Academy as an institution, no membership, no formal academy at all - only Ficino and his shifting group of contacts and acquaintances:

We can now summarize briefly the results of this inquiry. First, Ficino’s “academy” was not a “lieta brigata di platonici,” nor a “libera societa di eruditi,” nor again a “Platonic confraternity” meeting at Careggi under the patronage of the Medici. It did not include among its membership all the leading philosophers and literary men of Florence. On the most plausible interpretation of the contemporary evidence, his “academy” was simply a private gymnasium loosely associated with the studio, similar in kind to the private gymnasia run by Giorgio Antonio Vespucci or Ugolino Verino…

… Second, there is no compelling reason to qualify Ficino’s academy as a “Platonic” academy. No contemporary source does so. And indeed, one would not expect a private gymnasium to limit itself to readings of Platonic philosophy, though such readings certainly took place. In fact, the most detailed portrait we have of Ficino’s gymnasium shows it engaged in rhetorical practice on a subject having nothing to do with Platonism…

…Third, Ficino’s gymnasium was not a creation of Medici patronage, and no member of the Medici family was ever part of it. Neither Cosimo nor Lorenzo is ever, to my knowledge, described as an “academic” in Ficino’s works or other contemporary sources. To be sure, the Medici were the chief, if not the exclusive, patrons of Ficino’s “academy,” if that word is taken in the sense of “translations of Plato and the platonici.”

-The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence (1991) James Hankins

In a way the swirling currents around the Medici and other wealthy patrons during the Renaissance are far more interesting and colourful than clear-cut reinventions of ancient forms. These men did not aim to just recreate the past, which would have little value in a world of popes and cardinals and condotierri and Byzantine scholars fleeing their legendary city. What they took from their studies of Neoplatonic, Stoic, Epicurean thought served them in the present as much it satisfied their restless intellects. For those who engaged in any extended study of Plato, to be remembered to history with overtones of secrecy, brotherhoods, mystique seems fitting. In reality Ficino, like many artists and thinkers, lived at the caprices of fortuna - his extended network of fellow literary men was a liability as much as a blessing, as when the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 put him within several degrees of connection to the assassins. What could be more in the spirit of Plato’s afterlife than a man of genius creating a mythical Platonic academy, translating the philosopher’s ancient works, receiving money from some and esoteric Hermetic insights from others, ultimately being shunned by his patron for his links to a classical republican-tyrannicide conspiracy?

The next instalment of this history will cover real-world scenarios where Plato’s influence can be directly felt, along with the inverse use of his thought - where defenders of authority and power instrumentalised Plato to bolster and stabilise. I’m also tempted to do a deep dive into the very strange subject of how the Royal Society came to be founded, we’ll see how well these essays are received.

The volcanic haze went south, and by late June it lay across Europe - a dry unpleasant fog that burned the eyes and lungs of anyone working outdoors. Gilbert White in Hampshire called it unlike anything within the memory of man. Labourers went on working through the harvest and collapsed in the fields, Britain’s dead soared to perhaps twenty-three thousand. In a garden at Passy, working on the treaty that would end the American war, Benjamin Franklin looked at the fog and inferred it was the work of a volcano, in Iceland, and that a bitter winter was going to follow.

The Chesapeake froze up to its mouth, ice ran a hundred miles into the Gulf of Mexico. Alaskan tree rings dropped four standard deviations below their mean, and the Kauwerak remembered it as the summer that never arrived. Unfortunately 1783 was also an El Niño year that paired with a negative North Atlantic Oscillation. The same year also saw the Nile failing to rise. Volney, a friend of Franklin’s, recorded that much of the famous Egyptian farmland went to weed for lack of water and want of seed - the seed had been eaten. By January 1785 a sixth of the valley was dead or had fled.

India and Japan were already in dire straits before the fissure opened. The Chalisa famine had emptied the Doab, with whole villages abandoned as people simply walked off the land. Eleven million people had died over the past two years, while the East India Company looked to Bengal, which had already lost a third of its people to hunger over a decade earlier. In Tōhoku the rice yield had been progressively worse for years. Mt Iwaki then erupted in April, then Mt Asama in August, producing massive pyroclastic flows and dropping ash as far as Edo. The villagers in Tsuguru ate weeds, then straw, then each other - ultimately losing near half its people. Sugita Genpaku, the physician who revolutionised Japanese medicine by translating a Dutch anatomy book, estimated the national dead at twenty thousand - modern estimations put the full toll of the Great Tenmei Famine at near one million, when the handmaiden of all famines is accounted for, the spread of disease.

None of these starving farmers and labourers could have known anything about each other. The Icelander eating his poisoned sheep, the Egyptian watching the dying river, the family fleeing their land in the Doab, the Tsugaru household contemplating the ultimate taboo. Each catastrophe was local, explicable by God or the shogun or the Company, or maybe it was just bad luck.

For nearly all of human history, eternal cyclical hunger was the baseline condition of life. Bottlenecks, episodes of cannibalism, cave paintings of animals that vanished from the fossil record. Today we are aware of this, in a sense, but we cannot empathise or feel the same bond since we are blessed with the most anomalous of circumstances, abundance of all things. We are wired as animals to be driven by food, finding food, a preference for the rare high calorie gifts. We are the first civilisation to have solved the persistent problem of daily, annual, seasonal hunger. Thanks to the British Agricultural Revolution, the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process, Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat and an unfathomably sophisticated set of global supply chains - most people in most places are not starving.

A consequence of this is our unfamiliarity with true, ravenous hunger. We no longer know the internal feeling, and whilst we might occasionally miss a meal, or even be unfortunate enough to slide into homelessness or worse, we do not experience the collective sensation of seeing our crops fail, livestock die and water run dry. We do not have to make the choice of eating the seed corn, an idiom passed down to us as the ultimate choice to sacrifice the future for the present. We also don’t know the fear of starvation, of what it will do to a person, or a society. When it grips hard, men will do anything for a morsel, and all bonds of human fellowship and custom evaporate, leaving just man the animal.

What we do have though is unique, access to all available information about famines and hunger throughout the world, and we should read it and learn from it. First-person testimony from these famines, sieges, droughts, wars and even controlled experiments all point towards the same end: sustained hunger dismantles personhood itself, collapsing all thought, all morality, memory, sexuality and familial feeling down to one absolute overwhelming drive, before it finally kills.

The well-fed have always found the sight of the starving to be utterly unbearable, and observers across cultures and times describe how only a thin veneer separates the full from the dying. Civilisation can only be built and maintained within this narrow margin. Many cultures that had to live with threat of starvation left us a fossil record of myth and legend, warnings and stories such as the Wendigo, Erysichthon, hungry ghosts - insatiable beings that encode both the phenomenology of crazed hunger and the extreme danger a starving person poses to everyone around them.

The question ‘what does it feel like to starve’ is hard to answer fully, but the single most valuable body of evidence is the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. This was conducted at the University of Minnesota between November 1944 and December 1945 by the physiologist Ancel Keys (designer of the army K-ration) and published in 1950 as the two-volume The Biology of Human Starvation. Thirty-six healthy male conscientious objectors, screened to exclude anyone with prior mental illness or food problems, were fed roughly 1,570 calories a day, divided between breakfast and lunch, during the 24-week semi-starvation phase, about half their needs, on a diet meant to imitate war-torn Europe (potatoes, turnips, macaroni, dark bread). On top of this they walked roughly 22 miles a week.

These men were the opposite of desperate when they arrived at the university. All fit and healthy, morally idealistic, many of them religiously minded, all of them committed to the experiment, an experiment which had a fixed finish point. Despite these factors, they still came apart psychologically. Keys’s team coined the term ‘semi-starvation neurosis’ to describe what they saw, both during the hunger period and the rehabilitation period. On the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the men showed marked increases in depression, hysteria, hypochondriasis. Of the men who completed the study (several were dismissed for sneaking food), five developed symptoms beyond semi-starvation neurosis, for two the response bordered on psychosis - one, identified as Watkins, developed an MMPI profile resembling schizoaffective psychosis before the halfway point.

Their testimony is still fascinating to read today. Harold Blickenstaff, interviewed decades later:

Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life... if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.

Carlyle Frederick collected nearly 100 cookbooks by the end of the experiment. Men dawdled up to two hours over a meal they could have scoffed in minutes, they diluted food to make it feel like more, held each bite in the mouth, licked their plates, used salt and spices to excess and drank a lot of water. Participant Max Kampelman noted:

The sex drive disappeared. There was none.

Interest in friends turned into irritation, Frederick recalled that

Little things that wouldn’t bother me before or after would really make me upset.

Samuel Legg described a troubling moment of pure irrationality watching a boy cycle home to supper:

I was walking along … [with my] buddy … it was deep into the semistarvation, and we were tired … we were standing at a corner waiting for a light or something, and a kid came along on a bicycle, and he was really moving, pumping away … And I looked at him and said, “Wow, look at that boy. He's really whizzing.” And then I said to myself, “I know where he's going. He's going home for supper. And I'm not.” And then for a very brief, I hope it was brief, moment … I suddenly hated the boy … I hate at this point to tell you this, because it doesn't speak very well for me. But I remember … with … horror that I could feel such a thing. So utterly irrational, but there it was. And you ask an experience that I remember; I sure remember that. That was rough.

During the rehabilitation phase Legg chopped off three of his own fingers with an axe while cutting wood. When asked whether he did it on purpose, he said he wasn’t sure if he lost focus, or if part of his mind wanted to escape. Though he was technically in rehabilitation, Legg’s cohort were initially given just 400 additional calories a day. The study leader, Keys, testified to the US government that any civilisational level plan of implementing democracy and such after the war would rely first on feeding the population sufficient food. Ultimately he concluded, starving people don’t care about wider issues like society, politics or even friends and family.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this experimental record matches the testimony from real catastrophes. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (Sult, 1890), drawn from his own destitution in Kristiania (Oslo), portrays his starving mind complete with euphorias, paranoia, dissociation. At one point the narrator, unable to sleep, sucks his own finger and is suddenly seized by the overwhelming impulse to bite it off.

George Orwell actually went hungry for the writing of Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), describing the feelings of dissociation and fatigue:

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish, or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and luke-wann water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger

He noted that hunger dissolves the normal sensations of time, punctuality and the pressures of the future, preferring to simply not do anything right now - too much effort to worry about tomorrow. His character Boris also delivers the classic line

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

In Leningrad under siege (1941-44), the human response was the same. From November 1941 to February 1942, the city’s daily bread ration collapsed to just 4.4oz per person. But it was just the beginning, as this ‘bread’ was cut with more and more filler materials - sawdust, powdered wood, cellulose - leaving many surviving on just 300 calories a day. Leningrad’s suffering was recorded through its diarists, who contradicted the medical knowledge of the day by writing matter-of-factly about ‘hunger psychosis’

The siege diarists wielded “hunger psychosis” liberally as though it was a common affliction. Even young children, the journals suggest, learned to identify and diagnose it… she meticulously chronicled her father’s crippling delusions, which also included— like Sedel’nikova’s— images of devouring oneself:

He has been diagnosed with Stage III distrofia, the cachectic kind (I don’t know what that means, but they say that it is the worst kind of distrofia, from which it is impossible to recover, even through healthy food). He is really just terrible. He is completely withered, his face is yellow and puffy, and his eyes are glazed. Above all, he is completely changed through and through; he has become deranged. All day he lies around [. . .] indifferent to every thing. Or he begins to cry or scream from hunger and says that he will eat kindling, that he is prepared to eat himself. His voice rings in my ears, “Give me something to chew on! Give me something to chew on!” [. . .] Sometimes he starts saying all sorts of absurd things: “Where is my body? I don’t know what happened to me. I don’t understand what’s going on with me. Where is my body?” It is difficult and also irritating to look at him. This is not Papa, it is simply not him— this is a dirty, lice infested, half- insane person, almost not even a person.

-The War Within - Diaries From the Siege of Leningrad (2017) Alexis Peri

The Siege of Leningrad lasted for an agonising two years, four months and nineteen days, and caused the death of over a million Soviet citizens. The majority perished from starvation and disease, aided by freezing temperatures and relentless bombardment. It remains the most destructive and likely the most lethal city siege in human history, and suppression of its worst details by Soviet authorities has meant we are still learning of the terrible conditions Leningraders had to endure.

In the Warsaw Ghetto, a group of Jewish physicians led by the dermatologist Izrael Milejkowski studied starvation clinically even while they were starving themselves. When the Ghetto was liquidated, the doctors managed to collate and preserve their work, dubbed the ‘Hunger Disease’ studies, which was later smuggled out and published. Emil Apfelbaum, one of the imprisoned doctors, wrote:

The organism which is destroyed by prolonged hunger is like a candle which burns out: life disappears gradually without a shock to the naked eye.

This study remains invaluable, since it is impossible to replicate the conditions of the Ghetto under any experimental standards. The detailed and meticulous records the doctors made revealed the straightforwardly brutal pattern of long-term caloric deficit on the human body - first the metabolic system adapts and slows down, bringing activity to a near halt to conserve energy. The body burns through its glycogen stores (liver, muscles), then its fat reserves, finally it begins stripping protein from the organs themselves. The damage to the circulatory system was lethal if starvation had gone on too long - weakened capillaries and tissues leaked fluids, causing edemas and dropping blood pressure, the heart muscle itself degraded for fuel. The doctors were able to show that re-feeding a starving person required careful evaluation beforehand, that loading food into someone with a compromised heart and organ damage would quickly overwhelm and kill them.

A recurrent theme across cases of famines and sieges is that hunger steadily dismantles the moral person, then it kills the biological one. Chroniclers of the Great Famine of 1315-1317 in northern Europe described this sequence thus: first the slaughter of draft animals, then the eating of the seed grain, next leather and shoes, the reported abandonment of children and finally the troubled accounts of cannibalism and grave-robbing. The city of Bristol’s civic chronicle for 1315 recorded

a great Famine of Dearth with such mortality that the living could scarce suffice to bury the dead, horse flesh and dogs flesh was accounted good meat, and some eat their own children. The thieves that were in Prison did pluck and tear in pieces, such as were newly put into prison and devoured them half alive

-Bristol Archives transcription, manuscript 09594/1

The dissolution of shame is a frequently noted marker of extended hunger. Josephus, an eyewitness of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, wrote that

It was now a miserable case, and a sight that would justly bring tears into our eyes… the famine was too hard for all other passions: and it is destructive to nothing so much as to modesty; for what was otherwise worthy of reverence, was in this case despised. Insomuch that children pulled the very morsels that their fathers were eating out of their very mouths: and, what was still more to be pitied, so did the mothers do as to their infants. And when those that were most dear were perishing under their hands, they were not ashamed to take from them the very last drops that might preserve their lives. … when they saw any house shut up, this was to them a signal that the people within had gotten some food. Whereupon they brake open the doors, and ran in, and took pieces of what they were eating almost up out of their very throats, and this by force. The old men, who held their food fast, were beaten: and if the women hid what they had within their hands, their hair was torn for so doing… they lifted up children from the ground, as they hung upon the morsels they had gotten, and shook them down upon the floor.

His account of Mary of Bethezuba, a well-born woman driven by starvation to roast and eat her own infant became infamous across later Christendom. The public nature of her act, offering to share her ‘food’ with the combatants, shamed the Jewish insurgents - many of whom had robbed and stolen food from their own people during the siege.

The pattern repeats itself in every modern famine. In the Holodomor (Ukraine, 1932-33), survivors describe swollen bodies in the streets, the disappearance of dogs and cats, people eating grass, tree bark, acorns, earthworms, mice and cannibalism.

“One old woman ate her child,” Mariia reveals. “The woman was old, but she did eat her baby. That’s how it was in 1933. It stays forever with you, it is engraved in my mind forever. That woman survived, but she didn’t live long. Her niece took the woman to her house and reproached her: ‘You did eat your child’”

-Account of Mariia Andriivna Tilna, Holodomor Museum Archives

In the Great Leap Forward famine (China, 1959-61), Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone documented villages stripped of bark, people eating soil and seeds sifted from animal dung. Cannibalism was reportedly widespread, human corpses rotting where they fell since the cats and dogs and available wildlife had already been eaten. Yang concluded that at least 36 million people starved to death, other journalists and researchers have estimated higher.

Many cultures exposed to recurrent starvation distilled the experience into figures of terror, supernatural horror and warning - insatiable, ravenous beings. These monsters encode both the phenomenology of an endless hunger and the social danger a starving person poses to family and neighbours.

An obvious example is the Wendigo/Windigo of the northern Algonquian peoples - the Ojibwe, Cree, Innu etc. Here in the brutal forests of North America winter starvation was an annual killer and the Wendigo is described almost like a mythic transcription of reality. The monster is emaciated, gaunt, with a heart made of ice, perpetually ravenous but eating can never satisfy it. Some say it grows in bulk as it eats, remaining forever as starved as before. The Wendigo is not truly a predator from outside the band, although it acts like one. It was someone previously inside the group - a hunting partner, a parent, a child, then hollowed out by a bitter winter, forced to the eating of human flesh. Man’s warmth is primate solidarity, the Wendigo is a lesson that hunger can undo even this, breaking ties with a heart of ice. In societies where food-sharing is a foundational moral institution and survival necessity, an insatiable eater is a dangerous defector. Someone who eats alone, eats more than their share, even eats their own - this is a social monstrosity - but a monstrosity which lurks in everyone. Under the right conditions, anyone could become that defector, anyone could turn on their loved ones, driven out of their minds and conscience with hunger.

Ancient Greek tradition has its own version in Erysichthon of Thessaly. He foolishly cuts down the sacred grove of Demeter and the goddess sends a mountain nymph to summon Limos, the personification of hunger. Limos appears as a gaunt woman trapped in a frozen wasteland, clawing at dying grass with her nails and teeth. Limos (or Fames in the Roman tradition) appears to the sleeping Erysichthon and breathes herself into his veins. He wakes ravenous and begins to eats without end, consuming his whole estate, selling his own daughter for food. With nothing else left, he then devours his own body limb by limb. Self-consumption as the brutal final act of insatiable hunger is not unique to the Greeks, the same idea was reached by the Chinese, depicted by the bronze masks/faces known as taotie (饕餮). Tradition holds that such a creature, inflicted with ceaseless gluttony, must eat its own body until only the head remains.

The other well known monster is the hungry ghost: the Indian preta, the Japanese gaki, the Chinese egui, well described in Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Taosim. These beings from the realms of endless desire are sometimes depicted with a vast, swollen belly, a mouth or throat no wider than a needle, tormented by a bottomless appetite. Frequently the unhappy fate of the greedy and the miserly, those who in life hoarded food or refused to share. An entire ritual calendar exists just to relieve them, such as the Obon festival and the segaki rites of feeding the hungry ghosts. We must share food, lest we too one day suffer the same fate.

The Finnish famine of 1866-68, suuret nälkävuodet, the ‘great hunger years’ deserves to be better known as the last major famine of natural causes in Europe (along with the parallel Swedish famine of 1867-69). Nearly 10% of Finland’s population perished, some 270,000 souls over three years as the weather seemed to actively turn against the people. The mascot of that famine is pettuleipä, bark bread, made from the inner cambium layer of Scots pine. This material is harvested in spring when its nutrient content peaks, then dried, roasted to drive off the worst of the resins, pounded to dust and mixed with whatever rye flour there is to hand. Bark bread had been eaten during Finland’s Great Famine of the 1690’s and it was a regular food for the nomadic Sami. But in the 1860’s it became the taste of national catastrophe - a bread that does not rise and barely holds together, made from a tree. Three surviving pieces of it can be seen in the Helsinki university museum, preserved by one Dr von Collan. Today one can find many artisan sourdough breads on sale which incorporate acorn, birch and pine bark - traditional famine foods turned flavour curiosity.

The list of famine foods across the whole miserable record is itself a testimony to the ladder of necessity as hunger begins and then continues. In medieval Europe we know of roots, grasses, nuts, bark, then dogs, cats, leather hides and shoes, dirt and dung, then finally the dead. The Irish record adds seaweed (dulse, Irish moss) nettles, wild mustard, sorrel and donkeys (the ‘Donkey Aters’ of Skibbereen). In Leningrad they ate bark, glue taken from wallpaper, sawdust and boiled leather. The staff and researchers at Ivan Pavlov’s famous Physiological Institute turned on his dogs, who were all eaten during the siege. Incredibly the scientists in charge of the Soviet Pavlovsk Experimental Station remained committed to protecting the thousands of rare tubers and grain seeds in their gene bank collections, dying of starvation rather than consuming the precious plants.

What counts as an initial famine food is determined by culture. Human societies never eat everything they can find when times are good, but use complex rules of taboos, status, gender, age and religion to demarcate what should and should not be eaten and when. Fresh roadkill is often perfectly safe to eat, but it would not be considered a polite food to serve guests or bring to the office for lunch. When famine or war hits, one of the first thresholds to be passed is the cultural gate, followed by the unspoken proscriptions on zoo animals, pets, wildlife, insects and vermin, then barely edible plants such as flowers and sycamore seeds, other materials such as cattle feed, then the craft supplies of glue, pulp, engine lubricant, machine oil, paint, thatch, pottery clay and sawdust - to name just a few. The Dutch Hongerwinter famine of 1944-45 is well known for people turning to tulip bulbs for survival. Medical research in celiac disease before, during and after the Dutch famine is interesting to read about, as is work done on the Dutch famine birth cohort, which tracked epigenetic and health changes to children who were in the womb during that winter period.

What people will eat during extended times of hunger shows clearly how individual and collective social behaviours are stripped away, bit by bit, as norms and expectations, ethical obligations, kinship bonds progressively fail in the face of caloric deprivation. Likewise what people will do fir sustenance follows a similar course - selling possessions and heirlooms, prostitution, begging, stealing and robbery, selling children or oneself into bondage or slavery, performing degrading and humiliating acts or types of labour, selling one’s organs, assault, murder and cannibalism. For observers, witnessing this kind of collapse in dignity and familial ties is deeply disturbing and troubling. Man the sapien, reduced to Man the animal, the beast. Such a creature has no loyalty to the polis, city, community, village, tribe or nation, they cannot be expected to hold the line in a battle, nor keep the gates shut against the enemy. History records the many sad fates of besieged civilians: the 1204 siege of English-held Château Gaillard by Philip II of France saw non-combatants expelled from the castle as ‘useless mouths’ and prevented from crossing French lines, effectively trapping them without food in no-man’s land; the mind-boggling story of General Zhang Xun and the 757 Siege of Suiyang, where the civilian population was eaten by defending troops in order to maintain their resolve; Josephus recorded how the Romans encircling Jerusalem would torture and crucify any who escaped from the city or threw themselves on Roman mercy

the severity of the famine made them bold in thus going out.. after they had fought, they thought it too late to make any supplications for mercy. So they were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died; and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them; while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay some days they caught more. Yet it did not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way; and to set a guard over so many he saw would be to make such as guarded them useless to him. The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another to the crosses, by way of jest. When their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses; and crosses wanting for the bodies.

-The Jewish War, Bk V Ch 11, Flavius Josephus

For the whole of the Pleistocene survival depended on the fluctuating success of hunting, fishing and gathering. No doubt many times were good, and modern hunter-gatherers show us how their knowledge of their environment and seasonal changes create great breadth of food redundancies and reserves. However, natural selection certainly seems to have favoured the traits we call disorders of abundance in modernity: incredibly efficient fat storage to fuel a metabolically expensive brain, mechanisms for overeating, frequent eating, eating in the absence of need. These are adaptive in a world of feast-and-famine, but hazardous in today’s world of reliable supply. It stands to reason that our ancestors were not starving every day, but were biologically driven to eat as much as possible when food was available. Herbivorous grazers eat constantly, but grass is appallingly low in nutrition, so their appetite is justified. Rats maintain their body weight on standard rodent food, but become rapidly obese on high-calorie foods. Labradors and humans may share a genetic mutation which blunts appetite suppression, leading to constant and habitual eating, despite being physically full.

We can also tell from the opposite lens how difficult it is for human beings to control their appetites when confronted with food, especially highly palatable and sugary, salty, fatty foods. If left alone in a room with a table full of pizza, chips, desserts and the like, most people will eventually give in and eat some. Controlling one’s appetite is a traditional test of self-control, self-discipline, managing impulses and cravings. To be on a diet, to fast, to go on extended fasts - these are markers of willpower. Willpower can be aided by social reinforcement, status, rewards, fear of stigma and punishment, but ultimately controlling one’s intake of food - whatever the regime - demonstrates the inbuilt drive human primates have toward feasting.

A partial timeline of famines and starvation

A full list of human famine would be impossible, even a partial list would take a lifetime. I’ve selected a sample from across the span of history and geography, causes and results. Famines are rarely studied relative to war or other forms of mass mortality, and yet the figures reveal the vast scale of starvation, interlinked with conflict, disease, climate, weather, governance and sheer misfortune.

Ancient and medieval

1. Ancient Egyptian famine of 2180 - 2130 BC. Severe drought led to crop failures, starvation recorded on Ankhtifi’s tomb, likely the earliest famine testimony. End of the Old Kingdom, Upper Egypt was so hungry that people likely ate their own children. Death toll unknown.

2. Volcanic Winter of 536. Northern Hemisphere. A dust veil caused the coldest decade in two millennia, crop failure recorded in Byzantium, Ireland, Scandinavia and China. Plague of Justinian breaks out. Death toll unknown, estimated in the millions.

3. The Year of Ashes (Am al-Ramada) AD 638 - 639. Arabia. A 9-month drought leading to widespread famine, during which Rashidun Caliph Umar ibn al-Khittab suspended the Quranic penalty for theft, arguing that a starving man is not a thief. Re-emergence of bubonic disease, Plague of Amwas in Syria. Death toll unknown.

4. The Yōwa famine (養和の飢饉) of AD 1180 - 1182. Japan. Drought, war and disease led to populations fleeing and bodies piling up on the riverbanks. Death toll in Kyoto alone estimated at over 42,000.

5. Egyptian famine from AD 1200 - 1202. The Nile failed for two years in a row as rainfall decreased in Ethiopia, food stores ran out. The physician Abd al-Laṭif al-Baghdadi documented it as an eyewitness. People were convicted of eating human flesh and burned alive as punishment, children were targeted to be killed and eaten. 100 to 500 deaths a day in Cairo by Baghdadi’s count.

6. The Great Famine of 1315 - 1317. Northern Europe. Very high levels of rain in all seasons for several years, crops failed and food prices soared. Famine from Ireland to Poland, height of rural medieval population numbers - not seen again until the 19th century. Communities ate seed grain and draught animals. Infanticide and cannibalism reported. Death toll est. 5 to 12% of population.

7. Ce Tochtli (One Rabbit) Famine of 1450 - 1454. Valley of Mexico. Frost and drought depleted Moctezuma I’s granaries, Nahua families sold themselves into slavery on the Gulf coast in exchange for maize. The Aztec 52-year calendar linked the year of ‘One Rabbit’ to drought, partially confirmed by tree ring studies. Death toll unknown.

Early modern - Little Ice Age

8. Russian Famine of 1601 - 1603. Volcanic cooling from Huaynaputina in Peru destroyed three consecutive harvests, crops failed and the temperature plummeted, livestock and wildlife killed for meat and fur. Many sold themselves into slavery or fled to join the Cossacks. Estimated 2 million deaths, a third of the population.

9. Deccan Famine of 1630 - 1632. Est. death toll 3 to 7 million.

   The Gujarat famine began with a drought in 1630, attacks on crops by mice and locusts in the following year, and then excessive rain. Famine and water-borne diseases created high mortality: 3 million died in 1631. People migrated towards less affected areas, many died on the way, and dead bodies blocked the roads. Both Persian and European sources tell the story of this famine, with a subverted cornucopoeia of grotesque consumption patterns: cattle-hide was eaten, dead men’s bones were ground with flour, cannibalism was frequent, and people fed on corpses. Carts belonging to banjaras (carriers) transporting grain from the more productive regions of Malwa were intercepted and supplies diverted to feed Shah Jahan’s royal army in Burhanpur, who were fighting territorial wars in the Deccan (southern) provinces.

   -The Travels of Peter Mundy, Vol-I, 1628-1667

10. French Famine of 1693 - 1694. The worst demographic crisis of the ancien régime, killing roughly one in twenty as the cold weather led to a general wheat crop failure. Est. death toll approx 1.3 million.

11. The Great Famine of 1695 - 1697. Finland and Estonia. The Little Ice Age continued its reaping, this time the cold summer and early frost ruined harvests across the Swedish empire. Famine, then typhus and other diseases claimed around a third of all Finns and a fifth of Estonians. The first appearance of bark bread as a national diet. Death tool approx 150,000 in Finland, 100,000 in Estonia.

12. Bliain an Áir (the Year of the Slaughter) 1740 - 1741. Ireland. Everyone has heard of the Irish Great Famine, but a freak two-year cold spell killed a much larger proportion of the population a century earlier and is almost entirely forgotten. Severe frosts and freezing temperatures destroyed not only the harvests, but also the stored grain and seed potatoes for the following year. Hunger led to smallpox, dysentery and riots. Est. death toll 300,000 to 480,000 (around 15/20% of population).

Nineteenth century

15. Orissa famine of 1866, Na’anka Durbhikshya. India. At least a million died, roughly a third of the Orissa province, after the rains failed to yield the main rice harvest. The Bengal Board of Revenue was misled by fictitious price lists, then only able to send late relief by boat since the province had no railway and the monsoon had cut the roads.

16. Persian famine of 1870 - 1872. Drought and grain hoarding killed perhaps a tenth of the country, although some have argued up to a quarter of the population died when the subsequent waves of cholera and other diseases are considered. Est. toll of 1.5 - 2 million people.

17. 1877 - 1878 El Niño event. Potentially the worst environmental disaster in human history, the most intense El Niño on record, leading to the North Chinese Incredible Famine, the Brazilian Grande Seca and the Indian Great Famine, amongst others. Maybe 50 million people perished, between 3-5% of all human beings alive at the time.

18. Kifu Qen (the Evil Days) 1888 - 1892. Ethiopia. An imported rinderpest disease destroyed the cattle on which the entire highland economy rested. Drought then brought worms and locusts, ruining the crops. Under these combined pressures some have estimated up to one third of the population died.

Twentieth century and today

22. The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon. 1915 - 1918. An Allied naval blockade, Jamal Pasha’s counter-blockade and a locust swarm killed an estimated 200,000 people, approx one third of the region and forced another third to emigrate. Mount Lebanon likely suffered the highest per capita mortality of any bounded territory in the First World War, arguably a larger catastrophe than the civil war.

23. Famines between 1919 - 1923. USSR. The Russian civil war, post-WW1 economics, natural disasters and Soviet war policies such as grain requisition led to a vast number of famines and deaths, including on the Soviet Volga (est five million dead), in Tatarstan (up to two million dead), Ukraine (est one million dead), in Turkestan (Kazakh, maybe 750,000 dead). These events cannot be properly separated, and numbers vary widely. Taken together those four or five years may have affected up to 16 million people.

24. Asharshylyk. Famine in Kazakhstan. 1930 - 1933. Forced collectivisation destroyed the Kazakh nomadic pastoral system in three years, killing possibly the highest proportion of any Soviet famine. Est. 1.5 million, 38% of all Kazakhs.

25. Famines in Cape Verde, 1941 - 43 and 1947 - 48. Two famines under Salazar’s Estado Novo killed approx 45,000 islanders. The archipelago was settled in the 1460’s and has seen starvation and drought on a roughly 30-50yr cycle since the 1580’s.

26. Ruzagayura (search and find little). 1943-44. Rwanda and Burundi. Drought plus Belgian requisitioning of food for the Allied war effort led to the deaths between a fifth and a third of the population, several hundred thousand fled into the Congo. Ests vary 50,000 to over 200,000 deaths.

27. Northern Vietnamese Famine of 1944-45. Japanese occupation and food requisition combined with a French wartime administration, bombing damage and a failed rice harvest killed perhaps a tenth of Tonkin. Est. 400,000 to 2 million death toll.

28. The 1974 Famine of Bangladesh. Poor weather and floods, Pakistani capital flight, lack of governing infrastructure following the independence war, rampant corruption and a lack of co-operation from the Indian state triggered a brutal rice price spiral. Although downplayed by Bangladesh today, the acute food shortage and subsequent disease epidemics likely claimed up to 1.5 million souls, this in a country just a few years old.

29. Tigray Famine, Ethiopia. 2020 to today. A live siege and famine in Ethiopia. Despite modern communications technology, very little accurate data has been gathered, in part due to a blackout. Estimates of 150,000 to 600,000 excess deaths have been reported but remain contested.

International agencies use a tool called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC scale, to measure the severity of hunger, food accessibility and famine in a particular region. As of today, July 2026, these regions include North Darfur, the Gaza Strip, parts of South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan, Haiti, Mali, Burma/Myanmar, the DRC and Madagascar, amongst others. None of these are a huge surprise, but even in this age of history-defying caloric abundance and cheapness, there are an estimated 20.18 million people in Level 4 food insecurity - Emergency classification, and 290,000 in Level 5 - Catastrophic classification. Conflict and war are present in all major famine regions today, with the exception of Madagascar, with floods, droughts, disease and economic shocks on fertiliser prices and other essentials also common denominators.

Noone can be sure how many adults worldwide are taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Maybe 20 million Americans, 2 million British adults and half a million Australians are using the medications, primarily for managing obesity and diabetes. More than likely we now have an unprecedented global situation where an equal number of millions are struggling to stop eating, whilst the other millions are struggling to find enough food.

The apparent necessity of peptide drugs to stave off the endless eating mechanism does seem to indicate that, in the presence of abundance and the absence of penalties, a large proportion of the population will grow very large. Domestic animals will do the same. The cessation of cravings is not the same thing as the alleviation of starvation, but the former would seem an evolutionary strategy to prevent the latter.

To end this meditation on hunger I will leave you with some passages from the 2020 book The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy by Andrew Mangham, wherein Victorian clergy, scientists, reformers and writers redefine starvation as an unnatural and abnormal process, in contrast to its historical status as normal, providential and often deserved:

In 1822, the Leeds surgeon Charles Thackrah delivered a series of lectures on physiology to the Philosophical and Literary Society of his home town. Feeling that the information contained in his lectures on digestion was urgently required by the world, he published them in 1824. In that volume, Thackrah outlined the process of starvation in great detail. It involves, he said, ‘constipation of the bowels and [the opposite experience] tenesmus, swelling of the legs, extreme weakness of the muscles, a hollow and ghastly appearance of the face, dizziness, excessive inclination for sleep, debility of sense and intellect’.

He cited an 1818 case which had been outlined by the German physician Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland, where a thirty-two-year-old merchant, depressed by ‘severe reverses of fortune’,went into the woods near his home and committed suicide by fasting. In the man’s pocket was found a journal in which he had kept a record of the symptoms he experienced over the fourteen days he went without food and water.

On the third day he wrote: ‘I yet live; but how have I been soaked in the night, and how cold it has been! O God! when will my sufferings terminate!!’ Three days later: ‘How hard is this, no one knows; and my last hour must soon arrive. Doubtless, during the heavy rain, a little water has got into my throat [...yet] I have none even of this for six days, since I am no longer able to move from the place.’

Hufeland’s case study became famous among physiologists, not because of the spiritual raptures of the young man or the pathos of his sufferings, but for what it told them about the material process of starvation… the case was ideally suited to Thackrah’s seeming intention to speak about starvation in a way that stressed its materiality:

In extreme abstinence, we learn that the whole alimentary canal is contracted, and the walls close on the empty abdomen; that the gastric and pancreatic juices, the mucus of the intestines, and even the serum of the peritoneum are partially absorbed. Nay, from the ulcerated state of the villous coat, it seems, that the Conservative Power of the constitution, distressed by the want of nourishment, urges the absorbents to prey upon the live intestine. The blood is said to be depraved.

This last word, ‘depraved’, is very suggestive. Thackrah means it to denote a form of breaking down, or corruption, in the integrity of the blood, yet, combined with his general tone, ‘depraved’, when applied to material phenomena, suggests that hunger is an offensive and unnatural process: when we starve, our viscera cannibalize themselves—the gut becomes a place of warfare as the intestine is predated by the ‘Conservative Power’ of the constitution…

… In Skibbereen, during the height of the Irish Hunger, the physician Daniel Donovan identified what he called ‘famine cachexia [wasting], or lingering starvation’. According to Charlotte Boyce: ‘Famine cachexia caused the starving body to become autophagous—to cannibalise itself.’ What Combe, Lewes, and Donovan, following Hunter, all illustrated was how the ‘characteristic of being able to repair [one’s] own waste’ was a ‘distinguishing characteristic’ of the ‘living body’; it was a natural and a normal process to replenish the empty furnace. The impossibility of obtaining food, as in cases of shipwreck, is decidedly abnormal because it causes one to waste, to flicker, and become extinct.

In recent times, Juan Manuel Garrido has said that ‘hunger means the fact of being alive’, and ‘to live precisely means to be constantly and structurally dying of hunger’. Lesa Scholl has added that ‘some form of hunger seems an inevitable part of the human condition, from the gentle prod of a healthy appetite to dire starvation’. It may seem that such ideas are consummate with the waste theories explored in the previous section, yet medical specialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have agreed neither that ‘dire starvation’ and ‘dying from hunger’ are part of the ‘fact of being alive’, nor that they are ‘inevitable’. The gentle prod of a healthy appetite they would have seen as the cue to rectify a diminished amount of energy; what was normal was the maintenance of a nourished body, not the experience of a hungry one. The details of accounts such as Hufeland’s merchant or Ann Martin were extreme examples, yet they underscored how hunger was a pathological state; they also underscore, for us, how vital the materialist view became to challenging entrenched opinions about hunger as something that might be left to its own devices because it was natural. If people starved to death, according to medical men, they did so not in accordance with natural laws, but in breach of them. If, therefore, social policy was to be driven by perceptions of nature’s teachings, it stood to reason that, like the body, the state should be seeking to avoid starvation rather than form an unholy alliance with its fictive inevitability.

When Apollo sends death it arrives from distance, the god himself always remains hidden. That’s what his epithet means. Hekatebolos. Far-Shooter. Of all the Olympians he epitomises withdrawal, choosing not to claim a mortal hero and his journey for companionship or pride. His lofty, aloof nature burns with the qualities expected of the sun itself, purity and radiance, clarity and illumination. He is also iatromantis, divine seer, patron of oracular wisdom and visions through incubation.

Then Apollo, the son of Zeus, smiled upon them and said: “Foolish mortals and poor drudges are you, that you seek cares and hard toils and straits! Easily will I tell you a word and set it in your hearts. Though each one of you with knife in hand should slaughter sheep continually, yet would you always have abundant store, even all that the glorious tribes of men bring here for me.”

Walter Otto, in The Homeric Gods, describes Apollo in a manner now out of fashion. Otto’s Apollo is inhuman, which is harder to write than it sounds. We use inhuman largely as an intensifier for cruelty: inhuman conditions, inhuman treatment, ultimately meaning cruelty pressed past what ordinary people do to each other. However, Otto means something stark, the god is operating at a register where the human scale is simply irrelevant. The god acts and things are altered, and there is no affect in the altering.

This quality is what the archaic epithet carries. Apollo Lykeios. The wolf-god. The etymology is disputed - lykos, wolf, or Lycia, the region, or a root connected to light - but the wolf reading is not forced. The Lyceum in Athens, where Aristotle taught in a grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios, was not named after an abstraction. Something in his cult felt his wolf-nature - the focused calm, the total economy of motion, the relationship to his prey that lacks malice.

Predators are not cruel. As Nietzsche wrote - the lambs whisper among themselves, ‘These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?’, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, ‘We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb’. Cruelty requires the kind of attention to suffering that takes suffering as its object. The wolf tracking through snow is not attending to the suffering of what it hunts. It is attending purely to the hunt, death is simply completion.

Walter Burkert, analysed the ritual patterns behind Greek sacrifice and the sacred hunt in Homo Necans, and traced how violence and purification share the same gesture, i.e. the priest’s knife and the healer’s herb both belong to the god who sends plague and the god who ends it. Apollo kills with arrows and Apollo kills with disease and Apollo is also the physician’s god. Burkert understood purification in the archaic Greek sense as ecological, rather than moral. If the system had been disturbed - the system then returned to balance. Coronis was pregnant with Apollo’s child, yet she betrayed him with Ischys, and the god requested his sister slay Coronis on the shore of Lake Boebeis. Her last utterance that Apollo had also killed his own son was undone, as he rescued the infant Asclepius from the funeral pyre, the babe a future prodigy of healing and of medicine.

Across so many descriptions, Apollo demonstrates a nature detached yet capable of intense, overwhelming focus. When Marsyas loses the contest and is flayed alive for his presumption, the god is not inflamed by victory or offended pride - the flaying is almost administrative. The satyr exceeded his boundary, and the boundary reasserted itself. There was agony in this reassertion, but agony doesn’t change anything. When Apollo fixated on you, there was no evading his relentless, obsessive chase. Daphne didn’t want to burn, the god of youth crowned his victors with her leaves.

This is a quality that has become difficult to emulate or inhabit, now almost inaccessible. We can still reach Dionysus because his darkness is passionate. Excess, frenzy, dismemberment, the self dissolving into the mob and the god and the wine. Certain music is Dionysian, so is grief that cannot be consoled. Alcohol, loss of self-control and ego. Dionysus has been maintained because there are legible vessels and channels for passion, even destructive passion, and those containers invite identification with the force that overwhelms the self.

In contrast, Apollo’s darkness offers little by way of invitation. It does not overwhelm, he does not want anything from you. The Far-Shooter operates from a distance, he cannot be humanised. Remote, indifferent, withdrawn. Buddhist traditions produced a word for the being who has attained complete enlightenment and remains in the world, acting in the world, without attachment to outcomes - a bodhisattva. Complete competence, no ordinary affect, the capacity for actions that are genuinely terrible, a gaze that does not flinch. The bodhisattva does not suffer with the suffering.

Over the centuries Apollo has been smoothed and moulded into the god of reason and of beautiful forms, which are safe and curatable things. He has been gradually moved into a museum and held up as the exemplar of Hellenic rationality. What was dimished in doing this was the experience of a particular kind of sacred terror, encountering a power that is neither malevolent nor benevolent, that acts with absolute precision, and that will do so whether or not you are watching.

Peter Kingsley, from his book In the Dark Places of Wisdom:

For the Greeks the god of this other state of awareness was Apollo. In his consciousness space and time mean nothing. He can see or be anywhere; past and future are as present as the present is for us. And so he was a god of ecstasy, trance, cataleptic states-of states that take you somewhere. There was a single word in Greek to express this; it meant ‘taken by Apollo’. Apollo’s ecstasy was different from the ecstasy of Dionysus. There was nothing wild or disturbing about it. It was intensely private, for the individual and the individual alone. And it happened in such stillness that anyone else might hardly notice it or could easily mistake it for something else. But in this total stillness there was total freedom at another level.

The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European noun *kóryos, meaning unit of warriors is now widely accepted. It denotes landless bands of unmarried young men who lived on the social margins, raiding, self-identifying with wolves and dogs as symbols of death and lawlessness. The Männerbund framework under which the kóryos exists derives from early German scholarship and was developed within Indo-European studies by Georges Dumézil and Stig Wikander. Since the 1980s the field has subjected it to critical re-examination. The result has been a compromise, for while *kóryos is securely reconstructible, it’s unclear that it should be equated with the Männerbund.

Apollo’s connection to the Indo-European war band is also unclear, but we do have more to work with. Firstly his epithet Lykeios (typically etymologised as ‘wolf-like’ or ‘wolf-slayer’ [Lykoktonos] or ‘Lycian’). Then Apollo’s patronage of the ephebeia, whose members fought by ambush and night-raid (Athens) and the Spartan krypteia, the ‘human hunt’. Finally the bronze wolf that guarded Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The comparative mythologist Bernard Sergent collected his lifetime of research in Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indo-européens (1996). Sergent interpreted myths such as Apollo & Hyakinthos, Kyparissos and Narkissos as encoding erotic male rites of passage from boyhood to adult warrior status, stressing Apollo’s wolf-link, his northern (Boreas) associations and the possible Indo-European origin of these rites. Kershaw’s The One-eyed God: Odin and the (Indo-)Germanic Männerbünde also situates the Greek evidence within a pan-Indo-European complex of an ecstatic war-band god, connecting Apollo the Wolf with the Vedic Vrātyas/Rudra-Maruts and the Germanic Odin/Einherjar.

Interestingly, Dumézil himself explicitly regarded Apollo (and Achilles) as non-Indo-European figures which had been later absorbed into Greek tradition. On the historical-institutional side, the mainstream reading (Angelo Brelich, Paides e Parthenoi, and Fritz Graf, Apollo) treats Apollo’s youth/initiation role as a feature of the historical polis (the god of the ephebes and of civic incorporation) rather than direct evidence of an Indo-European wolf-cult. Scholar Michael H. Jameson’s chapter Apollo Lykeios in Athens in his book Cults and Rites in Ancient Greece, reads the Lykeion gymnasium connection in civic-ephebic terms. Walter Burkert’s Apellai und Apollon connected the Doric Apellōn to the apellai, the kinship-festival of youth-initiation, making Apollo “the prototype of the young men to be received in the initiation festival”.

For Apollo, possession is a conquest. And, like every conquest, it must be defended by an imperious hand. Like every conquest, it also tends to obliterate whatever power came before it. But the possession that attracted Apollo was very different from the possession that had always been the territory of Dionysus. Apollo wants his possession to be articulated by meter; he wants to stamp the seal of form on the flow of enthusiasm, at the very moment it occurs. Apollo is responsible for imposing logic too: a restraining meter in the flux of thought. When faced with the darting, disordered, furtive intelligence of Hermes, Apollo drew a dividing line; on the one side Hermes could preside over divination by dice and bones, could even have the Thriai, the honey maidens, despite his elder brother’s once having loved them, but the supreme, the invincible oracle of the word, Apollo kept for himself.

Apollo the Shaman is another popular reading of his nature. Karl Meuli in Scythica, argued that archaic Greek ecstatic figures reflected contact with Black Sea and Scythian shamanism. In chapter five of E. R. Dodds’ famous work The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), he dramatised this, with figures such as Abaris (the Hyperborean who carried Apollo’s arrow, fasted, banished plague, and flew on the arrow) and Aristeas of Proconnesus (whose soul left his body in the form of a bird and who journeyed north) as ‘Greek shamans’, along with Hermotimus, Epimenides, Pythagoras and Orpheus. Dodds argued for foreign influences on three grounds: that such behaviour appears only when the Black Sea opened to Greek colonisation; that the earliest ‘shamans’ are Scythian (Abaris) or had visited Scythia (Aristeas); and that there are concrete Greek-Scythian/Siberian parallels such as the shamanic sex-change.

These are strong claims for any classical era topic. Jan N. Bremmer in The Early Greek Concept of the Soul accepted the soul-journey data for Aristeas/Hermotimus - but he reinterprets it via the anthropological ‘free soul’ model. Thus the wandering soul in a trance reflects an indigenous Greek belief in a psychē/free-soul which is active outside the body, and is not necessarily a Siberian import. Historian Ioan Couliano preferred iatromantis to shaman, those ‘healer-seers, tied to Apollo Hyperboreus. Many others would prefer to abandon the concept of a Greek shaman altogether, arguing that the term is complex and difficult enough to analyse within Siberia and Mongolia, let alone amongst the ancient Hellenes.

Apollo didn’t want slovenly shamans but young virgins from the grottoes of Parnassus, girls still close to the Nymphs, and speaking in well-turned verse.

On the subject of Apollo and altered states of consciousness we can go further, to the oracular trance at Delphi and the Pythia’s ecstatic possession. Some might know the geological hypothesis of de Boer, Hale & Chanton: their paper New evidence for the geological origins of the ancient Delphic oracle (Greece) identified intersecting faults beneath temple and ethane/methane/ethylene in spring water, reviving Plutarch’s pneuma. This has been contested of course. Giuseppe Etiope from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Rome, argued that any effect of the fault lines came from an oxygen deficit. Academics Fontenrose and Maurizio took a different path, disagreeing with the vision of the Pythia as frenzied, babbling and ecstatic, saying that this is itself a later topos and that the Pythia’s utterances were perfectly coherent. Both Kerényi and Burkert treat the Apolline mantic complex as genuinely possession-based but they resist reducing it to imported shamanism.

Cyrene had beaten the lion yet again. To have her surrender her virginity without regrets, Apollo chose one of his most secret forms: the wolf. It was the form that would give most pleasure both to her and to himself.

Everyone knows that Apollo came from the north, he took shelter with those who live in the frigid wastes. Three strands - firstly the Hyperborean myths themselves, that Apollo wintered beyond the north wind, Leto reportedly came to Delos from Hyperborea (in Aristotle’s report, she came with a pack of wolves), the Hyperboreans sent straw-wrapped first-fruits via Dodona to Delos (so say Herodotus, Pindar and Callimachus); then the Dorian migration theory - the Homeric Hymn to Apollo depicts him as a northern intruder, the month Apellaios in north-west Greek calendars and the apellai link Apollo to the Dorians; finally the archaeogenetics: Lazaridis et al., Nature (2017) and Science (2022) revealed that Mycenaeans averaged ~8.6±2% steppe/Yamnaya-like ancestry, with individuals ranging from 0% up to 19±7% at Kastrouli and 12±2% at the Palace of Nestor; Middle Bronze Age northern-Greek individuals had ~50% Pontic–Caspian steppe ancestry, with the gene flow estimated at approx 2300 BC. This confirms a real northern steppe contribution.

However, this genetic influx is too early (Early/Middle Bronze Age) to map onto any Iron Age arrival of an Apollo cult, and the elite Mycenaeans showed no distinct ancestry profile. As Lazaridis et al. (Science 2022) put it, “Mycenaean period elites in Greece did not differ from the general population, and included both people with some steppe ancestry, and others, like the Griffin Warrior, without it.” The Dorian invasion theory has been widely rejected today. Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion called it a ‘spectre’ haunting historians of Greece, the migration model is dismissed by most as a ‘scholarly mirage’, with ancient-DNA continuity between Mycenaean and Iron Age populations.

The German tradition itself split anyway - Martin P. Nilsson emphasised Apollo’s Anatolian roots, as did Robert Beekes, who declared that “Burkert’s etymology deriving the name Apollo from a Dorian word for ‘assembly’, apella, is linguistically and historically impossible”. He further argued that “Apollo is a Pre-Greek-Anatolian name. The expected proto-form ... is found in the name Appaliunas, a god of Wilusa/Ilios mentioned in a Hittite letter” a position supported by the Homeric epithet Lykegenes, “an archaic formation meaning ‘born in Lycia’,” fitting “the strong Anatolian connections of Apollo as well as his mother Leto and his sister Artemis.” The classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff identified Gaia with Themis, and Apollo’s arrival as symbolic of a patriarchal change in order and values.

Where force reigns, the spirit is alien, detached from both earth and water. But Apollo and Athena were envious of force, that force which, by the time they were born, had already been pushed back to the ends of the earth. There, near the snaking coil of Oceanus, sleepless or lethargic creatures could still be found, lurking in caves or on mountains, creatures that still possessed an unextinguished force.

Wilamowitz is not alone in seeing Apollo’s destruction of the Python/Delphyne as encoding the historical displacement of an older chthonic earth-goddess (Gaia/Ge) religion by Olympian newcomers. This has deep roots, going back to Erwin Rohde’s 1894 work. Many have been taken by the idea of Hellenes capturing a pre-Hellenic shrine, with the supposed funeral games then instituted to placate local feeling. The hypothesis is supported by Aeschylus’ prophetic succession of Gaia to Themis, then Phoebe and finally Apollo and Pausanias (the earliest oracle belonged to Earth). Mycenaean (LH III) archaeological finds and a cemetery beneath the sanctuary do indicate Bronze Age cult activity at Delphi.

Joseph Fontenrose’s Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins is the seminal work on this topic. Fontenrose rejected the simple conquest/succession reading - Apollo vs. Python is one local Greek reflex of a single, inherited Near Eastern/Indo-European combat myth, set systematically alongside Marduk-Tiamat (Enuma Elish), Baal-Yam, the Hittite dragon-and-demon, Indra-Vritra, Horus and Zeus-Typhon. In his 1980 preface he insisted on a genetic relationship among variants, saying “Each variant is the myth itself, modified in transmission over space and time”. In The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations he was explicitly sceptical of a pre-Apollonian Gaia oracle, writing that “though this deity was probably a mother-goddess, it would be reckless to identify her with Ge and to suppose that she preceded Apollo as oracle-speaker”. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood reinforced this, arguing the friendly Gaia/Themis transfer was largely an Aeschylean construct designed to reconcile chthonic and Olympian powers.

French structuralists added a different layer rather than endorsing the migration narrative one way or the other. Marcel Detienne in Apollon le couteau à la main: une approche expérimentale du polythéisme grec, recast Apollo as a bloody founder-god, the archēgetēs in whose footsteps colonists trace cities, he wields the sacrificial knife of the Homeric Hymn (where the god orders his Cretan priests each to hold a blade and ceaselessly slaughter sheep). Detienne’s experimental method takes each territory/city-foundation as a chemical reagent or réactif, through which to read a god who is toujours au pluriel. Reviewers like Pierre Voelke found the founder/colonial thesis ‘incontestable’ but the blood-drunk, murderous Apollo thesis sometimes forced. Detienne, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet’s broader programme (La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, Le festin des loups, Le chasseur noir, 1981 - on the ephebe/black hunter) reads the wolf/hunter/marginal aspect of Apollo as structural inversions of the civic order rather than as a record of historical migration. So much for the god of pure light, reason and gentle song.

Do the pieces of this puzzle cohere into a single picture of Apollo as a god of a military-cultural movement from the north? The current answer is absolutely not. Burkert’s evergreen formulation discerns “a Dorian-northwest Greek component, a Cretan-Minoan component, and a Syro-Hittite component”, that is to say - a composite, fully Greek deity, and not a foreign import arriving with the conquerors. The initiatory/wolf-warrior and ephebic material together point to an ideology of liminal youth, of the hunt, incorporation - while the shamanic residues are most likely an indigenous soul-belief rather than any specific imported technique. Indo-European dispute does remain, the etymology and ultimate origin of the name (Anatolian Appaliunas/Appaluwa vs the Doric apellai), how much weight should we give comparativist Indo-European reconstruction? Then there’s the Dumézilian verdict that Apollo is not an Indo-European god at all. Our evidence stream points to a layered figure, an Anatolian/pre-Greek theonym attached to an Indo-European-inflected complex of youth-initiation and ecstatic prophecy. We await a securely dated Iron Age cult-discontinuity layer at Delphi with any intrusive northern material culture, or aDNA evidence of a singular Iron Age northern influx coinciding with Apollo’s cult spread. Either would revive the migration-conquest synthesis. It may happen, it may never happen.

Apollo Acesius, Acraephiaeus Apollo, Agetor, Aphetor Apollo, Aphetorius Apollo, Archegetes, Argyrotoxus Apollo, Apollo Articenens, Apollo Averruncus, Apollo Coelispex, Apollo Cynthogenes, Delius Apollo, Apollo Delius, Apollo Delphinius, Apollo Didymaeus, Apollo Epicurius, Apollo Galaxiu, Apollo Genetor, Hecaërgus Apollo, Apollo Hecebolus, Hekatos, Helius Apollo, Apollo Iatromantis, Apollo Iatrus, Kourotrophos, Apollo Leschenorius, Apollo Loxias, Apollo Lycegenes, Lyceus, Apollo Lycoctonus, Manticus Apollo, Apollo Medicus, Apollo Nomius, Apollo Nymphegetes, Apollo Paean, Apollo Parnopius, Apollo Patroüs, Apollo Phanaeus, Pythius Apollo, Apollo Smintheus, Apollo Sosianus, Virotutis…

Apollo’s nature opens a door into male initiation rites, secret societies of slave hunters, healer-seer visionaries, serpent slaying, the brutal founding of new colonies, foundational medical knowledge, invasions from the cold north, wolf-packs and a gaze which shifts from clinical disinterest to fixated obsession. The deity of beauty, austere clarity, dream-like prophecies, the enchantment of words and the terror of his wrath. Far-seeing. Far-Shooter.

Quotes in italics taken from Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Walter Otto’s The Homeric Gods. I cannot reccomend them highly enough.

They say Lucian of Samosata satirised Antonius Diogenes’ book Of the Wonderful Things Beyond Thule, and in doing so accidentally invented the genre of science fiction. More on this later. Did the ancient Greeks possess a futurist worldview, a vision of progress toward human transcendence and cosmic mastery? We saw in my last piece how Greek technology and science went further than many often realise, but couldn’t sustain the institutional ratchet that supported later European progress. But what about in their philosophies, religious stories and cosmological outlook? Can we look here to find evidence of Greek futurism?

The evidence does not support a single, settled doctrine of progress of the kind familiar from the Enlightenment. Many of the most authoritative scholarly studies have explicitly disagreed on how strong the Greek commitment to progress actually was. But, the evidence does cluster across philosophy, mythology, institutional life, material culture and Hellenistic political theology - enough that I would argue for a recognisable, recurrent stance in which a) the cosmos is, in principle, intelligible by reason, b) the human being can in some sense bridge the gap to the divine by means of techne, episteme, virtue or political achievement, and c) systematic effort by individuals, schools, polities and dynasties was directed toward that bridging. The picture that emerges is not exactly futurism as we might understand it today, but more of a recurring proto-futurist worldview, aWeltanschauung wherein human excellence and will could, even for a moment, attempt to reach beyond mere mortality and confront the eternal divine.

I’ve structured this piece in two halves, the first dealing with philosophy, religion, athletics and so on, the second examining the ancient Greek curiosity for robots and beings that were ‘made, not born’. Hopefully I will demonstrate that the idiosyncratic form of Greco or Hellenic futurism was real, and that it laid the foundation for later Western science fiction.

Part One

From this world of injustice, of insolent apostasy from the primeval one-ness of all things, Anaximander flees into a metaphysical fortress from which he leans out, letting his gaze sweep the horizon. At last, after long pensive silence, he puts a question to all creatures: ‘What is your existence worth? And if it is worthless, why are you here?’

- Philosophy In The Tragic Age Of The Greeks, Nietzsche

Philosophical Fragments and Texts

The Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) are the first to make the move from a mythic to a material explanation for the world. Cornford argues in From Religion to Philosophy (1912), the pre-Socratic concepts of Destiny, Logos, Soul and Substance carry forward the structures of myth in rationalised form. Cornford takes a position that Greek philosophy in-itself is myth purified by reason, rather than myth followed by its repudiation. To my mind this is directly relevant to the question of a materialist-yet-idealist stance, that the materialism of the Ionians is from the start oriented toward grasping or locating a unifying principle (archē) that is simultaneously physical and normative. This move is frankly odd, compared to most human systems of thought - and explains why the pre-Socratics are alien upon first encounter, with their cosmic explanations ordered by strangely abstracted physical phenomena, like water or fire.

To take Heraclitus, he appears to declare that the Logos is both a physical principle (fire and transformation, the hidden harmony of antagonistic opposites) and a rational order knowable by some humans. The Logos is common (xynos) accessible to anyone who learns to listen to nature. This is a philosophy of materialism (cosmic process is fire-flux) and idealism (a unifying intelligibility) combined by a single genius. For Anaxagoras, Nous (Mind) is the cosmic ordering principle that initiates the rotation separating the originally mixed elements. Plato in the Phaedo (97b–99c) records Socrates’ disappointment that Anaxagoras did not follow through teleologically, but Anaxagoras’s framework interestingly combines material monism (everything is mixed in everything) with a directing intelligence.

Empedocles argues that the cycle of Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos) over the four roots is a closed cosmology with an explicit claim to ‘salvation’ in his Katharmoi (Purifications) - the daimon falls and through transmigration may ‘in the end become gods, highest in honour’. The fusion of physics and aspiration is, again, strange and unusual. Famously Democritus and Leucippus brought forth the idea of atomism - the most obviously materialist Greek system - worrying generations of Christian thinkers during and after the Renaissance. Democritus also appears to have an explicitly progressive view of cultural history, as humans developed technai gradually under necessity, with no Golden Age and no decline.

Another well known quote“Of all things the measure is a human being, of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not” was actually Protagoras preserved through hostile witnesses (Plato’s Theaetetus and Sextus Empiricus’ Protagoras). Traditionally this has come down to us as Plato reading Protagoras as radical relativism, but recent scholarship emphasises that in the Protagoras ‘Great Speech’, he tells a Promethean myth in which humans, lacking natural endowments, must develop the political and technical arts to survive, and that this development is genuinely progressive. As a kind of anthropological narrative, it is one of the strongest pieces of textual evidence for a proto-futurist vision within Greek thought.

Plato is paradoxical in this project, and will be the subject of a future article. He is the ultimate Greek philosopher of ascent, yet his cosmology is fundamentally backward-looking - the Forms are eternal, the world of becoming is a copy. A few examples:

• The Symposium‘s ladder - the lover ascends from particular bodies to all bodies, to souls, to laws and institutions, to knowledge and finally to the Form of Beauty itself. This structure is progressive, but for the individual.

• The Republic‘s Cave is the philosopher’s ascent from shadows to sunlight, a programme of cognitive and ethical transformation.

• The Timaeus - the Demiurge is a craftsman-god who orders the chōra using the Forms as paradigms. The cosmos is a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence.

The most intriguing concept though has to be Homoiōsis theōi, which means ‘becoming like god’, with the qualifier ‘as far as is possible’. The principle appears in Theaetetus, with parallels in Republic, Phaedrus (where the soul assimilates to its patron god), and Timaeus. Scholarship (Sedley, The Ideal of Godlikeness 1999; Stern-Gillet on Plotinus and the Theaetetus 2019; Brill volume New Explorations in Plato’s Theaetetus, 2022) has shown that homoiōsis theōi became the telos of human life in Middle Platonism (eg Eudorus of Alexandria), was central for Philo of Alexandria, Plutarch, Alcinous’s Didaskalikos, and was fundamental for Plotinus and the Neoplatonists. As an ethical stance, largely concerned with cultivating virtue and wisdom (phronēsis), ‘becoming like god’ reflects one of ancient Greek’s ultimate transcendence-orientation positions - the philosophical telos of life for the entire Platonist tradition, is to become as much like god as a human being can.

Aristotle’s eudaimonia is the actualisation of a specific human capacity (ergon), the highest form of which is the bios theoretikos (the contemplative life. Aristotle uses the language of athanatizein, meaning ‘to immortalise oneself’, the recurring Greek ideal. His surviving treatises cover logic, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, poetics and metaphysics, and could be easily described as the first systematic attempt to categorise all knowledge under unified principles.

Turning to other Hellenic schools of thought, we find in Stoicism (including Zeno of Citium, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, the Roman Stoics) that the cosmos is a single rational living being permeated by logos/pneuma. This can be defined as ‘to live according to nature’ (homologoumenōs tē physei zēn), meaning man should align his reason with the cosmic Logos. This is simultaneously materialist (Stoic physics is corporealist, god is an immanent fiery breath, not transcendent), teleological (the cosmos is providentially ordered), and idealist-aspirational (the sage is the only truly free, truly happy being, the sage is in a real sense divine, he is ‘equal to Zeus’, in Chrysippus’s formulation). The doctrine of ekpyrōsis (cosmic conflagration) and eternal recurrence is a cyclical one, rather than our own linearly open-ended vision of the universe.

Epicureanism could be described as atomist materialism, with no providence, where gods exist but are indifferent and the philosophical goal is ataraxia (freedom from disturbance). Lucretius Book V offers us an example of a progressive anthropology in which human history rises from an animalistic beginning through the discovery of fire, language, agriculture, metallurgy and law, with explicit awareness that these are human achievements. Many have highlighted this as one of the clearest ancient progressivisms.

What we can point to across these schools is the underlying conviction that the cosmos has an intelligible, knoweable order, and that human reason is capable of grasping it. To do so actually changes the human being and makes him freer, happier, more virtuous and most crucially more like the divine. Whether this counts as proto-futurist depends on definition, since Greek thought was not progressivist about civilisation, but certainly was progressivist about the individual person. Between civilisation and Man as an individual was the institution, such as the school, the library or the ruler cult. Although Greece is considered the birthplace of democracy, perhaps what we have here is an elitist vision for human overcoming or human ascendance, the institution as a crucible for becoming-as-close-to-a-god-as-possible (could we say parapotheosis?).

Mythology

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!

- Prometheus, Goethe, 1789

In Hesiod, Prometheus is a trickster whose gift of fire is punished by the creation of Pandora and the loss of an earlier innocence. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the Titan delivers the Catalogue of the Arts - claiming to have taught humans house building, astronomy, numbers, writing, animal domestication, sailing, medicine, the gift of prophecy and metallurgy. Prometheus has thus rescued humanity from a sad, primitive condition. For Aeschylus, the story of Prometheus is a profoundly progressivist vision of human prehistory. The Titan myth encodes the idea that human civilisation is the result of transgressive acquisition of divine knowledge, without doubt a recognisably proto-Faustian, proto-futurist motif.

Heracles is a prime example of apotheosis through achievement. His Twelve Labours, originally a punishment, become his path to deification. This is fundamental for Hellenistic ideology, we later see Alexander, Macedonian kings generally and the Ptolemies all claiming Heraclid descent. Achilles’ choice at the crossroads between a long obscure life or a short glorious one, was and remains the ultimate heroic ideal, one in which mortality is exchanged for kleos aphthiton (undying fame), a form of transcendence-through-deeds (likely an older Indo-European ideal). The hero cult itself, often involving the worship of dead heroes at their tombs, was institutionalised in every Greek city - empirical evidence that ordinary Greeks believed extraordinary humans could achieve a quasi-divine status.

The Derveni Papyrus (c. 340 BC, our earliest substantial Orphic document) and the gold tablets from Thurii, Hipponion, and Pelinna (4th–3rd centuries BC) document a soul-itinerary in which the soul, falling into the body, must purify itself through successive lives to reunite with the divine (”I have flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel... happy and blessed one, you shall be a god instead of a mortal” - Thurii tablet). The Pythagorean tradition (transmitted via Aristotle, Iamblichus, Porphyry) shares this structure. This is not progress in the civilisational sense, but in the soul-trajectory sense it is starkly progressive: the telos is becoming divine.

More mythology will be covered below, including the stories of Hephaestus, Daedalus, Icarus, Medea, Jason and Pandora.

Attitudes Toward Knowledge and Inquiry

In his History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides says, “I have written my work not as an essay to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time” (ktēma es aiei). This is one of the most explicit ancient claims to knowledge transcending its immediate context. It’s not hard to find scholarship (Thucydides: A Possession for All Time; Thucydides and the Invention of Political Science) which treats the phrase as evidence for a self-conscious production of transferable knowledge of human affairs based on the evergreen predictability of human nature.

Similarly Herodotus opens by announcing that he writes ‘so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time’ and ‘so that great and marvellous deeds - some performed by Greeks, some by barbarians - may not be without their glory’. Herodotus’s project is comparative ethnography combined with inquiry into causation, namely why did the Greeks and Persians come to war? For both historians their attitude towards knowledge shares a conviction that the past is knowable, legible, that it exists as part of human activity. They put weight on autopsia - seeing things for oneself, and on the testimony of credible witnesses.

In medical matters we have Hippocrates’ On the Sacred Disease (late 5th century BC ), which opens by rejecting the divine explanation for epilepsy: ‘It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause’. Is this a foundational document of methodological naturalism? His other works, On Ancient Medicine and Airs, Waters, Places also demonstrate this profoundly radical new approach - medicine is a technē with reproducible methods, environmental causation is real, medical knowledge is a cumulative and progressive system.

The Lyceum was the first systematic research institution in the Western tradition. Its treasures include zoological observations (the History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals, drawing on a programme of empirical observation including dissection and reports from across Alexander’s expedition) and a collection of 158 city constitutions (only the Athenian Constitution survives). By any measure this was an attempt to categorise all human disciplines, to map all of human knowledge. Whilst impressive, the Lyceum was eventually overshadowed by the Mouseion Library (literally ‘shrine of the Muses’), which also aimed to gather and collect the world’s knowledge. Founded under Ptolemy I Soter (probably advised by Demetrius of Phaleron, c. 295 BCE) and developed under Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the Mouseion grew into a research institution, a library, a status symbol and an ideological statement of Ptolemaic aspiration to encompass the oikoumenē. Ships entering Alexandria’s harbour had to surrender any scrolls aboard for copying. It was an unprecedented institutional programme for the accumulation of universal thought, housing Euclid, Eratosthenes (who measured the circumference of the Earth), Archimedes (briefly), Aristarchus of Samos (heliocentric hypothesis), Hipparchus, Herophilus and Erasistratus (anatomy and dissection of human cadavers, with possibly vivisection of condemned criminals reported by Celsus).

Greek attitudes to knowledge, from Thucydides to Eratosthenes, revealed their genius for pursuing systematic and grounded scientific truth. When historians say that Greece is the foundation of Western civilisation, it’s to these men they point. We still use terms and concepts from Greek medicine, mathematics, anthropology & history, zoology, biology, political and rhetoric in the present - and will continue to do so far into the future.

Visual and Material Culture

The Archaic kouros presents the male nude as an ideal, the youthful body held up as a near-divine standard. The Classical revolution (eg Polykleitos’s Doryphoros, Myron’s Discobolus) introduced the contrapposto and proportional system, the human body re-imagined as a mathematically determinable ideal. An alien idea to the Christian/post-Christian West, but the exact same vocabulary of forms applies to both gods and athletes, developing from a more generic template to a rigorously quantitative one. The set of divine proportions, drawn from the human body itself, becomes canonical from the 5th century onwards, finding new expression eventually in the Italian Renaissance. Greece laid down a vision of the body which has stood the test of time, and remains highly influential in contemporary dreams of science fiction and future progress, the vision that divine and human bodies are aesthetically continuous. The smooth, symmetrical forms of sci-fi lore are the direct descendants of Greece dreaming.

The Parthenon frieze (mid-5th century BC, Phidian programme) goes further than even this. It depicts the Panathenaic procession, on the east frieze, with the gods seated in attendance. The compositional decision to place the Athenian people themselves in a continuous narrative space with the Olympians is unprecedented. Scholar John Boardman argues that the figures represent the heroic dead of Marathon, unorthodox and contested but an hypothesis that still presents human beings as capable of ascending to godly heights by their actions:

There is no other myth-heroic or myth-historical Panathenaia to suit the occasion so we are forced back to a mortal one or a version of a mortal one. In classical Athens of these years there was one group of mortal Athenian citizens who, by their actions, had acquired the right to their depiction on public buildings and in the company of the gods: these are the men who fought at Marathon

- The Parthenon Frieze — Another View (1977) J. Boardman

The shift in portraiture from idealised Classicism to individualised Hellenism has long been debated and discussed (see Smith’s 1988 Hellenistic Royal Portraits or Stewart’s 1993 Faces of Power). Lysippus’s portraits of Alexander, with his famous upturned head, dishevelled hair, and leonine gaze, established the iconography of the heroic individual. The Boxer At Rest (c. 100 BC) manages to render fatigue, scars and profound emotional weight through bronze, the Dying Gaul portrays the barbarian or gladiator as a tragic individual. This shift in pathos coheres with the Hellenistic political reality of charismatic monarchy with the period’s interest in individual achievement and psychological interiority.

Finally we could point to Greek classical coinage, and how it carries gods, heroes, civic emblems. Beginning with Alexander’s posthumous image on Lysimachus’s tetradrachms, his deified portrait actually wearing the ram horns of Zeus-Ammon, the living ruler begins to appears with divine attributes (diadem, horn of Ammon, radiate crown). This is the material expression of the king-as-god ideology, the man who could rise above this mortal coil.

Social Behaviour and Institutions

The Olympic (traditional date 776 BC), Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean games together formed the ‘circuit’, or periodos. These games were a religious-competitive complex: the athletes competed naked (gymnos) before the gods, the victors were crowned with vegetal wreaths (olive at Olympia, laurel at Delphi) the victor was isotheos (‘equal to a god’) in Pindar’s epinician odes. Pindar repeatedly warns athletes not to ‘seek to become a god’ whilst celebrating that they have come very close. The games institutionalised, for over a millennium, the public test of human excellence against a divine standard. Men who perhaps sought godhood in their heart-of-hearts had the chance to unleash this desire before their peers, in a culture for whom competition was life.

Self-deification through philosophical, martial and athletic means was therefore possible, if only temporarily. Alexander of course went further, inspired by the measure of the ultimate semi-divines - Achilles, Hercules. During a visit to the Oracle of Ammon at Siwa (330s BC) the priest reportedly addressed Alexander as the ‘son of Zeus-Ammon’, and when he visited the ruins of Didyma the sacred spring burst into life again. He attempted to introduce the Persian act of prostration (proskynēsis) at the Macedonian court, which was vehemently resisted by his fellow Greeks - a refusal which Xenophon had earlier cited as a distinguishing mark of Hellenic freedom against Xerxes (‘As tokens of these victories we may, indeed, still behold the trophies, but the strongest witness to them is the freedom of the states in which you were born and bred; for to no human creature do you pay homage as master, but to the gods alone’ - Anabasis). Modern scholarship is divided on how much Alexander himself believed, and the differences in attitude towards Alexander’s apotheosis by Greeks and non-Greeks. What is clear is that by his death the apparatus of his deification was sufficiently developed that the Diadochi continued and elaborated upon it.

Alexander was not alone however - Hellenic attitudes towards human ascension to godhood, and the god-king cults/institutions which naturally followed, show us that the concept had some social elasticity and that extraordinary men could be accorded an extraordinary reception. Historian Angelos Chaniotis in his 2003 chapter The Divinity of Hellenistic Rulers (in A Companion to the Hellenistic World) argues for a genuine theological-political doctrine that outstanding human benefactors (euergetai) can rightly receive divine honours - including the Athenian cult to Demetrius Poliorcetes, the Ptolemaic state dynastic cult (the Theoi Adelphoi, the Theoi Euergetai, etc.) and the Seleucids category of divine kingship. The honours here include temples, priesthoods, sacrifices, festivals, and games. Altogether this is structural alignment with the philosophical doctrine of homoiōsis theōi, ancient Greece and its cosmopolitan offspring was really a society in which becoming-divine through achievement was a publicly available possibility. Where man can rise to such heights, and not just inherit them, there treads the possibility that man through deed can become more, that strife and competition and vision reveal new horizons.

Part Two

Made, Not Born - Artificial Life & Biotechne

Adrienne Mayor’s Gods and Robots (2018) is the most exploratory book-length treatment of the idea that Greek mythology contains forms of speculative, science-fictional thought. In her reading the Greeks imagined automata, biotechnical creations, AI, prosthetics, and human enhancement before they could build them, and these imaginings have trickled through Western civilisation, impacting creative and ethical thought to the present day. Its true that many if not all human societies have some kind of animistic strata, and some explicitly describe the animation of dead, inert matter by an external force. What truly separates ancient sci-fi from pure magic is the divide between things that are born, not made and things that are made, not born.

Read more

Famously Greece also developed a cyclical and tragic counter-current alongside this: the Hesiodic decline narrative, the Stoic ekpyrōsis, the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the Platonic catastrophes of the Timaeus and Laws, the warning against hybris in Pindar and the tragedians and the recurring myth/mytheme of Icarus. Greek culture self-consciously bounded its own proto-futurist sensibility within a system of religious and tragic checks. They imagined human transcendence and warned themselves against it, evolving a double structure where aspiration became entwined with recoil.

My claim here is that Greek proto-scientific and speculative thought cannot be separated from their sophisticated material culture, which encompassed bloomery furnaces, struck coins, geared bronze, surveyed tunnels, ramming triremes, torsion-spring artillery and water-driven keyboards, amongst others. From the the Early Iron Age reorganisation that followed the Mycenaean palatial collapse, roughly 1200–1100 BC, through to the Ptolemaic-Alexandrian synthesis, Greeks and their diaspora (the Black Sea colonies of Olbia, Sinope, Panticapaeum, Magna Graecia, Tarentum/Taras in Apulia and Syracuse in Sicily, Massalia in southern Gaul, Cyrene and the Egyptian-Greek powerhouses of Naucratis and Alexandria) developed a technological culture which integrated theoretical mathematics and practical, sophisticated engineering. We’ll now turn to that culture, looking across multiple interlocking domains, paying attention to the chronology, archaeological evidence, cross-cultural transfers and controversies.

Metallurgy: From Bronze Recovery to the Alloying Sciences

The Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1100-800 BC) can potentially be described as a metallurgical reorganisation. The collapse of the Mycenaean palace economies severed the long-distance copper and tin trade, causing Greek smiths to respond by drawing on reconfigured local and regional ore/smithing networks across the Aegean, Cyprus, the Levant and western Anatolia. By 1050 BC, small local iron industries were widespread, and by approx 900 BC, almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron. The classic argument made by Anthony M. Snodgrass in The Dark Age of Greece (1971), has been refined by recent Cambridge scholarship on Aegean iron technologies, consolidating the case that this was a genuine ‘iron revolution’. This revolution depended on building subtle, skilful metallurgical knowledge: yes, cold iron is mechanically inferior to bronze, but by mastering carburisation (intentional carbon enrichment, not universally done but the best smiths learnt), quenching and tempering, these smiths produced what is essentially a low-grade steel, capable of matching the qualities of bronze. Edged weapons were therefore available to less elite warriors, and on top of that, bronze was dependent on two separate, long-distance trade routes (and iron was not) meaning the metallurgical revolution was to have profound social consequences for Greece and for hoplite warfare.

Bronze was not abandoned though, rather its production and use became specialised. Chalcis, a settlement on the island of Euboea, boasted this trade, becoming a major bronze-working centre and exporter of the craft by the 8th century. The first western Greek colony at Pithekoussai (founded approx mid-8th century BC) was Euboean in origin. The legendary Roman descriptions of Corinthian bronze, or aes Corinthiacum, has teased generations with coveted, dark-patinated alloys of copper with gold, silver and tin in varying proportions, a sublime possible example of the Greek aesthetic mastery of alloy properties.

Casting by the lost-wax method reached an extraordinary scale and level of refinement (see my previous writing on Greek art), with the Riace bronzes (circa 460-450 BC), the Artemision Zeus and Hellenistic statues such as the Antikythera Youth showcasing indirect casting complete with internal armatures. Furthermore filigree, granulation and gilding appear at Vergina, then across Macedonian and Scythian-Greek workshops in the Black Sea, where Greek goldsmiths worked up to supplying the Scythian elite.

Silver and lead processing was based on a method called cupellation, which is the oxidation of argentiferous lead in a porous hearth, aiming to drive off lead oxide (litharge) and leave behind purified silver. The technique was already well-established (see Bronze Age Aegean and Anatolia) but it reached industrial heights around the southern Attican mines of Laurion, a place of such archaic longevity that Xenophon could not identify its origins in his Ways and Means (355 BC):

It is clear, I presume, to every one that these mines have for a very long time been in active operation; at any rate no one will venture to fix the date at which they first began to be worked.

The integration of the whole process (mining, smelting, cupellation) meant that coinage eventually became the technological pipeline that underwrote Athenian regional power.

Coinage and Monetary Technology

Coinage was an Anatolian invention adopted and transformed by the Greeks. The earliest stamped electrum lumps appear in the record from Lydia in the second half of the 7th century BC (630 BC) under the Mermnad dynasty, the principal mint found at Sardis. Herodotus also credits the Lydians, and the coins themselves, with their Lydian inscriptions, confirm the connection. Electrum‘s natural variability in gold content (spans 65-85%) might appear to us to be a defect, but recent scholarship has argued that the issuer’s monopolistic control over the alloy allowed the state to capture a seigniorage, or issuer’s premium, that buyers could not detect simply by weight or use of a touchstone. King Croesus’ introduction of a bimetallic gold-silver coinage (the Croeseids) around 560 BC was the first documented bimetallic system, its fineness and weight standards survived even his defeat by Cyrus.

Greek cities adopted coinage rapidly: Aegina (earliest stamped ‘stater’ στατήρ had the image of a turtle, created the widely-used Aeginetic standard, 6th century BC), Athens (first the silver Wappenmünzen, then the pure silver owls, with stable Attic standards by approx 510 BC), Corinth, and the Ionian cities. Coinage spread along key colonisation routes: Massalia, Syracuse, Olbia and Panticapaeum (Black Sea), Cyrene. Greek mints introduced two-die striking with engraved obverse and reverse. Die-cutters at Syracuse achieved miniature sculpture, their surviving decadrachms are now considered some of the finest engraving works of antiquity. The technology required hardened bronze or iron dies, struck blanks (flans) cast in moulds and skilfully manipulated to form.

Monetarily, coinage performed three social-technological functions: firstly it standardised value (a precondition for the Greek agora economy and the wage labour seen at Eleusis and the Erechtheion accounts); secondly it underwrote state finance (e.g. the Athenian Laurion silver paid Themistocles’ fleet of 200 triremes in 483 BC); thirdly it became an accepted instrument of statecraft. The Spartan occupation of Decelea, from 413 BC, damaged Athenian access to Laurion, eventually leading to the issuance of emergency bronze/plated coinage in 406-5 BC. Aristophanes’ Frogs (405 BC) records perhaps the first articulation of Gresham’s Law, that bad money drives out good …

She has good and ancient silver, she has good and recent gold.
These are coins untouched with alloys; everywhere their fame is told;
Not all Hellas holds their equal, not all Barbary far and near.
Gold or silver, each well minted, tested each and ringing clear.
Yet, we never use them! Others always pass from hand to hand.
Sorry brass just struck last week and branded with a wretched brand.

The monetary experimentation in Alexandria was both technologically and politically radical. Ptolemy I introduced a sophisticated capital-control regime, one where foreign merchants arriving in Egypt were forced to exchange their coin at royal banks, allowing the crown to pocket the difference in metal value. Ptolemy II attempted to anchor the domestic economy by introducing massive, heavy bronze coins. Finally a real ‘monetary revolution’ began in the 3rd century BC with La Grande Mutation. Facing civil war and a silver shortage, the state uncoupled their currency’s physical weight from its value. They re-tariffed cheap bronze tokens with large face values, beginning a decimal accounting system. It was the ancient world’s foremost example of a closed-loop economy, where a state held enough power to value, issue and accept what was essentially the ancestor of fiat currency.

Naval Technology

Greek shipbuilding was shell-first, meaning that planks were edge-joined by mortise-and-tenon joints, then internal frames inserted afterwards. This produced a stiff, light hull well suited to ramming. Merchant vessels (holkades, gauloi) could carry up to 400 tonnes by the late 4th century, the famous Kyrenia wreck was found to contain perhaps 400 or so amphorae of Rhodian wine and Cypriot almonds.

Warship evolution proceeded from the pentekonter (50-oared, single-banked, around 8th century BC), then the bireme (two banks, 7th century), moving to the trireme (triērēs, three banks). Thucydides credits the Corinthians with first adopting triremes around 700 BC on the Greek mainland, though as with many forms of Mediterranean technology they may be Phoenician in origin. The Athenian trireme was around 37m long, with a 5.5m beam, capable of displacing roughly 40 tonnes, manned by 170 oarsmen arranged in three tiers (thranites, zygites, thalamites) with one man to an oar. One reconstructed trireme (Olympias) from the 1980’s was viable and could reach high speeds, nearly 7 knots in early trials and higher sprint figures in later reporting. Larger Hellenistic polyremes (Ptolemy IV supposedly had a legendary ‘forty’) were not necessarily multi-banked but likely had multiple men per oar.

The embolon (bronze ram), with its three horizontal cutting blades, was the trireme’s key offensive weapon. A good example is the recovered Athlit ram (approx 200 BC, Israel coast), a mind-boggling 465 kg of carefully cast bronze. Greek ships used a single square sail (later added to with the foresail, artemon) which was primarily for transit, not battle. In the same way modern people are surprised the earliest horsemen rode to the battle but fought on foot, so the Greeks sailed from place to place, but deployed the oars when engaging the enemy.

Navigation depended on coastal piloting, references to the stars (the Lesser Bear, Phoenikē, was credited to Phoenician practice, while the Greeks used the Great Bear), wind knowledge and the creation of sail logs or periploi. These sailing manuals/records must have been invaluable, examples include the lost 6th-century BC Massaliote Periplus, which detailed the voyages taken to the French and British coastlines in search of tin. Blue sea navigation was avoided when possible, but the grain run from the Black Sea to Athens crossed large stretches of open water.

Harbour engineering reached an industrial scale at the Piraeus. Dragatsis and Dörpfeld’s excavations in the 1880’s and the recent work of marine archaeologist Bjørn Lovén together revealed the presence of ship sheds (neōsoikoi). These long, narrow (40 × 6m) structures cover roughly 110,000sq m across the three Piraeus basins. Carbon dating places the main phase between 520 and 480 BC, which matches the documented push by Themistocles for Athens to build a powerful navy. At her peak Athens possessed over 300 triremes. If we accept that building a hull took two to three months of skilled work, and each trireme contained roughly 6,000 individual wooden components, then it seems likely that this was the largest industrial production project in the classical world before the Roman Empire. Dry-dock hauling slips, fortified harbour entrances which could be locked down by chains, segregated commercial and military zones - Piraeus had become the prototype of all later naval bases in the Mediterranean.

Hydraulics and Hydrology

In my opinion the single most mind-blowing demonstration of Greek surveying and tunnelling skill is the Tunnel of Eupalinos on Samos. Built roughly between 530-520 BC by an engineer named Eupalinos of Megara, the aqueduct spans an entire kilometre through the solid rock of Mount Kastro. It lies 180m below the summit, a cross-section tunnel of approx 1.8 by 1.8m with a separate water channel cut into the floor. It was created by working from both ends (amphistomon), relying on a rigorous, geometric survey to make them meet accurately. The tunnelling teams met with a horizontal offset of barely a few metres and an astonishing vertical mismatch of just 64 cm. In 2009 a laser-scan survey confirmed an extraordinary 0.6% gradient on the channel. The aqueduct functioned for around 1,100 years.

However, this achievement was not an isolated event. Megara had its own aqueducts, Athens built the Peisistratid Enneakrounos fountain-house in the late 6th century and further monumental public fountain-houses (krenai) could be found in Olympia, Corinth and Cyrene. Large cisterns served the needs of the Acropolis, Lindos and various Hellenic fortresses. Water technology by the late Hellenistic period additionally included the ‘Archimedes screw’, the saqiya (compartmented water-wheel) and the tympanum (drum-wheel). These were standard equipment for irrigation in Egypt and for waste water extraction in Spanish mines, where Roman-period bronze components have been excavated.

Ptolemaic hydraulics in Egypt went further than most. The reclamation of the Fayum under Ptolemy II’s rule added around 1,200 sq km of agricultural land and was recorded for posterity. Water-lifting devices, sluices, dykes and canal locks became extensions of the Greco-fiscal-administrative state. Even the prize jewel, Alexandria herself, depended on a complex freshwater cistern and canal system fed from the Canopic branch of the Nile. In many ways these water management projects were more far-sighted and ingenious than today’s hydrological time-bombs, but that is for another day.

Agriculture and Land Management

Agricultural technology in Greece advanced slowly but surely over the centuries. The Mediterranean trio of wheat/barley, olives and grapes, had been established back in the Bronze Age, but the Archaic and Classical periods saw more intensive and organised production. In Hesiod’s Works and Days (700 BC-ish) the writer records two-field fallow rotation and the use of lunar timing. By the 4th century, Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and Theophrastus’s two works (Historia Plantarum and De Causis Plantarum) record dozens of crop varieties, grafting techniques such as inarching, cleft and bud, methods of seed selection, soil typology and the practice of planned manuring.

Olive presses evolved from simple basin-and-trough installations through lever-and-weight presses to the screw press. Wine production used basin presses (the lēnos) and the familiar treading. Where Greece did push for innovation was in the storage and transport and wine, which included the pithos (a large fixed jar) for cold storing and the amphora for shipping. Amphora typology is a tedious but well-tested and rigorous tool within modern archaeology. Using their stamped handles (Rhodian, Knidian, Thasian, or Chiot) scholars have been able to map trade flows. Production centres at Knossos, Keratokampos, Ierapetra, and Achladokampos in Crete have been identified and researched. The Cretan and Cycladic data reveal that Hellenistic wine and oil production was organised on industrial estates whose output was ultimately tied to the symposium and to military supply economies.

Terracing was labour-intensive but became central to making the hilly and rough Aegean countryside cultivable. The practice is well attested from the Archaic period onwards, recent geoarchaeology in Boeotia and the Methana peninsula has dated Greek terrace systems to the late Archaic and Classical periods. Slave labour was crucial for large estate agriculture, and for the latifundia model exported to Sicily and Italy, but the small, free and virtuous citizen farm remained a moral ideal of the Greek polis. Similar tensions can be seen in other periods of overseas expansion, such as European agriculture and land holding in the Americas. The Greek institution of the symposium is often imagined and described in its social context, but the symposium economy was very important. Again echoing periods of modernity, elites drinking premium alcohol was a major demand-side driver of viticulture, as well as ceramics, metalwork and human entertainment. The latter also had upstream impacts on the slave economy, and in training and providing work for courtiers, musicians and artisan traders.

Mining and Boring

The previously mentioned Laurion silver mines in southern Attica are amongst the best documented industrial complex of the classical world. Worked from the Late Neolithic for copper and galena, they were then systematically exploited from the late 6th century BC under Peisistratos. By 483 BC, mining had reached around 100 m depth (according to Aristotle). A well-timed discovery of a rich vein at Maronea ended up funding Themistocles’ fleet, allowing Athens to draw around 100 talents of silver (estimated 2.6 tonnes) to build 100 ships according to Aristotle, or 200 according to Herodotus, for the Persian War. Both Aristotle (Athēnaiōn Politeia) and Demosthenes (Against Pantaenetus) record that the Athenian state owned the mines and leased them to citizens for 3 or 10 year terms.

At its peak an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 slaves worked in the Laurion complex. Thucydides records 20,000 deserting to Spartan-occupied Decelea during the late Peloponnesian War (413 BC). Annual production at max is estimated at 20 tonnes of silver and 8000 tonnes of lead. Slave life expectancy in the mines was about five years, and archaeological remains at the Thorikos and Agrileza barrack complexes corroborate their brutal chained, naked and branded conditions described by ancient sources.

Mine and gallery ventilation was achieved by pairs of shafts at opposite ends of a working area, with fires lit at one shaft to draw a draft inside. Light was provided by oil lamps, and thousands have been recovered. Ore was hauled in baskets up the shafts, then crushed with mortar stones and processed in washeries. These were large, water cycling installations which can still be seen today at Agrileza and Thorikos. The galena was smelted in furnaces which required vast amounts of charcoal, ultimately leading to the deforestation of all Attica.

Other mining centres include Siphnos (gold and silver, was exhausted by the late 6th century after a flood), Thasos (silver, gold) and Pangaion in Thrace. Pangaion was exploited first by local kings and then by Philip II of Macedon, reportedly yielding 1,000 talents annually and funding his army. Macedonian gold from this source flowed through the whole Hellenistic monetary system. Aside from silver and gold, the Greeks also discovered and categorised many mineral products at Laurion. Some 265 minerals are recorded, and Greek miners could empirically distinguish cinnabar, ochre, pyrite and sphalerite, amongst others.

The tunnelling expertise of engineers like Eupalinos and of Macedonian engineers skilled in siege warfare was rooted in the same body of practical knowledge as deep-shaft mineral mining. Greek mining engineers were among the most technically demanding craftsmen of antiquity, and sought after for this combination of experience, skill and practical knowledge.

Mechanics and Gears

Surely the crowning evidence for the sophistication of Hellenistic mechanics is the world-famous Antikythera Mechanism, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901.

Read more

Along one boundary in the coastal region designated “San Diego, California,” approximately thirty million combatants die every year. The front line has not moved appreciably in a decade. In the grimdark of the near future, there is only war and more war.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An armed conflict of planetary scope has been ongoing for approximately forty million years. It currently spans six continents, involves at minimum six distinct invasive military powers and shows no sign of resolution. The primary combatants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae (vulgar - ants), with approximately 25,000 known species, of which a small number have achieved global force projection through a combination of chemical weapons, slave armies, suicide units and accidental alliances with the planet’s dominant hominid species via its cargo shipping networks.

The latter population is largely unaware of the conflict. Where they are aware, they are still losing.

This briefing covers: (1) the general military capabilities of the combatants (2) the campaign history and current disposition of the conflict’s dominant power (3) the secondary invasions complicating that picture (4) an assessment of likely future trajectory.

PART ONE: CAPABILITIES ASSESSMENT

Survey of belligerent armaments, doctrines, special units

1.1 COMBAT DOCTRINE

Ant military doctrine ranges from ritualised deterrence to industrial-scale annihilation. The variance is significant, we impress upon the reader that these are far from a unified force.

Deterrence model. Myrmecocystus mimicus (the honeypot ant):

• Colonies of 20–130 workers deploy hundreds of soldiers for pre-engagement assessment

• Combatants perform stereotyped threat displays: stilted locomotion, raised abdomens, antennal percussion

• Casualty rate during tournaments: near zero

• Purpose: force assessment before committing to decisive action

• When imbalance is established, the weaker colony is raided and enslaved

• Assessment: Cold War logic. Show of force followed, when asymmetry is confirmed, by annexation.

Human-shield doctrine. Pheidologeton diversus (marauder ant):

• Minor workers (expendable, low-cost) deployed for frontline mass

• Major workers (high-cost, high-capability) held in reserve until breach is achieved

• Colony displays no apparent grief response to minor worker losses

• Assessment: Identical in structure to ancient conscript-and-elite armies. Independently derived.

Age-stratified deployment. Solenopsis invicta (fire ant):

• Months-old workers: assigned to combat. Weeks-old workers: assigned to flight/withdrawal

• Days-old workers: feign death upon contact

• Source: Cassill (2008), Naturwissenschaften

• Assessment: A triage doctrine, the colony produces its own order of battle.

The mathematics of mass: Champer & Schlenoff (2024) confirmed that ant battles obey Lanchester’s Square Law. This principle was originally derived for WW1 aerial combat, it states that in open-terrain engagements, doubling your forces doesn’t simply double your advantage, but rather quadruples it. Numerical superiority compounds exponentially. Lanchester’s Law is arguably the dominant point of ant success worldwide.

1.2 CHEMICAL WEAPONS PROGRAMME

The Formicidae chemical arsenal is the most sophisticated battlefield pharmacology on the planet. The following represents a partial inventory.

Primary weapon systems:

• Formic acid (subfamily Formicinae): Sprayed via specialised acidopore gland. Formica sanguinea (blood-red ant) uses a two-stage system, first Dufour’s gland compounds (hendecane, decylacetate, dodecylacetate) dissolve the enemy cuticle first, then the acid penetrates the exposed tracheal system. Assessment: shell, then gas.

• Solenopsin (fire ant, Solenopsis invicta): Piperidine alkaloid. Venom composition >95% alkaloid by mass. Cytotoxic, hemolytic, fungicidal, insecticidal. LD50 data: Pogonomyrmex harvester ants are 684× more resistant than Argentine ants. Fire ants are 330× more resistant than Argentine ants to their own weapon. Assessment: armed and armoured against their own ordnance.

• Propaganda substances (Formica subintegra, parasitic slave-making ant): Hypertrophied Dufour’s glands contain ~700μg of decyl acetate, dodecyl acetate, and tetradecyl acetate. During raids, this mixture is discharged at any defending workers which triggers the target colony’s own alarm pheromones. Defenders then interpret their nestmates as threats leading to widespread colony panic. (Regnier & Wilson 1971)

This propaganda weapon is almost certainly unique in the biological world, nothing else in this conflict or arguably in the broader study of warfare, quite matches it. The attacking force reprograms the enemy’s communications network, and the defenders route themselves. Regnier and Wilson called these chemicals “propaganda substances”, they remain one of the most elegant methods of warfare in any species.

Defensive countermeasures:

• Tawny crazy ant chemical antidote (Nylanderia fulva, a.k.a Raspberry crazy ant or Caribbean crazy ant): When contaminated with fire ant solenopsin, workers apply self-produced formic acid to their own bodies. Survival rate with treatment: 98%. Without: 48%. (LeBrun et al. 2014). This is the first documented instance of any insect producing and self-applying a chemical detoxification agent in combat conditions. It was derived from an evolutionary arms race conducted over millions of years in South America and was imported, inadvertently, to a theatre where fire ants had held dominance for eighty years.

1.3 SPECIAL UNITS

Trap-jaw ant (Odontomachus bauri):

• Mandible closure speed: 35.5–64.3 m/s (up to 230 km/h)

• Strike duration: 0.13 milliseconds. Peak acceleration: ~100,000 g

• Mechanism: latch-release of stored elastic energy; trigger-hair contact initiates strike

• Secondary function: mandible strike against hard surface launches ant into air becomes an escape mechanism

• Designated “probably the fastest reflex yet described for any animal” (Gronenberg 1995)

• Assessment: a frontline unit with its own ejection system.

Exploding ants (Colobopsis explodens, described Laciny et al., 2018):

• Autothysis is the voluntary gaster rupture under muscular contraction

• Explosion releases sticky, toxic, antimicrobial secretion from glands extending the length of the body. Kills or immobilises attackers and disinfects the immediate area

• Assessment: the suicide vest which also sanitises the crater, just a standard operating procedure for this unit.

Phragmotic doorkeepers (Colobopsis spp.):

• Soldier ants possess flattened, shield-shaped heads

• Function: physically block nest entrance with cranium, requires significant force to dislodge or displace

• Assessment: specialised caste as living door. They are also the fallback position, in the event of a breach, the door can become a fighter.

Megaponera analis, the field hospital:

Megaponera analis (Matabele ants) raids termite colonies in organised columns of up to 600 workers. Termite soldiers fight back, many ants suffer injuries (legs seized, limbs locked, bodies damaged). The injured ant releases dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) and dimethyl trisulfide (DMTS), which is a chemical distress signal. Uninjured nestmates carry the wounded back to the nest.

Workers apply metapleural gland secretions to the injuries. Those secretions, analysed by Frank et al (2023), contain 112 antimicrobial compounds and 41 proteins. Without treatment: 80% of injured ants die. With treatment: 10%. Colony populations are approximately 29% larger as a direct result of this practice.

Megaponera analis is the only known non-human animal, besides chimpanzees, to treat infected wounds with what are functionally antibiotics. The colony derived this practice from evolutionary pressure, preceding human medicine by tens of millions of years.

1.4 SLAVE ARMIES AND OCCUPIED FORCES

Dulosis is the term of the raiding and enslavement of foreign colonies. This practice has evolved independently approximately ten times across roughly sixty known species, distributed across multiple genera. First documented by Pierre Huber in 1810.

Polyergus spp. (Amazon ants), the professional raider:

• Mandibles: sickle-shaped, useless for any purpose except combat and larval transport

• Colony composition: 3–5 slave-maker workers per 70–90% enslaved workforce

• Queen infiltration protocol: kill resident queen, assume her cuticular hydrocarbon profile, achieve colony acceptance through chemical impersonation

• Enslaved species: Formica spp., entirely responsible for nest maintenance, foraging, and brood rearing

• Assessment: infiltration, assassination, identity theft and proxy labour, a complete colony founding strategy.

Propaganda substances in occupation:

• Formica subintegra deploys chemical dispersal agents during raids

• Enslaved workers are behaviourally suppressed by the chemistry of their own home, as such workers raised under occupation lack the chemical reference points for resistance

Slave rebellions, what we’ve documented:

• Achenbach & Foitzik (2009), Evolution 63:1068–1075: enslaved Temnothorax workers systematically kill 66% of Protomognathus americanus pupae; 83% of future queens destroyed

• Method: direct attack (worker gangs dismember developing ants) or selective neglect

• Recognition threshold: pupal stage, when species-specific cuticular hydrocarbons become detectable; 95% of larvae survive, lacking discriminable chemical signature

• Geographic variation in resistance (Pamminger et al., 2012): West Virginia: 27% pupal survival, New York: 49%, Ohio: 58%

• Evolutionary mechanism: kin selection, the rebellion reduces parasite pressure on related host colonies in the surrounding area

• Assessment: an organised resistance movement, operating inside the occupied territory, recognised only at the stage when identification becomes chemically possible. Some populations resist harder than others. The variance in resistance is heritable.

1.5 ARMY OPERATIONS: INDUSTRIAL SCALE

Eciton burchellii (New World army ant):

• Colony size: 425,000–2,000,000 workers

• Raid formation: swarm front up to 200m wide, 200,000 individuals

• Operational tempo: statary phase (2–3 weeks, fixed bivouac, pupal development) alternating with nomadic phase (2–3 weeks, new bivouac nightly, maximum advance)

• Infrastructure: workers construct living bridges across gaps; fill terrain irregularities with their own bodies; bivouac is built from linked worker chains

• Associated species: 350–500+ obligate associates including antbirds (follow columns for flushed prey), parasitic beetles (infiltrate bivouac), hitchhiking mites, specialist spiders

• Assessment: the engineering corps is the army. Infrastructure and personnel are the same resource. The camp followers number in the hundreds of species. All the great armies of history generate this economy.

Dorylus spp. (African driver ants):

• Colony size: up to 20,000,000 workers

• Raid front width: up to 30m

• Assessment: the largest army any land organism has ever deployed. On a per-area basis, this exceeds any human military operation in the historical record.

PART TWO: THE CAMPAIGN - LINEPITHEMA HUMILE

The Argentine ant: the century of global conquest

2.1 THEATRE OF ORIGIN

• Native range: Río Paraná drainage basin e.g. eastern Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, northern Argentina

• Habitat: riparian floodplain, within a few kilometres of river drainage (Wild 2004)

In-range constraints:

• Supercolony size: 25–500m (small)

• Intraspecific aggression: high at colonial boundaries

• Annual supercolony turnover: ~one-third replaced

• Limiting factors: parasitoid phorid flies (Pseudacteon spp.); aggressive competitors; high genetic diversity maintaining effective chemical recognition between colonies

The Argentine ant in its native range is a moderate regional power, constrained by its own internal diversity. Outside of this range the Argentine ant becomes a different beast altogether.

2.2 THE GENETIC WEAPON

The Argentine ant’s global conquest was largely the result of an accident, a founding bottleneck of such severity that it solved the problem of civil war.

Tsutsui et al (2000) established the mechanism: California’s introduced Argentine ant population carried only 23 genetic alleles across 7 microsatellite loci, against 47 in equivalent southeastern US samples. Genetic homogeneity produced uniform cuticular hydrocarbon profiles across nests, these uniform profiles eliminated the chemical basis for colony discrimination. Without the chemical signal for outsiders, a recognition system which had evolved over millions of years to police colonial borders suddenly had nothing to police.

As a result, introduced Argentine ant colonies do not fight each other. Workers from nests a thousand kilometres apart, meeting for the first time, behave as nestmates. The colony no longer has a civil war to fight, thus every unit of aggression is directed outward.

Giraud, Pedersen & Keller (2002) added a further mechanism dubbed “genetic cleansing.” High-density invasive populations actively select against divergent recognition alleles over time, progressively homogenising the chemical landscape. The Argentine ant empire, as it expands, only becomes more unified, not less.

2.3 THEATRE-BY-THEATRE ADVANCE

Maritime cargo of principally coffee and sugar from South America carried Argentine ants to every inhabited continent, at present we can only partially reconstruct this timeline:

• Madeira, Portugal (before 1858). The earliest confirmed introduction outside its native range.

• New Orleans, USA (1891). Arrived via Brazilian and Argentine cargo vessels.

• South Africa (1893). Now split into two distinct supercolonies.

• Continental Europe (1890s-1917). Spread from Madeira through Iberia and along the Mediterranean coast.

• California, USA (1905-1907). First detected at Ontario, San Bernardino County.

• Australia (1939, although possibly as early as 1931). Established successively in Melbourne, Perth, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland.

• New Zealand (1990). Detected at the Commonwealth Games venue, Auckland.

• Japan (1993). Entered via Kobe port; spread approximately 900 km along Honshu.

• South Korea (2019). Detected at Busan.

Advance rates:

• Budding (local spread): ~150m/year where climate permits

• Jump dispersal (human transport): 10–360km per event, Suarez et al. (2001)

Conclusion: The Argentine ant campaign of global expansion was opportunistic. Shipping lanes performed the strategic planning, whilst the ants required only the capacity to survive transit in cargo holds and the genetic homogeneity to cooperate with their own kin on arrival.

2.4 CURRENT SITUATION: THE SUPERCOLONY NETWORK

• European Main Colony: 6,004km, northwestern Italy to Atlantic coast of Portugal. 30 of 33 sampled populations: no mutual aggression. (Giraud et al 2002)

• Catalonian Outlier: Separate supercolony, eastern Spain. Cross-colony trials: lethal combat in 98% of encounters with Main Colony.

• California VLC or Very Large Colony: ~1,000km, San Diego to Ukiah. Estimated 30 million combatant deaths annually at southern border.

• Australian Network: Melbourne-Adelaide-Perth corridor, ~2,700km. No internal aggression. (Suhr et al, 2011)

• Japanese Theatre: Four supercolonies, dominant colony spanning ~900km along Honshu. (Sunamura et al, 2009)

THE INTERCONTINENTAL FINDING:

Van Wilgenburg, Torres & Tsutsui (2010) conducted cross-continental behavioural trials. Workers from the dominant supercolonies of Europe, California, Japan, Australia, and Hawaii were introduced to each other under laboratory conditions. Despite being from the other side of the world, the worker ants groomed each and displayed no aggression. These ants have a shared ancestor who lived in the Río Paraná basin a century earlier, whose lineages had diverged across multiple independent founding events on four continents, yet they recognised each other as nestmates. The authors’ conclusion: “This intercontinental supercolony represents the most populous known animal society.”

2.5 EFFECTS ON OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Competitive mechanism upon arrival, effects upon native ants and flora/fauna (Holway, 1999):

• Food discovery speed: Argentine ants locate resources in less than half the time of native competitors

• Numerical deployment: 4–10× more workers at resources in invaded vs. uninvaded sites

• Nest raiding: Argentine ants physically enter and plunder native colonies for brood

California — documented displacement: Pogonomyrmex californicus (California harvester ant), Messor andrei (Harvester ant species), Solenopsis xyloni (California fire ant), Aphaenogaster occidentalis, Formica aerata (Grey field ant), Formica moki, Liometopum occidentale (Velvety tree ant), Monomorium ergatogyna, Tapinoma sessile (odorous house ant). Overall, a near-total collapse of native ant community in riparian habitats (Holway, 1998)

Cascade effects:

• Loss of Pogonomyrmex harvester ants > primary prey collapse for coastal horned lizard (Phrynosoma coronatum) > lizard population decline (Suarez, Richmond & Case, 2000)

• South Africa: displacement of Anoplolepis custodiens (common pugnacious ant) and Pheidole capensis (seed dispersers) > Proteaceae seeds left unburied > post-fire regeneration failure (Bond & Slingsby, 1984)

Assessment: collateral damage extending three trophic levels beyond the original engagement.

2.6 STRATEGIC LIMITS

The Argentine ant empire has not proven invulnerable, at the edges they have strategic limits created by climatic conditions.

• Argentine ants require moisture; cannot penetrate xeric habitats, thus invasion typically limited to ~250m from urban edges in coastal sage scrub (Holway 1998, Bolger 2007)

• The 2012-2015 California drought: Argentine ant-occupied area shrank ~30% (fall surveys), ~27% (spring). Native Prenolepis imparis (winter ant) expanded 70% in spring surveys.

• Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve long-term monitoring: 26-year decline in Argentine ant occupancy

New Zealand anomaly: Cooling et al. (2012) reported that 40% of surveyed sites showed Argentine ant population collapse. Mean survival time: 14.1 years. Cause: unknown. No human management was involved. To date no competing species identified as responsible.

The empire contracted spontaneously, for reasons researchers cannot perceive, leaving behind communities statistically indistinguishable from pre-invasion baselines. The retreat left no survivors capable of reporting why it happened. Amongst all the documented findings of the Argentine ant projection phase, this is by far the most significant unexplained development. More primary data required.

PART THREE: MULTI-FRONT ANALYSIS

Secondary invasions, overlapping theatres, escalating complexity

3.1 BELLIGERENT REGISTER: SECONDARY POWERS

Red imported fire ant (RIFA) (Solenopsis invicta):

• Origin: Pantanal flood plain, northeastern Argentina

• US arrival: Mobile, Alabama, 1930’s, via cargo, estimated 9-20 unrelated queens

• Global invasion events: minimum 9 independent introductions (Ascunce et al 2011). Mistaken identification may be common, unsure.

• European breach: as of 2022 confirmed established population, Sicily (88 nests) (Menchetti et al, 2023)

• Combat record: wins 78% of competitive interactions with other ants. 80% against Argentine ants specifically making them a viable global contender

• Venom toxicity: 2 to 3× DDT per unit weight, venom contains solenopsin which can cause cardiorespiratory failure in humans

• Assessment: RIFA are a power that regularly defeats the Argentine ant in direct confrontation. Currently spreading through all major theatres of war.

Little fire ant, or Electric ant (Wasmannia auropunctata):

• Reproductive system: queens produced clonally via parthenogenesis; males clonally via genome elimination; workers sexually as interlineage hybrids

• A single founding queen is a complete, self-sufficient invasion kit

• Current deployment: Intentional introduction into West Africa as pest control (since 1913). Later invasions into New Caledonia (one supercolony, 450km), Galápagos, Hawaii, Israel, Taiwan, North America, the UK, Cuba and more.

• Assessment: little fire ants solved the logistics problem of invasive expansion (requiring a queen plus a founding cohort). A lone queen will suffice.

Tropical fire ant (Solenopsis geminata):

• Oldest documented global ant invasion

• Vector: Spanish Manila galleon trade, Acapulco to Philippines, 16th century (Gotzek et al., 2015), estimated through genetic data

• Assessment: the earliest stages of this conflict predate the modern nation-state. The first recorded supply chain exploitation was the Spanish Empire.

Yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes):

• Foraging density: up to 2,254 workers/m², the highest recorded for any ant species (Abbott, 2005)

• Assessment: assault capacity and hegemonic power based on overwhelming force of numbers, see Section 1.1 for Square Law combat doctrine

Big-headed ant (US) or Coastal brown ant (AUS) (Pheidole megacephala):

• Australian supercolony: no intraspecific aggression across 3000 km (Fournier et al., 2009)

• Kenya, 2024: invasion displaced Crematogaster ants protecting whistling-thorn trees, led to increase in elephant browsing and a decline in tree cover. As a result lions switched primary prey from zebra to buffalo (Kamaru et al., 2024)

• Assessment: tactical-scale invasions capable of reshaping apex mammal behaviour, ants alter lion prey selection. This exemplar trophic cascade covers approximately four kilometres of savanna food web.

Tawny crazy ant (Nylanderia fulva):

• First US detection: Houston, Texas, 2002

• Assessment: addressed in full below.

3.2 FRONT LINES: INVASIVE POWERS COLLIDE

The most unpredictable development in the conflict is the emergence of engagements between invasive powers. These forces never encountered each other in their native ranges, none evolved to meet the specific challenges now faced.

The American Southeast: a three-stage displacement

Stage 1: Argentine ants eliminate native ant communities across the southeastern US. Hegemonic regional power for decades.

Stage 2: RIFA established since the 1930’s, then limit and in many areas reverse Argentine ant advance. Fire ants win 80% of direct engagements. Argentine ant populations in the Southeast remain fragmented, with high intraspecific aggression suggesting a smaller, less unified force than their California or European counterparts.

Stage 3: Tawny crazy ants are first detected near Houston in 2002 and identified as Nylanderia fulva in 2012. They displace fire ants across their established range, success coming from their ability to apply formic acid as a solenopsin antidote. This new tactic gives them a huge survival advantage: 98% with the antidote vs. 48% without. The tawny crazy ants achieve densities of 100× all other ant populations combined in peak-density zones. Result: fire ant populations are locally eliminated. LeBrun et al. (2013) reports “most residents prefer the fire ant.” That the liberators proved worse than the occupiers is a situation familiar from the study of human warfare, and has now been observed at insect scale in Texas.

Florida, combined arms: Big-headed ant minor workers engage fire ant workers in holding actions (grasping legs and antennae, preventing effective response) while major workers sever their limbs and follow up by plundering the brood. A two-tier combined-arms operation (1) pin with fast units (2) execute with heavy units.

Bermuda: Argentine ants displace big-headed ants (Wetterer 2017). The same species that lose to fire ants in Florida win in Bermuda. Local conditions (climate, competition history, habitat structure) determine the outcome. There is no absolute universal hierarchy, each species could dominate under the right circumstances.

3.3 THEATRE REPORT: CHRISTMAS ISLAND

Christmas Island. 134 km², Indian Ocean. A rainforest ecosystem of unusual isolation, dominated by one keystone species above all others: the red land crab, Gecarcoidea natalis. Pre-invasion population: approximately 43.7–55 million adults. The crabs graze seedlings, turn leaf litter and regulate the structure of the forest floor through sheer biomass. If the crabs are removed, the forest as it exists now would radically change.

Yellow crazy ants (Anoplolepis gracilipes) arrived at some point in the early 20th century and persisted at low density for decades. They were not identified as a threat. The first supercolony was detected in 1989. By 2001, supercolonies covered approximately 25 km², roughly one quarter of all island rainforest, existing at densities of up to 2,254 foraging ants per m². For scale: nest density was 10.5 entrances per m², measuring far beyond a typical infestation.

When the ants encountered the crabs, they sprayed formic acid into the crabs’ eyes and mouthparts. The crabs suffered blindness and dehydration, and died in place, many eaten alive by the ants. Within the supercolony footprint, burrow density collapsed from 1 per m² in intact forest to 0.03 per m², an approximate 42-fold reduction. Millions of crabs were eliminated across a quarter of the island’s surface.

The cascade that followed has virtually no parallel in the ecological record:

• Seedling density: 30× higher in invaded zones. With no crabs to graze them, the forest floor underwent impenetrable regeneration.

• Scale insects in the canopy: population explosion, tended by ants for their honeydew production. Sooty mould accumulated on the honeydew deposits and led to widespread trees death.

• Giant African land snails (Achatina fulica), previously held in check by crab predation: population increase of 253-fold within supercolonies (Green et al., 2011). This secondary invasion was dormant for decades, but was activated by the collapse of the ecological control that had suppressed it.

The academic source for this primary cascade (O’Dowd, Green & Lake 2003) also introduced the concept of an ‘invasional meltdown’, the process by which one invasive species creates conditions that accelerate the establishment and impact of others. Christmas Island is the canonical example in the literature.

The Australian management response was to use aerial fipronil baiting, the campaign began in 2002. Additionally biological control was attempted via the parasitoid wasp Tachardiaephagus somervillei, targeting the ant-scale honeydew mutualism, introduced from 2016. Crab populations show evidence of recovery, but the forest itself has not. Recovery timelines for the canopy die-back zones are unclear.

3.4 RESISTANCE ASSESSMENT OF NATIVE FORCES

Wittman (2014) conducted the most comprehensive review of native ant resistance to invasive species, concluding that the evidence for native ant communities resisting invasive beachheads and overwhelming surges is weak. In suitable habitat, during peak invasion, native species are unlikely to co-occur with foreign armies at meaningful densities.

Documented exceptions:

• Prenolepis imparis (winter ant/false honey ant, California) survived the Argentine ant invasion by foraging exclusively in cold months when Argentine ants are inactive. This strategy cannot ultimately defeat the invasion, but it does avoid the worst of it, and prevents total annihilation. Assessment: strategic withdrawal to a niche the invader cannot occupy.

• Xeric and high-temperature habitats: Cataglyphis spp. (North Africa), Iridomyrmex spp. (hot inland Australia). Using thermal tolerances which exceed invasive species’ operational range provides another passive defence. Assessment: terrain advantage as last reliable strategic asset.

• Island eradication (Channel Islands, California) using human helicopter-dispensed liquid bait, $50,000- 200,000 per km². Feasible only because innate island biosecurity can prevent re-invasion. Assessment: a lasting victory is achievable only where borders can be sealed. On continental landmasses the borders cannot be sealed.

3.5 PROJECTED TRAJECTORY WITH CLIMATE VARIABLE

Bertelsmeier et al. (2015) modelled 15 invasive ant species under 2080 climate scenarios. The counter-intuitive result: the majority were predicted to contract as climatic warming pushes temperatures beyond thermal optima in currently occupied tropical and subtropical zones.

Exceptions with significant implications:

• Fire ant suitable habitat in Europe: ~7% of EU territory currently but projected ~30% by 2070 (Menchetti et al 2023). Approximately half of current European urban areas are climatically suitable.

• Liu et al (2025) concluded that, across North America, alien and invasive ant species projected to expand range more than native species. This structural divergence favours invaders over the course of this century.

The infrastructure finding:

Bertelsmeier, Ollier, Liebhold & Keller (2017) insisted that, ultimately, human shipping history governs global ant invasion dynamics far more than the climate. Colonial trade routes created invasion corridors that climate models do not capture. A simple takeaway, empires that build shipping lanes also build invasion infrastructure.

CLOSING ASSESSMENT

Returning to San Diego: 30 million annual ant deaths along the borderline represents attrition, a conflict in total stalemate. Neither supercolony is advancing nor retreating, the sheer loss of biomass may eventually grind one or the other into submission, but not yet.

Widening the lens, we have six continents with front lines active for over a century. There are secondary invasions displacing primary invasions in sequences that render the original ecological baseline unrecoverable in human timescales. We have an intercontinental supercolony constituting the most populous cooperative society ever documented on this planet. On one small island in the Indian Ocean we have a complete ecological system dismantled by a species that was simply foraging.

The one force that has demonstrated consistent capacity to reverse the invasion is not a competing species. The climatic forces of heat, aridity, drought: these impartial factors are the only ones with the efficacy to reverse and change the front lines. The New Zealand collapse remains a true mystery, an empire that retreated spontaneously, for unknown reasons, leaving communities indistinguishable from pre-invasion baselines. One generation it was there and fourteen years later, it was not. No successor ant state or invasion has been identified. If there is a mechanism operating in those abandoned sites, it too remains unknown. Working it out could be the most important defensive tool for humans in the coming century, to rout and reverse the flow of invasive ant species.

Beneath the reader’s feet, the engagement continues, as it has done for around forty million years. Your cities, gardens, your patios, terraces, farmlands, fields, your roads, tracks and runways, these may already constitute occupied territory. The warning signs are trail pheromones and alarm compounds and propaganda substances, invasion columns, nest entrances and slave armies. The war began before the human species existed, and will in all probability, continue for long, long after. One day humans may accidentally transport ants to other planets, they may create supply routes that span the solar system and beyond, unintentionally expanding Earth’s most ancient conflict to the stars.

Japan is the, almost singular, masterful exception. Throughout this series I’ve had to stop myself from referencing Japanese equivalents in virtually every area of study - serenity, the grotesque, psychological and internal conflict, demons and possession, skin and body horror, masks, repression, order vs chaos and all the rest, from motifs to deep cultural themes. When I was researching and thinking through my ideas about northern vs southern European differences, and the role of masks and the face throughout European history - I kept having to bracket off Japan, so much so I began to wonder if my whole project was flawed. Now I don’t think so, and I believe there is an explanation for this resonance which supports my overall argument.

Before we dive in I should clarify a few points: what Westerners refer to as ‘J-horror’ typically refers to the time period of films which successfully crossed the divide into Hollywood, roughly the mid-90’s to early 2000’s. In this piece I’ll be using J-horror to point at both those well-known films but also wider and deeper Japanese horror/ghost story-making and media. I also want to anticipate the obvious challenge that Korean horror, or K-horror, is a very popular and growing genre in the West. Without spending a whole essay on the subject, I believe that K-horror is best understood as a secondary formation rather than an origin-point. The genre is (in my opinion) a deliberate adaptation of the already globalised horror grammars from the West and Japan, to distinctly Korean structures of family melodrama, social pressure and critique/metacommentary. I will not elaborate more here, hopefully this argument will make sense by the end of the article.

Sharing Western interfaces

Japanese cinema and horror media are not footnotes or mere derivatives of the Western canon. Japan’s highly original and distinctive cultural ‘givens’, or metaphysical starting points, clearly make it feel to a first-time viewer that they are encountering a different civilisational space. J-horror uses the same modern stages the West lives in (domestic space, school, technology, commuting life) so the viewer doesn’t need any cultural translation for the setting. However, it powers those settings with a distinct logic: obligation, pollution/contamination, place-memory and curses that behave more like algorithms or transmissible diseases than moral punishments.

To help orient us first within the larger framework of J-horror, let’s go through some of the main motifs which make it stand out:

Long black hair as a horror instrument

Hair with agency. Roots in mourning, kabuki, style of ‘masking’. Hiding the face, unnatural and tendril-like movement, a veiling boundary between the living and the dead. Eg Tomie (1999), Onibaba (1964)

Faces withheld rather than revealed

Western horror revels in the reveal (unmasking, the jump-scare). J-horror often terrifies by refusing this facial legibility, with the head lowered, hair curtain, turned away, static blankness, an uncanny face that doesn’t emote properly. Eg Kwaidan (1964), Siren / Forbidden Siren (PS2, 2003)

The onryō logic, vengeance is a force of nature

The vengeful spirit is a cosmic remainder, an unpaid debt, rather than an agent of evil. Western horror has revenge ghosts, but J-horror makes this part of its cultural-cinematic engine. Eg Ugetsu (1953), Tōkaidō Yotsuya Kaidan (1959)

Grudge horror

You walk into the wrong relational stain (house, object, family line, location), which can then spread outwards. Eg Ju-on: The Grudge (2002), Toire no Hanako-san, (1995)

Horror via transmission media (tape/phone/photo/site/rumour)

J-horror treats curses like information, to be copied, propagated, to recruit you into passing it on. The West has chain-letter tropes, but J-horror made replication one of the genre’s defining mechanisms. Eg Ringu (1998), One Missed Call / Chakushin ari (2003)

Domestic claustrophobia and dread

Bathrooms, corridors, genkan/thresholds, stairwells, futons, cramped apartments, all create a suffocating intimacy. Not a haunted house exactly, more like being stuck in a micro-universe or a maze. Eg Dark Water (2002), House / Hausu (1977)

Crawling/contorted locomotion as a signature movement

One of J-horror’s best known motifs - the body moves wrong. Low crawling, joint reversal, twitchy resets, broken rag-doll kinetics. Western horror does use contortion too, but J-horror made this a globally understood grammar of the non-human getting inside the human. Eg Pulse / Kairo (2001), Yomawari: Night Alone (2015)

Ritual pollution and cleansing. Eastern metaphysics

Often an implied or presupposed world where uncleanness, taboo contact, and failed rites have consequences. The Western mode is to frame spiritual threat through sin (internal violation). Japan, like other East Asian/Buddhist/animistic cultures, frames it through boundary violation. Eg Noroi: The Curse (2005), Kuon (2004)

The dead are socially present, they have unfinished business

Ghosts are persistent cohabitants of space and time. Western ghosts might want a message to be delivered. J-horror ghosts might linger as an ongoing condition. Eg Gakkō no Kaidan (1995), Corpse Party (1996 / 2012)

Urban legend monsters

Many Japanese folk-devils/monsters function like mini street-level closed scenarios. If you answer wrong / go there / say that, the sequence is triggered. Kuchisake-onna (2007), Hanako-kun (game/anime variants)

Animated-object spirituality

Objects are potentially alive, offended, even mundane items might have agency.
Western horror has dolls and cursed artefacts, but J-horror can imply a world where object agency is more than a gimmick. Eg Hell Girl / Jigoku Shōjo, Fatal Frame / Project Zero (2001)

Sound as possession marker (croaks, clicks, breath, wet throat noise)

J-horror leans hard on bodily noises (and silence) as a marker of wrongness. Eg Audition (1999), Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

Deeper than these motifs or elements are the wider thematic styles which Japanese horror has become celebrated for, these include the paced build of dread and suspense, an acute wielding of psychological terror and the successful melding of folkloric and older storylines with new technologies and mediums. It is also impossible to imagine modern video game horror without Japan’s influence: Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Siren. Since the 1990’s, J-horror has become an indispensable part of the wider horror media landscape, in particular with Japan’s overall domination within online aesthetics, memetic internet culture and animated storylines.

Compressed modernity: Japan’s breakneck acceleration

Readers of this series might remember my argument, that the advent of modernity drove the deep psychological internalisation of the self ‘at war with itself’, or at least a self which cannot know its own mind fully. Japan underwent probably the fastest modernisation period in history, the Meiji Era of 1868-1913. The end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the wake of a feudal order encountering the power of external, modern military and economic force, caused a systemic and then centralising shock. The Meiji Restoration saw a new constitution imposed across Japan, a nation state built over the regional differences and divides which had always plagued the archipelago. This new state was envisioned as democratic, rational, bureaucratic, industrialising, liberal and future-oriented (destroy the old castles, smash the shrines) - there was to be no place for the ghosts, monsters and folk-lore of the superstitious past:

What are called “ghost stories” [kaidan-banashi] have greatly declined in recent times; there is hardly anyone who does them at the variety halls [yose]. That is to say, since there are no such things as ghosts and they all have come to be called neurosis [shinkeibyō], ghost stories are unseemly things to the professors of civilization [kaika senseikata]. . . . By saying that it’s a neurosis because there’s no such thing as fox-possession and goblin [tengu]-abduction, they completely fob off any and all frightening things on neurosis.

-San’yūtei Enchō, Shinkei Kasane ga fuchi (1888) in Enchō zenshū

We’ll refer to this as ‘compressed modernity’, the total transformation of Japanese lifeways, a phenomenon which took centuries in Europe and only decades under Emperor Meiji. Such compression leaves uncanny traces and shadows in its wake. As the old shogunate crumbled away, spontaneous Ee ja nai ka dancing festivals broke out, as did bakumatsu bakemono ‘grotesque’ or ‘monstrous’ apparitions and scenes of supernatural change. In Osaka, there were ‘monster riots’ (yōkai sōdō), and across Mito and Shimosa there were tengu sōdō disturbances, including looting and rioting. Fears of the Western barbaric outsider became especially acute in the early Meiji period: not only had the Western habit of drinking wine and ‘blood’ during church services been translated into popular beliefs about vampiric outsiders, but it was rumoured that ‘strangers’ (ijin) would appear in the countryside and kill people (ijingoroshi). Worse still, these strangers might actually drain your blood or bone marrow away, a terror which led to the 1873 Okayama ‘blood-tax’ riots (ketsu-zei ikka):

the Okayama blood-tax riot, as well as those in Tottori, Kagawa, and other areas, arose from a much more broadly based sentiment against government collaboration with foreigners in the program of civilization and enlightenment. Ketsutori (blood-taking) was not the only word commoners used to signify the object of fear associated with military conscription; aburatori (fat- or marrow-taking) and kotori (child-taking) were also used. According to one contemporary article critical of the official explanation for the riots, the idea of blood-taking (or fat-taking or child-taking) circulated among the populace well before the 1873 conscription order, usually in association with Western foreigners who, since the end of the Tokugawa period, had been believed to “take the lifeblood of children and refine medicines with it, mix the fresh blood of pregnant women and drink it in medicines, and also coat electrical wires with the blood of virgins.”

-Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (1999) G.A. Figal

The new Enlightenment-style Meiji state took aim at these and many other remnants of folk-beliefs, such as the misemono street shows, yose variety halls, ghost story recitations and many more. To the ordinary rural Japanese villager, the government had itself become a demonic force, seeking to uproot tradition and suppress their inherited explanations for disease, misfortune and death. That being said, when the 1868 leadership announced the Shinbutsu Hanzenrei, the official separation of Shinto and Buddhism, it unleashed a tsunami of pent-up anger and violence towards the institutions of Buddhism - leading to the most intense period of haibutsu kishaku (‘abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni’). The greater crime perhaps, in the eyes of the ordinary populace, was the later Jinja seirei Shinto shrine consolidation ordinances, which aimed to abolish and aggregate large numbers of small, rural shrines, to help create a state-run Shinto religion. The vandalism and destruction of many tiny, carefully tended shrines deep in the woodlands caused great outrage and opposition, complete with charges of angry homeless kami spirits. After the 1905 war with Russia, the government capitalised on its power to enshrine the souls of the deceased soldiers, again to the outcry of families and local shrines.

These are just some of the many examples which illustrate the Meiji era tensions between the rapid, centralising forces of modernisation, and the older, distributed forms of power and knowledge. To create a homogeneous and nationalistic state, the Meiji government had to stamp out everything from informal shamanic healing to institutionalised Buddhism. In smoothing out and eradicating the intensely localised wrinkles of folk-devils and superstition, Japanese society underwent the same process of psychological internalisation and vulnerability to the irrational as the Westerners they sought to learn from.

A psychological core without Western confession

It would be easy to simply fall back on the neat binary that the West vs Japan represents a ‘guilt-based’ culture vs a ‘shame-based’ culture - but I think we need to do better than that. The compressed modernity timeline, in particular between 1868-1913, created a complex and contingent set of psychological pressures on Japan.

In attempting to copy or borrow institutions from the West, Japan entered something of a paradox: how to create a liberal individual who precedes and resists the State (a prerequisite for Anglo-American constitutional law) using the mechanisms of the State? The more communal, clannish, ancestrally-bound people of Japan were forced to be free and then handed a list of rights and duties as citizens which made little sense and were hardly desirable to begin with.

A new idea was needed to conceptualize progress as it transpired at the collective level and to act as the counterpart of the individuated person. In the West it was called “society,” and in Japan shakai (coined by Inoue Tetsujirō)… Society “enabled Japanese intellectuals to rethink Japanese society on a new scientific basis and to produce new interpretations of Japan’s past, present, and future… Before 1880, no standard translation for “society” existed; “indeed, one can insist that there was no such concept in Japanese.” Originally, terms designating small face-to-face, self-selected, concrete groups (gangs, clubs, and guilds) that denoted “associating” or “fraternizing” were employed. Kōsai (“interaction”)—as in “human society” (ningen kōsai or hitobito kōsai)—and setai (“the human world”) would also be used.

-The History of Japanese Psychology: Global Perspectives, 1875–1950 (2017) B. J. McVeigh

The foundational material for this new democratic, individualistic society was the feudalism of the Tokugawa period, and its popular ethical system of shingaku. In the 1835 collection of moral tales - Zoku Kyuo Dowa - the authors aim to teach both absolute subservience to authority combined with a spiritual doctrine of ‘no-self’:

If one had no selfish motives but only the supreme virtues, there would be no self. . . . If he serves selflessly, he does not know what service is. If he knows what service is, he has a self. If you think that you work diligently, it is not true service

Moulding a positivistic, utilitarian and science-minded citizen from this substrate proved largely impossible, even for the Meiji ruling elites, so they emphasised the role of the state in building the people first - whilst promoting devotional worship of the Emperor. Submission to authority, combined with no outward manifestation of egoism - a resignation to Heaven’s law, to fate - fatalism even: these were the qualities most Japanese people had inherited according to the psychologist Hiroshi Minami, who authored the classic 1953 work Nihon-jin no shinri (Psychology of the Japanese People). Minami leans towards irrationalism, elasticity and most of all - ambiguity - as the defining features of the modernising Japanese. A people who neither rejected science, logical analysis, rationalism; nor fully embraced them. As imports, these world-views created a ‘leftover’ tension:

I use the so-called abstract nouns of foreign origin only for the purpose of analysis, but when it is a case of measuring a man’s philosophy of life, I am careful to use them as little as possible.

-Ryoshu [Loneliness on a Journey] (1950) Yokomitsu Riichi

Stop leaning toward such an un-Japanese thing as analysis and theory.

-Toyo nodo no kyogaku [The Way of the Farmer-Warrior] (1939) Sugawara Hyoji

The great turn of modernity, the turn inwards, has a confessional tone in the West arising from centuries of Christian theology and structure. The Western Christian self was built from barbaric materials and disciplined through an imagio dei which moralised the interior. Japan’s encounter with modernity also created a new kind of inward facing self, but without the Christian confessionalism - which is impressive when we consider that Japan embraced the field of psychology, a field saturated with implicit Western assumptions about how the self functions and becomes dysfunctional.

In 1877 the University of Tokyo was founded, and Toyama Masakazu began teaching shinrigaku - a concept meaning ‘mental philosophy’ or ‘study of the mind’, which minimised the experimental focus of Western psychology and looked instead Buddhism, areas of religious agreement between East and West and practical applications such as pedagogical psychology. Education was the early Meiji era’s main use of psychological learning, attempting to standardise and modernise the whole edifice. Pupils were taught to spatialise the world mathematically; that the moral cosmos was structured through the interior and not ‘out there’; the mind’s eye created space for a self-reflective subject, an ‘I’ that does the thinking; circumstances were contingent and time linear, a subject can make progress, like society. All are necessary to create the autonomous, rights-bearing agent, and all left a sensation of breakneck dislocation and disorientation.

Literature, rather than psychology, probably better expressed this sensation during and after the Meiji era. Writers like Natsume Sōseki, Tayama Katai, Shimazaki Tōson and Mori Ōgai still remain trailblazers of literary modernism in Japan. Much of their work deals with the subjectivity of the new man under rapid modernisation, their loneliness, alienation and internal detachment from the past. The entire concept of the ‘confessional’ self-conscious novel, an ‘I’ novel, has been debated as to whether it precedes an interior subject in need of confessing, or if it creates that subject through a kind of internalised dialogue with the text.

Like the system of genbun itchi, the system of confession has been naturalized to the extent that we no longer notice it. Examining the process through which genbun itchi was institutionalized reveals it to be a kind of writing which has nothing in common with either the speech (gen) or the writing (bun) of an earlier time, a writing whose origins have been repressed from memory. People came to think of themselves as simply recording “speech” (gen) by means of “writing” (bun). Similarly, confession is not simply a matter of concealing one’s sins, it is a system. It is the existence of the system that gives rise to the need to conceal, but we do not perceive this…

Katai labored to tell the “truth”, but it was the system of confession that made his truth visible. The system of confession preceded the action of confessing, in much the same way that the confessional techniques of psychoanalysis gave substance to the concept of the unconscious. There is no a priori “spirit” but only what has been produced by the system of confession.

-Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (1993) Karatani Kōjin

Ultimately it is fool’s errand to attempt a thorough cultural and psychological explication of modern Japan, there is no ‘nucleus’ or ‘kernel’ of culture or self-hood. However, its clear that the process of modernisation from the 1860’s onwards radically transformed pre-existing Japanese cultural relations, religious beliefs, affinities, sense of personhood, relationship with authority and so much more. Exposure to and training in European Classical-Christian-Enlightenment-Romantic universalism was an ordeal which produced immense individual turmoil and national progress. The self which was born at this time was unique, semi-confessional, raw; estranged from the past and an outsider to the future. Sōseki’s epigram - sokuten kyoshi, “Be in accord with heaven and reject the self” - may be his attempt to ‘return’, or his attempt to move beyond and ‘transcend’, anything but being stuck here.

The overlap - what J-Horror shares with the West

Without making this article too long, it seems necessary to cover those areas where J-Horror taps into Western psychology, in some cases going above and beyond what Western Horror can produce. We’ll limit ourselves here to: domestic enclosure, numinous technology and performative normality.

Domesticity and claustrophobia are powerful lenses in horror, sharpening and heightening the primitive sensation of being trapped. Both J and W horror share a resonance with modern alienation, in architecture and human relations. In both traditions, horror works by turning supposed intimacy into entrapment. The corridors become narrow, the rooms become repetitive, the plumbing leaks, doors no longer protect. The house starts to feel like an extension of the psyche, a point true of Western films like The Shining and Repulsion, where confinement and mental pressure are inseparable from the built space, and true of J-horror films like Dark Water and Ju-on, where apartments and houses become machines for dread rather than shelters. J-horror differs in that the architecture more often feels saturated by residue or a curse. In line with Japan’s religious heritage, to be ‘haunted’ is less a point of revelation (a very Western valence) and is rather concerned with ‘contamination’. Water keeps recurring in films like Ringu and Dark Water - a constant sign of dread, seepage. Water points to a failing boundary. The ceiling leaks, the tank overflows, the building sweats, the dead return through dampness. This ‘residue’ refuses to leave, a perversion of ritualistic cleansing methods like misogi and harai. Western horror wants the catharsis of confrontation and revelation - what secret is hidden in the house? J-horror likes saturation, i.e what has soaked into this place and refuses to leave?

Another point of high resonance between them is the deployment of ‘numinous technology’. Both genres use technology to destroy the fantasy that modern life is rational and disenchanted. The phone, camera, television, tape, radio, computer, network moves from neutral and inert to uncanny. Tech receives, stores, repeats and transmits forces the human subject cannot fully master - other agencies are at work. Both traditions play with the feeling that technology is terrifying underneath: invading the private sphere, outliving the body, storing traces, repeating without feeling, connecting strangers invisibly. As the Victorians saw, tech is a form of occult medium. J and W horror so often return to recording devices, screens, telephones, surveillance apparatus and communication systems - because these all use presence-at-a-distance. Analog internet horror surfaces old VHS tapes showing traces of monstrous entities, J-horror gives us old VHS tapes, cursed and lethal. The difference is that the West has a centuries-old fear of technological overreach, the Frankenstein complex. Technology is framed as dangerous because humans have corrupted it or act as Prometheus and Faust, we see our ‘real interior’ through it - in constant tension with Christian-psychological moral anxiety. J-horror on the other hand sees technology as becoming incorporated into a wider field of impersonal spiritual or affective transmission. The medium is not instrumentalised in the way Western narratives often converge on, its a medium that now belongs to the ecology of the ghosts, less a portal than yet another part of the universal web-of-being. Think of the 2001 J-horror Pulse / Kairo versus the long-running anthology TV show Black Mirror. The former using the internet as a spectral tangle of ensnarement for the living by the dead, the latter using speculative technological advancements as moral parables.

Finally, performative normality is a feature of both genres, which helps with cross-pollination -although the social contexts differ in some key ways. Scary monsters and demons are the stuff of stories all around the world, but J-horror and Western horror - with their internalised psychological battles - find the cracks in normal life and exploit them. What’s going on underneath family life, smiling faces, the routine 9 to 5, the performance of normality. In the West this is repression or denial. The social mask exists, but the narrative pressure usually pushes toward exposure and something hidden must come out (eg Babadook, Rosemary’s Baby, Get Out, Hereditary). In Japan normality is not simple hypocrisy, bur rather a social duty, a discipline or a way of containing chaos, which gives it a different tone. Hence why J-horror can feel subdued, muted, affectively flattened, eerily polite even to a Western audience. But one word in particular constantly appears in reviews of J-horror films, dread. Dread is built and amplified by the skilful refusal of dramatic release: rather than the climax-catharsis / unmasking / confrontation of Western aesthetic logic, J-horror can finish with a sense of unease, lingering residue, relational stickiness between people, utilising Japanese concepts like yūgen and mono no aware to great effect.

All three of these areas - domestic enclosure, numinous technology and performative normality - resonate enough with Western audiences to make J-horror feel familiar, but have enough differences to feel culturally distinct and distant. The psychological teeth do bite, but Japanese metaphysical and religious assumptions about how the world works give J-horror an exotic quality, arriving from ‘somewhere else’. This similar-but-different feeling is why many J-horror films were remade for Western audiences, especially in the 90’s and early 2000’s, but also why audiences went looking for the originals, seeking something more.

Lost in translation - masks and villains

To highlight two points of difference which help show where some of these metaphysical assumptions differ between the genres, we’ll turn to masks and villains.

Japanese and Western horror both make use masks, but they do not use them in the same way. Examples from across Japanese tradition such as early gigaku (an outdoor Buddhist masked procession-performance introduced from Baekje, flourishing in the 7th/8th centuries), later stage arts such as Noh and Kyōgen and Shinto kagura dances all repeatedly show masks as a technology of transformation. This logic is grounded in an ontology of surfaces-as-interfaces, which is neither the serene mirror of Apollo nor the numinous rupture of the Germanic north. There is also no primary anxiety over deception, falsehood, trickery or deceit - hence why Japanese horror masks tend to feel less like a lie and more like a threshold through which contamination, mediation or uncanny agency enters the visible world.

Western horror works more often with the aforementioned climax or catharsis of unmasking. The mask signifies a hidden identity, transgression, anonymity, bodily disfigurement, and the tension lies in who or what could be underneath. Japanese horror changes the emphasis away from this singular point. J-horror masks and mask-like faces are less revelatory and more relational. An audience in the know will be questioning what has been activated. This relational stance explains the primacy of hygiene masks, faceless spirits and Noh-derived expressions in J-horror. The lank curtain of wet hair hanging over the villain’s face functions in the same way. To take the classic example - Ringu/The Ring - famously the antagonist Sadako/Samara makes use of older onryō/yūrei iconography, along with Noh’s magic to create multiple emotional surface-states from small differences in viewer angles. But, her iconic hair-veil is used very differently between the original Japanese and Western films. In the former it remains an active surface, in the latter it conceals - right up until it reveals the ‘truth’ underneath. What is lost in the translation is the Japanese anti-catharsis, slow dread, the lingering unease.

Aside from masks, we also find differences in J-horror through its forms of non-Western, non-confessional antagonism. One classic motif that exemplifies this is the relational, rule-bound type of horror villain, where our main characters accidentally find themselves ‘activating’ what feels like a script or protocol. The protocol then moves procedurally through its own logic, ending only when the character dies, or is able to find the ‘exit’ switch - leaving the script fulfilled and awaiting the next victim.

Films based on folklore collected during the Meiji era show this kind of relational, sequence-based curse in action. The 1968 film Yuki-onna / The Snow Woman was based on a reported story in the famous 1904 book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, written by the Irish-Greek translator Lafcadio Hearn - who himself transcribed it first hand from a farmer in Musashi Province. It depicts the story of two sculptors who cut down a tree to carve as a Buddhist statue, triggering the wrath of a Yoki-onna spirit. The sequence unfolds like paper - an encounter, a warning, a prohibition and a consequence. As Japanese ghost/horror films moved into the modern era, the use of contemporary technology to act as the medium for the deadly scripts became one of its defining features. The infamous urban legend of Kuchisake-onna, or the ‘Slit-Mouthed Woman’, follows a flow diagram-like interaction sequence in which the wrong answer leads to death and the right answer leads to mutilation. Proposed ‘cheats’ and tricks have appeared over the years, with internet forum users trying to logically determine the best form of escape, should any of them come across Kuchisake-onna on the street.

Future fusions - digital culture, metaphysical battlegrounds

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this essay, examining multiple aspects of Japanese history in an attempt to understand J-horror - and there’s so much more we could have talked about, especially the post-war cultural changes in the country. However, now we turn to the future: J-horror, as just one of many J-culture exports, will continue to be relevant. Despite being somewhat eclipsed by K-horror today, J-horror still has huge value for understanding the current metaphysical anxieties of digital culture. Many of the genre’s most central structures, the contagious media, haunted domestic technologies, recursive scripts, ambient presences, persistence of affect in impersonal system. Every year these appear less like unique stylistic peculiarities than as early descriptions of the networked life. In this respect it departs from both Romance-Gothic localisation and from many Western models of technological horror, where danger is often framed in terms of hubris, scientific overreach or institutional abuse. By contrast, J-horror more often presents media as spiritually and affectively porous.

This logic is now everywhere in the digital present. Contemporary online life is characterised by almost exactly those conditions that J-horror had already explored. We live within replications-without-origins, the circulation of detached faces and voices, persistence of traces, the collapse of clear boundaries between intimate and public spheres and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing presence from simulation. James Earl Jones’ voice lives on past his death, old browser games whirr away without any users, the faces of politicians are public property for manipulation. Social media profiles, algorithmically curated feeds, AI companions, face filters, virtual avatars and synthetic media all intensify the sense that personhood can now be copied and maintained across technical systems that exceed the control of any individual subject. Within such an environment, the older Western model in which the face guarantees interiority becomes unstable. J-horror was way ahead of the game here because it offers neither simple technophobia nor a merely sociological account of mediation. It provides a metaphysics of contaminated transmission, that is to say - a way of imagining how grief, shame, desire, violence, memory can become ambience and self-propagating.

Thus the future significance of J-horror may lie in its ability to shine a light on digital culture as a battleground rather than a technological environment. What counts as a self when images act independently of bodies? What happens to moral agency when scripts and algorithmic repetitions shape action in advance? How should horror be understood when contamination no longer requires physical proximity, but can be encountered through platforms, archives and interfaces? J-horror suggests that these are technologically intensified versions of older concerns with attachment, pollution, possession, ritual failure and the unstable traffic between the visible and invisible worlds.

What we now have is a growing tension between the digital aesthetic dominance of Japan and the metaphysical authority of the West. Japan, and the cultural swirlings from which J-horror emerged, have supplied a disproportionate amount of the aesthetic grammar through which contemporary digital uncanniness is imagined. The digital world resembles a space which functionally ignores or bypasses classical Western distinctions between essence and appearance. Western audiences recognised in J-horror the domestic settings, media devices, social routines and so on, but encountered within them this novel metaphysical logic of shredding and re-arranging the singular, moral, autonomous individual.

Yet if Japan has helped shape an aesthetic vocabulary of the digital uncanny, Western culture continues to exert extraordinary power at the level of moral interpretation. The dominant Anglophone and European response to digital culture still relies on a visibly Western metaphysics of the self, such as authenticity contrasted with performance, one’s inward truth threatened by surface manipulation, human innocence endangered by seductive images, psychic damage understood and revealed through confession and trauma. At the risk of sounding horribly pretentious, we live in an ontological battlefield: much of the online world operates through mask-like interfaces, stylised personae, virtual intimacies, circulating affective residues, things that are more legible through J-horror’s relational and surface-oriented logic than through older Western models. At the same time, public discourse continues to try and cram these phenomena back into moralised frameworks of corruption and hidden harm.

In Western horror, the loss of interiority is usually catastrophic because the face is still expected to testify to ensoulment and authentic feeling. J-horror comes out of and builds on a tradition where an empty form can survive: the face remains correct, the body continues its normal routine but the animating core is thinned-out or absent. In a kind of techno-animist sense, what links the cursed school corridor and wet-haired onryō to modern avatars and synthetic personas is a relay of personhood. Japanese visual culture has long normalised performative and non-naturalistic faces as emotionally operational rather than morally deficient. Anime, masks, dolls, mascots, cosplay, kawaii-core, VTubers and so on all help produce a cultural environment in which the face does not need to be a transparent window into the soul in order to function socially and affectively. A synthetic or artificially generated face is a surface engineered for attachment. They do not need depth in the old Western sense. They need only enough responsiveness and stylisation, some procedural intimacy to hold attention and they inevitably invite projection.

Western modernity interiorised the self, moralised the private life, and made confession, authenticity, trauma and psychic depth central to personhood. Digital culture and technology doesn’t have a simple relationship with this form of selfhood: one the one hand it externalises internality into infinite surfaces (feeds, chats, selfies, reacts, companions, generated voices, confessions, emotional dashboards), on the other it encourages never-ending introspection. Japan is important here because its horror and adjacent media forms often anticipate a world in which interiority no longer belongs securely to the inner person. For a Western person today digital technology is morally suspect and must be held in check to prevent mental corruption, but for non-Western people this core of anxiety is often not present at all. The same features produce different results, due to the cultural conception of how a self is constituted and maintained: arguably the internet causes internalisation without end, the private self endlessly performed, copied, aestheticised, fed back through interfaces. Inner life becomes a loop - agony for some, normality for many, bliss for a few.

To finish then - J-horror is full of beings and conditions that are neither fully alive nor fully absent, a world without simple psychologically legible subjects nor simple monsters. What lingers on instead is the residue. This could be an attachment without a body, or emotion without closure, a face without a person, or repetition without any meaning. What we mean now by artificial intelligence does map well onto J-horror territory, because LLM-based interfaces do not have a core, stable self. In practice this means the chatbot after the breakup, a dead person’s voice model, an AI therapist, virtual idols, masked influencers, tell-tale imprints of synthetic writing, art or music, these are all residues of the human, not replacements for it. Japan matters because it has repeatedly imagined worlds in which these residues are active, adhesive and socially real. When science fiction describes the posthuman it too often imagines a linear progression of human towards machinic, cyborg futures. The posthuman world we’re already in is much more animistic, antagonistic, sticky, much more a contest of European-derived individual values and other, relational web-like worlds-in-the-making. J-horror has skilfully negotiated this tension and found huge success in the West, and hopefully I’ve shown there’s good reason for this. A nation and people who modernised at warp-speed, explored the psychological pain of that process, but were able to take the best of Western tools and hold up a mirror and a road-map in return.

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While this threat is real, especially in regard to child image exploitation, this type of image crisis is not new. In 1896 the late Victorian world was rocked by the shocking power of X-rays, an almost other-worldly technology with the frightening ability to ‘see through’ flesh, and yield a deathly visual imprint of bone and metal. Their medical and entertainment value was immediately recognised, but a cultural and moral fear took hold that X-rays heralded the complete end of bodily privacy. It wasn’t until some time later that the harmful effects were recognised, and X-rays became a highly regulated but crucial piece of our medical and security technology. There is no direct comparison obviously between AI and X-rays. but there are important similarities with how both re-render the world anew through the alteration of surface and depth, appearance and reality.

The Shock of Discovery (1895-1896)

By the time Wilhelm Röntgen accidentally produced the first X-ray images in his laboratory, the question of artificial images and their manipulations had been ongoing for over three decades. Photography and the daguerreotype exposure process had made it possible for fake images to circulate, ‘proving’ the existence of spirits and ghosts. Huge numbers of young American men had died during the 1860’s, and photographers like William H. Mumler siezed the opportunity to sell images of grieving loved ones with an ethereal person present in the frame, exemplified by his photo of Mary Todd Lincoln sitting with her dead husband standing behind her.

Röntgen, a German physicist, had been tinkering with running electrical wiring through vacuum tubes, and during one experiment had noticed a fluorescent afterglow.

it looked like faint green clouds … Highly excited, Röntgen lit a match and to his great surprise discovered that the source of the mysterious light was the little barium platinocyanide screen lying on the bench. He repeated the experiment again and again

-Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen and the Early History of the Roentgen Rays (1934) Otto Glasser

One of the first images produced using these new ‘X-rays’ was of his wife’s hand, with her wedding ring. This picture became a cultural sensation, and later many women rushed to have an X-ray of their hands with their own rings. Röntgen was unnerved and panicked by his discovery - a form of light that could peer inside the body and project the bones outwards - noone had even speculated about such a discovery. He worked feverishly and secretly in his laboratory, a quasi-Faust who had stumbled upon an occultic power. In late December, just a few weeks later, he published On a new kind of ray: A preliminary communication in a local medical journal, but this invention was not going to stay confined to the world of scientists. Within days the news hit the press, and the public were smitten. The response was, in the words of one scholar:

the most immediate and widespread reaction to any scientific discovery before the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945

-X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duchamp, and the Cubists (1988) L.D. Henderson

The British Quarterly Review similarly wrote of X-rays in 1896, that no previous breakthrough in physics had ever

so completely and irresistibly taken the world by storm

-Anon (1896) page 496

The speed of science then compared to today is startling to consider. In 1896 alone Röntgen was awarded medals and honours by the Royal Society and the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze; twenty lectures on X-rays had been delivered to the French Academy of Sciences by March; over 60 articles appeared in American and British periodicals by year’s end. Overall estimations suggest that between 50-60 books and pamphlets, and more than 1,000 papers were published in 1896, all concerned with the new Röntgen-rays or X-rays. In one of Röntgen’s French audiences was Henri Becquerel, who listened enraptured and immediately began working with the new technology. Becquerel discovered radioactivity that year, and published no less than seven papers in 1896. The year after, Marie and Pierre Curie began their work with radium. 1895-1896 also saw the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi patent and publicly demonstrate his new wireless telegraph system. For the public, greedily consuming all this rapturous news, the world was spinning off its axis into uncharted territory - invisible, penetrating waves of all kinds were suddenly present, peering into their bodies and carrying their messages.

The scholar Chris Otter, in his fascinating 2008 book The Victorian eye: a political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910, describes how illumination through electricity and gas lamps created a new kind of society, one which managed this new capacity to see clearly by creating expectations of privacy, the interior of the home as sacrosanct, as well as new kinds of taboos (voyeurism). X-rays and other forms of wireless, invisible wave which could move through opaque defences such as walls, clothes and even skin, threatened this liberal order of light and dark. But they also confirmed and excited long-held beliefs in the ‘reality of the invisible’. Topics like auras, ghosts, the ether, spiritual mediums, telepathy and elusive knowledge of alchemy and the occult were bolstered by science. We should not forget that the simple cleavages of today - natural/supernatural, spiritual/material - did not really exist for the late Victorian and early Edwardian world. Men of science could explore the existence of the ghostly and spirit photographers could invent new ways to develop their films.

Magic & Medicine (1896-1900)

Three months after the news that a new kind of ray had been identified in Germany, one that could pass through flesh and project an image of the bones onto a plate - Thomas Edison presented the world with the fluoroscope, a real-time X-ray medical imaging machine that gave doctors an immediate advantage. See, unlike Marconi, Röntgen did not patent his X-ray technique and had no interest in commercialising the process. Therefore X-rays were an ‘open source’ and decentralised phenomenon, meaning that 1896 was a year of massive collective experimentation. Edison had not only spotted the medical benefits of photographing bone and teeth, but he upgraded the recording plate from thin card coated in barium platinocyanide or other fluorescent metal salts, to calcium tungstate, which produced a much clearer image. As hard as it is to imagine now, in the days and weeks that followed Röntgen’s paper, doctors were improvising their own glass vacuum tubes and subjecting themselves and their patients to huge doses of X-rays for up to an hour. Typically the doctor stood behind the patient, holding the recording screen and peering directly into the beam of rays to watch the faint impressions of bones appear.

In the early weeks of 1896 the international medical community was awash with anecdotal and single patient data: bullets located in bones, fractures, malformations, pathological growth and juvenile growth patterns. Teeth were also imaged. The German dentist Friedrich Otto Walkhoff X-rayed himself just two weeks after Röntgen’s publication. He devised a set-up whereby he lay on the floor with a glass plate in his mouth for nearly half an hour, directing a Crooke’s tube output straight into his face. He would go on to professionalise and institutionalise dentistry, lobbying for dentists to take a medical degree before practising. Bones and teeth were the first obvious targets of the new technology, but 1896 also saw the first imaging of human blood vessels using X-rays. In Vienna, Edward Haschek and Otto Lindenthal injected a mixture of calcium carbonate and bismuth into an amputated hand, displaying cleanly for the first time the intricate structures beneath the skin. Shortly afterwards other scientists attempted the process on cadavers, living animals and then living humans by 1923.

These practical uses of X-rays which have survived into the present were also accompanied by intense speculative and occultic ideas. One such was ‘mesmerism’, an older vitalist theory which posited the existence of a vital, universal ‘fluid’ or version of aether which permeated human beings as well as the outer world. Light and sound waves were still an abstraction to most, and although aether as a medium for wave propagation had been proven false in 1887 by the Michelson–Morley experiment, there were many scientists and physicians who clung to the idea. X-rays were a new source of hope, and researchers were soon beset with letters making wild claims. Edison reported that in 1896 an ardent fan messaged him talking of:

an English scientist who was experimenting in the new X-rays. The account stated that this scientist took a picture of his own brain while thinking of a little child who was dead. When he developed the plate he found that there was a faint impression of the child of whom he was thinking when he took the picture

- Scripts, grooves, and writing machines: Representing technology in the Edison era (1999) L. Gitelman

Telepathy and mind-reading were also suggested as possible functions of X-rays. Since they were able to surface the deep interior of the body onto a flat surface, perhaps mental information could be beamed in and out of the brain, maybe thoughts could be read and textbooks installed via these rays? Far from rejecting X-rays as crude materialism, the prominent Spiritualists and occultists of the age embraced them, watching for any connection to Baron Dr Karl von Reichenbach’s ‘Odinic’ life-force, or to resurrect spirit photography, or clues to the proposed ‘subliminal’ self, astral body, cosmic life force, bodily aura, dis-aggregated ghosts or some other term.

The more cynical and mercenary amongst audiences immediately spotted another opportunity - to use X-rays and their new aesthetic vocabulary on stage. Albert Hopkins’s 1897 guide to such performances, Magic: Stage Illusions, Special Effects and Trick Photography, noted in a chapter called The Neoöccultism, that magicians were actually using Crooke’s vacuum tubes to bathe an unsuspecting volunteer with X-rays and display his skeleton on a screen behind him. To the best of my knowledge nobody is sure whether X-rays were genuinely deployed as a type of showmanship, but certainly the pretence was. All manner of ingenious stage props and lighting sleight-of-hand could leave audiences gasping, as grinning skeletons appeared on the walls or in prepared coffins, most famously in the Paris Cabaret du Néant evening performance.

Magic and medicine had collided when Röntgen showed the world it was possible to pass light through the opaque body and reveal the inside on the outside. But whilst these technical uses of X-rays were being explored and discussed in the early days of 1896, the moral and spiritual panic had only just begun.

Death and Privacy in the Age of Röntgen

If you were a doctor, a scientist, an inventor, magician, patient or Theosophist, the new Röntgen rays were a practical, intellectual and career delight. For the rest of Victorian society they were somewhere between a morbid curiosity and a moral menace. London’s Pall Mall Gazette likely spoke for many when they wrote

We are sick of the Röntgen rays.. .you can see other people’s bones with the naked eye, and also see through eight inches of solid wood. On the revolting indecency of this there is no need to dwell

We are perhaps too accustomed today with invisible penetrating rays and fields to empathise with people at the dawn of the 20th century. We live amongst Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 5G, NFC, RFID, GPS, 50 Hz electromagnetic fields from substations and charging pads, AM/FM radio, DAB, radar, LiDAR and too many others to list. Probably only airport scanners cause us enough similar discomfort, but for the public of 1896 - they had no way of knowing that X-rays would become a static, specialised and highly regulated technology.

The 1870-1880’s had seen the development of portable and near-instant cameras in public life. Gone were the days of arduous daguerreotype grim family portraits, now young men and women could use their new Kodak devices to snap pictures whenever and wherever they felt like. This very quickly developed into a battle over privacy, and camera manufacturers responded by creating some quite stunning hidden photographic mechanisms - including secret parcel cameras, proposed pocket watch and waistcoat cameras, and the quite bizarre ‘detective’ gun cameras, which were presumably aimed at people on the street. A new folk devil emerged, the ‘camera’ or ‘kodak fiend’. The Victorian Anglosphere in particular had developed complex codes of privacy, sanitation, inspection, obfuscation and signification. Slaughterhouses had been hidden away, as had corpses, private bedrooms and bathrooms had appeared, curtains for hospital patients, workhouses and factories became more observable, zoos were invented, in short the entire human architecture of city life had been remoulded for middle-class tastes and values. Who could look at who, who inspected what, what could and should be done in public versus in private or obscured.

Voyeurism and camera fiends were the equal and opposed reaction to this system. Where the power and right to view and see had become so thoroughly codified, to look where one shouldn’t was a powerful transgression. Cameras were destabilising, but also useful tools of inspection and regulation. X-rays on the other hand were a nauseatingly effective threat, with their unnerving ability to see through all the carefully arranged screens, doors, locks, walls and clothes of the average bourgeois household.

One response to this was simple panic. February 1896 saw the first London stores offering women ‘X-ray proof undergarments’, which, unless lined with lead, would have been as effective as tissue paper. Satirical cartoons and poems poked fun at the scientist’s obsession with seeing through everything

O, Rontgen, then the news is true And not a trick of idle rumour,

That bids us each beware of you And of your grim and graveyard humour.

We do not want, like Dr. Swift, To take our flesh off and to pose in

Our bones, to show each little rift And joint for you to poke your nose in.

No, keep them for your epitaph, These tombstone-souvenirs unpleasant;

Or go away and photograph Mahatmas, spooks, and Mrs. B-s-nt

-Punch, Jan 1896

The Pall Mall Gazette continued its broadside against the technology, raging that if X-rays ever came into widespread public use

it will call for legislative restriction of the severest kind. Perhaps the best thing would be for all civilized nations to combine to burn all works on the roentgen rays, to execute all the discoverers, and to corner all the tungstate in the world and whelm it in the middle of the ocean. Let the fish contemplate each other’s bones, but not us

In 1897 a 44 second-long black comedy film was made by G.A. Smith and the Warwick Trading Company called The X-Rays aka The X-Ray Fiend, wherein the actors donned black costumes with bones overlaid. The choice to expose a courting couple to X-rays so that they could ‘see’ one another ‘underneath’, says a great deal about the anxieties and amusement the public felt over this novel form of bodily intrusion.

Finding X-rays funny or a cheap form of entertainment was another immediate reaction, and arcades began a small trade in penny-slot machines. The simplicity of producing the rays meant the apparatus could be placed inside booths, boxes, cupboards and portable machines. X-ray graphics rapidly became part of early 20th centre visual culture. There were also a number of jingles and musical hall songs written in 1896-7 about X-rays and their scandalous nature, including X-Rays March Two-Step and The X Rays Will Give It Away with the latter saying

Of course, you’ve heard of the new-fangled craze,/ How things are exposed by the flash of X rays;/ The latest and greatest of fads up to date,/ That pictures your heart or your brain while you wait,/ And make it more plainer than day./ Through bone, flesh or leather those searchlights can go,/ If beauty’s skin-deep ugly girls have a show;/ That pompous policeman who paces the street,/ Will soon have to quit taking drinks on his beat,/ The X rays will give it away

-Edison’s Brain: An inside look at early recorded sound and the discovery of X-rays (2012) A. Koenigsberg

Probably the most circulated image of the day though was the skeletal, ringed hand of Bertha Röntgen. Some historians have classified it as a type of fetish object, with the fashionable women of New York lining up to have their wedding ring and hand subjected to X-rays, offering the pictures to their family and friends. The co-registration, ie the picture registering both the external ring and internal bones, makes the image so culturally powerful - a combination of the deathly with the immortal, of love and the cold grave, but also of lifelong commitment and fidelity.

Death was easily the most visceral topic to come to mind along with privacy. Our familiarity with the human body as a medical and biological sequence of layers, organs, systems and tissues makes it hard for us to empathise - but for men and women of the 1890’s, seeing one’s own hand, skull, rib cage - this was the stuff of gothic fiction and mortal dread. Bertha Röntgen herself was said to have screamed when she first saw the image; one Professor P. Czermak in Graz had agreed to have his skull X-rayed in the presence of journalists, but refused to show them the picture, reportedly saying he hadn’t slept for days after seeing his own death. A pulp horror story written in a magazine in 1896, called Röntgen’s Curse by C.H.T.  Crosthwaite, followed the story of a scientist who accidentally gave himself permanent X-ray vision and went mad after seeing the ‘grinning, horrible skull’ of his wife. Röntgen was portrayed as a skeletal Grim Reaper in Life magazine, and at least one account in the Transactions of the Colorado Medical Society described seeing their finger bones appear on screen as like a hand beckoning from beyond the grave.

Sadly, whilst death was an emotional reaction to seeing the X-ray pictures, for those who were building, designing and using the machines in those early days, death was the price to pay for such knowledge.

The Martyrs and the Road to Regulation (1896-1945)

Before the year was out there were signal flares coming from all over that something was not right about the marvellous new scanning devices. They had been deployed everywhere from customs to the military to nightclubs, but the wages of innovation often include death.

Nobody knew in 1896, and wouldn’t for a while, about the danger of X-rays. One future and hugely significant use of X-rays is their ability to be fired into crystals of proteins, and the scattered diffraction patterns mathematically yield the secrets of the protein’s structure. This only works because X-ray waves are so small, peak-to-peak, they match the distance between the atoms of the crystal (approx 1.5 angstroms for crystallography). What this means for a living person is unpleasant - acute radiation burns followed by the unknown risks of cancer, as the waves pass through cells and cause damage to the complex DNA molecules.

A glassblower at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, named Clarence Madison Dally, insisted on quality checking each hand-made Crookes tube by bathing his hands in the active beams. It wasn’t long before his hands became swollen and burnt, but he insisted on continuing the practice. By 1904 Dally had undergone a double arm amputation, and died at the age of 39, terrifying Edison - who refused to work with or undergo X-ray screening again. Dally may have been the first ‘X-ray Martyr’, as they are sometimes known, but in the months and years post-January 1896 it had become increasingly clear that the new rays were very dangerous.

Today a chest x-ray might deliver 0.01 rads or 0.1 millisieverts of radiation. For those physicians working in 1896, who knew nothing of radioactivity, they couldn’t have known that documenting blisters, skin peeling off or hair falling out at the X-ray site likely signalled they were administering up to 1,500 rads in a single dose. The unknown calibrations, power and measurements for safe radiotherapy in those early days meant that patients and doctors, and bystanders, were absorbing higher levels of radiation than survivors of Hiroshima. Only a few other unlucky human beings have ever received higher doses than those working in 1896-1900, and the only reason deaths weren’t immediate then was the Crookes machine’s precision in producing a small, localised beam, rather than bathing the entire patient’s body.

So it was that, despite receiving radiation levels higher than Chernobyl firefighters and the unfortunate Louis Slotin of the Manhattan Project (who died following an accident with the plutonium ‘demon core’), the X-ray pioneers mostly carried on believing they were safe. Official regulation proper would not be seen until WWII, and radiology association safety guidelines were not issued until 1915 (In Britain at least). In reality it took a rising and unexplained death toll amongst doctors to force the radiology profession to take it seriously. Early opportunities were missed, in particular those from a shy and altruistic dentist named William Rollins, who published far-seeing safety recommendations in 1901-2, including: the need for lead shielding, lead painted eye protection, radioabsorbant PPE and astoundingly - ventilation for the nitrogen ozones /oxides X-ray byproducts in the room. Sadly these were ignored at the time. In 1936 the Röntgen Society of Germany unveiled the Monument to the X-ray and Radium Martyrs of All Nations in Hamburg, listing and honouring the hundreds of radiology and radiation pioneer deaths. The inscription reads:

To the Roentgenologists and radiologists of all nations,
To the doctors, physicists, chemists, technicians, laboratory assistants and nurses who sacrificed their lives in the fight against disease.
They were valiant pioneers in the effective
and safe use of X-rays and radium in medicine.
Immortal is the glory of the work of the dead

Image crises: surfaces, depths, representation, meaning

The erasure of the surface (which paradoxically renders the world and its depths and interiorities superficial), the disappearance of a discernible interiority, plunges the subject into a “universal depth.” A total and irresistible depth, everywhere.

The world is no longer only outside, but also within, inside and out …

In the X-ray image, the body and the world that surrounds it are lost. No longer inside nor out, within nor without, body and world form a heterogeneous one …

You are in the world, the world is in you. The X-ray can be seen as an image of you and the world, an image forged in the collapse of the surface that separates the two.

-Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) A.M. Lippit

Manipulating the newfound properties of light, sound and different forms of energy to ‘surface’ or register hidden phenomena is one of the technological markers of the 20th century. X-rays, along with ultrasound, magnetic resonance, positron emission etc, flatten out 3-dimensional bodies into one plane, with the interior and exterior brought together. The opaque boundary of the skin and flesh failing to prevent these waves and signals from travelling through them.

Generative-AI can produce a similarly discomforting effect. Taking flattened images or videos of real human beings and apparently ‘surfacing’ superficially hidden depths. AI can do much more than this of course, and struggles with demonstrating verification and truth, becoming yet another layer of representation. X-rays are usually accepted as an accurate representation of reality, but a reality which is dehumanising - in the sense of stripping the subject of their exterior selves - requiring great expertise and experience to accurately interpret. Even so, X-ray imaging regularly feels like it violates a form of subjectivity and ownership over one’s body. A doctor or dentist informing a patient that they are currently suffering from an ailment which the patient could not sense or feel themselves, is one way that medical imaging relocates truth from the subject to the external world of physician judgement. We accept that X-rays tell us something objective, but human beings still need to perform that translation, who knows how many X-ray images are sitting in files around the world, their secrets untold.

As I said though, there is no direct one-to-one comparison between AI images and X-rays. What they both share though is the reconstruction of surfaces, depths, representation and meaning. Both prompted a social backlash, arguments about their immorality and the radical change in privacy the technology would surely usher in. X-rays ultimately became a highly regulated and specialised event, even if they were being used to measure customer’s feet sizes in shoe shops as late as the 1950’s. They also began as a very decentralised affair, their creator refusing to patent the process, and the equipment needed to generate an X-ray was easy to purchase. Their discovery was a testament to the speed of science at the turn of the century, and their subsequent uses and exploration a testament to the curiosity and ingenuity of those pioneers. Without X-rays its hard to imagine where we would be today - even a cursory glance at the list of their impact includes:

• The discovery and elucidation of quantum mechanics, inc the electron

• X-ray crystallography revealed the internal structure of proteins, minerals, and crucially the DNA double helix

• Medical diagnostics and treatment for fractures, TB, tumour detection, dentistry, locating shrapnel

• Semiconductor invention and production

• Inspiration for X-ray astronomy, understanding cosmic X-ray/gamma ray production, earth’s ionosphere, creation of X-ray satellites

• X-ray microscopy, revealing structures of cells, viruses, chromosomes. Also used for art, archaeology, geology and many other fields

• Security and border/customs controls

It’s hard to imagine modern life without the X-ray, both confirming and disproving late Victorian fantasies of ‘hidden worlds’ and communication at a distance. I wonder if the people of 1896 would have agreed to the trade-off in privacy and bodily representation had they known about the knowledge and applications the X-ray would bring?

I’ll leave you with this poem written in 1897, and published in a popular magazine:

An Englishman’s body belongs to himself,

But surely that proverb was made

Before Dr Roentgen’s impertinent rays,

With furtive, adumbrate, and mystical ways,

Our structures began to invade.

‘T is an “habeas corpus” of uncanny source,

A forerunner of agencies evil,

A gruesome, weird, and mysterious force,

(But clothed in a garb of science of course)

A league between man and the devil.

For a steady gaze thrown on the sensitive plate.

With a one-ness of theme and conception.

And fixing our minds in a uniform strain.

Will picture the image begot by our brain.

And reveal our most inmost perception.

Who among us is safe if this can be done,

Who can bear such a scrutinization?

Scant courtesy, too, our friends would afford.

When they find that our actions are often a fraud.

And our words but mis representation

Why do we smile in photographs? The answer doesn’t appear to be a simple one. Smiling is one of the most basic expressions humans learn to perform, received in common wisdom as ‘smiling takes 17 muscles, while frowning takes 43’. Despite this apparent simplicity, which is debatable, smiling is an immensely ambiguous and subtle posture, connected to submission, aggression, mimesis, happiness, sickness, madness and countless other signals. The meaning of the smile has also changed over time, and varies from culture to culture. In Europe, to smile could at one point indicate drunkenness or revolutionary fervour, happiness or demonic possession. The precise shape of the eyebrows, the skin around the eyes and the position of the face all matter to the interpreted meaning, as does the social context, the cue, and how appropriate the smile or laugh is compared to its source.

Following on from my last piece about the ‘skin-as-mask’ within European history and metaphysics, the argument below examines one specific type of facial expression - the smile, the uncanny smile. I want to show how smiles appear through European art, what they meant, and how they map onto my core thesis (southern serene + northern grotesque →moralising Christianity → Renaissance/Enlightenment control → Gothic & Romantic break → modern internalisation, finally the digital and AI disembodiment). We’ll see how smiles reinforce the idea that skin is a mask, through an examination of demonic possession, madness/mental illness and the explosion of AI ‘horror smiles’. Finally this all comes together through today’s horror media, with a closer look at the 2022 film Smile, amongst others.

What Is the ‘Uncanny Smile’?

What are we doing when we smile? First we must contract the major muscle of the cheek, the zygomaticus major, plus a whole host of other muscles to create those tiny alterations for a toothy grin, a smirk, the raised eyebrows of placation or acknowledgement or the crucial Duchenne smile - to smile with the eyes, by crinkling the orbicularis oculi muscle. Then we must decide whether this smile will fade or carry on into a laugh, if we’re the only ones smiling, whether the smile is inappropriate or not. How long should we smile for? All these split second and usually instinctual decisions matter.

Chimpanzees and other apes can grin, which makes primatologists believe the root ability lies deep in the hominid past. Chimp smiles adorn birthday cards and graphic design, although for them smiling is a signal of fear, unhappiness, aggression. Those who work in chimpanzee sanctuaries know that human smiles appear to them as highly threatening. Bonobos as ever, are slightly different, but even they will cover their top teeth when extending a cheesy grin. So smiling could have meant something different for our ancient kin than it does for us? In general today smiling is seen as a cue of openness, happiness. For children it indicates spontaneous amusement or joy, for adults it is dependent: service workers might be expected to smile constantly, between colleagues and neighbours it says “I’m friendly”. It is a mimetic signal, a biological technology that attempts to extract an affect from another person, even to oneself! Smiling when you’re unhappy can help ‘fake it till you to make it’. If the smile appears genuine, then the other person is expected to respond in some way.

Herein lies the problem. The so-called Duchenne smile is widely recognised to be an honest signal, since a smile alone can be inauthentic, whereas a smile plus eye-creasing points to a real internal sensation. What is offered to the world on the outside (skin-as-mask) should match the deeper sentiment (interior self). Where a mismatch occurs, it can provoke other feelings in the observer. Layered over this is any juxtaposition between the smile and the context. Someone standing smiling at the scene of a car accident would instantly appear suspicious and wrong to us. An uncanny smile then is a facial expression that signals interior displacement - a sense that the face is no longer governed by the self that should inhabit it.

So what do we unconsciously look for?

• Asymmetry or an over-extension (too wide, too still)

• Context mistake (smiling at pain, death, violence, taboo)

• Affect mismatch (the expression contradicts the situation)

• Skin-level performance (the smile appears ‘unnatural’, uninhabited)

Since smiles are supposed to be a fleeting gesture, a fixed smile with an incorrect affect, especially during in an inappropriate moment, would be a major social cue for danger to everyone who sees it. Following our previous look at The Uncanny, unheimlich, this kind of smile perfectly encapsulates the definition of ‘familiar yet suddenly alien’. Dolls, toys, puppets, ventriloquist dummies, clowns and other simple mimetic devices for children can take on this alien quality. What were once cheerful static smiles suddenly become leering and mocking, discomforting or even horrifying. Worse are the same smiles but on a living being, combined with a fixed stare, which activates a primal sense that you are the target, and this malevolent smiler is in a state beyond normal social behaviour. They seem almost, possessed…?

Did Uncanny Smiles Exist Before Modern Psychology?

Classical South: Controlled Serenity and Dionysian Excess

If one searches for the earliest examples of smiles in art within antiquity, its unlikely that you’ll miss the famous ‘archaic smile’. This sculptural motif was possibly inherited from Egypt into early Greece, making its appearance in the kouroi/korai (see my previous writing on Greek art for more details). Most scholars today accept the interpretation that the smile, posture and first stirrings of naturalism in these figures represent inner serenity and calm radiance, kalokagathos or the noble ‘smiling ones’. Internal harmony reflecting the cosmos. Lacking a mismatch between the internal and external, the archaic smile doesn’t qualify as uncanny.

The inverse of serene is frenzied, and Dionysus would be all too happy to oblige. His followers, and the mytho-maddening world he inhabited, sanction divine intrusion, chaos, the ripping and tearing of limbs, uninhibited laughter, intoxication and ego death. Much as a sacrificial hart was pulled apart while alive, Dionysian death-and-resurrection is a shredding of the material body until just the bloody meat remains. Masks and carvings of Bromios, Bassareus, the great liberator Eleutherios, with their insane open mouths and amoral mirth, have a primeval fear quality to them. Yet they too lack the internal displacement needed for the psychological to dominate.

By contrast, there is a near-absence of smiling faces in the pre-Christian material culture of northern Europe. The carved wooden idols and stone heads appear mask-like and closed, they are expressive only within narrow symbolic limits. Smiling mouths do finally appear with Christianisation, and they do so almost exclusively on demons and fools. Perhaps we can say, in the North smiling is not a culturally meaningful expression within art until Christian teaching introduces the moral split between body and soul.

Christianity. Possession. Moralisation.

There has been extensive scholarship on illuminated manuscripts and medieval sculpture, yet its almost impossible to point to the precise emergence of the smile as a facial expression. The first curved mouths appear only sporadically and almost exclusively in Christian contexts. They belong to fantastic beasts, animals, demons, hybrids and marginal figures, marking the smile from its first appearance in the North as a sign of liminality and inversion - supporting my previous argument that masks in northern Europe function similarly. Let us look at two crucial Christian-era ideas.

The Smiling Demon

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. - Ecclesiastes 7:4

Christian Rome was a total revolution in human life, including the redefinition of laughter and smiling as suspicious, perhaps heretical. In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, the pagan virtues of comedy as described by Aristotle become the unspeakable corruption around which the monastic murder mystery hinges. Eco chose well, for early Christianity adopted a severe and uncompromising stance against humour, joking, laughing, smiling and entertaining follies of all kinds. To pick on just one, Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD) was emphatic in his banishment of laughter and almost every expression of happiness from the face of man (a subtle twitch of the mouth reflecting inner harmony was graciously permitted):

For speech is the fruit of the mind. If, then, wags are to be ejected from our society, we ourselves must by no manner of means be allowed to stir up laughter … Smiling even requires to be made the subject of discipline. If it is at what is disgraceful, we ought to blush rather than smile

-Paedagogus, ChV, On Laughter

Alongside this prohibition was placed the equally grave problem of Satan’s appearance as an ‘angel of light’ (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). The Devil was first and foremost a Great Deceiver. Truth and falsehood could potentially be signified on one’s countenance. Depictions of Lucifer would take many centuries to arrive, and artists/evangelists found in pagan Greek imagery a perfect source of ammunition - gaping, leering dramatic masks; grinning Dionysus, Gorgons and leafy satyr-monsters from evil forested wellsprings. Monks and bishops realised after much experience that the northern barbarian tribes responded well to these symbols. Through remnants like the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter (c. 830 AD); the Insular Irish Book of Kells (c. 800 AD); stone carvings like the Northumbrian Easby Cross (c .800 AD) and Muiredach’s High Cross in Monasterboice (c. 900 AD), we see the twisting of older art forms to represent the perverted joy of demons and beasts.

Around the turn of the millennium, medieval societies in Europe relaxed their stance on humour and turned it against the devil instead. The grotesque, grinning gargoyle type artworks on churches and religious iconography had a dual purpose: to point to the false mask of Satan, arriving with comedy; to make Satan look ridiculous, in hopes he will slink off home after being roundly mocked. In line with the later medieval imagination which so prized inversion, humour and the ‘smiling face’ moved between the diabolical and the carnival-esque, coming to settle on the general position of morally suspicious. Fools, drunkards, jesters, demons, animals, hybrids, marginalia, momento mori, unnatural faces and whatever those things in Bosch paintings are called - the circulation of deviant faces had an interior/exterior divide by the time of the Renaissance. The ‘knowing smile’ had joined the ranks of the bulging-eyed demons, mocking grins and hollow skeletal mirth.

Skin as False Surface

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness

-Romans 2:14-15

In 2023-2024 the actress Selena Gomez revealed her ‘new face’ to the world, provoking online speculation about what exact cosmetic procedures she had undertaken. Her leaner and more unnaturally still face was studied and analysed by fans and critics, some of whom outright described her as looking like Voldemort from Harry Potter or as succumbing to ‘demon face’ - meaning here an artificial and uncanny expression/posture which triggers in people the fear that her face is not under her own control.

Pauline theology took an ancient problem and modernised it. Demons had been tormenting the bodies and minds of people around the Levant since before the Bronze Age Collapse, but it was Paul and his acolytes who restructured the problem - evil was no longer just out there, now it could settle and take root within the heart. Centuries of intellectual struggle ensued, taken up by early giants such as Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage: each trying to work through the problem of corporeality, demons, possession, evil, magic, taint and temptation. Whilst much of this theology is a moral inversion of Greco-Roman paganism (including the spectacular punishments the Romans will undergo in hell, to the glee of Christians in heaven - imagined as a spiritual Colosseum), it leaves a legacy of demonic possession as a dual spirit/body problem. Demons arrive as a ‘winged spirit’, but cause physical harm. They can be removed by spiritual means such as prayer and fasting.

As with so many things we imagine to be medieval, the real ‘science’ of demonology was an Early Modern innovation, spurred on by revolutions in science, jurisprudence and medicine. Curiously Protestant theology did not reject Catholic doctrine on demonic possession, but attempted to ground it in both older and more contemporary forms of knowledge. To quote one scholar:

There was virtually no change in the theological understanding of demonic possession from A.D. 100 to 1700 … The origins of the demons, their organizational structure, their names, and their behavior patterns had been received from the Babylonian, Judaic, and early Christian traditions … The medical doctors, in a growing area of study, attempted to use rational "scientific methods” in order to comprehend the irrational and evil. However, they too were tied to the long-respected theories of Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna.

-Theology and the body in demonic possession; France, England, and Puritan America, 1550-1700 (1992) J.S Cooper-Forst

The porous body can be diabolically inhabited, and betrays itself through manifestation, expulsion and interaction: speaking in unnatural tongues; seizures; teeth gnashing and grinding; vomiting bile, coals, black substances, snakes; muscle spasms; inhuman strength; rage, fury and screaming; uncontrollable laughing; refusal of communion, prayer, crucifix, priests; the ability to inflict demonic temptation or possession on others. Sometimes superhuman feats seem satanic but aren’t (St. Christina the Astonishing), other times the presence of a demon may go unnoticed for a long time (Jeanne des Anges). The latter was a constant cause for concern, the diabolus latens and spiritus occultus. Since the devil was the ultimate deceiver, the body could be forced to shelter evil for a long time, leaving observers to build up lists of possible symptoms and to devise means for extracting sincerity from beneath the insincere mask of skin.

Regimes of Smiling and Resistance

Leaving aside the devilish, foolish grins of the medieval period, what actually stands out when the artwork and literature is examined, is how marginal smiling was to their legacy. In fact, right up until the French Revolution smiling was simply not the done thing. Photos from before the mid-20th century seem grim, dour, miserable - noone is smiling! What we could call a contemporary ‘regime of cheerfulness’, or as Barbara Ehrenreich calls it in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, a ‘cult of toxic cheerfulness’ - this insistence on everyone being upbeat, positive, always smiling. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild spent weeks observing the training of new female flight attendants in the 1980’s, noting that:

The young trainee sitting next to me wrote on her notepad, “Important to smile. Don’t forget smile:’ … The pilot spoke of the smile as the flight attendant’s asset … As the PSA jingle says, “Our smiles are not just painted on.” Our flight attendants’ smiles, the company emphasizes, will be more human than the phony smiles you’re resigned to seeing on people who are paid to smile. There is a smile-like strip of paint on the nose of each PSA plane … For the flight attendant, the smiles are a part of her work, a part that requires her to coordinate self and feeling so that the work seems to be effortless.

-The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) A.R. Hochschild

Whilst this compulsion to maintain a beaming, Barbie-like composure has probably dimmed in recent years, there is nevertheless an expectation in Anglo-American style service and office work that professional public and team comportment be friendly and hospitable. If any one facial expression could sum-up post-WWII culture, it would be the forced grin of advertising, customer service and non-industrial job relations.

However, the rise of the fully digital economy, the political rejection of smiling as performative labour (MeToo, ‘don’t tell me to smile’), and the rupture of COVID does seem to have cracked this facade. Gen-Z’s refusal to present an insincere affect at work, the so-called ‘Gen-Z Stare’, could reflect a generational awareness that they do not receive sufficient monetary and social remuneration to act happy in front of customers. Certainly the turn towards foregrounding burnout culture, mental health management and workplace identity conflict does not require cheerfulness, and could actively undermine it. This does not mean that facial performance has disappeared though. Facial performance is still absolutely critical to the newer forms of labour and interaction, think of video content, personal brands, reaction thumbnails - arenas where authenticity, spontaneity and sincerity are rewarded, and hyper-emotionality is rewarded further still. If the smile used to represent a social obligation, it is arguably now a knowingly fake gesture, the difference being perhaps that younger people make a stronger distinction between the online and the physical.

Horror Codification: Gothic to Digital

In-between the Renaissance and the late 20th century were the great ruptures of the Scientific/Enlightenment period; Romantic and Gothic backlash, 19th century Industrial and urbanisation revolutions and the psychological movements of modernism - all covered in previous articles.

Smiling only became a publicly circulating visage at the dawn of another Revolution, the French. In 1787 the painter Madame Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun hung a self-portrait in the Paris Salon, and it caused a scandal. Her slightly open mouth and visible teeth ran against all public ideas of decency. In his 2014 book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, Colin Jones lays out how dentistry and class antagonisms produced a transient social moment wherein smiling and laughing were liberating, encouraged even. Although I cannot find any explicit research to support it, I would imagine this had the effect of encouraging ever more grim stoicism in England and elsewhere. As the Revolution progressed, the smile turned from optimism to horror, the cow-eyed sans-culottes quickly bearing an abyssal gaping maw in satirical art. Mouths became the subject of morbid fascination in and out of France: heads horribly mutilated and degraded during the Bastille storming; the notoriety of the murder and posthumous degradation of Marie-Thérèse Louise of Savoy; the scientific fascination with how long a person remained conscious after decapitation, with multiple stories of smiling heads as onlookers grabbed them up by the hair. French Gothic fiction - roman noir - contained unpleasant scenes of frightful smiles, such as found in Vathek (1782) and Dolbreuse (1783). The Marquis de Sade invented an archetypal legacy concerning the internal world of young, libertine aristocratic men, smiling sadistically as they inflicted cruelty and humiliation to their victims. Thus the smile became violence-coded, on the mob for their bloodthirstiness and on the individual man as an indicator of suspicious intentions.

As we’ve seen, smiling had also long been linked to carnival, misrule, foolery and drunkenness. The psychological turn of the 19th-20th centuries added madness and internal breakdown to this schema, often popularised through clowning, commedia dell’arte, Punch and Judy, Pulcinella and stories of lunatic asylums. Experiments on the rictus and Duchenne smiles, and on animals, combined with psychiatric work by Jean-Martin Charcot on hysteria, cemented in the public mind a connection between uninhibited laughter and madness. Probably the greatest modern character to come from this mix of ideas is DC Comic’s iconic Joker - Batman’s smiling rival. The Joker’s lineage belongs to 19th century psychiatry and to key fictional works such as Victor Hugo’s 1869 L'Homme qui rit, the 1928 film adaptation of which was a direct influence on DC’s writers. Conrad Veidt’s disturbing smile in the German expressionist drama is surely the godfather to all later horror smilers, such as Mr. Sardonicus, Pennywise (It), Art (Terrifier) and Twisty (American Horror Story). The outward clown makeup and ludicrous grins signifying total internal incoherence, a reduction to primitive drives and amusements, a degeneration of the rational human into something else. Early psychiatry would understand this logic immediately, they invented it.

Truly the explosion of smiles within the visual arts came down to cinema. Cinema alone had the power to represent the human face in an altogether different paradigm, with its unique blend of theatrical intimacy and camera-legerdemain, audiences could be drawn into an actor’s expression and emotion and feel entranced. Perhaps this explains why the smirk and the fixed-eye smile became an instant on-screen shorthand for something internal possessing a character. Both Norman and Marion in Psycho smile, for very different reasons, but to suggest a private psychological state. Demonic possession itself had been resigned to the margins of European culture since the 1700’s, lingering as a metaphor and memorial of more suspicious times. This exile came to a swift end in 1973 when Friedkin and Blatty’s The Exorcist single-handedly reintroduced the diabolical to the modern world. Regan’s evil smile under predatory, mocking eyes, appeared to terrify audiences, who also demanded more. Soon all-knowing smirks, grimaces, demonic laughter and cruel glee crossed the faces of Damien (The Omen), Alex (A Clockwork Orange), Jack (The Shining), Hannibal (Silence of the Lambs), Linda (The Evil Dead), Emily (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), BOB (Twin Peaks), Valak (The Nun), Peter (Hereditary) and more. Each time the smile revealing something happening beneath the skin, on the inside. Ever since horror appeared as a genre, for reasons explained in another article, the ambiguity between the supernatural and the psychological has been blurred. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is an enduring story because it speaks to the modern condition of internal alienation, likewise dramas of diabolical possession walk the line between mental illness, trauma and evil entities. The vocabulary of both psychiatric disorders and demonic infiltration share commonalities since they describe outward manifestations of a pathological interior. In both senses the skin is a mask, and horror recognises the older unnerving smile and plays with it, suspending momentarily the normal belief that the skin and its owner are the same being.

Digital & AI Faces: Possession without an Interior?

The world of animated smiles is far more spectacular than anything worn by a human actor. From the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland), the Coachman (Pinocchio) and Ursula (Little Mermaid), to the maniacal Happy Tree Friends and The Grinch, cartoon faces are infinitely plastic and malleable. Digital manipulation takes this further: the 1994 music video to Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun became memorable for its huge, unsettling smiles, in 1996 the musician Aphex Twin released the Richard D. James album - the cover bearing his own, very modern looking, Joker-face. This was a starting shot to a wave of early internet smiler-memes and creepypastas, including Trollface, The Biting Pear of Salamanca, Smile-Dog, Zalgo, Jeff the Killer and Suicidemouse.avi.

What many of these had in common was the use of the smile to signify corruption. Mascots and children’s characters in particular came in for a re-working, with Sonic.exe and ‘dark edits’ joining ‘lost episodes’ to create a digital folklore brimming with nostalgia-perversion and ruined-childhoods.

we argue that the digitally networked horror genre ‘creepypasta’ and its networked horror collapses the comfortable dichotomy of subjects acting upon objects by creating narrative spaces in which haunted objects encroach upon the lives of their victimized subjects. Particularly, creepypasta legends such as ‘Candle Cove’ and ‘BEN Drowned’ upset the subject/object relationships of the technological nostalgia that fuels a mutating genre of Internet discourse.

-Haunted objects, networked subjects: The nightmarish nostalgia of creepypasta (2018) Cooley & Milligan

This theme found extraordinary success with digital native horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s, followed rapidly by scores of similar mascot-themed jumpscare games. The hidden smile which could be deployed as the mascot caught the player presented them with a dichotomy - what exactly is smiling inside? Many franchise lores incorporated some kind of childhood trauma motif to explain how their animatronic bear/mouse/rabbit/train came to be so evil. Even when the enemy was a digital theme-park villain, the interior needed an explaination

Increasingly though, this need for interiority is breaking down, or certainly changing. Generative AI horror faces have become ubiquitous across any and all platforms which host visual content, many of them iterating towards a pure smile affect. The analog horror genre of lost, tainted and retro data formats may have been the final bridge towards this, such as the Mandela Catalogue which features a number of grotesquely smiling ‘alternates’, or the aptly named SMILE Tapes with their fungus-riddled sardonically grinning victims. Exactly what is going on inside these fictional beings is intentionally at a remove from the final audience, with almost Greek-drama type mask expressions to indicate emotion and intention.

AI faces are a true blank where they lack even a narrative framework to explain their presence. A simple prompt can produce an uncanny, unpleasant face staring out of the screen, their gaze fixed on the viewer rather than elsewhere in the scene. These have become incorporated into games, community stories or straightforward Halloween reels. Their unnatural affect, lack of human oversight and even bodies to connect to their smiles - means we now have empty or hollow faces populating the digital visual landscape. The history of Western faces and masks has rarely, if ever, accepted the animistic tradition of ensouled or haunted facial coverings. But this seems to be the logical endpoint of creating truly empty faces, that people will begin filling them out with something else. The story of Loab, maybe the first AI ‘cryptid’, and Crungus, show that we have become quick to assign liminality to generative AI. This is the idea that AI is summoning or creating a doorway for something else to enter our world, which is a very ‘northern grotesque’ concept. Without entering into the demon debate, we can just observe that many people seem to want AI to be a portal or diabolical technology. Perhaps our deep primate nervous system can never accept empty faces? Maybe vacancy or absence is far more frightening than supernatural entities?

The Smile as Virus, as Algorithm

Our final stop on this journey is the use of smiles as a potent viral technology. As we all know, smiling is a contextual social cue, and often the aim is to have another person mirror ourselves - or we mimic them. Smiling is ‘contagious’ as some say, to resist a grin when others around you are chuckling is to show that you don’t understand what’s happening, or you’re actively not joining in. Therefore its understandable that smiling as both expression and vector crops up again and again in horror and scare stories.

F. M. Crawford's 1911 gothic novel, The Dead Smile, uses a macabre smile which transfers from a corpse onto the living, the involuntary expression used as a symbol of degraded ancestral inheritance. In 2008, a 4chan creepypasta known as smile.jpg centred a cursed file story around a user’s encounter with a picture of a smiling dog. ‘Smile Dog’ would either drive the viewer insane over time, or release his victim in exchange for them forwarding the image. The original creepypasta references chain emails and spammed message boards, keeping the link between smiling and virality. Similarly themed memes and content has continued up to the present, including: the Momo phenomenon, the Roblox SMILE entity, the MLP Infection AU/Pestraobia, the SMILE Tapes and many others. The 2022 film Smile is the best known though, a successful horror franchise which began as a short film project (Laura Hasn’t Slept) by the filmmaker Parker J. Finn. In the first full-length film (Spoilers!) the main character experiences a patient commit suicide in front of her, whilst fixedly smiling. As the story unfolds it transpires the witnessed suicide-smile combination is a mechanism for some malevolent entity to pass between hosts, who suffer paranoid hallucinations of strangers and friends smiling at them in a threatening, uncanny way before convincing them to also take their own life in a dramatic fashion.

Smile isn’t shy about its symbolical and metaphorical allusions and presentation of trauma, mental health and smiling as masking. Perhaps nodding to the 2019 Joker film, where forced smiles are part of the alienating process, Smile’s villain -The Entity - seeks out and torments mentally fragile victims with a history of pain and guilt. The algorithmic process of breakdown→ suicide → smile → new host → hallucinations → breakdown, works well as an updated version of chain mail, social media contagion and viral content. More than any other facial expression, smiling works so well for the digital world since it can focus on the face, freeze the moment and create a mood juxtaposition for the audience. Arguably it is one of the internet’s most popular and meaningful affects or motifs.

Grin and bear it!

In 2018 4chan’s /v/ board saw the first use of what became known as Psycho or Demonic Grin Wojak, aka Le Scary Face. A drawing halfway between Troll Face and Jeff the Killer, with overtones of 18th century comic grotesque and cartoonish bad guy, Psycho Wojak is a perfect tribute to centuries of demons, slashers and monsters. His deployment in order to personify extreme, erratic, risky and insane behaviours is in a long line of Western ‘smiling-as-madness’ images. Some meme variants also mocked the cultural sympathy trope offered to insane characters in cinema and television, only once the reason for their deranged smile is explained. The smile reveals internal madness, but it can also be involuntary or inflicted - do you want to know how I got this?

The duality is I think, why the smile has become so important within digital culture. We have inherited the metaphysics of our skin-as-a-mask, which in turn can slip (to show us the true intention underneath), or it can be reconfigured (to show the world a different face). Smiling is both. Smiling is the demonic glitch, as well as an external curse to be borne.

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Victorian morbid eroticism went far beyond Ophelia though, to be thorough this article will cover:

• Why the Victorians sexualised death

• The drowned maiden, suicide and female passivity

• Erotic seances, mediums and electricity

• Vampires and necrophilia

• The corpse in art - ballet, photography, pornography, skeleton-erotica and more

• Intimacy in death, keepsakes, friendships, mourning

• Medicine - body snatching, anatomical venuses, female bodies

• Jack the Ripper and the invention of sex crimes

Introduction: Why the Victorians Sexualised Death

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the Victorians were a society of highly repressed individuals, whose careful and prudish sexuality was only clumsily released in pornographic photos and the interior of sweating brothel walls. This popular truism is, however, only half-correct at best, the Victorians were indeed highly restrained when it came to all matters bedroom related, but the return of their collective repression should not be thought of as crude relief. The displacement of eros from any public expression of intimate desire could never have lingered in the background, a total misreading of how the charge of transgression operates by us moderns, no - the Victorian psyche instead shifted from the arousal of the warm living, to the morbid sublime of the cold dead. Although alien in our age of repetitive, looped and symbolically hollow digital desiring, the Victorians were drawn towards photographs of the recently deceased; the autopsy room; the anatomical perfection of idealised virginity; smooth, taut surfaces of stone and preserved flesh; nocturnal ravages by moonlit teeth on a bare neck; goosebumps after reading of yet another female murder or drowning; brushing fingertips over locks of hair cut from loved ones now entombed underground. Bataille was clear on this point - eroticism and death are always linked, the former seeking the same loss of self as the latter.

Any account of this Victorian morbid eroticism must begin with the fact that their culture was saturated with death. Rapid urbanisation, epidemic disease, industrial accidents and a depressingly high child mortality rate ensured that death was not a private anomaly but a constant public presence. Mourning practices became formalised and highly prolonged. Cemeteries became civic monuments, post-mortem photography, memorial jewellery, deathbed narratives and elaborate funerary rituals circulated widely, the morgue itself became a site of public visitation in a way that seems alien to us. All of this ‘death-theatre’ was a form of cultural management, a struggle to aestheticise, ritualise and ultimately stabilise a new overwhelming material reality.

The Drowned Maiden: A Defining Erotic Fantasy

Death is the most profound threshold and transformation in the human experience. What is left behind after a being ceases to exist is not a simple problem, anthropology is in large measure a study of Man’s anxieties around the corpse. It’s fitting that we begin with a singular strange attractor within Victorian erotic dynamics - the beautiful corpse, the beautiful corpse of a drowned virginal maiden.

The erotic vitality of young male deaths in Homer, a beautiful death with an ecstatic moment of heightened glory, was replaced during the coming of Christianity - the peak of male action swapped out for the stillness of quiet female passivity. Pagan mythology too had its sleeping beauties - Chione, Ariadne, Danaë, Psyche - and European folklore had Snow White archetypes, cementing the public equation of sleep/death/bewitched = erotic and sexual vulnerability. Tuberculosis had long ravaged Europe, but the 19th century in particular saw mind-boggling levels of infection, with roughly 25% of all deaths across the continent and the USA attributed to the mycobacterium. TB sufferers became thin, anaemic, withdrawn and frail, a condition which was romanticised and aestheticised through poets and artists. ‘TB chic’ inspired women to mimic the look through whitening and dieting, and the sought-after spes phthisica burst of euphoric creativity as the patient neared death led Keats, Lord Byron, Chekhov, Verdi and others to glorify a young, tragic death.

Suicide and water complete the morbid mise en scène. Today we probably imagine the act of taking one’s own life would have been a quiet, private taboo in Victorian public culture. To the contrary though, the newspapers loved nothing more than reporting on the lurid details of female suicide - an act strongly associated with unrequited love. A woman who had been tempted into an illicit affair with a roguish gentleman, and then abandoned, throwing herself off a bridge into oblivion: this was heady stuff, reinforcing women’s mental and physical dependency on men, and underlining their easy slide into passion and hysteria. The rash of male suicides after the 1774 publication of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther, still referred to as ‘Wertherism’, came to be reversed. Male suicide lost its virtuous overtones and became a private affair, women’s was elevated to a public spectacle, and their bodies became a form of public property. Water also belonged to the female sphere, reflecting their changing, fickle natures, with unfathomable deepness of tide. The ‘wetness’ of the female body and its fluids, the depths of her watery womb and frighteningly unknowable sexuality both fascinated and repelled Victorian male sensibilities. The term ‘nymphomania’ was in general usage by the 1800’s, and water-nymphs were a popular artistic motif - women as seductive, alluring, dangerous. Suicide by water fulfilled all of these fantastical elements, through the gentle reception of the woman under the surface - enveloping, embracing, surrounding, submerging. Edgar Allan Poe stated, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”, and the drowning of a beautiful woman was all the more eroticised. Women jumping to their dooms in reality, sometimes with children in hand or belly, was redemption-through-death for the fallen woman. The baptismal action of drowning purified her sins, and artistic depictions of the recovered corpse often portrayed her in a white dress or gown.

The 1852 painting of Ophelia by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s own Sir John Everett Millais, is probably the superlative example of the Victorian ‘beautiful corpse’. His model, Elizabeth Siddal, was noted as melancholic and sickly, and died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862. Like Ophelia herself, Siddal departed this world without the male preference for handgun or blade, but quietly and, one hopes, without any pain.

Erotic Spiritualism & Intimacy With the Beyond

It seems impossible to imagine that the English speaking world was swept by a religious mania for the best part of a century, a mania for speaking to the dead. Spiritualism began in 1840’s, specifically with the Fox family in 1848, Hydesville, New York. Not uncoincidentally the first full telegraph had been sent four years earlier between Washington D.C and Baltimore, Maryland. For Spiritualists, women were simultaneously active and receptive, literal receivers of electromagnetic messages made easier by their excess of nervous physiological energy - telegraphy had become a structural, explanatory metaphor within the Spiritualist cosmology. Both men and women could be mediums for ghosts or spirits, but mediumship was an inherently feminine role. To get a more accurate feeling of this period, readers should try to forget the images of haunted, dark and neo-medieval Victorianism, and remember that Spiritualism’s primary animating force was electricity. Robotics, seance communications with Samuel Morse and Benjamin Franklin, human batteries, houses with huge metal antennae. The chemist Carl Reichenbach conducted experiments in 1840’s using ‘cataleptic’, ‘feeble-brained’ and ‘neurasthenic’ teenage girls, isolating them in pitch-black rooms until they could see a ‘luminous appearance of a flaming, wave-like nature’ at the poles of powerful magnets - confirming his organic vitalist theory of additional field-forces which connected mind and nature.

Women possessing this nervous and electromagnetic connection to the spirit realm gave them social powers as mediums, engaging in medicalised, discursive warfare with sceptical male physicians over what constituted ‘proper female behaviour’. Female mediums might shout, scream, gibber, drink alcohol, flirt, convulse or moan during trances - proof of concept for a believer, proof of hysteria or epileptic lesions to a doctor. Women might contact dead politicians, Maori spirits, or lecture audiences on the plight of prostitutes using this ethereal telegraph, much as a businessman might use the physical telegraph to convey stock prices, political news or corporate instructions. Women’s passivity became a precarious source of strength, and it also began a process of erotic disembodiment. A medium was a vulnerable receptacle for external, penetrating spirits, and during private sessions they or the sitters might report being physically touched:

The Spiritualist writer and editor Mary Dana Shindler recalled being drawn to materialization séances, “Wishing to feel once more those singular touches of fingers which were certainly neither mine nor the medium’s … those mysterious touches thrilled through my soul.”

-Ghosts of futures past: spiritualism and the cultural politics of nineteenth-century America (2008) Molly McGarry.

Through this novel, para-scientific or occultic technology, both men and women could experience heterodox forms of physical and spiritual intimacy, affection, eroticism and even sex, which were strictly forbidden within normal life. Trusted female friends might caress the naked body of a medium to ensure a spiritual line of connection; male mediums would embody female spiritual affects; a medium might be stripped and tied to a chair, only to escape and cavort through the audience, planting kisses on the necks of certain favourites; spirit marriages could occur, divorces in reality on the word of a ghost. This form of eroticism drew its intensity from the polarity between the real and the ineffable, the field of electromagnetism, the ego-less empty body of the medium. Not a corpse, but not a fully living person either - not simple immediacy, but the startling strangeness of communication through a void.

Vampires & the Necrophile Lover

The erotic nature of Dracula (1897) and Carmilla (1872), of the vampire, is hardly difficult to identify. Nocturnal visitations from a seductive monster, consumed by a monstrous desire and appetite. However, vampyres were more than cheap pulp fiction. Surprisingly perhaps to modern ears, many were female, and some even seduced human women. Far from Victorian culture banning such entertainment, the undead feminine is just one more valence of the popular, morbid-erotic transgressive activities we’ve been examining.

Female bodies were believed to be more prone to disease, hence the targeting of prostitutes in the sweep of Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860’s in Britain. Female vampires concentrated this taboo along with lesbianism, predatory masculine behaviour and the insatiability of unshackled feminine sexuality. Male vampires were re-imagined as dandyish, decadent, aristocratic - nothing like their bestial peasant origins in Transylvanian rurality. Both seduced, both dwelled in an inverted or barbaric reflection of normality, unable to withstand the light and compelled to feed only on human blood. Female vampires sometimes horrified readers by reversing motherhood and suckling from warm, living children. The biting, penetrative act of Dracula, exchanging fluids while infecting his victims, has also long been seen as a distorted sex act.

Vampires thus combined a mosaic of anxieties around sexual desire, giving space for this appetite only in the suspended space of the ‘living dead’, a person freed from social constraints, but whose body has not succumbed to decay. Erotic intimacy with a beloved corpse, necrophilic lovers, death and sex combined without reproduction of life, only of untrammelled appetite in the blood.

Corpse-Love in Art: From Skeleton-Seducers to Beautiful Deaths

As we’ve seen, the ideal feminine in Victorian art is a body without agency, suspended between life and death. Many art forms excelled in producing this body, ballet being a perfect example. The en pointe technique developed by Marie Taglioni, Comtesse de Voisins, produced an ethereal, weightless dancer who moved like a sylph or winged nymph, animated from beyond. But there was also evolution in photography and the visual arts (painting, sculpture) which took the ‘body-in-death’ idea both more literally and more symbolically simultaneously.

Death and the Maiden is a long running Western European artistic motif, dating back to the medieval era and beyond. Death, often portrayed in a grotesque, almost lecherous fashion, lusts after a young woman, lining up Eros and Thanatos cheek-to-cheek. In the late 1700’s and the early-to-mid Victorian period, this motif is re-imagined, and death becomes a beautiful young woman herself. This changes again during the 1880’s and especially the 1890’s with the Decadent/fin de siècle movement, and death once again becomes a skeleton, although an explicitly eroticised one.

Photography takes a very different route here. Where painters began creating a beautiful Death figure, photographers went in the other direction and made a new type of Death and the Maiden image. Victorian photography is a huge subject, worthy of entire bookshelves, but what we need here is to highlight how distinct painting and photography were as cultural mediums of visual expression. Professor Green-Lewis describes in her book,Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Photography, how early photographs were immediately read as literary texts, more often described than printed, and how they were immediately envisioned as a technology of memory. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in one of his essays on photography, Sun-Painting and Sun-Sculpture (1861), described photographs as a way of ‘flaying’ the present surface of reality for preservation:

The monuments of Art and the face of Nature herself are treated in the same way. We lift an impalpable scale from the surface of the Pyramids. We slip off from the dome of St. Peter’s that other imponderable dome which fitted it so closely that it betrays every scratch on the original. We skim off a thin, dry cuticle from the rapids of Niagara, and lay it on our unmoistened paper without breaking a bubble or losing a speck of foam

For the Victorians then, photography was a hard medium of realism, which is why the Spiritualists and others worked so diligently to produce ‘spirit photography’. These images were not symbolic, imaginative or overly stylised, but a memorialisation for an audience - both public and private (thanks to Eastman’s 1888 Kodak cameras) - and therefore meant to be observed, seen, gazed at, treasured. Victorian pornography has become well known in recent years, and one can find many examples online and in academic works. Compared to today, these photographs are strikingly intimate, warm, even funny. The so-called eroticism of modern pornography is very much a function of repetition and carefully calibrated micro-drama, whereas Victorian pornography was not meant for mass consumption, and explicitly defied the typically well-managed and curated domestic family photograph.

One strange version of this erotic photograph was a fashion for images where a young woman posed with a real human skeleton. Painting had turned Death into a woman, but photography removed the symbolism and mediation layer of art and straightforwardly placed a real skeleton next to an alluring female model. These images have sometimes been interpreted as allegories, metaphors or cryptic references - but I argue they are the collapse of such motifs into direct evidence, this skeleton was really there. To us, these images are odd, not even unsettling but bizarre. The skeletal form is not a danse macabre, not an active agent, nor a menacing presence. A body emptied of desire, a prop, death as an object to theatrically manipulate. Only the woman has any meaningful role, but in a closed loop. Photography is the conversion of action into appearance, for a gaze. This kind of image prefigures the discovery of X-rays in 1895, which fascinated and terrified people with its ability to ‘see’ death inside one’s own body.

Legend has it that when Berthe Röntgen first saw the X-ray of her left hand, she shuddered at the image presaging her own death (Glasser 1934, 399)… A newspaper editor in Graz allowed Professor P. Czermak to make an X-ray image of his head and reported that, “and later, after he had seen the picture, he ‘absolutely refused to show the picture to anybody but scientists.’ ‘He has not closed an eye,’ the report continued, ‘since he saw his own death’” (Glasser 1934, 40).

-The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) Murray Leeder

For a few short years, before the medical profession regulated their actions, X-rays sat at the intersection of entertainment, cinema, the macabre and the erotic. Victorian society was scandalised by the idea that female opacity could be so easily violated, and the skeleton was at the forefront. In art the Decadent movement also focused on the bones, with artists like Beardsley and Rops aiming to shock their audiences with stylised skeletal erotica - feelings of consumption, disease, poison, necrosis, pallor, langurous sexuality abounded.

Finally, sculpture offers yet another angle on eroticised death. Depictions of slaves, such as Power’s 1843 The Greek Slave; Cordier’s 1852 Vénus Africaine and John Bell’s 1868 The Octoroon, show the half-life state of the living dead - manacled, eyes semi-closed, utterly vulnerable - desirable and passive. Cemetery angels, death masks and casket sculptures similarly featured smooth-faced young women, both alive and supernatural. Harry Bate’s 1861 Mors Janua Vitae captures the moment of death through total surrender and serenity, the young nude figure succumbing to winged sleep. Troschel’s 1845 La Filatrice Addormentata was a gift to Queen Victoria from Prince Albert, who apparently adored it. A quick walk around any old British cemetery will show the popularity of weeping guardian angels, their drapery often revealing a bare breast or nipple underneath. In death, in quiet cold stone, here desire can be immortalised.

Mourning Was Intimacy With The Dead

Victorian mourning culture has been well studied, but a quick overview of the intimacy aspects will help show the continuity between art, life, technology and death. Some common practices included: wearing jewellery made from a dead lover’s hair; keeping locks of hair in lockets against the skin; kissing or touching the corpse in farewell rituals; post-mortem photographs posed to look sleeping, serene, never grotesque or necrotic.

Although a large number of these ‘post-mortem’ photographs identified as such online are mistaken, the fact remains that Victorian families who could afford it employed new photographic technologies to capture a final farewell, in particular for the children who died so regularly. Mother-child photos, ‘hidden mother’ photos, ‘Final Sleep’ poses with flowers, rosy cheeks and their best clothes. Victorian American photos, particularly from frontier settler communities, possess a spartan tenderness - a child laid in a pram, dressing deceased and living siblings in the same outfit. Every effort was made to disguise the cause of death, and uncanny methods like painting eyes onto closed eyelids just add to the effect. Families would wash, prepare and dress the corpse themselves, binding linen around the jaw, shaving a man’s beard, combing the hair and creating a repose of undisturbed peace. Rural Victorians maintained the older tradition of ‘watching’, ensuring someone was sat with the body at all times, through the night. Visitors were expected to touch, or kiss the corpse, experiencing the ‘cold finality’ of death. Hair might be snipped to create mourning jewellery, a keepsake held close to the body. Such items were not intended as public displays of status, but were worn underneath clothing or kept private, emphasising the intimacy and sincerity of the connection.

We know comparatively little about male grieving practices for the time period, as compared to women. Men were expected to display stoicism and emotional resilience, wear minimal mourning attire and remain in public life. Therefore, the true feelings of husbands, brothers, sons, fathers and especially friends are largely lost. Male Victorian friendship was a far more traditional affair, alien to us today with our rigid categories of desire as belonging to a distinct orientation in the world. Male friends expressed passionate feelings of love, devotion, pleasure in one another’s company, and intense grief at their death. Although confined to private letters and diaries for posterity, and the narrow public window of military fraternal comradeship, we get glimpses of these emotions through friends taking snippets of hair and sitting with a body for hours and days - final acts of farewell documented through kissing, hand-holding and tender mortuary care. Female friendship is far better documented, and more explicitly physical, including in death - a woman might sleep next to her female friend while she was sick and dying, hold her during her final moments, wash and prepare her body, sit in vigil holding her hand and kissing her face, keep some of her hair and visit her gravestone regularly. Victorian friendship was modelled after the Aristotelian and Ciceronian concept of a ‘second self’, an alter ego, and the loss of such a friend could profoundly destabilise the one left behind: half of my heart, my beloved, my soul flies out to meet yours. Desire and loss co-mingling in a fierce profundity, eros without sex but sublimated through death.

Medicine, Anatomy & the Forbidden Corpse

Modern medicine is built on anatomical foundations, and that had always required a supply of human bodies. Since the time of Henry VIII, those condemned to capital punishment in England suffered doubly, since after their ordeals on the gallows came their dissection on the table. The ‘Bloody Code’ of the 18th century increased capital offences from around 50 at the time of the Glorious Revolution, to over 200 by 1800 - but the physical yield of these laws diminished over time as jurors and judges increasingly refused to execute desperate and poor people. ‘Resurrectionists’ or body-snatchers stepped in to fill the gap, leading to wide-spread societal panic as graves were ransacked. In America the creator of Harvard Medical School, Dr John Warren - brother of one of the Founding Fathers - organised a secret society of anatomists dedicated to body-snatching throughout the Revolutionary War and beyond. In Britain the Burke-and-Hare murders in Edinburgh, and the London Burkers in Bethnal Green, finally prompted Parliament to regulate the flow of cadavers into medical schools through the 1832 Anatomy Act.

Britain and America differed from other European nations by their explicit moralisation of cadaver procurement, linking punishment and dissection. They also struggled to de-couple race and class from anatomical procurement, generating an anxiety that the medical gaze was also a gaze of moral superiority. Anatomists themselves aspired to enter the ranks of respected medical men, but were dogged by rumour and tainted by association with a market or trade in human bodies, and their dissection labs feared as charnel houses of butchery and even sexual impropriety.

Who even among the practitioners of medicine, does not shudder at the mere contemplation that the remains of all which was dear to him, of a beloved parent, wife, sister, or daughter, may be exposed to the rude gaze and perhaps to the INDECENT JESTS of unfeeling men, and afterwards be mutilated and dismembered in the presence of hundreds of spectators

-An Account of the Circumstances Attending the Imprisonment and Death of the late Mr William Millard (1825) Anne Millard

In Ruth Richardson’s book, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, she mentions how sexual activity with cadavers was routinely hinted at, satirised and suggested in writings and cartoons of the 19th century. One of Burke & Hare’s victims, Mary Paterson, had been preserved in a whiskey barrel by the unscrupulous surgeon John Knox - who was infatuated with her enough to bring in local artists to draw her for posterity. Gabriel von Max’s 1869 Der Anatom painting exemplifies this relationship between the anatomist and female corpse.

The woman’s animated body has been arrested in death, while traces of death, like decomposition and decay, have likewise been arrested. A feminisation of death occurs even as the body is desexualised. It is an aesthetically pleasing corpse, suggesting harmony, wholeness, immortality, because it is a ‘secured dead body’ (much like the skulls). Above all its beauty marks the purification and distance from two moments of insecurity – female sexuality and decay.

-Preparation For An Autopsy, from Over Her Dead Body (1992) Elisabeth Bronfen

Not all was hidden away in the surgeon’s chambers however - since the Medieval period anatomical models straddled the line between aesthetics and science, most famously the ‘Anatomical Venus’ created by Italian sculptor Clemente Susini. His 1780’s ‘Cagliari’ series of hyper-realistic female wax models with removable layers of internal organs and their postural expressions of ecstasy still retain an incredible power to shock and fascinate. Victorian wax models were less Renaissance-styled in their curiosity, and became more moralised and sensational. The truly odd model created by Pierre Spitzner named the Cesarean Venus (c. 1860) admits none of the ‘messiness’ of the female interior, but rather presents a tied-up woman in a pure white gown with a gaping hollow wound. Disembodied surgical hands work on this opening, while her eyes are open in shock. While anatomical museums were popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, Victorian England closed them down and they remained closed until the early 21st century. Dr Joseph Kahn's Anatomical and Pathological Museum was shut down by the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, pushed by anti-vice and anti-pornographic campaign groups. The unpleasant details of sexually transmitted diseases, the practicalities of conception, contraception and biological reproduction, and the internal organs of women were rolled together and censored. The female corpse was desirable and erotic, but only when intact, in that suspended state between death and decay.

When Murder Became Sexual - The Ripper

No topic illustrates the Victorian fascination with morbid eroticism than murder, and no murderer bring it into greater focus than Jack the Ripper. The Ripper’s cultural and psychological power has never waned since the Manchester Guardian first reported on the murder of Mary Ann Nichols - some have gone so far to say that the media circus around Jack the Ripper invented the category of ‘sex crime’.

The paradigm for modern sex crime is the Ripper-style mass murderer… But, however common now, the mass sexual murderer in 1888 was virtually unprecedented and almost incomprehensible to his society. That practice and event became familiar and finally mythic only in the years after the killer known as Jack the Ripper provided the prototype for a criminal career founded upon a compulsion to destroy women.

-The Age of Sex Crime (1982) Jane E. Caputi

However, sexual violence against women as a group, rather than personal, domestic or wartime crimes, was not invented by the Ripper. In fact, he stands in a lineage of similar such acts which can be traced back at least as far as the Tudors in England: the Damned Crew, Whipping Tom, the Mohocks, Young Bloods, Hawkobites, the Lascar Seamen and Colonel Francis Charteris (aka ‘the Rape-Master General’) were all categorised under 17th and especially 18th century terminology as physiognomic monsters and deviants. The problem of male rakes, predatory aristocrats like Henry Beresford the 3rd Marquess of Waterford or the Marquis de Sade, urban legends such as Spring-Heeled Jack and most crucially - the appearance of the London Monster - prefigured the idea of an anonymous amoral male with a taste for attacking women, driven by unintelligible and unnatural urges.

In a 2006 PhD thesis entitled Deconstructing the House that Jack Built: An Examination of the Discursive Regime of Sexual Murder, the doctoral candidate Jane Monckton-Smith examines a fundamental problem with the Ripper murders - why are they considered sex crimes when there is no evidence that any sexual activity took place? Leaning on a phrase from Brian Marriner’s 1992 publication - A Century of Sex Killers - she wondered how the Ripper’s signature modus operandi of throat slashing and disembowelment could have been interpreted as the ultimate rape. The final years of Victorian Britain and America became a battleground over the body and the correct way to use it. We have already seen the regulation of anatomical corpse acquisition, laws to prevent sexually transmitted diseases spreading amongst prostitutes, medico-legal fights to declare female mediums sane or insane and the outlawing of public anatomical specimen displays. To this we must add: the 1853 Maine liquor law and subsequent temperance movements; the founding of the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection in 1875; the 1885 ‘Maiden Tribute’ media report into child prostitution; the founding of the anti-porn National Vigilance Association also in 1885 and the anti-vaccination movement which began in the 1850’s and peaked in the 1890’s.

The “mangled remains” of the Ripper victims triggered off a set of psychosexual and political fears that resounded, in different ways, across the social spectrum … these negative body images included the prostitute as putrid body, as sewer, as syphilitic carrier, as corpse, and as link in a chain of resigned female bodies “at the beck and call of the bourgeois body.” …

The Ripper murders “eerily evoked” themes of medical violence against women that pervaded fin-de-siècle literature—of opening up, dissecting, or mutilating women: indeed, they may well have helped to consolidate and disseminate those themes publicly to a wider readership. They also played on—and seemed to play out— popular fears of surgeons, gynecologists, vaccinators, vivisectors, and dissectors as violators of, in this context, the innocent bodies of women, children, and animals, that had found considerable expression in a range of popular health and antimedical campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s …

-City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992) Judith. R. Walkowitz

The explicit link between Jack the Ripper’s actions and his theoretical sexual motivation was made by the journalist W.T Stead - the author of The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon newspaper series covering child prostitution. Stead likened the Ripper to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, referencing Stevenson’s novel which had been published a few years earlier, as well as comparing him to the Sioux Indians, a plebeian Marquis de Sade and a sufferer of erotic mania. This cocktail of moralism, social Darwinism, literary psychiatry and the newly minted terminology from Dr Krafft-Ebing’s foundational book in pathological sexology - Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) - supplied all the necessary ingredients to impugn the Ripper’s motives with a deviant sexuality in perpetuity. Despite the coroner’s suggestion that the victim’s missing organs suggested a grotesque form of anatomical body snatching to supply a specific medical school, the media pushed for a sexual angle: either the Ripper was a debauched libertine-esque aristocrat, indulging his perverted appetites, or he was some kind of slum monster, a primitive throwback crawling forth from the degeneration and evolutionary wastelands of the East End.

As Walkowitz discussed in the above quote, Victorian progressives and moralists were both concerned with what we could call the penetrating male/scientific gaze. Unlike the Renaissance-era vision of bodies as permeable to astrological and divine forces, Victorian bodies were meant to stay opaque. The animal rights activist, suffragette and philosopher Francis Power Cobbe had forcefully argued that science was the principal outlet of male ‘heteropathy’ - her own neologism for hostility and cruelty - and that both vivisection and gynaecology exemplified this passion for ‘mad doctors’ to torture and dissect their victims. Around half of all the public letters sent to the Metropolitan Police during the Ripper investigation claimed he must be a ‘human vivisectionist’, with the famous ‘Ex-Medico’s Daughter’ missive identifying the killer as a scientist hellbent on understanding female anatomy at all costs. An entire complex of arguments and discourses had collided at once during the Ripper enquiries - fears of the ‘spaying’ of women in surgery, the removal of the ovaries; the materialist and atheistic doctrines of French medicine; feminist campaigns against gynaecology, the speculum, stirrups, the examination of the vagina by unscrupulous men; the taboo and pornographic link between laudanum or anaesthesia and the unconscious body of a female patient under the hands of potential monsters.

The Ripper murders exemplified all these fears and anxieties over the female body and how much power men of science had over them. It also continued and developed the lineage of passive and eroticised ‘near-corpses’, as well as the metaphor of rape, which now extended to mutilation, dissection and vivisection. What lay inside female bodies was, towards the end of the Victorian era, no longer veiled by artistic metaphor - but spectacularly laid bare before a gleeful newspaper readership. The hollowed-out bodies of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly became bloody amphorae into which all of England and beyond could pour their concerns, fantasies and imaginings.

Conclusion

By the end of the Victorian era the fin-de-siècle movement had combined with certain scientists and strands of progressive occultism in wishing to liberate their societies from the strict codes of morality around sex and eroticism. In opposition there were old-fashioned conservatives, a variety of feminists, anti-obscenity groups, anti-prostitution lobbies and religious moral crusaders. Woman as passive object could no longer be tolerated, and as her decadent brothers-in-arms dressed as dandies, she openly embraced Salome: the femme fatale, sexually aggressive female. ‘Salomania’ would dominate culture for decades. Some also took up the bicycling New Woman, ready for education, suffrage and the workplace. Agency was back on the menu.

Death too had lost something of its sting. The turn of the century saw child mortality rates decrease, public sanitation improve, diseases like smallpox diminish as the state and scientifically-backed medicine intervened in everyday people’s lives. With this medicalised regime of the human body came new threats and challenges, but the aesthetic eroticism of death was no longer so prevalent. Edwardian society turned away from the stifling, unhealthy atmosphere of the last hundred years and felt the thrill of youth, muscles, athletics, swimwear, mountaineering and the élan vital of a eugenic, outdoor and expansive life. Eroticism also found a new home in the psyche as Freud and others mapped (or invented?) the structure of the mind, revealing and detailing how sexual life manifested in fetishes, neurosis and obsessions. Victorian stillness-in-death, heaviness, ornamentation, weight and melancholia was challenged by a futurism of speed - cars, planes, engines, cinema, electricity, technological forces beyond the human. Thus stasis became motion, decay became risk, passivity became agency, death became health and the body became the psyche or even the will and the drive.

The erotic will always be connected to death in some way, but death does not have to be morbid. That sentiment reached its peak in the English-speaking Victorian world, chaperoned by a mortality rate and familiarity with the grave we today cannot possibly envisage. Death has all but vanished from our world, out of sight and mind, the fitful spasms of mass terrorism viewed through the screen and permitted only as trauma. To see death is to destabilise the mind, to find in it erotic or aesthetic pleasure is to bear the mark of deviancy. If optimisation is our watchword, do we even have space for the erotic, or death?

Skin is the Real Mask?

Over several articles now, we’ve been able to sketch out a rough theory of how masks, the face and identity, horror and the self have functioned in Europe in different times and places. In brief:

• Greco-Roman (southern serene) - calm, Apollonian, idealised, smooth. Divine terror and masking controlled through public and group-based ceremonies, festivals

• Northern-Germanic (northern numinous) - eruption, chaotic, grotesque. Divine terror and masking expressed through confrontation, intrusion, liminality and external threat

• Modern horror emerges as a response to the breakdown of Enlightenment individual rationality in the face of modernity, systematised and internalised through psychoanalysis. Both southern and northern faces/modes integrated.

With this basic scaffolding in place we can deepen our analysis, and begin to fill in the blanks, starting with two linked articles - this piece on skin and identity, and the second on smiling, possession and sincerity.

So what’s my claim? Skin is the most intimate mask of Western civilisation. Where other cultures might animate their masks with spirits, the West has always insisted that identity lies beneath the surface, in the flesh, nerves, psyche. It seems absolutely true to me that the Western mask is completely inert, and the real, true site of possession, horror, or transformation is the skin itself. Skin is the container, the surface wrapping or even ‘envelope’ which both presents and encloses personhood. Skin is the mask of the deeper self, and when removed, modified or damaged instinctively leads to ambiguity about that self. Before the horror mask came the dread of skin, the body’s mask. A space for horror arrives whenever the skin can no longer guarantee stability, identity, or integrity, as we shall see.

Greco-Roman Naturalism, Skin as Divine Surface

The Western metaphysics of skin begins in classical naturalism. To the Greek mind, surfaces were everything. As we’ve already seen in earlier articles, Greek idealisation of the human form created artistic/religious representations as well as real physical bodies, which aligned with their vision of divinity. Theologian Thorleif Boman wrote, “Greeks, who find beauty in the plastic”, summarising the Greek tension beneath the visible and invisible - mysteries which should not be explored.

The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all, they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Surfaces were an expression of divinity, and the Greek mind managed the struggle between mind-body, sea-land, god-human, us-them - by conjuring fictional idealisations, allowing them to go above and below the surface just enough. Greek proto-horror (we could say the aestheticisation of terror) revolved around violating this surface. Medusa petrified her victims, rendering their perfect exterior frozen for all eternity; Marsyas attempted to challenge the divine harmony, and was flayed alive by Apollo for his hubris; Dionysian sparagmos, the tearing apart of a human body, an inversion of sculptural bodily integrity; leaving corpses for the animals to eat, or desecrating a corpse as Achilles did Hector - forms of the Greek disgust at the stigma, marking and puncturing the skin. All these horrors indicate Greco anxiety at surfaces and skins being opened, the inside spilling out, the body failing at its boundaries.

Of course, the Greeks did wear masks: theatrical, communal, ecstatic. But these were not like masks elsewhere, which in themselves added something to the skin, in an animistic or religious sense. Masks were not alive. To don a mask during public festivals or witnessing a blind, bleeding mask on the stage, was not to invite the divine in through the mask. Skin ultimately remained the divine surface.

After Greece, Rome: Roman attitudes to skin evolved from idealisation into an extreme naturalism, or verism. Harmonious form was recognised, but Roman skin was turned towards the outward, legible record of citizenship. The body’s surface was politicised, and depictions of virtuous citizens proudly displayed scars, wrinkles, age, lopsided features and every marker of gravitas. Conversely, this surface record could be unmade through violation. Damnatio ad bestias, crucifixion, scourging. Enemy leaders were mutilated not for spectacle alone, but to erase their public identity.

A citizen whose skin was torn apart by beasts lost not only life but civic personhood. They were denied burial, memory, and the continuity of their name. Their face could never be recreated in wax and paraded with their ancestors, the imagines maiorum, since the face needed to be intact and politically acceptable.
One of their civilisation’s most profound fears is found in this intersection of flesh, citizenship, and public visibility: to be flayed, exposed, or defaced is to be erased from the civic and familial world.

Enemies paraded in chains are displayed as bodies whose skin will soon be violated, their future dismemberment implied by the ritual. Triumph and execution share this same metaphysical grammar, since the skin is where order can be affirmed or removed. The skin is not a spiritual veil but a social contract, a surface where identity becomes politically visible. When that surface is violated, Rome experiences the dreadful void of political dissolution. A civic body torn up as much as the human one. Rome, as ever, is the bridge between Greek corporeal metaphysics and the later Christian concern with sins, flesh, wounds and miraculous skin. The takeaway here is that the Western skin tradition starts with Greek idealisation, and then Roman politicisation. But what happened in the European north?

Northern and Medieval Skin Traditions | Skin as Moral Boundary

Christian Europe drew on multiple sources of meaning for skin, beginning with the Roman inheritance of public identity. Although not strictly Republican citizenship, medieval law codes nevertheless insisted on the skin acting as a legal document due to its obvious irreversibility: Early Germanic law was largely (not exclusively) compensatory rather than punitive, injuries were assessed, priced, and resolved through payment (weregild) instead of mutilation. As Roman models of governance spread northward, punishment increasingly targeted the body itself, with branding, disfigurement, and amputation turning the skin into a surface on which authority could be written.

Medieval Christianity also inherited a complicated mixture of attitudes towards the skin. In the logic of Judaism, to be ‘marked’ on the skin could be both good (circumcision, protection e.g Ezekiel) and bad (Leviticus). Early Christianity similarly emphasised this dualism - the mark of the beast, Christ’s wounds, saintly mutilations. The Church reviled tattoos as marks of paganism and criminality, although the Eastern Church and Christians living under Islamic rule came to re-invent them, viewing crosses on the wrist or marks of St Michael as protective. Crusaders and pilgrims picked up this attitude, and presented their absolute proof of the journey through scarification and Coptic/Armenian tattoos.

What this all has in common is the shift from a political body to the skin as a moralised boundary - a veil over the fallen flesh, sinful body and immortal, idealised soul. God’s grace could be shown through the preservation of the saintly body, which never degraded, or his displeasure extended via leprosy and plague. Punishments written onto the skin such as mutilation, beating and amputation are designed to reflect both the legal and moral/theological crime - the earthly and heavenly. The use of fire to execute becomes institutionalised after the Orléans heresy of 1022, and canonical concepts of purgatorium between 1150-1250 containing ‘purging fire’ emphasise the punishing aspect of flames on the skin. Fire neither mimicked the holy shedding of blood, nor the cruel visceral martyrdoms of the saints, but destroyed the skin completely and purged the veil of sin.

Meanwhile in northern Europe, older traditions of the skin as a membrane which could erupt were still active and preserved. As described inYnglinga Saga and Haraldskvæði, warriors enter a state of berserksgangr (‘bear-shirt’ or ‘bare-shirt), the skin metaphorically altered with swelling, heat, morphing and invulnerability. Identity erupts through the body, rather than expressed symbolically or legally. Change breaks through the skin, and the skin can cause change, an object in its own right. Werewolves demonstrated a similar belief - Marie de France’s Bisclavret, the Irish Ossory werewolves - here the skin is a removable and transformable boundary, and to change skin is to change the underlying moral and social being. At the Celtic fringes, Selkie seal-skin folklore (Orkney, Shetland, Faroes) also insists that the skin can be stolen, leading to identities being change and trapped. Returning the skin can restore the being, thus skin is an ontological property, beyond a container, boundary or surface appearance. Skin is animate, or has agency in some sense.

These two visions of the skin between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance again highlight the north-south polarity we’ve discussed, with change and harmony, legalism and chaos being front and centre. Where they meet during the process of Christianisation results in the skin being a site of intense moralisation.

Renaissance and the Enlightenment: Open it up and see what’s inside.

While the cult dedicated to St Bartholomew, patron saint of tanners and bookbinders, may have began during the medieval period - it was not until the Renaissance that the lurid fascination with his martyrdom truly took off. The poor man had been flayed alive. Medieval skin was theologically rich of course, but the Renaissance celebrated what was to become a fundamentally Western orientation to the world - what is underneath the skin, what is inside? Flaying as a form of punishment has always been exceptionally rare and likely a poorly managed spectacle (leaving aside the Assyrians, who cared little for the soul or moralisation of the skin, and simply flayed, then nailed up skins as a demonstration of imperial power, skin’s owner’s personal identities are irrelevant). Despite this, the unease and horror of being flayed alive plays on the human mind, and has produced some immense artworks, reflecting this crawling terror of being intentionally separated from our skin. The artwork of flaying is not a story for here, but suffice to say the Renaissance was able to depict it more graphic detail due to the new appreciation of perspective, the body and its skin.

Thus from the 15th century onwards, skin becomes a threshold to be opened, studied and perfected. Proto-science emerges through early anatomical theatres, where the skin is removed and the deeper layers of body revealed before an audience. Renaissance alchemy and magic located cosmic influences within the skin. Skin could be used for its metaphysical properties, as well as read as a surface betraying inner truth. Vesalius peeled back the surface to reveal a body composed of structures, fibres, and tensions. The opened corpse was arranged, posed, and displayed as evidence. At the same time thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Paracelsus continued to treat the skin as a porous membrane through which astral and elemental forces acted. Disease, temperament, and fate were still imagined as entering and exiting at the surface. Marks on the body: scars, growths, anomalous nipples, were read as signs of invisible influence. The skin remained legible, but it was no longer metaphysically sacred.

Medieval punishment was often less, shall we say, anatomically inventive than this early modern successor? High medieval justice usually relied on fines, exile, outlawing, hanging or simple beheading- all methods intended to remove the offender rather than systematically work on the body. Its only in the early modern period, especially from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, that routine punishments and torture become technical, prolonged and surface-focused: the rack, the strappado, breaking on the wheel, judicial burning, boiling and carefully staged executions designed to extract confession, deterrence and brutal spectacle. As states centralised and legal authority hardened, violence shifted from retribution to methodical inscription upon the body. Torture and execution became instruments for producing truth and obedience by acting directly on the skin.

The Enlightenment inherits this vulnerable, exposed body and attempts to stabilise it through systematisation. By the late 17th century, figures such as William Harvey, Herman Boerhaave, and Albrecht von Haller reframed the human organism as a regulated interior, governed by circulation, nerves and laws. The skin became a boundary condition, a surface separating a private, rational interior from a world to be measured and controlled. Medical classification accelerated, insisting that pathology appears on the skin, while causation retreats ever-inward. The emerging sciences of mind and body depend on this partition, e.g. John Locke’s conception of the self as interior consciousness presupposes a sealed surface that contains it.Yet this rationalisation did not resolve the unease. Once the skin is defined as a barrier, its failure becomes a primary source of anxiety. The Enlightenment feared leakage rather than possession: eruptions, rashes, sores and lesions become visible signs that the internal system was breaking down.

It seems that at certain periods the dichotomous feelings towards the skin can be greatly intensified. According to Barbara Maria Stafford, the Enlightenment was one such period. The remarkable chapter entitled ‘Marking’ in her book Body Criticism outlines in detail the fascinated disgust with the pathological skin which reigned in Europe from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The ‘aesthetic of immaculateness’ of the eighteenth century, with the smooth, white complexions of its ladies, the dazzling white lines of its neo-classical sculpture and architecture and the sumptuously bland sheen of its portraits and landscapes, was, she argues, a panicky and unstable response to the nauseating phantasmagoria of rotting, eruptive and squamous skins that constituted the actual bodyscape in the eighteenth century

-The Book of Skin (2004) Steven Connor

By the eighteenth century, the skin had become a site of surveillance and intervention - to be observed, classified, and treated, but never fully secured. Terror no longer arrived from beyond the body. It emerged at the surface, where the fragile boundary between interior order and exterior force begins to give way.

Modernity. The Skin as Material, Project and Regime

From the late nineteenth century onward, the skin ceases to be merely injured or violated and becomes something that can be systematically worked. Advances in surgery and experimental medicine transform the body’s surface into a manipulable substrate. Skin grafting techniques develop rapidly after the 1870s, driven by industrial accidents and colonial medicine, and reach its grim maturity during the First World War. Surgeons such as Hippolyte Morestin in France and Harold Gillies in Britain pioneer flap surgery, pedicled grafts, and facial reconstruction for soldiers whose faces had been torn apart by shrapnel. These procedures reconceptualise skin as modular and transferable. Early transplantation experiments push even further, testing xenografts using animal tissue and skin, and later organ transplantation. These destabilise the boundary between bodies altogether. The surface of the human becomes provisional and capable of replacement, supplementation, substitution. Identity could no longer reside securely in the skin and had to be reconstructed, sometimes literally stitched together from borrowed matter.

Alongside this surgical manipulation emerges the modern discipline of skin maintenance. Practices that were once associated with trades such as butchers, tanners and leatherworkers are gradually displaced by hygienic, medical, and cosmetic frameworks. By the early twentieth century, dermatology separates itself from general surgery and pathology, while commercial cosmetics industries expand rapidly in Europe and the United States. Skin care became a daily obligation rather than an occasional intervention. You must wash, exfoliate, moisturise, protect, tan. The surface of the body subjected to continuous regulation. One’s skin must be actively produced and vigilantly preserved to maintain health. Smoothness, youth, and uniform tone become newly moralised ideals, presented to the world evidence of one’s discipline, vitality, and self-control.

This regime intensified throughout the twentieth century. Chemical peels, early hormonal treatments, ultraviolet tanning lamps, collagen injections and later synthetic fillers promise to correct, preserve, and optimise the surface. Masks and creams, which were once ritual or theatrical are now routine technologies of concealment and repair. The language of care slides seamlessly into the language of control, and to neglect your skin is to fail oneself. Injury and pathology are equally reframed through maintenance: scars softened, burns disguised, pigmentation corrected. The body’s surface becomes a site of constant anxiety, monitored for signs of decline or disorder.

Beneath the seductive promise of this care routine is a fairly anti-human logic: the skin is no longer a metaphysical boundary that guarantees identity, but is rather a mutable interface to be managed. Modern horror emerges with the recognition that the self has been reduced to a surface under permanent maintenance, endlessly repairable, endlessly correctable, and never complete: see the 2024 satirical body horror The Substance pushing this concept to absurd heights, comfortably viewed alongside TikTok clips of grotesque filler and injection mistakes. To be comfortable in one’s own skin can feel like a social rarity in the contemporary world when new bodily dsymorphias keep being discovered, and transgender medical care promises the Promethean dream of completely rearranging the skin to match the interior identity. As Judith Halberstam argued in her 1995 work, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, older Gothic ideas of monstrosity fall away under modernity’s ability to swap, alter and change the body and skin. What is immutable becomes more problematic.

Modern Horror: Case Studies

Having covered the trajectory of the Western interest in skin, boundaries and selfhood, we can now look at what horror reveals to us through stories and images. As previously argued, the horror genre exists because modernity created a new psychological depth and mental structure which results in dread, fear, terror, phobias, the logic of the uncanny - each person contains a permanent tension between their conscious and unconscious selves. Since skin is the ultimate boundary of these selves, it becomes a ripe arena for projections and artistic visions where the self and identity come under extreme threat.

The French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu argues, in his 1985 book The Skin Ego, that Western subjectivity is built through the psychological interdependence of real tactile skin and the mental ‘skin ego’ wrapping or envelope, which contains the stable self. We still say that someone is ‘thin-skinned’ or needs to develop a ‘thicker skin’ to describe their internal resilience and ability to keep from being psychically wounded. Patients who have lost their physical skin to third-degree burns often present as regressive infants, the sensation of totalising pain de-centering consciousness, making a coherent ‘I’ impossible. Using this lens of the skin-ego, we can see how the different Western models of the skin-as-boundary have been explored in cinema, through four films.

In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the skin ego is framed as a problem of containment and identity transfer, given life through two figures who embody opposite solutions. Buffalo Bill’s fantasy of literally “wearing” another’s skin is an attempt to manufacture an envelope that he cannot generate psychically. This could be seen as Renaissance-coded in its literalism, the skin treated as a detachable garment, and yet the fantasy is modern in its surgical logic: the body is really just a material to be cut, shaped, and assembled into a new surface. The skin’s temporary wearer should rub the lotion on the skin, in preparation for its new host. Arguably though the film’s true structure comes from the later Enlightenment, with its investigative gaze, classificatory apparatus, clinical spaces, a procedural language that assumes the human is an object of study. Clarice Starling moves through these spaces and institutions which try to read human surfaces, looking for truth. Dr Lecter himself sits serenely behind glass like an idealised, perfected envelope. He is the opposite of Bill, he presents a sealed interior on almost public display, a Roman-style civic, stoic face transposed into modern transparency. The horror is not that something ‘possesses’ the self (a medieval fear), but that the barrier fails or must be replaced, a very modern anxiety of leakage and intrusion. If Anzieu says the self is held together by an envelope, then Silence of the Lambs explores what happens when that envelope is unlivable and the subject seeks a substitute in the flesh.

If Silence is an Enlightenment/modern procedural film about surface as identity, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) can be seen as a medieval-northern nightmare of pre-symbolic life, where the psychic skin envelope never properly forms. Leatherface is not a stable villain, but rather a being who requires external skins simply to function. Each flayed mask is a crude prosthesis for an absent psychic boundary, haphazardly wrapped around his head to show the barest semblance of a face to the world. I interpret this as the northern dynamic at its most extreme: eruption without containment, the berserker logic of pure affect breaking through the surface, but stripped of all heroic mythos and reduced to sheer panic. The family home is an upside-down ‘anti-household’, a grotesque parody of the hearth. Where the medieval oven is a site of domestic order and sacramental warmth, this horrific interior is a slaughterhouse, a tragic inversion of nourishment. The meals are humiliation, the kinship is animalistic noise. Leatherface attempts, or is pushed to take up the role of the absent symbolic feminine, as ‘cook’ and ‘carer’, but utterly fails to cohere this identity within his skin. The resulting violence is not stylised like a Greek tragedy or Roman spectacle, it is a process, abattoir-like, almost industrial. Bodies are treated as hides, the human reduced to the animal surface worked by tools and hooks. The film has cultural staying-power because it depicts a world before the civic and theological systems that once stabilised skin with meaning. Like a state of nature in the outer dark (rural Americana), there is no Roman personhood to violate, no medieval soul to damn, no Renaissance curiosity to even dignify the bloody exposure - only the fact of skin as a base material, and the terror of a self that cannot be held together.

Goodnight Mommy (2014) flips this previous structure entirely. In this Austrian horror film the skin ego envelope exists, but the moment of terror comes when recognisability collapses. The mother’s post-surgical face, all bandaged, altered and temporarily suspended between two forms, this becomes an embodiment of the modern condition: repair but without reassurance, reconstruction but without psychic continuity. Arguably this is modernity’s surgical regime crossing over into metaphysics. The unfortunate children experience the maternal face surface not as a comforting haven but as an uncanny facade: the skin appears technically ‘correct’ yet fails to display the affective signature which once made it trustworthy. The horror is not northern eruption but verification, not unlike a fairy changeling, except here the facial skin has a double problem - the outer layer of bandages, the inner layer of raw wounded dermis - which is hiding the real mother? The children’s eventual cruelty functions like an obscene Enlightenment experiment: pain as epistemology, torture as proof of interiority. Their question is utterly primitive, “does this skin still contain my mother?” The maternal body once guaranteed protection as an enveloping presence, but in the film the envelope has become unreliable. In Roman terms, the face is the seat of recognisable personhood. For the boys, her personhood is thrown into doubt by this repaired surface. The film’s dreadful chill arises from the premise that identity can be medically preserved yet psychically lost, that the skin can survive as an interface while the self, for the child, no longer ‘arrives’ through it. We moderns cannot even cling to the succour of fairies stealing and replacing people, for now the skin-interior-self layers are all medically and psychologically legible, reproducible, divisible, fungible.

Finally, Martyrs (2008) is possibly the most extreme articulation of my proposed Western skin logic, because it makes skin/envelope-destruction purposeful. Where Greek sparagmos tore the body apart in Dionysian frenzy, Martyrs replaces this ecstasy with a precise method, a kind of modern administrative violence that turns suffering into procedure. In one sense the core concept of the film is pure Renaissance in its detached fascination with what lies beneath the skin, yet it also echoes or summons up a medieval-like theology of pain, with visions of purgation and ultimate sanctification through visceral bodily process. However, I think the film’s real symbolic engine is completely modern. The disciplined enclosure, institutional rhythm, the reduction of the subject to a pure surface that can be acted upon repeatedly until symbolisation fails. What happens to the terrified victims is a systematic dismantling of their skin ego, through blows, confinement, deprivation, humiliation - each one eroding the envelope that allows a person to still remain a person during adversity. The cult’s aim in the film is a total metaphysical hollowing, to produce a consciousness beyond the boundary of the skin, a self emptied of selfhood. A person still alive without their skin is not truly a person - they are a mythical creature of total agony and de-centred consciousness, what Ovid described as “one vast wound”. Martyrs goes beyond ‘body horror’ as the mere mutation of the human body, and creates a symbolic horror-process for achieving human vacancy. When the container is peeled away, how can the interior still hold?

Taken together, these films show how Western horror cycles through its own history of the surface. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be interpreted as the northern abyss, a skin without symbol, an envelope never formed. The Silence of the Lambs is an Enlightenment/modern surgical imaginary, the skin as an identity-project, with substitution, theft, and control. Goodnight Mommy is a modern reconstruction which turned metaphysical, the skin preserved as an interface but recognisability collapses. Finally Martyrs is a fusion of medieval pain-theology with modern technique, envelope destruction as truth, hollowing out as transcendence. Across all four films, the older European motifs still remain metaphysically important, such as the classical faith in the surface and the northern fear of eruption, the medieval moral reading of flesh, the Renaissance appetite for exposure, the Enlightenment obsession with classification and interiority, modernity’s surgical remaking of the human. Modern horror is not just a neutral medium though, it gladly recombines these themes, whilst showing us that the direction of travel is consistent. From skin as the guarantor of personhood, towards skin as a detachable layer, and in the contemporary media landscape of AI faces and synthetic media - a new implication is on the horizon: if skin can be generated without a body, and the face can circulate without a self, then the West’s oldest boundary becomes a perfectly stable surface which contains nothing.

Post-script: Digital Horror and the End/Triumph of Skin

Contemporary horror media is increasingly converging on a point where the skin and interior will finally separate. In digital culture, the surface can no longer cover, protect, or really reveals anything beneath it. Instead it functions autonomously. Filters, avatars, manipulated faces and generative skins all present a body without any flesh and a face without any visible biography. Horror will migrate accordingly. The terror will no longer be that the skin can be torn, flayed, or invaded, but it will remain intact while nothing exists behind it. This is what I call the logic of hollowing: the surface perfected to the point of emptiness.

Digital horror repeatedly stages this condition. In games such as SOMA (2015), identity persists as a skin-like interface, with voice, memory, facial continuity, all the while consciousness itself is endlessly copied and abandoned. The body is no longer visually violated, it is irrelevant. Similarly, The Mandela Catalogue and other analog/digital hybrids fixate on faces that appear to be human but fail to contain a person, with eyes that look correctly but do not gaze back, smiles that persist without real affect, surfaces that can simulate expression but really signal vacancy. In Black Mirror episodes such as Be Right Back and White Christmas, synthetic bodies and faces reproduce intimacy without interiority, generating horror through perfect continuity, absent self-presence. Analog skin eventually lies, betrays and fails, digital skin is immortal.

This marks a decisive break from classical body horror. In films like The Fly, Videodrome, or Martyrs, the horror depends on rupture. The skin splits, mutates, peels, or collapses under pressure. Identity is threatened because the envelope fails. Pain, transformation, and invasion still assume that something inside is being exposed or destroyed. Even the most extreme corporeal horror retains this metaphysics of depth, that beneath the skin there is a self or soul to lose. Body horror is only terrifying because the interior really is vulnerable.

Digital horror will reverse this logic, precisely because there is no depth to violate. Nothing needs to break. The face persists, smooth and functional, and interiority evaporates away. I posit this is why contemporary horror is moving, and will move, to a focus on glitches rather than wounds, uncanny stillness rather than gore, faces that linger just that little bit too long. Gone are the gorno fears and pleadings against bodily death or physical mutilation, future-oriented horror is encountering a surface that no longer corresponds to any kind of real underlying selfhood. Earlier horror explored what happens when the skin fails, digital horror presents what happens when the skin surface itself is near-divine.

With this in mind, I argue that nascent digital horror is not a new genre but one possible expression of a long Western trajectory. Greek serenity idealised the surface and the Romans politicised it, the northern imagination feared its rupture and medieval Christianity moralised it, the Renaissance opened the skin and the Enlightenment sealed an interior within it, finally modernity learned to cut, graft, and maintain it. Now the skin has been emancipated from the body entirely. It can be generated, inhabited, exchanged, and circulated without clear origin. This piece therefore ends where Western metaphysics seems to be headed: towards a face that does not bleed, does not decay, does not open - and does not contain anyone or anything. Skin, once the ultimate mask and vessel of the self, has become a perfectly stable interface over nothing, nothing at all.

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I. Introduction: Horror as the Daughter of Rational Man

Horror emerges not from “primitive fear,” but from the cracks in Western modernity’s greatest invention: the rational, bounded, introspective individual.

Why does horror exist? Why is it a genre at all, don’t we all have a fear response?
The answer to this is not immediately obvious, and its certainly not universal. All human societies and civilisations had some kind of monsters, ancestral or animistic spirits, demons, supernatural threats, other realms and worlds — but only the West produced horror in the modern sense. Only the West developed a tradition where fear is not a simple experience to be avoided, but one to be contemplated, performed, aestheticised, and ultimately used as a mirror for the modern, psychological self.

Something unique happened in the centuries between the Enlightenment and the early twentieth century. The human being — in European thought — became a fully-fledged individual, a rational agent with a stable interior life. The Enlightenment built on its Classical-Christian inheritance, evolving the idea of a self that could be known, controlled, examined, perfected. This new, bounded person became the basic unit of modern society: the legal subject, the moral subject, the political subject and the national citizen.

Building this rational individual meant extending and developing complex philosophical ideas about how the internal self operates, how it relates to the soul (if that even existed?) and insisting on a harmonious unity. Whatever darkness lurked inside Man could be expunged in the clear light of truth and reason.

Romanticism sensed the flaws here immediately. The Gothic sensed it even earlier. These movements were the first cracks in this Enlightenment façade. They suggested that, beneath the symmetrical order of the rational self lay something older, darker, more numinous — a reservoir of instinct, violence, longing, compulsions, vices and terror. Thus the Gothic castle, the revenant, the ancestral curse, haunted portraits, vampires: all early attempts to map this interior landscape. The decisive turn came with the rise of psychoanalysis - a scientific system which insisted that the self was not one thing, but a battleground. Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the familiar made strange — was a key moment in the development of horror, a late stage of internalisation.

Horror ceased to be a theological problem or a moral allegory, and it became a psychological event: the return of what the self must exclude in order to remain ‘rational’. As the self fractures, horror breaks loose. Not an external monster, but a shadow of the rational mind. Without a cosmological framework to maintain stability, the individual cannot contain its own depths, there is no limit to this interior, an abyss. Western Man became something new - rather than taking the advice of the Greeks and becoming profound through superficiality - he turned inwards, finding both new heavens and novel hells.

II. The Enlightenment: Building the Rational Individual from the Outside In

The modern self was constructed over many brutal centuries, coming to emphasise rational introspection to build an optimistic, progress-oriented society.

Inventing the individual was a centuries long project encompassing multiple streams of thought, theological argument, dense philosophical texts and creative legal judgements. Many were ultimately rooted in European Christianity, such as Man’s inner conscience and natural law, both of which came to be derived from natural and rational principles rather than divine revelation. The concept of ‘looking inwards’ had been central to medieval monastic and scholastic introspection - St Augustine, Ockham, Aquinas - and although it had been tempered by external, earthly authority, interior examination was continued during the Renaissance by Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus. The Reformation electrified this tension through Luther’s insistence on the primacy of conscience:

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe

The creative destruction of Protestant thought produced Calvin, the Anabaptists, the Swiss Brethren, the English Dissenters, the Zwickau Prophets; Batenburgers; Restorationism and countless more. Alongside this flowering of religious conscience came the Scientific Revolution, with its eventual emphasis on rational and empirical methods for revealing the truths of nature. Man’s place in a divinely ordered universe seemed assured, even as Europe slipped into the agonies of the Thirty Years War, the English Civil Wars, the French Fronde and numerous conflicts of restoration, monarchical rule and nation-building. The darker nature of Man was on full display, and the Enlightenment movement which came out the other side had to grapple with load-bearing ideas such as scepticism, freedom or liberty of thought, conscience, speech and association.

European order balanced on a knife edge of tyranny and chaos, and the individual self had to practice self-discipline, rationality and toleration to keep society from sliding one way or the other. Balance, harmony, symmetry and clarity. Portraiture from artists like Allan Ramsay and Anton Graff emphasised the southern, serene face - a calm and cerebral poise which allowed truth and virtue to shine through. Despite this veneer, the Enlightenment was always in a state of flux and conflict, both within its ‘Republic of letters’ and from its external critics. By the 1770’s the individual self may have acquired great legal, economic, social and religious liberties, constituted on rational, scientific progress - but it was about to undergo its first major trial.

III. Romanticism and the Gothic: The Counterattack

he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from, among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air of the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with a work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungain1y shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them

-The Stones of Venice (Vol II), 1853, John Ruskin

In 1756 the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke had laid out a crucial argument, one which would move the emotional response of simple fear from primitive to contemplative. Burke was the first thinker to split the concepts of beauty and sublime, that sublime was a feeling of awe, wonder and fear before something much greater than oneself. Being trapped on a boat during a storm produced terror beholding the raw power of nature. Seeing a painting of such a storm invoked this feeling, at a distance, causing a paradoxical delight and even pleasure in the viewer. Art could use the triad of terror through obscurity to give pleasure through the sublime.

The British Gothic responded to the Enlightenment in a typically English way - by using older, ruined or abandoned architecture as a metaphor for the haunted and repressed psyche. Castles, half-overgrown monasteries, windswept moors become stages for barely glimpsed monsters and ghosts which ultimately illuminated the interior world of the mind. Walpole’s medievalism, the fusion of Milton’s defiant Satan with a transgressive supernatural villain and early bourgeois anxieties about industrialisation - this witch’s brew produced an enduring aesthetic movement in love with twilight, gloom, forbidden desire, dangerous eros, beauty and terror, the troubled inheritance and hubristic tragedy. German and French equivalent literary genres existed (Schauerroman, roman noir), dealing far more with visceral horror and moral corruption, but it was the British Gothic which pushed psychological depth to its height in the late 18th century.

Romanticism was the wider oceanic swell in which the Gothic surfed, an upsurge of momentous feeling which has never culturally receded. Turning away from calm rationality, the Romantics looked simultaneously backwards and forwards, to nature, primitivism and medieval enchantment, and to revolution, experimental art and expanding empathy towards animals and the disenfranchised. The German Sturm und Drang, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Chatterton’s suicide, the French Revolution, the primacy of individual subjectivity and even emotional turmoil and crisis - Romanticism created the West’s love affair with the tormented genius, the rebel and the tension between duty and passion. The Sublime was to be found in the overwhelming power of mountains, oceans, caves and landscapes, but also in the mysterious and thrilling terror of summoning ghosts, of nightmares, apparitions, visions, sleepwalking, altered consciousness and madness. Terror was not just for moonlit nights, but also experienced in the obscurity of the human mind and the deeper subterranean forces which threatened to seep out and swallow men whole.

IV. Psychoanalysis: The Internalisation of Chaos

“Bow or not? Call back or not? Recognize him or not?” our hero wondered in indescribable anguish, “or pretend that I am not myself, but somebody else strikingly like me, and look as though nothing were the matter.”

-The Double, Dostoevsky

Knowingly or not, the writers of Gothic fiction had begun exploring an idea which would become central to the lives of Europeans even today - the return of the repressed. That Man had an inner life was not new, the ancients knew that, but Romanticism had opened the door to a new kind of subjectivity. Kant suggested the mind containable unknowable regions beneath rational cognition, Schelling and Fichte pushed into them - the dark unconscious strata of the self. Carl Carus explicitly named it, Fechner studied it. The German Romantics sketched out doubling, repression, dream-life and the uncanny through Herder, Goethe and Hoffman. In France, Maine de Biran, Ribot, Charcot and Janet laid the clinical and psychological foundations for dissociation, trauma and instinctive or automatic behaviours. Darwin, Spencer, Edward Tylor, James Frazer, Jakob Bachofen and Max Muller expanded the depth of human time and breadth of human culture, opening up vistas of development and branching within consciousness itself. By the time Nietzsche, Breuer and finally Sigmund Freud came to name and systematise the disturbing layers of Man’s inner world, European thought had spent over a century building the foundational architecture of the modern mind.

Freud famously explained ‘the uncanny’, or Das Unheimliche, in his 1919 essay - describing this ‘unhomely’ feeling as the return of the repressed. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, alien and dreadful. Long buried childhood fears suddenly snap into view through the symbol of a doll, a frozen face or the sensation of repetition. I’ve dreamt of this moment before. The uncanny has lost much of its precise meaning today, and is best known for the endlessly discussed uncanny valley effect. For Freud and the early psychoanalysts the uncanny, along with the structure of the mind, the unconscious, defence mechanisms, slips in speech or behaviour and psychosexual development, constituted a specific phenomenon. Presenting the uncanny through fiction is difficult, and Freud was clear that while fiction gives an author more license to develop uncanny moments, there is a distinction between the uncanny in reality and in literature/film.

Psychoanalysis is a fundamental pivot point in the development of the Western horror genre, and thus, under the surface, also of Western metaphysics concerning the self, identity, the face and the other. External terror in the form of monsters and demons became thoroughly internalised, not just as guilt or shame, but as the blueprint of the Western psyche. Almost all horrors have, since Freud and modernity, been taken into the mind - doubles, doppelgangers, the omnipotent child, the devouring mother, the gaze of the other, bodily fragmentation and alienation, our body as foreign or containing a contaminant, possession, the death drive, forbidden knowledge, repression, the uncanny, breach of taboo, the power of naming, castration/blinding/cannibalism/phallic anxiety, dissociation, hysteria and many, many more. Horror is now an internal genre, and any horror media which does not utilise this psychological angle feels simple, quaint and almost primitive.

V. Modernity and the Uncanny: When the Self Itself Becomes Unstable

Psychoanalysis was not alone in birthing the modern self. Industrialisation, secularisation, middle-class urban culture, mass democracy, the world wars and bureaucratisation all played their part. Selfhood and identity became vastly more internal and self-reflective, whilst the physical body underwent multiple rounds of discipline, correction, control and legibility. Everything from the criminal face to childhood education was put under the microscope of scientists and innovators, producing mini-factory floors in every setting. The face as a whole was ever more reproducible and visible, yet disembodied, through photography, cinema, advertising and art. The Industrial Revolution demanded new faces, new skins - welding masks, goggles, respirators, diving suits and eventually fully operational gas masks (see my bonus piece on gas masks for more details)

We can list out how the face changed as modernity began and picked up pace:

• Death masks, realistic wax statues/busts, mass produced dolls, mannequins

• Victorian fireplace masks, fans, mourning veils, death and spirit photography

• A continuous stream of beauty treatments, masks, visors and facial apparatus, including phototherapy, compression and jawline masks

• Development of the cinema face - silent film, technicolor, prosthetics,

• Military helmets, gas masks, splatter masks, aviation/flame/cold weather masks, sniper/anti-shard/ballistic masks

• Diving, mining, smoke, welding, mountaineering, radiation, UV masks and respirators

• Post-WW1 surgical prosthetics, tin-masks, medical masks/visors, lead-glass eyewear, anaesthesia masks, post-war flu masks

• Sporting helmets and masks in hockey, baseball, motorcycling, skiing

• Shift from traditional blackface guising/mumming to Halloween monster and franchise costumes

• Policing helmets, balaclavas and riot facial protection, anti-spit/bite masks, restraint hoods, prison and psychiatric anti-self harm headgear

In the traditional visual arts, the face undergoes a radical transformation. In stark contrast to the Pre-Raephelites, Neo-Classicism or French Realism, modernist art begins to destabilise the face, seeing it not as an eternal vessel of identity - but as a vector for internal incoherence. The Impressionists dissolve it into atmosphere, a fleeting configuration of light; while the Symbolists turn the face into a psychic screen - masklike, withdrawn, eroticised, empty. Post-Impressionism fractures the face: Cezanne abstracts it with planes, van Gogh charges it with emotional violence, Gauguin mythologises it into primitive archetypes. By the turn of the 20th century the face is deliberately smashed. Picasso, Braque and the Cubists finally destroy Renaissance-derived perspective and the face is flattened and broken into a collage, an assemblage. Futurism takes the face and tries to smear it across time, identity split by velocity and speed. German Expressionism (Kirchner, Nolde, Heckel) distorts the face into intentional masks of rage, grief, anxiety, derangement and madness. Weimar artists like Dix and Grosz use the face to convey social unravelling, through war injuries, make-up, hyper-realistic and unpleasant visages. Surrealism uses the smoothed out, rubbery, mask-like concept of the face and facial skin to melt, distort, mutate and collapse identity into dream-like anarchy. Max Ernst even hybridises the face into an ‘animal-becoming’ collage. In a climax of ‘northern-grotesque’ angst, Francis Bacon completely shreds any metaphysical unity left in the human face - creating howling vortices of flesh, metal, wounds, trauma.

New media like photography and cinema heralded radical new ways to display and manipulate the face. People and their emotional states were abstracted away from a living breathing being, but simultaneously we had never before had such an intimate affair with the face, which could be captured in exquisite detail and frozen in time. Photography could reveal a serious but loving family portrait, a momento mori serene face of a dead child, uninhibited and unstaged erotica, extra heads as a baby moved back and forth during exposure, ghostly apparitions of ancestors and spirits, the almost comically-creepy hooded ‘hidden mother’ clutching children in her lap. Georges Méliès combined this technology with movement and demonstrated how the face and body could be fully malleable to any desire, with clones of himself singing, throwing his own head around, faces merging with objects (go watch his 1902 short, A Trip to the Moon). Cinema required stage-like exaggerated facial features, chiaroscuro make-up, mask-like emotional performance - until the technology improved enough to fill the entire screen with faces. Luminous fields of emotivity could be generated by filmmakers, such as German Expressionist horror; Soviet political montage; Surrealist violation - then Hollywood’s Apollonian mask of beauty, all engineering parasocial feeling within the viewer, whilst the embodied person behind the face retreated. Facial detachment, facially uncanny, visually immediate but insincere. The face could no longer be trusted as a genuine portrayal of the other.

The Tale of the Mannequin and the Ventriloquist Dummy

Freud explored the uncanny through Hoffman’s tale of the Sandman, focusing on the automaton’s uncannily lifelike qualities. Two examples of similar humanoid constructions can also be compared to show how the ‘southern serene’ and ‘northern grotesque’ came together during modernity’s turn into the interior. Mannequin dummies have their origin in Renaissance art technology, drawing on an idealised human form, smooth, symmetrical and proportionate. Mannequins found multiple later uses in Europe for dressmaking, medical anatomy, art and eventually storefront advertising. Their calm, still, objective and smooth form is in direct contrast to ventriloquist dummies or puppets. Although ventriloquism as an art form is culturally widespread and makes use of animals, masks, hands, cloths and other people - European ventriloquism matched well with the Germanic-style puppet. Their jerky movements, unnatural faces, gaping mouths and often mocking, sardonic voices perfectly exemplify the ‘northern grotesque’ lineage. Where the mannequin was compliant, pure and represented order, the ventriloquist dummy was intrusive, chaotic - an eruption of the performer’s id into riotous misrule. The mannequin obeyed, the dummy was restrained.

Little wonder then that their uncanniness produced horror and desire in viewers and owners. Psychoanalytical and early psychological work identified agalmatophilia and automatonophobia, pygmalionism, pediophobia and many other odd fears and attractions towards these human-like objects. Sexual attraction, overwhelming terror, uncanny emotions provoking childish regression, anxieties and desires of being turned into a puppet or a doll, of being made out of wood, of feeling empty and faceless. Modern horror and science fiction is simply impossible without this internalisation of feeling towards androids, dolls, puppets and robots.

VI. Conclusion — Horror Exists Because the Western Self Cannot Contain Itself

Put simply, the West invented horror because the West underwent a singularly unique transformation, a total revolution in human life, which involved discovering or creating previously unknown psychological depths. Horror is the shadow of this transition, that which can never be sublimated or neatly categorised. Horror wears the skin of former fears, but exists in the mind - monsters become metaphors, haunted houses the sites of unresolved traumas, possession is madness, childhood toys return as uncanny phobias, demonic temptations reinterpreted as repressed desires. Modernity changed us, and it changed our faces - which were peeled from embodied men and women, and fractured, distorted, rearranged, engineered, sculpted through photography, cinema, advertising, art and war. Faces floated on screens, tugging emotions from audiences, who in the outside world covered themselves in ever-advancing layers of second-skins, visors, helmets, goggles, masks, prosthetics and make-up. The face was no stable no more, split apart by the forces of Freud, trench warfare, industrial advance, visual technology and painters. Precarious, shattered, smoothed, abstract, doubled, desired, feared.

Now that we have this framework in place, we can begin to dig deeper into the Western metaphysics of the face through topics like smiling, possession, the skin, pain, eroticism and a contrasting piece with Japanese horror. Next time we’ll explore the skin (through horror) as the true metaphysical boundary of the individual - removing it, adding it, changing it, growing it…

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

A “secret” memo by Canadian Headquarters was more frank, reporting that “These men must be warned that they may expect to experience not only slight discomfort but very serious discomfort in some cases almost amounting to a feeling of suffocation.”

The solution, as espoused by the High Command, was to avoid movement.

-Through Clouded Eyes: Gas Masks and the Canadian Corps in the First World War (1998) Tim Cook

The Horrible Mask

Invented under extreme duress during the 1914-18 Great War, after centuries of slow prototypes, the gas mask suddenly appeared amid clouds of chlorine, lachrymatory agents and mustard gas. With its alien goggles, protruding mouth-parts, tubes and anonymising effect, the generic gas mask quickly became a symbol of all that was wrong with modern warfare. In the century since, the gas mask has been used in BDSM, protest movements, art pieces, industry, agriculture, theatre, aesthetics and fashion design, cinema and satire. It remains an instantly identifiable silhouette, and, despite the former list, has maintained its latent power to disturb, unnerve and horrify. An ecstasy of fumbling. Welcome to our first bonus piece in this series on masks, faces and horror - the gas mask as the ultimate symbol of modern terror!

Major Andrew McNaughton remembered the Algerians streaming past him, “their eyeballs showing white, and coughing their lungs out — they literally were coughing their lungs out; glue was coming out of their mouths. It was a very disturbing, very disturbing sight.”

-McNaughton Volume I (1968) John Swettenham

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The Origins of Gas Masks and WW1

The 18th century saw the invention of enclosed diving suits (Charles C.-J. Le Roux) and respirators made from long tubes (Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier). In the 1790s Alexander von Humboldt designed an advanced respirator for Prussian miners, the Respirationsmaschine - followed swiftly by early firefighting masks, then the mobile Haslett Lung Protector in 1848. Between then and 1900, chemists like Stenhouse, Tyndall and Barton innovated with more sophisticated filters, eye-pieces, rubber tubes and face shields. At the turn of the century, specialist European workers deep underground or enveloped in arsenic could be confident enough in their safety equipment to put their lives in its hands.

Despite this, the 22nd of April 1915 caught Britain, France and her allies by surprise. At Ypres, southwest Belgium, German forces briefly swallowed the sun with a 10km wide cloud, composed of 160 tons of chlorine gas. This sickly green miasma of death wafted over the French and Algerian Territorial Divisions, who had no idea what was happening. Within moments soldiers were tearing at their throats, the chlorine reacting with the wet linings of their lungs, generating hydrochloric acid. Men asphyxiated where they fell, suffocating as the contents of their bronchi frothed and burbled up onto the mud. Within days Allied forces had ordered their forces to douse cotton pads with sodium bicarbonate, water or urine and hold them over their faces, or stuff them into their mouths. The next few years saw rapid innovations in respiratory-goggle masks adapted for mass use on the battlefield. Cloth masks became initially standardised (Black Veil), then replaced with a sack saturated in chemicals (Hypo & P/PH Helmet) - the idea being that soldiers could just breathe through the cloth weaving and exhale via a metal valve held in the mouth. In 1916 the Small Box Respirator modelled the now familiar idea of inhaled air being filtered through a structure designed to catch and neutralise poisonous compounds.

Each step in this evolution was an agonising trial for the men at the front. Cloths had to be constantly wet, eye pieces fogged up instantly or cracked, sodium phenolate flannel burned when the skin sweated, saliva saturated their faces and chests when mouthpieces had to be gripped by the teeth, nose clips had to be worn - forcing the men to constantly gasp into tubes. All the while battle continued to rage, shrapnel explode and enemies loom up through the smoke. Movement was almost impossible when breathing was so laborious, and early masks were a choice between inhaling poison and suffocating as carbon dioxide levels spiked. The psychological effect of having to don them while hands trembled and straps got caught was unbearable, and panic often ensued even when they were safely hooded - the claustrophobia and loss of sense input might push a frightened man into a complete frenzy, tearing off the hated mask, screaming even as the fog of Phobos descended. Invisible phosgene mixed with chlorine, a wave of chloropicrin inducing vomiting, a third round of bis 2-chloroethyl sulfide - could you survive this while fixing bayonets, the enemy stalking across no-man’s land?

WW1 Madness: Berserker Trench Raids & Gas Attacks in the Tunnels

World War One already summons to mind post-apocalyptic wastelands of mud, craters and callous death, but there were many more strange and terrifying aspects that get far less attention. Trench warfare might be despicable to imagine, but what if your platoon was ambushed during the night by a masked gang? One wearing metal plate armour, cloaks and furs, armed with nail-studded clubs, medieval flails and spiked knuckledusters? As above, so below - the extensive, mind-boggling expanses of tunnel systems below the battlefields were filled with caged birds and skirmish parties stabbing each other in the pitch black, injections of chlorine gas and acrid smoke.

Masks of every conceivable kind exploded during and after the First World War: masks for doctors and nurses, gas masks, oxygen respirators, smoke hoods, anti-frostbite masks, aviation and pilot masks, sniper face shields, full-body armour, anti-shard goggles, the tank ‘splatter’ mask with chainmail, recreations of medieval helmets, flameproof hoods and more besides. Soldiers, engineers and miners working in the tunnel systems below the trenches were at constant risk of carbon monoxide poisoning, accidental fires, enemy mines, ceiling collapse and breakthrough raids from the other side. Miners exposed to low levels of oxygen or excess poisonous gases (including enemy attempts to flush them out using acrid smoke, chlorine or other lethal chemicals) were in need of rescue. The British ‘Proto’ Men, kitted out with one of the earliest self-contained oxygen breathing systems, would have roughly two hours to find them.

Defensive stalemate was the norm for most soldiers, but some were selected to form aggressive units of trench raiders. These began as relatively ad hoc, almost feral groups of men leaping into enemy trenches in the dark, armed with clubs and axes, dragging away screaming prisoners into the night. Soon their effectiveness became apparent - reconaissance, intelligence capture, prisoners, terrifying the enemy and boosting group morale - raids slowly became formalised into doctrine. The Canadians emerged as masters of the craft, groups of lightly-commanded friends who sometimes ignored orders and enjoyed the dash and adrenaline of raiding. The Germans developed the elite unit concept of the ‘shock’ or ‘storm’ troopers. Both images have persisted into popular culture, one a gang of ‘Mad-Max’ crazies, with improvised weapons and unique disguises, the other a regimented unit with specialised weaponry and formal roles. In a war of dehumanisation and little agency, trench raids with their eclectic mix of shields, body armour, gas masks, hoods, swords, flails, maces, shotguns, shanks, brass knuckles, ‘flash-bang’ style grenades and use of frightening facial appearances, were a temporary outlet of animal spirits. I haven’t seen this argument made anywhere, but it seems likely that this high-low technological melee style combat in the hellscape of the trenches became a primary template for later stories and aesthetics.

To distinguish between the unpleasant (tear gas and the chlorarsines) and the lethal (chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas) took nerve and training. Indeed, chlorarsines caused short-term but intense respiratory distress designed to disable temporarily but also to terrify.

Colonel Soltau emphasized the importance of chemical weapons in the genesis of ‘nervous disorders’: there ‘is nothing more liable to cause panic than the idea of being choked … the dread of being slowly strangled’

-Terror Weapons: The British Experience of Gas and Its Treatment in the First World War (2016) Edgar Jones

Anxiety, subversion, dread (1919-2025)

Post-war society in western Europe was shattered by 1919. Many soldiers survived, who would have otherwise died from head trauma. But the cost was unbearable, the horrific disfigurements reducing their children to screams. Mirrors were banned, veterans shut themselves away. One anonymous soldier wrote, in a poem from the Craiglockhart War Hospital, “on my tomb would be this curse, to be stared at”. At the same time as facial prosthetics rapidly advanced for these poor souls, artists began to show the fracturing of the human face, and the role of the mask. Otto Dix, George Grosz and the Neue Sachlichkeit painters used the gas mask as a symbol of terror, alienation, social hypocrisy. Modernisation required faceless men, bureaucratic and contained, the face attaching itself to the mask. Dadaism mocked the powers-that-be, using grotesque and primitive masks alongside the gas mask. As author Hugo Ball said of them - they were “the horror of our time, the paralyzing background of events, visible”.

As direct experience with poison gas was confined to veterans, and as the population had to prepare for potential gas attacks on civilians - the gas mask moved from its visceral, first-hand symbol of utter terror and confinement, to a symbol of anxiety and dread. Science fiction, social magazines, propaganda all used it to great effect. The British re-arming and civilian preparation campaigns normalised uncanny images of children, babies, whole families wearing gas masks. How fast can you get your mask on and get to the shelter? Are you sitting comfortably? Children carried them around their necks and shoulders in small cases, young children had special Mickey Mouse masks, or decorated them with felt and colours. Pictures of nurses, police and air wardens, school assemblies and entire factory floors quietly wearing their masks, produced a feeling of mass de-personalisation, but also solidarity. As with COVID, preparing a nation for mass masking requires provoking fear, and it resonated long after the second world war officially ended. Children continued to wear them for fun, adults carried them around or stored them under the bed and in the attic. The psychological fear and panic of bombs, gas, fire and eventually nuclear weapons, led many to keep them close-by, a long tail of control against the disorder of modernity. No longer just a battlefield tool against gas, the masks (internally, to the wearer) were a symbol of safety - and paradoxically a symbol of authority, blank insect gazes and impersonal violence (externally, to the observer).

As for the British so for the Germans, the new improved military gas mask (S-Maske) was redesigned for mass civilian use (theVolksgasmaske) during the Third Reich. Japan and France underwent a similar process. However, German research and attitudes towards chemical weapons and masks went much further than defence. Through organophosphate pesticide research, German chemists developed the first extraordinarily powerful nerve agents (Tabun, Sarin and Soman). These compounds possessed god-like powers to administer pain and death. Just a few milligrams of them would kill a man stone dead, every muscle fibre in his body firing uncontrollably, every orifice slack, unable to breathe as his diaphragm stopped responding. Manufacturing them was horrifying enough, using them was an ultimate expression of inhumanity, and gas masks were largely ineffective against them. The projected image of the Nazi stormtrooper wearing a modern rubberised hazmat suit complete with a gas mask and gloves remained an ideal within the SS inner circle, and it stayed that way. Poisonous gases were made and tested on a wide scale during WW2, reaching their global apotheosis on civilians, but their use in combat remained limited. The gas mask was for all.

Since the development and proliferation of nuclear technology, novel nerve agents and biological weapons, gas masks have lost their mass existential symbology. There is little point owning one for protection against an external threat, and modern uses are largely specialised: riot police, industry, scenes of terrorism, research labs. Culturally however the gas mask has evolved and continues to evolve. Its smooth, rubberised surface has lent itself to experiments in colour, texture, surface and compression. The total sensory deprivation when placed over the face makes wearing them a unique sensation, while seeing a person wearing one instantly anonymises, dehumanises and elevates the eyes and mouth far beyond normal proportions. Like with all masks, they have been used subversively and playfully - in political subcultures and protest movements (80’s punks, Hong-Kong, Banksy art, anti-pollution campaigns), erotic fetish play, dance/rave cultures and for aesthetic sub-genres (steampunk, dieselpunk). The inner and outer subjective experience of gas masks has remained central to their relevance ever since WW1, and we will now turn to how they have become the ultimate horror mask.

we went down into these troglodyte dwellings where good men who have bidden farewell to worldly things, did their ‘dirty work’ with the ingenuous, childish and methodical spirit of Benedictine monks. We saw the monstrous, grotesque masks of the gas masks, those fearsome goggled snouts which men with such paternal, such gentle faces, so ill-fitted for war, adjust with all the care demanded by the insidious poison.

-Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1916

Turn to Horror: TV, film, games, online

On May 21st 2005, British viewers of the television series Dr Who were introduced to an unnerving WW2-era two-part episode, where the ostensible villain was a small frightened boy. Wearing a large gas mask and sporting a shrapnel wound to his hand, this ‘empty child’ roamed London, terrorising people with his power to control technology and his simple catchphrase “are you my mummy?”. As the Doctor unravelled the mystery, we learn that the little’s boy’s appearance and injuries are spreading like a virus, transforming any sufferer’s face in a scene of horrific transfiguration - the respirator filter sprouting from the distended mouth, halfway between a retch and jaw dislocation, the eyes bugging and goggling over, smooth rubber literally becoming a new, fused skin, the personal identity of the wearer gone. Replaced with a robotic algorithm, empty and hollow.

Gas masks in horror amplify what we already feel about them: our inability to read an expression or even see the eyes, the unnatural exaggeration and simultaneous smoothness, the implication that something is wrong with the surroundings but they are in control of it, a ‘chemical subject’. A lone person wearing such a mask is even stranger, a juxtaposition that feels menacing and threatening. The slasher Harry Warden from the two My Bloody Valentine films, known as The Miner, silently wields his pickaxe against transgressors, his eyes hidden behind reflective goggles. The Surgeon from Hellraiser’s Stygian Inquisition silently carries out the sentences of mortals, dressed in a black leather bodysuit, chainmail apron and black gas mask - an outfit of hygiene and terror, with the lurking implication that they take some sensual pleasure in their craft.

The gut dread that something not quite right is behind the gas mask is another twist of this horror style. The creepypasta gas masks and cornfields being is an empty mask filled with insects; the Snorks from the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R; the relentless things of Wyrmwood. Within analog horror stories the gas mask silhouette and eye pieces stare out of found footage or old camera reels, invoking paranoia, dread, the resurrection of old ghosts. Gas masks in The Purge franchise, by contrast, play with its counter-cultural, protestor, raver usage. LED patterns, youthful hoodies and the addition of wigs reflect its self-concious use in the Purge universe as an intentionally anonymous, frightening and disturbing mask.

Reflecting the inner experience of the gas mask - films and games where the protaganists and players have to wear them, in order to survive their environment and to build an historical or dystopic feeling. Empty Shell, Metro 2033, Demonsomnia, The Last of Us, Darkwood, Tenet, Contagion, Chernobyl and many more explore post-apocalyptic or historical worlds, where respirators are needed. Dramatic or horrfying moments are made that much worse when only the eyes can be seen through the lenses, or muffled screams drowned out by the filter. A final and obvious version of this type of media are films and games set in WW1 and WW2, which either intend to portray the reality of the combat, or use the masks to invoke that terror, which we today can only have read about. These include: All Quiet on the Western Front, Trench 11, Overlord, CONSCRIPT, Trench Crusade, Trench Tales, Ad Infinitum and Amnesia: The Bunker. The 2021 film The King’s Man has a wonderful combat scene in no-man’s land at night, between British and German soldiers. Both sides agree not to use weapons, to prevent escalation, and hand-to-hand combat begins - the Germans fulfilling the Junger-esque dream of a modern knight, with gas masks blending seamlessly into a medieval skirmish. A final mention must go to the ‘Nazi zombie with helmets and gas masks’ trope from countless splatter and comedy games/films - the mask-as-face/face-as-machine blending together.

The new soldier was a whole new breed, embodying energy and loaded with the utmost force. Smooth, lean, sinewy bodies, striking faces, eyes petrified in a thousand horrors under the helmet

-Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis

The mask as involuntary face

Horror is obviously associated with actions that people did not want to experience, and several masks get to play a key role in this narrative. Medical masks will be explored in a separate article, but gas masks are unique because they afford the wearer some genuine protection and isolation from the outside world, survival. Sometimes this becomes a necessity, as with the character Bane from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, and most famously with the iconic Darth Vader of Star Wars.

Vader is easily the most famous use of the gas mask silhouette in film, perhaps in all media. His striking black suit, gloves, cape, helmet and mask radiate terror and fear. But when one strips away the scifi-opera theatrics of Star Wars, the story of Anakin Skywalker’s rise and fall is genuinely horrific. His gruesome and excruciating disfigurement-as-punishment and compulsory life support system portray body horror, claustrophobia and the power of the face/mask dualism almost like no other. Vader’s costume design drew explicitly from Japanese and German sources, including a gas mask.

In Summation

My argument, that the gas mask represents the horror of modernity, and has become the ultimate symbol of modernity within the horror genre, seems obviously correct to me. A mask that provokes so many emotions, both in the wearer and observer, that has come to symbolise so many aspects of modern life, stands out from the horror crowd. Gas masks are:

• Alien, smooth, insectoid, bizarre, second skin

• Mechanistic, industrial, survival

• Dehumanising, anonymous, beaurocratic, procedurial

• Menacing, threatening, violence is not far away

• Psychological aids, crutch, comfort

• Panic inducing, sensory deprivation, heartbeat-in-your-ears

• Nostalgic, paranoia, dread, analog familiarity and fear

• Playful, erotic, amusing, funny, sensual

• Rebellious, energetic, movement, vitality, speed

They could be considered almost serene, in the ‘southern serene’ sense of my first article, due to their blank, symmetrical and smooth appearance. But I think ultimately, their monstrous distorted visage and hybridity between flesh and synthetic machine makes them a modern ‘northern numinous’ mask. Terror, violence, the eruption of huge eyes through gas, transformation and fear inside and out, mask as portal, hyperventilation and asphyxia, sweat and mist blinding the glass - a torture chamber for the psyche attached to your face, a parasite of modernity.

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

As for the Harii, quite apart from their strength, which exceeds that of the other tribes I have just listed, they pander to their innate savagery by skill and timing: with black shields and painted bodies, they choose dark nights to fight, and by means of terror and shadow of a ghostly army they cause panic, since no enemy can bear a sight so unexpected and hellish; in every battle the eyes are the first to be conquered.

-Tacitus, Germania, in Orchard, 1997

***DISCLAIMER*** - this piece contains images of real historical injuries/disfigurement and graphic horror from film/games, you have been warned!

In my last article we covered a specific facial mood and style, a phenomenon we could dub ‘the southern serene’. In contrast to this classical and harmonious depiction of humanity as aloof, calm, perfectible, smooth and idealised - we turn to northern, barbarian Europe. The early Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Celtic imagination of the face is strikingly different to the southern approach. This is a world of shape-shifting, hybrids and transformation. A world where the supernatural threatens to erupt, chaotically and violently, and people respond with traditions of joyful confrontation and boundary-crossing.

The classical world also contained ritualistic excess and transformation, often referred to as Dionysian, but I argue that this differs from northern traditions in some fundamental ways: firstly the Dionysian is a mode of group-based, ecstatic dissolution rather than confrontational intrusion; secondly the classical world managed this ecstasy through public or semi-public seasonal festivals, rites and theatrical performances. Hopefully these differences will become apparent as we explore some examples.

The core features of this ‘northern numinous’ style I really want to emphasise are its unstable and transformative nature, and its intrusive, liminal and confrontational feeling. Its the difference between a licensed music festival where the crowd dissolves and unifies in the dance, and the illegal pop-up rave, as masked revellers confront the police and descend into mischievous chaos. Its Trick-or-Treat instead of Carnival, a home invasion versus the gallows, the arbitrary metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa and not the cosmic logic of Ovid. Its not Gothic, its not the uncanny - the northern numinous is a blood-curdling scream in the depths of a forest, the leering of demonic gargoyles, a man sprouting tusks and attacking his family. Raw, primal, aggressive, circling-the-house, being-chased-up-the-stairs. Run, run, run as fast as you can!

Fee-fi-fo-fum, I think I smell the scent of a placenta.

-Stay Wide Awake, Eminem

Exhibit A: Medieval & Early Modern Grotesque

Motifs: eruption, distortion, chaos breaches reality.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500) is a triptych painting by Hieronymus Bosch which never fails to reward another examination. Generations of students have shook their heads wondering how a Renaissance Dutchman could have created such surreal and disturbing scenes - but Bosch was not alone. The ‘northern grotesque’ stretches from the ever-changing vines and dragons of Norse wood-carving well into the Renaissance period, with its peak being reached between AD 1400-1600. Artists include the Limbourg Brothers, Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien and Cornelis van Haarlem - to name a few. Many of their paintings require patient, close-up observation to see just how detailed and horrifying they really are - for here is truly a realm of surreal, nightmarish images. Snarling, laughing demons swirl around monstrous human-animal hybrids. The grotesque explodes into the world, gaping maws open wide, human war and death and pain are distorted by the presence of this other, chaotic world. There is no harmony, only monstrosity.

Exhibit B: Folk Masks & Confrontational Rituals

Motifs: intrusion, confrontation, transformation.

The south may have riotous Carnival and public festivities, but in the north the atmosphere was different. Midwinter was the season for mischief as well as fire. Britain has a long tradition of ‘mummers’ or ‘guisers’, groups which disguise themselves in ad hoc folkish costumes and masks, who might perform a religious play, or who might knock on your door in the night and invite themselves in to play dice. In Central Europe the Krampus monster and Perchten winter spirits intrude into village life during midwinter. Schiachperchtenlauf sees masked youths running and fighting with sticks, while the Krampus might beat you with a birch rod for misbehaving. Even today violence simmers and sometimes breaks out in the Alps during the processions.

Mummering, Mari Lwyd, Soul Caking, Mischief Night, Schimmelreiter, Guising and many others all take part in this motif to some extent- small groups, disguised, knocking on doors, making mischief, fighting, gambling, drinking, confronting. Authorities disliked these games and activities so much there were laws passed against mask wearing, sword dances, against mummering. These masks were often rough and homemade, from sack, cloth, linen, straw and hair, or mummers simply painted their faces black with charcoal. This is not a crowd losing themselves in anonymity, this is a group of masked people confronting a group of unmasked people, often on their doorstep - an intrusive act by transformed people, often with a threat of trouble if their demands were not met. A neighbour who owed you money may have a pound of flesh taken, as you sport a rough sack mask and inhale when you speak to hide your identity. Will you let them in? What if you do, what if you don’t?

shameful things could happen during this rural saturnalia when normal social constraints were relaxed and everything was turned upside down. It was not only a time of making merry, it was potentially a time of reprisal, of setting things straight, of settling old scores. There was a lot of drinking. Things could get rough. People were afraid of strangers.

-Mumming and disguising, politicworm

Exhibit C: Disease & Disfigurement (The Diseased Face as Mask)

Motifs: face as moral boundary, identity reshaped by external forces.

In AD 643 the Lombard King Rothari declared in his series of law codes, the Edictus Rothari, that those afflicted with leprosy were legally dead. The walking dead (tamquam mortuus). Their property was confiscated and sold, they would die twice - once socially, as displayed by their disfigured face, and second physically. In parts of France lepers were compelled to attend their own funeral mass, dig their own graves and lie down in the cold earth - without a face, you cannot really be alive.

Western facial metaphysics are not so committed to uncleanliness in the caste or ritual purity sense, rather the face is a reflection of the individual - in the Christian medieval era the face was a moral boundary, and as the scientific revolution and secularisation re-imagined it - the face became a reflection of psychological character - physiognomy, criminal deviancy.

Disease has always had the power to deform the face and force the morality or character of the sufferer to become visible. Leprosy was the dominant such example during the European Middle Ages. Lepers were pariahs, but Christian Europe developed a conscience about this suffering, and developed leprosaria hospitals, the Order of St Lazarus, specialised medical and palliative care. “Dead to the world, but alive unto God”. However, Europeans never lost their fear of facial deformities and diseases, including the later plagues and waves of scarring smallpox. To have one’s skin eaten away by a corruption, of the flesh and soul, made one a vessel of sin - one’s own before God or some shameful hereditary mark (physiognomic or eugenic). The face becomes a mask of sorts, even as lepers hid themselves away behind veils, their former identities and social selves obliterated by this evil, a divine punishment for their own wickedness?

Exhibit D: The Industrial Grotesque

Motifs: modernity reshaping the face; identity erased by mass trauma, masks.

British industrialisation was a violent beast. Children scalped and maimed by spinning machines, trapped in chimneys, hundreds of boiler explosions scattering debris and scalding steam through narrow streets. Fumes of carbon disulphide, lead paint - match girls screaming as the phosphorus ate away their mouths, bones glowing in the dark - the neurotoxicity of mercury for felt-making, mad as a hatter - a teenager collapsing, convulsing, foam in her mouth, eyes and nails bright green, the arsenic dust on her fingers finally killing her. All these horrors and more reached their apex during World War One, a civilisational seizure which ground millions of men into the mud, their bones annihilated into fertiliser.

This war, and the ever-expanding industrialisation of the West, gave birth to the gas mask. A blind, insectile second-skin, one which strips the identity of its wearer away while promising survival in a poisoned landscape. The face came under attack everywhere, from poisoned gas - blistering and peeling - molten metal, glass, shrapnel, barbed wire, chlorine, blinding. Modernity arrived with a new demonology of fields and forces: x-rays, radiation, gas clouds, radium jaw, bomb blasts, fire from the sky, pesticides, microwaves, radar, phosgene, air pollution. The demons of old at least went after the sinful, within these satanic mills there was no preference. Cold, arbitrary, meaningless. All the while humans were forced into new skins to stay alive, donning hazmat suits, welding masks, respirators, protective goggles, and the face itself was blurred out and replaced with haunting ocular frames and protruding tubes.

The industrial grotesque was also external, intrusive, confrontational, but it required that humans join with it. Bullets and shrapnel lodged into bodies, plaster masks made from the mangled faces of soldiers, broken gargoyles with metal legs, napalm fused with clothing, xenomorphic-looking tumours, visceral fat hoarding forever-chemicals. Industrial injuries were nothing new of course, Roman mines were death traps and Tudor gunpowder stores might decide to explode. But modernity was more than a wound to the face, it was the mass, anonymising and inhuman forces which stripped man of his presentable self and re-applied new skins, new visages, new components. Facial trauma from war and mechanised labour deformed and twisted the human beneath into a mockery of god’s image, with no rhyme or reason. Facing your enemy on the battlefield was one thing, but methane seeping out from the coalface into a sweating tunnel and igniting from a candle held by a rake-thin colliery child? Boris Korchilov donning a raincoat and gas mask to cool down the faceless nuclear tabernacle powering K-19, sweating blood within minutes, his eyes sightless after an hour of agonising tissue inflammation? These fates were measured by sieverts, emission factor coefficients, ppm, better hope you have enough air in that tank?

> Competion_Owl53: This has got to be the most horrific way to go, and unlike Byford Dolphin these guys had to wait it out before they died. Absolutely appalling.

> No-Work-10: True, I just hope that they were all already dead when the surface removed the blind flange of berth 5.

Exhibit E: Eruptive Modern Monster Faces

Themes: monstrosity emerging through the face, not behind it.

Contemporary horror art has altered the traditional relationship between the face and its beholder. Stability has been replaced with rupture. The face used to present divine beauty, symmetry, or morality, or the grace of god - if outwardly disfigured then a mask would disguise. Modern horror instead uses the face as an unstable mask, out through which a monstrosity emerges. We can call this the ‘eruptive face’. Digital film technology and AI can make this possible in a way previous filmmakers would have found impossible. Faces can be smoothed out, but contain multitudes. Chthonic tentacular feelers, rows of unrolling, unfurling teeth, like a Russian doll, nested in the vast empty interior of the Face «then erupting forth in the confrontational moment». Huggy-Wuggy, the xenomorph, the Demogorgon, Skeleton Man…

Exhibit F: Techno-Mutation Grotesque (Games & Sci-Fi)

Themes: machinery as numinous, flesh invaded, face overwritten.

We saw in the last piece that the serene southern face belongs to a lineage of futurism, with sci-fi smooth android faces representing the triumph of Greece and Rome amongst the stars. The northern numinous offers a different vision altogether - grimdark, mutation, techno-grotesque. Bosch at Passchendaele. An eternal nuclear Ragnarok. This ‘techno-grotesque’ is an obvious child of modernity, with its concerns about genetics, nuclear proliferation, planetary scale war, the priority of the machine over the human, as life becomes a mere number. The inversion of natural life is inevitable here, since the environment is inhospitable and the ontologically bounded human is assaulted both externally and internally. Biohazardous waste, parasites, radioactivity, infections and xenomorphic agents threaten the body by penetrating the skin, sometimes rendering the skin defenceless by silently seeping through the pores, other times violently transforming it. Mutations, hybridity with machines or aliens, life-support for massively traumatic injuries, sometimes the body horror of transplanting conscious scraps of flesh into steel, or the obliteration of bodily integrity by forcibly remoulding the human into a receptacle, fungal node, appendage, spore, tool. Violation, hybrid, morph. Finally the techno-grotesque also offers a twisted theological vision reminiscent of Grünewald or Bruegel, as portals open into hell, the dead rise again and long-buried gods of chaos come laughing to the surface. Think Dead Space, Annihilation, Warhammer 40K, Alien, Quake II, Half Life, Hellraiser, Event Horizon and The Hills Have Eyes.

the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god, our mother’s eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father’s ribs, still studded with our egg sacs

-Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

in summary_final

The case studies presented above are snapshots into a total world of numinous terror, one with its own shared metaphysics and aesthetics. A world I argue belongs to the cultures, literature, imagination of northern European. The contents of this shared bestiary include:

• Horror is eruption, and not serenity, disorder not violent re-ordering

• The face is the major site of transformation

• Chaos is external, not psychological, interiority is fear

• Identity is unstable and porous, becoming rather than being

• Bodies are reshaped, transformed by external forces (disease, aliens, wilderness, machinery, spirits)

• Liminality: the mask acts ‘between-states’, a portal and not concealment

• Confrontation on the threshold, will you let them in?

With these motifs and anchors in place we can now turn to how they have played out across modern horror, how they have been imagined and re-imagined, and how they are transforming with the merge from analog to digital to AI.

Modern Horror, a legacy of the Northern Numinous

The rich dark soil of this northern realm provides artists with one of the most fertile sources of inspiration for contemporary horror - the motifs of intrusion, strangers, confrontation, animal-hybrids, chaos, the Inhuman, grotesquery, violation of the body, the breaking of the face, the anonymity of war and more.

Films like The Thing, The Fly and An American Werewolf in London capture the unspeakable feeling of a human being forced against their will to become something else entirely, their bodies stretched and deformed until the last vestige of the self - the face - is eventually lost. Folk-confrontation in Kill List, Wicker Man and The Strangers taps that ancient northern fear of others outside, a feeling which never dies, simply repurposed now through doorcam videos, security footage, GPS trackers - we will never shake off the dread that someone is coming inside. Mummers on your doorstep. Midsommar, The Ritual, The Witch, Lamb. Deep, old forces stirring in the wild, the northern forest and mountain hauntings.

Animal and other forms of monstrous hybridity are so deeply rooted in berserker stories, men wrapped in bear cloaks, tusks on helmets (úlfhéðinn, svínfylkingar, Torslunda, Gutenstein, berserkergang hólmgangumaðr jǫfurr hamask ᚲᚢᛖᛞᚢᛚᚠ!!), it makes sense that so many horror monsters or victims suffer or embrace this chaotic flux - be that a mask (Saw, Creep), an intrusion (Donnie Darko), a transformation (Men). Chaotic unstable forms abound in the works of Francis Bacon, David Lynch and video games like Bloodborne and Dead Space. The face becomes liminal, it loses fixed identity and meaning through diseased corruption, sightlessness, multiplicity of holes, protrusion of teeth, melting of flesh and the grafting of metal. The container of myself, being inside my own skin and flesh, is ruptured traumatically. Both pre-modern and modern images of terror play with this sensation - then scenes of eternal damnation, chewed up by the ravenous gobs of the underworld, now scenes of barbed wire Brusilov barbarity, empty glass eyes breathing through gas. (Trench Tales, Ad Infinitum)

While classical futurism became scientific optimism and progress in science fiction, the northern vision is cyclical and apocalyptic in tone. Science brings progress yes, but progress in making earth a hellish place. Threads, Fallout, Dying Light, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, The Last Of Us. Perhaps the superlative genre of this eschatology is ‘Grimdark’, a world-building format of endless war with no relief, suffering without redemption, horror without catharsis. In true northern numinous style grimdark is a collage of aesthetics, taking Western history and breaking it on the wheel, revealing jagged bones made of high medievalism, torn skin from the Somme, pulped flesh of Gothic fantasy.

There are too many films and games to list in this combined style of scientific pessimism, the grotesque, industrial fusion and diseased-hybrid-mutation. Chernobyl, The Hills Have Eyes, Silent Hill, The Descent, Scorn, Necrophosis, Agony, Apsulov: End of Gods. The power of the divine and the scientist become mirror images, unleashing monsters which feed on human terror, all of which find their apotheosis in the face and the mask - that most sacred and fragile of boundaries.

The gears crank on, and AI promises us more in this vein. The tale of Loab as a digital glitch, an intruder into our smooth systems of image generation, prefigures one direction of this technology - AI as portal. What remains to be seen is how the face will respond. AI conjures up faces as hollow masks, devoid of meaning beneath. An empty form with an artificial skinsuit, wearing our likeness but to no end - a void, the mouth opening unto eternity like a Shepard tone scream.

Why the Northern Numinous will endure

The northern numinous is horror’s oldest and most visceral vision of chaos. Modernity gifted it electricity, radiation, metal, and now digital smoothness.

What lurks outside will never die, and what threatens the body and face will always torment us. The Northern Numinous dredges up our most animal terror of being devoured and transformed and grafts it onto cultural mannequins. Masked strangers, eruptions of madness, twisted nightmares and the obliteration of selfhood, facial integrity. How could we ever conquer this, masks simply hide the gnawing disease. Are we alone?

**NEXT TIME**

Expect a bonus feature focused on the gas mask, the most enduring face of modern horror…

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

Part One: The Serene Face of Terror

Some time in the late 1800’s a young woman was pulled out of the Seine at the Quai du Louvre. She was dead, maybe 16 years old, and she was flawless. The story goes that the coroner who examined her body was so moved by her beauty, so enraptured by her perfection, he fashioned a wax death mask from her face. A plaster one soon followed. These masks quickly sold out in Paris as many writers and artists rushed to hang her smooth likeness on the wall - Nabokov, Rilke, Man Ray. Camus compared her to the Mona Lisa for her subtle smile and serene expression. Louis-Ferdinand Céline sent her picture to a publisher that wanted a photograph of him. Eventually her perfect face became the model for novice painters, and the CPR doll ‘Resusci Anne’. One theory as to why her death mask appears so beautiful is that the coroner had already made a mask of his young daughter while she was alive, but she committed suicide by jumping into the Seine. To us contemporary viewers this mask seems morbid enough, but after surrealist artists dressed her in wigs, put her in bed, and made her replica skin-mask come alive by opening her eyes through photography - she crossed over into the realm of the uncanny and the horrific.

Death masks are just one example of the European fascination with preserving, and idealising the face of the dead. The Western face is the seat of identity, and to place a mask over it is to play or manipulate with that identity. To wear a calm, serene expression can turn the face itself into a mask, protecting what turmoil truly lies beneath. This article will explore this particular type of face and mask - its evolution from the archaic world to science fiction. I will make three main claims:

1. The Apollonian futurism of Greece invented the smooth, symmetrical human form of the modern android

2. The Roman development of stoic, impassive visages personified their use of terrible, dispassionate violence as a corrective response to disorder

3. Modern horror inherited the serene face/mask and used it in multiple registers - as a symbol of Roman-style violence against transgression (slashers), as an uncanny facial presentation (psychological horror), and ultimately as a marker of human abstraction and disappearance (sci-fi horror)

I want to flag here that the West is not the only civilisation to invent facial serenity. African equivalents like the Mblo, Dan, Punu maiden and Guro masks, the Buddhist face of enlightenment, and the Japanese Noh masks similarly emphasise symmetry, beauty and a lack of strong affect. That said, I will hopefully demonstrate through this series that horror is a uniquely Western genre, and - for reasons we will discuss in another article - Japan has been the only external culture with enough metaphysical, psychological and aesthetic resonances to the West to make a serious and long-lasting contribution to horror media.

A Brief History of Masks

We have almost no evidence of true masks for the aeons leading up to the Neolithic, most likely due to the materials degrading over time. Palaeolithic human-animal figurines, paintings and even Mesolithic antler headdresses have been identified in the archaeological record, but we have to travel to the Neolithic Near East to find any really convincing examples.

These stone masks date to around 7,000 BC, during the Pre-Pottery B phase of the Neolithic. They have been found all around the Judean Hills, in caves and parts of the desert. Their function is unknown, but the faces are strikingly eerie and modernist in appearance. Many bare their teeth, sometimes as a grimace, other times like a malevolent smile.

Since that time period, masks have become an increasingly common topic within archaeological and anthropological research. Masks for festivals, ceremonies, warfare, secret societies, theatre, religious rites, protection, amusement and burial are all well known and described in the literature.

One basic division amongst the array of masks in the image above is who the disguise was intended for? Masks do disguise the wearer, but many masks and costumes around the world are created to fool, mimic, mirror or engage with the supernatural world and its human agents (Fang Ngil masks, Japanese Oni masks, Mah Meri masks), rather than other human beings - a function known as apotropaic magic. Of course many are intended to frighten, intimidate, amuse, delight and entertain people - but we should bookmark this original function of masks, as it diminishes and almost disappears in Europe.

Suffice to say that we know little about the deep origins of masks. Carvings and depictions of human faces are rare (see the Russian Mesolithic Shigir Idol) in the deep archaeological record. Globally masks are used in all sorts of creative ways, and often the mask itself as an object possesses a form of agency, the mask is a being which can impose itself over the wearer. Examples include tutelary spirit masks amongst the Kpelle people of Liberia, Hopi dance masks which are ritually fed to appease them, and Vajrayana Buddhist Cham masks worn in Tibet.

As we will see throughout this sequential exploration of masks and faces in the Western tradition, apotropaism and mask agency become metaphysically marginal, as the face and the mask evolve within a system of thought that comes to idealise, moralise, internalise, fracture and hollow out the human self. I believe the face is central to this development, as are masks, and the tensions within this system are best explored and revealed through horror.

Greco-Roman mirrors of the divine

To save time I will simply state up front one of my given axioms - the ancient Greeks invented the idea of Nature - this doesn’t seem a hugely controversial argument and I leave it up to the reader to explore the topic if they wish. Greek naturalism was certainly influenced by Egyptian depictions of the divine, as an ideal form. Greek art revolutionised the human body by grounding its portrayal in reality, but a reality which saw the body as ultimately perfectible, with an ideal form imitating or mirroring the beauty of the divine. This made Greek civilisation (and its inheritors) a futurist culture. The Greek imagination was populated by androids and automatons such as Talos, the robotic-bronze man who guarded Crete, the story of Pygmalion & Galatea, and the creations of Hephaestus - his android golden handmaids, mechanical cauldrons and divine commission to manufacture Pandora. Greek anxieties around Pandora are the first known concerns about the unknowable behaviour of an artificial intelligence.

One face in particular though was birthed here, and has continued to be used as the symbol of progress-oriented science fiction, and that is the visage of Apollonian serene calm. This face is symmetrical, smooth, stoic, expressionless or with minimal expression, disinterested, flawless, youthful, standardised and eternal. For the remainder of this essay and beyond we will simply call this the serene face. The Greek and Roman examples we will examine are: sculptures, death masks and cavalry masks. Both of course had other mask styles, most notably the expressive theatrical types, but these will be covered another time.

Greek naturalistic sculpture is so well known there is little need for a full exposition. From the Archaic to Hellenistic period the overwhelming power of the sculptural arts to project an increasingly detached, menacing and yet utterly composed and serene face is breathtaking - in particular Kritios Boy (c. 480 BC), Polykleitos’ Doryphoros and Diadoumenos (c. 435 BC) and the Lysippus Alexander (c.330 BC). The Romans continued this tradition, with depictions of Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Antinous, to name a few.

The Romans also enjoyed death masks (the funerary imagines). Aristocratic families kept images, replicas, busts and plaster/wax face masks of their ancestors, and it became a tradition that the living family should don these masks during a funeral to welcome the deceased. The sight of a public procession led such lifelike faces, which would have eventually distorted through fire and smoke, must have been unnerving for onlookers.

Finally the Roman cavalry masks (Nijmegen, Ribchester, Kalkriese styles) truly exemplify something approaching ‘serene horror’. The juxtaposition of violence and indifferent calm ultimately points us to the deeper logic of Roman metaphysics. If the Greeks were future-oriented, the Romans were order-oriented. For Rome, chaos was the ultimate terror, which licensed them to undertake brutal violence and inflict incredible suffering in the name of extinguishing disorder and punishing transgression. The cosmos was harmonious, and they would see it remain so.

Thus the Greek serene face signifies natural beauty, perfection and divine symmetry. The Roman serene face signifies natural hierarchy and cosmic order, emotional stoicism, legal discipline and pitiless indifference when dealing out corrective violence.

Angels and Mortals: The Renaissance to Modernity

Readers will forgive the jump to the Renaissance, but the medieval era will be covered in great detail another time. The uncovering of antiquity during the 15th and 16th centuries saw the serene face being re-imagined and redeployed across southern Europe. One way was through the choice of how to depict Biblical angels, the second was the artistic innovation of the human and the human face.

Today angels are almost always pictured as serene and calm, but this was not inevitable. In the Hebrew and Near Eastern traditions, angels are terrifying, many-eyed, disturbing beings. But in southern Europe, shaped by Greek ideals and Roman order, angels were remade into serene, symmetrical figures: they became the face of cosmic authority in the style of classical harmony. Renaissance Europe chose the calm angelic face because it suited a worldview in which order reveals the divine. As we will see, this serene, flawless face later became a template for impassive horror masks and the unreadable visors of modern science fiction.

Portraits and depictions of Christian or Classical mythology, through sculpture and painting, continued the old lineage of calm faces. Renaissance ideas of the micro and macrocosm, good and evil, also became refracted through the idea that masks were often concealing something corrupt (Carnival and Dionysian masks will be covered another time). Thus Cesare Borgia’s ‘smallpox mask’, the Morosini helmet and the serenity of the Venetian ‘larva’ mask existed alongside Michelangelo, Botticelli, the aloofness of Mannerism (Bronzino, Pontormo) and the eventual climax of Enlightenment rationality. Recovering Europe’s Greco-Roman inheritance helped keep the Apollonian face front-and-centre, emphasising classical virtues and rational control of the mind. Neoclassical portraiture repeated the Roman motif of a stoic and impassive imperial gaze, unperturbed and reflecting cosmic order.

Even as the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantics and the Gothic sublime, the wheel of progress turning towards industrialisation, revolution and war - the serene face continued to haunt Europe, channelling the archaic stillness of silent menace. Death masks and wax heads became very popular, incorporating elite and deviant alike, thanks to Marie Tussaud during the Revolutionary Terror in France. Modernist art from de Chirico’s androids to Khnopff’s hauntingly odd Symbolism repeated and expanded the face, while the mask became smoother and more abstract for Bauhaus and Triadic ballet. With modernity came psychological depth and with individuation came alienation, the impassivity came to appear uncanny and enigmatic - the metal mask of Roman order is replaced with the imposed expression of outward control. Beauty, orderliness, serenity, perfection, control, abstraction, blank, inscrutable, empty. The serene face becomes a mask, as the self goes inside, external violence replaced with internal trauma.

Sci-fi and Futurism

The preservation of Greek futurism through the Western imagination was obvious as soon as science fiction began creating art. In Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, the character Maria is transformed into the Maschinenmensch - a glowering robot modelled explicitly after classical artworks. Gort, from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), C-3PO, the androids of Asimov’s writings, Star Trek’s Data - these are smooth, serene, Apollonian figures. Symmetrical and idealised.

The Roman gift to science fiction came soon after, as impassive masks and helmets became staple features of law enforcers, punishers, avengers, soldiers, judge-like figures who dealt out death and violence without emotion. Robocop, Iron Man, the Space Marines of Warhammer 40K, Storm Troopers of Star Wars and Spartans from Halo. Their brutality is in the service of correcting transgression and maintaining order - cold blooded, emotionless and impersonal.

Although we today can look back at the Roman cavalry masks and see dread - horror as a genre is a post Enlightenment struggle between the bounded self and the eruptive numinous (more on this in another article). Therefore its only in modern cinema, gaming and art do we finally see sci-fi making use of the serene face to provoke a feeling of terror, uncanny fear and horror. Films and series like Prometheus, M3gan, Westworld and Ex Machina lean heavily on the smooth, flawless visage - draped over the technology like a mask, yet betraying none of the human affects. The serene face becomes horrifying when it no longer expresses order, but rather indifference or predation, inhuman.

Apollo Returns With Terror: Serene Horror Masks

Now we arrive at horror proper - the films, television, games and other media made from roughly the start of the 20th century, carrying the weight of the Gothic, theatre, war, modernist art, literature and photography. Masks of serenity appeared very early, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera and 1926 Faust used calm angels and the archetypal, almost Venetian, smooth mask to cover the Phantom’s disfigurement.

In the 1960 film Eyes Without A Face, Christiane is forced to wear a permanently empty and featureless expression through her mask. This visage was a landmark in cinema horror. The film intentionally looked back to antiquity for the costume, and it became hugely influential, with Mike Myer’s Halloween mask imitating her total calm - in doing so echoing the Roman warrior on horseback of millennia earlier. We all know that slasher villains appear suddenly, to punish violations of taboos and social norms, often preserving only the final virginal woman. This became such an established trope that slasher movies began to satirise it with Scream. However, few have made the connection between the masks and the actions. The classic slasher villain is impassive, silent, calm and procedural in their formulaic violence. They don’t seem to relish their work, but simply deal death. Arguably then, the calm horror mask is the Roman face returning - a disciplined, impersonal force that punishes rather than enjoys.

The serene face does not end with masks though. The angels of Constantine, Hellraiser: Judgement, the twins of The Shining, Damien from The Omen and Nina of the Black Swan also unnerve and frighten audiences with their calm, joyless faces and composed affect. Apollo has continued his reach into the 21st century, seeking beauty in perfection and dispensing cold punishment.

The serene face has become a self-contained Western visual and aesthetic grammar. It has evolved from Greek beauty and proportion to Roman indifferent punishment, through medieval and Renaissance angelic calm, youthful symmetry and scientific rationality, before turning inward onto the self and becoming abstract, blank and ultimately devoid of humanity with the arrival of the android. It turns out that horror is the perfect medium to explore this rich legacy and rivalry between the face and the mask - masks of serene correction, faces of catatonic repression, artificial beings of uncanny menace.

In the next article I will set up the counter-tradition to this southern serene - the northern numinous. In contrast to the classical emphasis on harmony, beauty, symmetry, smoothness and stoicism, the northern European imagination is about the sublime, terror before the divine. Expect shape-shifting, instability, confrontation and the grotesque.

If you enjoyed this work please consider a paid subscription or browse my books on Amazon. I always aim to write high quality articles covering the macabre and darker sides of anthropology and archaeology, as well as coverage of contemporary science topics and my own personal takes on philosophy, history and art. Your support really helps me continue this project, thank-you!

-Grasping the Power of Language: Name and Song in Inuit Culture (Tina Pylvainen)

Þórr qvað: „Hins viltu nú geta, er við Hrungnir deildom, sá inn stórúðgi iotunn, er ór steini var hǫfuðit á; þó lét ec hann falla oc fyrir hníga. Hvat vanntu þá meðan, Hárbarðr?“ Þórr said: “This is what you’re talking about, that Hrungnir and I fought, the great-spirited giant, whose head was made of stone; and yet I brought him down and made him fall before me. What were you doing in the meantime, Hárbarðr?” (St. 15)

Hárbarðr kvað: ”Var ek með Fiolvari fimm vetr alla í ey þeiri, er Algœæn heitir; vega vér þar knáttom oc val fella, margs at freista, mans at kosta.“ Hárbarðr said: “I was with Fjölvar five winters long on that island called All-green; we fought there and wreaked slaughter, we tried out many things, had our choice of girls.” (St. 16)

-Hárbarðsljóð from the Poetic Edda

The two women, dressed in furs, grasp each other by the arms and come face to face. A stream of rhythmic punctuated sounds begin to issue forth from them, some like escaping air from a sealskin, some like harsh feline growls. They press their faces closer, their breath mingling as they almost stab one another with each exhalation, before they finally collapse into the snow, laughing hysterically. Called katajjaq in Nunavik, the Inuit practice of female competitive throat singing is an interesting counterpart to the male practice of verbal duels mentioned above. Katajjaq shares many similarities with other circumpolar throat singing and musical practices, including the intense use of environmental and animal mimicry, as well as the sharing of breath and use of another person’s mouth as a resonance chamber for notes and sounds.

Katajjaq is a friendly and light-hearted competition, but it fits into a style of verbal/oral duels which take on many forms all around the world. In the west today we only really experience agonistic linguistic conflict in one place - rap/hip-hop and their derivative subgenres. In fact the idea of two men squaring up to one another and trading rhyming insults in lieu of real violence seems anachronistic, backwards even. Even so, competitive verbal contests remain at the heart of human civilisation - in law courts, debates, parliaments and senates, in the words of opinion writers and gossip columnists, in doctorate and professorial vivas and appointment hearings, cross-examinations, academic presentations and in conference Q&As.

In many historical periods, indeed in most cultures whose state of records permits speculation in the matter, socially legitimated forms seem to have been created for the verbal expression of adversativeness. The highly distinguished and various career that the verbal contest has sustained in the history of human cultures attests to the significance and dynamicism of the adversarial relationship as one of the prime determinants of human behavior

Contests, as others have shown, are an expression of an indigenous human urge toward ritualized combat… By means of the contest, the participant is able to establish identity - and particularly sexual identity - in a public way. Thus the ritualization of contest is not at all externally added on, the imposition of a community fearful of unrestrained displays of aggression. On the contrary, it arises out of the very nature of contests themselves. For the proving of selfhood is inextricably tied to the role of the individual within his social group. The ritualization of contests provides the means by which these individual displays can become invested with public meaning

-Flyting, Sounding, Debate: Three Verbal Contest Genres (1986) Wards Parks

The initial question, ‘did the Inuit invent rap?’, is an obvious nonsense - but it provides a great framework for exploring some of these verbal contests and duels, as well as some features of circumpolar music, in particular throat singing and other unusual vocal techniques. So let us begin in that most appropriate of places - with Homer

Homeric and heroic insults

The term flyting comes from the Old English flītan, meaning ‘to quarrel’. Although it is strongly associated now with Scottish and other North Sea cultures, the term is often used academically to refer to verbal duels made in public between any two individuals, usually men, and often for the entertainment of those watching. Flyting covers all sorts of verbal contests: trash-talking, insults, boasts, rhyming attacks, barbed plays on words, structured verse and poetry, preludes to actual combat and straight up scatological comedy. For a literary example we can turn to Act Two of Henry IV, where Hal and Falstaff let fly some golden insults at one another:

PRINCE These lies are like their father that begets
them, gross as a mountain, open, palpable. Why,
thou claybrained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou
whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch…

FALSTAFF ’Sblood, you starveling, you elfskin, you
dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish!

O, for breath to utter what is like thee! You tailor’s
yard, you sheath, you bowcase, you vile standing
tuck—

PRINCE Well, breathe awhile, and then to it again, and
when thou hast tired thyself in base comparisons,
hear me speak but this.

Engaging in insulting, crude verbal spars has always been part and parcel of the heroic mindset. Public boasts and drinking contests, oaths and duties, the swearing of allegiances, the settling of scores, revenges against insults to one’s honour and the power of humour and wit to defeat a rival in the eyes of their peers - all these appear throughout heroic and warrior literature. For the Islamic world, they had naqa’id poetry, for the Norse they had senna, and for the Greeks they had neîkos.

The Homeric world itself is also full of heroic jabs, mockery and hostile trash talk.

neîkos in the Iliad and its generic equivalents share certain broad features. All involve antagonistic speeches composed of ritual abuse, vows, threats, and boasts… in an epic flyting two warriors come face to face, the challenger makes a Claim, and the challenged in turn makes a Defense and Counterclaim before the contestants proceed to physical fighting.

-Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad (1996) Hilary Mackie

The heroic figure is of course different to the ordinary community from which he is drawn. He might have warrior kin and peers, but he is apart from the ordinary rank-and-file. Within his band, his friends, there will be competition and rivalry - but this rarely breaks down to lethal violence. On the other hand, the hero could be expected to fight a solo combat, partly to redirect mass violence and casualties towards one skillful duel, and partly to display his fearlessness and abilities. Insult verse and structured lines of threats and abuse therefore help prevent violence when between friends, but act as a on-ramp to violence when hurled out before a fight. This tension between verbal duels as a group safety valve but also as a way to cross the threshold into real violence is present wherever it is found around the world. The scholar Wards Parks offers a cohesive explanation to unite this tension in his book Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative (1990)

Deadly combat flourishes most in inter group settings, although here too, since contests as rule-governed interactions are built on the recognition of reciprocity, the flyting negotiative process offers loopholes by which fighting can be avoided. Even mortal enemies, if they are engaged in long-term warfare, come to recognize the need for certain reciprocal observances. Thus, the Trojans and Achaeans in book 3 of the Iliad try (though unsuccessfully) to make a single duel between Menelaus and Paris substitute for continued hostilities between the armies.

He goes on to argue that flyting can only exist in a situation of reciprocity, since predators and threats from outside the human realm cannot and do not engage in it. Grendel, the Cyclops, wild animals - duels with these beings do not observe rules of combat nor of wit, nor can they be avoided or defused with language. Ironically our capacity to insult one another has probably saved more lives than it has cost.

Ancient Greek literature approached the neîkos in different ways depending on the genre. Whilst Homeric and epic poetry use the quarrel as the prelude to a formal physical duel, iambic poetry turns the neîkos into an entire literary style. Iambic ‘blame’ poetry is a form of controlled aggression, sometimes more light-hearted and satirical, sometimes full of invective and bitterness. Some verses from Epode 10 of Horace illustrate this well, full of hatred for the poor anonymous Mevius.

The ship casts off from shore in an ill-omened hour,
Carrying the stinking Mevius.
God of the southern wind – take care to pulverize
Both its sides with horrendous waves!

Let the black eastern wind turn the sea upside-down,
Some oars here, some rigging there,
And may the north wind loom as large as when it rends
Oaks trembling on the mountain tops,

That time Athena turned her rage from smouldering Troy
Onto Ajax and his damned ship!
Oh what a cold damp sweating will beset your crew
While you change hue to a pale green,

Bucolic or pastoral poetry/literature in the Greek world also featured the neîkos, but in yet another form. Here in the world of the shepherds the flyting and quarrels between men high up in the hills also turned into a formal contest, but rather than with swords and shields - these men would sing mocking and sharp songs at one another in the presence of a judge (known as Amoebaean singing). In all these examples the quarrel is a public spectacle rather than a private fight, the victor decided by witnesses. Heroic taunts and boasts exist all over the world, wherever heroic martial cultures take root - but the ancient Greeks with their foundational cultural roots deep in the agon, the competition as the source of existence- elevated the verbal contest for multiple walks of life.

Pastoralists & Poetry

As we go deeper into types of formal verbal/sung duels around the world it is worth listing out some examples, many of which are still practiced today:

1. Norse / North Atlantic

   • Flyting / senna / mannjafnaðr (Viking & medieval Scandinavia/Scotland): Verse-insult and “comparison of men” contests

2. Classical Mediterranean

   • Amoebaean singing (ancient Greek/Roman): Competitive “answer-song” poetry in Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, foundational for European “song contests.”

3. Caucasus / Central Asia

   • Aitys/Aitysh (Kazakh/Kyrgyz): Improvised sung duels between akyns with dombra/komuz

   • Meykhana (Azerbaijan): Improvised rhymed duels in a 6/8 time signature, has been described as a local rap tradition

4. Middle East

   • Zajal (Lebanon & wider Arab world): Semi-sung, metric duels with chorus

   • Naqa’id poetic dueling in Arabia

5. South Asia & Himalaya

   • Dohori (Nepal): Antiphonal, often competitive improvised duets (frequently male-female)

   • Bait-bazi (Urdu, Pakistan/India): Competitive verse-recitation game with rules. Less musical, but still a verbal contest tradition.

6. Southern Europe & Mediterranean

   • Bertsolaritza (Basque Country): High-level improvised sung verse contests

   • Sardinian poesia estemporanea (Italy): Public improvised verse jousts

   • Portuguese desgarrada: Accordion-backed improvised duels, again described as ‘rap’

   • Maltese għana (spirtu pront): Improvised, witty multi-singer duels, less competitive

   • Cretan mantinades: Competitive improvised couplets

   • Turkish âşıklık ‘minstrelsy’: Traditional nomadic folk poet-singers, one of their many skills is the art of verbal/lyrical duelling, also known for other challenges like holding a pin between the lips (lebdeğmez) and reciting without the letters ‘p’ ‘b’ ‘m’ ‘f’ and ‘v’.

7. Latin America

   • Payada / paya (Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay): emerged from Guacho culture, payada guitar-accompanied poetic duels, make use of a beat sometimes

   • Repente poetry/song (NE Brazil): Different forms exist, use of two players with instruments singing/verbalising funny, clever songs, sometimes in duels other times duets.

8. Africa

   • Halo (Adja-Ewe of Ghana, Togo, and Benin) insult poetry and performance, mocking ritual against warriors

   • Udje (Urhobo of Nigeria) dance/poems between rival towns/villages, often scathing/insulting or lampooning criminals and social deviants

   • Yabis (Nigeria) contemporary insult poetry duels, known to use modern Afrobeats music

   • Taarab (Swahili/East Africa) sung poetry duels/competitions, can be insulting, predominantly female

This is by no means a complete list, but even so it is striking how often this form of solo conflict-poetry appears in nations, regions and peoples strongly connected to shepherding and pastoralism. This includes South American Gauchos, Arabian camel herders and Cretans tending their goats in the rocky hills. By contrast the African examples showed more communal tendencies, entire groups using lyrical satire to deflate the egos of strongmen and criminals. The connection between pastoral life and verbal sparring has not been discussed much in any literature I can find. Anthropologist Elizabeth Mathias wrote an article in 1976 describing her fieldwork in Sardinia, wherein she explained:

The Sardinian shepherd’s code of onore has developed out of basic needs in his society which place a high premium on individualism, independence, and the ability of the individual to defend his personal interests… Performance of La Gara Poetica in the ovile acts as a way of channeling the shepherd’s intense individualism into an expression of power.

-La Gara Poetica: Sardinian Shepherds’ Verbal Dueling and the Expression of Male Values in an Agro-Pastoral Society (1976) E.Mathias

The rough, often brutal world of cowboying, cattle rustling, racing camels and horses, protecting flocks against wild animals and defending one’s honour lends itself well to clashes of individual pride and reputation - boasts about young women bedded, fights won and even rivals killed flow easily alongside a declared love for horses, cows, animals, the quality of their meat, milk and wool or how much they sold for at market. For a shepherd almost everything is a challenge, a threat to their herd and family, including other shepherds. In this way the pastoralist and the hero are very similar.

Deeper than words - poetry, music and throat singing

The human voice is amongst the most expressive in the animal kingdom, partly because we have conscious control over our breath, and partly because we have accreting cultural mechanisms to learn sound-making skills rather than inventing them with each generation. The result is a global soundscape which has recently become sadly narrowed and homogenised. One can look up Scandinavian kulning, Croatian ojkanje singing, Alpine and Central African yodelling/yelli, the endlessly entertaining Balinese kecak performance, Xhosa click-tunes, Korean pansori, the Sami joik and modern metal screams and growls for some inspiration.

Music does seem to be a human fundamental, to my knowledge there are no known human societies which lack the ability to make and understand music. The brain is adept at and adapted to processing sounds as they are experienced by the listener - melody, pitch, rythmn, harmony and, most crucially, these sounds are experienced emotionally. It barely needs to be said that music can make us weep or move us to anger, feel love or joy or the need to move, because most of us have all felt that. In Oliver Sack’s wonderful book Musicophilia, he shows that the brain is normally so engaged and so stimulated by listening to music, it becomes a form of syndrome or a neurological symptom (known as ‘amusia’) when the brain fails to correctly process it.

Nevertheless, culture is the major determinant in what kind of music developed where. European hegemony over the development of musical composition, expression, technique, theory and melody is unrivalled - with most music around the world remaining wedded to strict traditions and conventions. However, there are sounds and skills from elsewhere to be discussed, one of which is throat singing. The name throat singing is recognisable to many today, although it does not accurately reflect the sound that is being made. Most people think of the deep Mongolian/Tuvan form, but the main principle is that of overtone singing or polyphonic singing. This refers to the sound of one human voice which can make two or more distinct notes, usually a lower ‘fundamental’ note and a higher ‘overtone’ note. Overtone singing itself has emerged and branched away from traditional throat singing (you can search Anna-Maria Hefele or Wolfgang Saus), and Tuvan throat singing also contains many complex and subtle techniques, which makes the term throat singing hard to define.

Cultures that have developed forms of throat/overtone singing - many Turkic, Siberian, the Chukchi, Inuit, Balochi, Sardinian, the Xhosa - often reference the ability of the sound to travel well through the large empty spaces or mountaneous regions. In the song Anoana by the band Heilung, one of the vocalists uses a kulning-esque herding vocal technique which cuts through the air like an alarm, similarly Altai throat singing overtones can be very high and bright sounding. Another common reference is the mimickry of nature, singers attempting to copy the sounds of the wind, different birds or animals, the noises of water, ice or storms. Thankfully these once obscure singing techniques have become incredibly popular - in bands and groups like The Harmonic Choir, Old Norse covers, Siberian Chulym’s Otyken, Mongolia’s folk-metal The HU, Buryat singer Aryun-Goa and in whatever this Khoomei ‘throat-techno’ is.

Arctic music, beatboxing and final thoughts

In a 2012 paper called ‘Animal Impersonation Songs as an Ancient Musical System in North America, Northeast Asia, and Arctic Europe’, the independent scholar Richard Keeling proposed what he called The Northern Hunting Religion - an assemblage of shared beliefs and behaviours which spread across ancient Europe, Siberia and North America. The core features of the religion were:

Annual ceremony for major game animal (salmon, whale, or bear)

Propitiation of game animals through spoken prayers and other offerings

Concept that animals are immortal and only give flesh temporarily

Concept that animals are conscious of human intentions

Ritual disposition of bones and unused parts from game

Sexual and other restrictions to avoid offending game animal

Fear of menstruation and ambivalence toward female sexuality

Specialized shamanism involving possession by animal spirits, and

Songs imitating the voices of mythic animals or other spiritual entities

The last of these, that songs and music are rooted in the imitation of animals (even mythical ones), does fit with other scholarship about Arctic/circumpolar musicology, even if the rest of the religion may not be.

Suddenly he commenced to beat the drum softly and sing in a plaintive voice: then the beating of the drum grew stronger and stronger; and his song—in which could be heard sounds imitating the howling of the wolf, the groaning of the cargoose, and the voices of other animals, his guardian spirits—appeared to come, sometimes from the corner nearest my seat, then from the opposite end, then again from the middle of the house, and then it seemed to proceed from the ceiling. He was a ventriloquist. Shamans versed in this art are believed to possess particular power.

-The Koryak (1908) Waldemar Jochelson

The development of music and song with animals is likely bi-directional, meaning that many northern pastoral musical traditions may have evolved out of the need to communicate with animals. The scholar Aleksey Nikolsky has recently argued in a 2020 paper called The pastoral origin of semiotically functional tonal organization of music, that yodeling, kulning and later hollering, are distinct forms of a broader Indo-European ‘cow-language’, whereas Finno-Ugric cultures have created their own ‘reindeer-languages’ with specific vocalisations. Lulling, milking-songs, calling-home, ‘motherese’ soothing music-speak for new calves - all fall into a distinct vocal register which animals can interpret as safety, and all exist/existed across the northern pastoral world from Scotland to Sweden to Altai.

In contrast to domesticated animals, wild animals can also understand human songs, but these are not the clear high harmonics which signal protection. Arctic peoples such as the Sami are known to sing or joik specific songs to specific animals - ie the ‘bear’s song’, or the ‘elk’s song’. The concept of a ‘personal song’ also exists amongst the Inuit and the Sami, an idiosyncratic melody/rythmn which can be intensely personal and rarely if ever vocalised. More broadly however, animal imitation forms part of the well-explored circumpolar/circumboreal musical repertoire. According to ethnomusicologist William P. Malm, this region around the Arctic, encompassing the Ainu, Sami, Siberian peoples, Aleuts, Inuit and some other Native Americans, displays a roughly shared musical lexicon of: animal imitation sounds, breathing/sound games and harsh, throaty utterances, use of framed drums, an acceptance of loose sing-speak epic chants or narratives, use of timbre-rich instruments such as the jaw harp and various local zither/lute variations. Studies of how well the Ainu fit into this pattern have been fairly extensive, including a 2015 article called How ‘Circumpolar’ is Ainu Music? Musical and Genetic Perspectives on the History of the Japanese Archipelago, which attempted to fit the Ainu musical heritage with their known genetic admixtures.

One of the reasons for the focus on the Ainu over the years was the discovery that some Ainu engaged in a very similar breath game to the Inuit, known as rekuhkara. A modern recreation of this can be watched here - listen out for the obvious animal noises and distinctive breath control/beat, but also notice that the players are making noises into each other’s mouths, with the aim of the using the mouth and throat of the other player to resonate and modulate the sound. Good players are supposed to recieve the sound from the other, and modify their larynx and mouth shape, like singing backwards.

This brings us back to the beginning, to the Inuit duels. There are many contemporary examples to watch, like this one dubbed The Competition Song. They are genuinely strange to listen to, the game is played by two women facing each other closely, then one starting the beat with a strongly accented sound and the second replying with a weaker sound. Motifs are cycled, throat singing is employed as are animal yips and calls, the beat is held and sometimes increases and the players need excellent breath control to last more than a few seconds.

To bring together our themes of competitive duels, poetry/music and vocal techniques/mimicry, I wanted to touch on the art of beatboxing. This genre feels strangely fitting since it was birthed as a part of hip-hop - one of the few mainstream verbal battle formats - but has incorporated vocal techniques such as throat singing as it has matured. Contemporary beatboxing today has advanced rapidly, to the point where artists can produce multiple sound effects simultaneously whilst perfectly imitating synth and digital/analog instrumental sounds. They have also pioneered incredible feats of breath control, utilising inhalations to keep a smooth output, whilst also creating bizarre and novel sounds to include in their songs and battles. In a 2021 paper, scientists who had analysed the vocal tracts of beatboxers using MRI reported:

We found that beatboxers can create sounds that are not seen in any language. They have an acrobatic ability to put together all these different sounds …

… the beatboxer was able to generate a wide range of sound effects that do not appear in either of the languages he spoke. Instead, they appeared similar to clicks seen in African languages such as Xhosa from South Africa, Khoekhoe from Botswana, and !Xóõ from Namibia, as well as ejective consonants — bursts of air generated by closing the vocal cords — seen in Nuxálk from British Columbia, Chechen from Chechnya and Hausa from Nigeria and other countries in Africa.

-Segmentation and Classification of Beatboxing Acoustic Voice Tract Variations in MRI through Image Processing Technique (2021) A.Sinha

Researching this meandering set of topics was like discovering one series of rabbit holes after another - Norse poetry duels, Altai throat singing, modern Siberian revival bands, lost Ainu breath battles - and they all point in the same fundamental directions, to the human necessity for music, for poetry, for confrontation and co-operation. I do think there is also something important about the pastoralist world with regards to both poetry and music. I’d like to spend some more time with this idea that different ‘culture-language’ families have developed musical forms specifically to communicate with animals. I’ll leave you with this, the possible origins of the Sirens from the Odyssey…

Local names for kulning imply the alluring of animals by magic properties of sound to suggest certain behavior to the herd, avert evil trolls and predator-animals—following shamanic tradition of maiden singing. In Swedish mythology, forest spirits possessed their own cattle, and herdswomen (kulerska) learned kulning from skogsra, “sirens of the woods”. Folk beliefs attributed this power to beauty. Indeed, well-ornamented high “warbling” register of distant female voice made men and women pause their work and enjoy the sounds…

Pastoral spells in Altaic tradition constitute female prerogative, but are occasionally performed by men. The same applies to whistling signals, used across Eurasia by herdsmen to stimulate and/or safe-guard animals. Just like kulning, in pastoral societies whistling is associated with sorcery and is thoroughly regulated by taboos. Acoustically, whistling comes closest to “kula” in distance-range, loudness, and tonal quality. To command their animals, Altaic herdsmen produce whistles audible over 4–5 km, and throat-singing—3 km.

-The pastoral origin of semiotically functional tonal organization of music (2020) Nikolsky

-Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, Vol I

If you’re anything like me then birds are one of those perennial, permanent obsessions. The kind of obsession that lasts a lifetime, and continually rewards you for your perseverance. One simple conclusion from this love affair is that birds are truly very strange. Creatures that live amongst us every day, in every habitat, that sing, that fly, that swim, dive and walk, creatures that range from the exquisitely drab to the sublimely beautiful in appearance, and are constantly watching us. Everything from their bone structure to their brains is different to ours, and much of their lives remains a mystery to us.

Somewhere around 66 million years ago life on earth underwent one of its most famous rearrangements. The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event resulted in the annihilation of the dinosaurs, themselves one of nature’s most interesting experiments in body shapes, behavioural adaptations and charisma. As most schoolchildren know, the only surviving lineage of these beasts became the ancestors of modern birds. In fact, three major groups of these dinosaurs seemed to pass through this event: the Palaeognathae, the ancestors of ostriches, emus, cassowaries and other ‘primitive’ birds; the Galloanserae, the group containing fowl and waterfowl, and the bizarre Neoaves, who constitute the other 95% of living bird species. Whilst the former two groups had already diverged prior to the K-Pg asteroid collision, the Neoaves suddenly exploded into wildly diverse families and forms as the rest of the dinosaurs died away. Today the Neoaves are classified under the charming lineage titles of ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and the ‘Three Orphans’. The physical space in the world and the opportunities it offered suddenly opened up to a group of flying animals which rapidly took advantage of every niche.

Whilst I don’t want to overly personify something as abstract as an evolutionary lineage, I do want to use the language of ‘will’ and ‘intention’ to describe the life paths that these new animals took. They moved away from the logic of lizard life, and instead drove themselves into novelty through three main vectors, in my opinion anyway. These were:

• The freedom to move

• The freedom to see

• The will to beauty

Each of these will be broken down in turn, but a side point - birds were not and are not the only creatures to make use of flight, even during the age of the dinosaurs. They are however the only surviving creatures to combine feathers with flight. The Scansoriopterygidae dinosaurs of the Jurassic era had bat-like membrane wings for gliding and perhaps flying; the feathered Microraptoria should be better known for potentially using four wings, and the early Cretaceous Caudipteryx could turn out to be a feathered dinosaur which became flightless over time. But none of these managed to flourish like the ancestors of modern birds did.

The Freedom To Move

The most obvious thing about birds is that they can fly. But they can also dive, hover, swim on and under the surface, run, hop and jump, climb, walk, burrow, wade and glide. In fact, their range of motion is truly astonishing, limited only by their shoulders, two legs and lack of digits. Going further though, these movements are not just utilised but mastered. Peregrine falcons can dive at their prey with speeds of over 300km per hour; swifts can spend entire seasons in the air, sleeping on the wing; emperor penguins have been known to dive underwater to over 500m and hold their breath for 15 minutes; ostriches can run for long periods at 50mph; bar-headed geese can fly with ease over Mount Everest, and a five month old bar-tailed godwit recently flew non-stop from Alaska to Tasmania - a world record of 13,560 km.

To gain such mastery, birds have developed one of the most sophisticated suites of locomotion of any living species on earth. These include:

• Hovering and ‘kiting’, back-hovering and reverse flight, ‘helicoptering’ and hover-gleaning

• Cursorial foraging, flock synchrony

• Striking, kicking, stamping

• Sea-anchoring, surface-skimming and sand-swimming

• Swooping, wing & foot propelled diving and plunging

• Dynamic, thermal and static soaring

• Tail-supported vertical climbing, beak-assisted climbing, head-first descending

• Lekking dances, coordinated rushes

• Flutter-diving, parachuting and flutter-down displays, sky-dancing and wing-clapping

• Aerial acrobatics and courtship displays (rolling, tumbling, dropping-and-catching, winnowing, snaps, inverted hangs, pendulum flights and chase flights)

• Wing-assisted incline running (WAIR)

To focus in on just one of these - hummingbird hovering - is to show just how far birds explored and innovated within the evolutionary space of movement. Hummingbirds (Trochilidae) are a New World bird species that decided to develop the capacity for hovering flight, a hover so precise and controlled that they could feed on sugary nectar within plants. The sugar is essential to feed their explosively high metabolic rate, and maintain the roughly 80 wingbeats per second generated from their huge pectoralis and supracoracoideus muscles. Uniquely hummingbirds generate lift on the wing upstroke as well as the downstroke, by rotating the wing each figure-of-eight cycle. For those of you interested in metabolism - the muscles of the hummingbird wings are fast oxidative-glycolytic fibers (type IIa), with giant mitochondria occupying around 50% of total cellular volume. This speed and style of wingbeat produces the distinctive humming sound as the bird merrily flies around, one of the biological wonders of the world.

Of course, to really describe the adaptations of birds we have to look at feathers. These oddities arrived around 200 million years ago first as simple filaments. Feathers are made up of keratin and typically come in two forms - down feathers and vane feathers. The central rachis of the feather supports orthogonal barbs, sometimes highly coloured, other times not. Vane feathers on the wings (remige feathers) are further broken down into primary, secondary and tertials, and tail vane feathers (retrices) also have the same similar stiff morphology, with interlocked barbs. Down feathers, plumes, filoplumes, bristles and other specialised feathers also exist. Since the function of feathers varies widely between species (camouflage, flight, mating attraction, waterproofing, warmth, sound production), types of feather and their unique structures also change.

With feathers and wings comes the need for a much higher metabolic rate and decreased mass, to make flight efficient. This is achieved through a number of specialised changes to the vertebrate body. Firstly birds have many hollow bones, that is to say the interior of the bone is devoid of marrow or bone cells, but often contains internal struts and supports. The skeletal structure works perfectly with the second adaptation - the astounding avian respiratory system. Bird lungs are not the expanding bellows of mammals, but rather a rigid assortment of front and rear air sacs connected by parabronchi. When the bird inhales, fresh air is drawn the rear or posterior sacs, and as the oxygen gradient alters and the bird exhales, this air moves to the front or anterior sacs, before finally being expelled. In this way there is no mingling of old and fresh air, as with mammals, and the air is circulated in one direction only. The gains from this system are incredible, birds are roughly ten times more efficient at oxygen uptake than mammals. This system of air sacs can also in some birds extend into the bones themselves, combining with the skeletal system to maximise metabolic output with minimal weight. The core body temperature of birds is also typically between 39 and 43 degrees, reflecting this engine of oxygen turnover and the constant muscular activity of flight.

Arguably the most crucial evolutionary feat to allow for bird flight, the wing is a system in which the skeleton and feathers act together to allow for a high lift-to-weight ratio. The wing skeleton is particularly lightweight; unlike terrestrial vertebrates’ marrow-filled bones, most bird wings are composed of hollow bones, similar to the bones of bats and pterosaurs [7]. These hollow (pneumatic) bones connect to the pulmonary system and allow air circulation which increases skeletal buoyancy…

The wing skeleton and flight feathers work together to form an airfoil that supports the bird's mass in flight and undergoes torsional and bending forces while maintaining a minimum weight. Both wing bones and feathers have a thin, dense exterior with reinforcing internal structures, efficiently tailored for the specific bird, and a composite microstructure. The coinciding design principles between these features reveal an apparent evolutionary trend toward structures that efficiently resist bending and torsion.

-Extreme lightweight structures: avian feathers and bones (2017) Sullivan et al

By shedding excess weight such as teeth, jawbones, heavy marrow-laden skeletal structures, and developing a massive rigid respiratory-skeletal system - birds have been able to take advantage of the feathers gifted to them by their dinosaur forebears and colonise practically every environment on earth. Movement for birds, the freedom to move, means the freedom of the sky, land and sea; it means making homes on cliffs, in trees, the tops of buildings; it means shrinking themselves down to take advantage of insect food sources; it means the liberty to migrate away as the weather changes and to utterly dominate their world of the air, with speed and graceful motion.

The Freedom to See

Such a creature which excels at moving through space should of course develop an ultra high sensitivity to their surroundings. Bats use echolocation, arachnids use vibration, and birds use sight. But as we’ve already encountered, bird sight, like movement, is about pushing evolutionary capacity to its limits and mastering the field. Birds in their totality have:

• The highest visual acuity of any animal

• UV light detection

• An extremely high field of vision

• The capacity for night vision/low light hunting

• Very high flicker-fusion frequency processing power (can see in slow motion)

• Polarised light detection

• Magnetic field detection

• Multiple adaptations for eye protection while diving, pecking wood

• Aquatic vision

If the bird body developed to fly, then the bird brain and head developed to see. Some birds are so good at this, they have been described as ‘eyes with wings’. Avian eyes often occupy over 50% of their cranial volume (humans clock in at around 5%), and they are shaped differently - often flatter, with the lens brought forward. Bird eyes are secured more rigidly, can move independently and use a third membrane (nictitating eyelid) to keep the surface lubricated rather than blinking. Birds prefer to move their whole head rather than swivel their eyeballs in their sockets, but their field of vision is often vast:

The avian species with the greatest field of vision is the American woodcock (Scolopax minor). Its eyes are positioned exactly opposite of each other, allowing it an astonishing horizontal visual field of 360° and a vertical field of vision of 180°, which enables it to quickly scan its surrounding area with out moving its eyes or head. Martin reports the horizontal visual field of the mallard duck (Anas platyrhynchos) to also be 360°, with a binocular field of approximately 20°

-Avian Vision: A Review of Form and Function with Special Consideration to Birds of Prey (2007) Jones et al.

Avian photoreceptors within the eye are far more sensitive than mammalian eyes. They typically possess six types of photoreceptive cells on the retina, compared to our four. Their possession of four cone cells for processing colour, along with specialised oil droplets within the retina, means birds are tetrachromatic and some species like the zebra finch can perceive ultraviolet light.

Avian retinas also often show a depressed pit called a fovea which allows for the denser packing of photoreceptor cone cells and higher visual acuity when incoming light is focused onto these cells. Some birds such as raptors, swallows and pigeons have two foveae, which gives them immense powers of sight while flying. To illustrate lets look at the peregrine falcon. The falcon has two foveae per eye, one forward angled for binocular vision, the second angled laterally for long distance monocular vision. These are very densely packed with cone receptors (approx one million per mm²), roughly 2 to 3 more than in humans. Falcons can easily spot prey like rabbits from miles away, first utilising their monocular resolving power, then descending with a logarithmic spiral pattern to keep the prey within their monocular fovea. Finally, sometimes approaching speeds of over 300km/hour, the falcon will roll or bank to switch to binocular vision, providing more accurate depth perception as its brain calculates the necessary acceleration and adjustments in wing and foot placement to catch their next meal.

Another feature which allows falcons and other birds to operate so effectively at such high speeds is their ability to still see frames of motion, even at very high speeds. This processing power is known as the flicker-fusion threshold, or rate. Humans can perceive flickering light bulbs at a rate of below 60 Hz, after which they become a single continuous image. Birds can still detect the flicker at 80-100 Hz (songbirds, pigeons), up to 120 Hz (hummingbirds), and falcons up to 129 Hz. What we would perceive as a colourful smear or blur, the falcon observes like a slow motion film. The density of photoreceptor cells, combined with their eyeball shape, lens placement, additional cones/oil droplets, foveae and eye placement gives different bird species immense flexibility. Owls and other low-light species such as nightjars, petrels, shearwaters, bitterns and kakapos, have huge eyes packed with rod cells, along with specialised neural processing capabilities for light contrast. Birds that hunt underwater such as penguins, gannets, cormorants, kingfishers, loons and grebes make use of powerful, spherical lenses with strong muscles for instant focusing, as well as employing their nictitating eyelids as protective goggles.

One final mention must go to the humble pigeon and compatriots for their almost science fiction-like ability to actually see magnetic fields. Specialised proteins called cryptochromes have been discovered in certain bird photoreceptors; four types of cryptochromes—Cry1a, Cry1b, Cry2 and Cry4—have been found in pigeons and migratory passerines. Complex quantum biological mechanisms have been proposed for how these work, but at present it seems certain that some birds can fly across huge distances in part guided by the earth’s magnetic fields. Thus again, like with movement, birds seem determined to pick a family developmental route and drive evolution into previously unknown forms of mastery. Theorists of motion have discussed how birds and humans differ in their perception of the world - our egocentric forward facing vision with the sensation of stepping into reality, while birds with their vast and lateral fields of vision experience themselves moving through the world.

The Will to Beauty

To cram all this into a single article I have had to leave out many other fascinating avian features, such as their intelligence and sociality, how they forage and hunt for food, and their fascinating life-cycles. Bird mate selection and breeding is full of curiosities - their monogamy, lek performances, parental investment, and the arms race between parasites and their hosts (cuckoo!).

I have subsumed much of these behaviours, and more, under the concept ‘the will to beauty’, which I feel captures the overall avian push towards song, dance, theatre, performance, colour and costume. Birds are not subtle creatures, they have Apollonian tastes in exteriority. Bird song is not a pale imitation of human song, on the contrary birds have mastered the art. Their vocal syrinx, not larynx, provides them with the capacity for multiple notes simultaneously, for syllables, warbles, chirps, sustained tones, trills, clicks, whistles and harmonics. They can sing in duets, in groups and alone, as part of territorial defence or to attract a mate. The specialised neural circuitry which helps them memorise thousands of songs also helps with learning new songs, a process which leads to distinctive musical subcultures within the same species. Many birds are also outstanding mimics, uncannily replicating everything from chainsaws to human speech, car alarms to guitar solos.

Song naturally accompanies dance and performance. Everyone by now has seen the wonderful and alien courtship rituals of the birds-of-paradise, with their highly specific tutu-like plumages or striking eye patterns on their raised tails - but they aren’t the only ones. Birds all over the world perform acrobatics (mannakins), object tossing, synchronised ‘rushing’ (grebes), graceful ballet duets (cranes), ritualised beak tapping and head bowing (albatrosses) and many other rehearsed solo or group performances. Some bird species have to practice these dance moves for years as male juveniles, in the hope of attracting female attention. Many go beyond just dance, and use props, architecture, precision footwork and coordinated wing/tail motifs in some of nature’s ultimate courtship performances. Look up videos of grebe water dances, parotia’s ballet, the argus pheasant display or the bower bird’s eye for colour.

As we’ve seen with their visual adaptations, birds love colour. Therefore it makes sense that birds are arguably the most visually dimorphic family of animals on earth. The sexual theatre of avian life extends into every part of the male bird (as a generalisation). Males often show radically different colour and feather schemes to their female counterparts, theorised as the classic example of ‘runaway sexual selection’

One of the side effects of coating a body with feathers is that it provides a perfect canvas for decoration. Birds may have found practical uses for these stiff keratin bristles, but one could be forgiven for thinking that their primary function was personal ornamentation. They might be mostly eyes with wings, but this results in a natural race of aesthetes, gifted with almost divine powers of sight and adorned with a miraculous tapestry for experimental colours, patterns and motifs. Add to this their capacity for song, theatre and speed, and they seem in aggregate profoundly alien. Even their intelligence and mischievous sense of humour arises from a radically different brain, complete with a convergent frontal lobe (nidopallium). Their dinosaur ancestors renounced their claim to world dominance, so birds pursued other paths of mastery and pleasure.

Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features — a blush of red, a feathered flourish — to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes…

Birds transformed what was once mere frippery into some of the most enviable adaptations on the planet, from the ocean-spanning breadth of an albatross to the torpedoed silhouette of a plunging falcon. Yet they never abandoned their sense of style, using feathers as a medium for peerless pageantry. A feather, then, cannot be labeled the sole product of either natural or sexual selection. A feather, with its reciprocal structure, embodies the confluence of two powerful and equally important evolutionary forces: utility and beauty

-How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution (2019) Ferris Jabr

This theory, that beauty is an evolutionary force in its own right, is one I will be exploring further in future writing. Until then, go outside and watch some birds!

What will follow is a roughly faithful transcription of a monologue by the subject of a previous study. I had recorded it on paper in note form two years ago but never got around to exploring it in detail. As an aside - making Britain’s canals into a long-term project of inquiry has proved incredibly challenging, given their unique aspects and often itinerant userbase. Thus the nuclei of the entire work is laid out here using anecdotes, but each deserves a more thorough treatment when funding allows.

Subject: Matt, male, late 20s, white British.

No, the canals were never a creepy place to live near, not at all. There were lots of tourist boats that would moor for a day or two, and I used to enjoy waving to people as I came home from school along the towpath. It was properly overgrown in the summer, alive with bees, I’d even saw a kingfisher if I was lucky! Sometimes the old guys would stay put for a few weeks, you got to know them as they'd come back maybe once a year or so. Once an old timer was walking back across the lock with a metal detector. I was so fascinated, I was like nine, maybe ten years old. He stopped and showed it to me, then he waved it around on the ground and it made all those noises and he stopped and pulled a real bullet out of the dirt. He gave it to me, I was so excited, I kept it for years. It wasn’t until I was an adult that it dawned on me he probably just had it in his pocket and pretended to find it.

Anyway. So, creepy isn’t the right word, but there was one guy. Some people called him Akker, or Akky? We just called him the Boat Man. He lived on a real wrecked old barge, and he always had heaps of stuff on his patch of the bank and path. He had an old dog tied up on the mooring posts or on the back of the boat, would always bark at everyone. He was always collecting old computers, wires, cables and bits of things - and he would sometimes make a bonfire at the back of mum’s pony field and throw all the plastic wiring onto it. Me and my mates would watch sometimes, he didn’t care if we stood a way off with our bikes. The fire would go crazy colours when the wires burnt, purple and green and blue, the smoke was horrible though, smelt so bad! He never seemed to care, he would light up his cigarette off a bit of burning wire and stick his face into the whole thing, poking and prodding until the plastic was gone, then he’d use a garden fork and throw everything off as fast as he could.

He never had a shirt on from what I remember, he looked like he used to be really strong, with faded old tattoos. I sometimes would ask mum why she let him on the field, she told me that everyone said he was from South Africa and used to be a soldier in a war with some other African country, and that he was addicted to amphetamines because the army actually gave them to their men to stay awake all night!

I never actually spoke to him though, he was quite scary as a kid, like we’d dare each other sometimes to sneak up and touch his boat. One time he came running down the towpath with a machete and we absolutely legged it. He probably wouldn’t have hurt us for real, but it was properly terrifying. Sometimes his boat was empty for weeks, then he’d come back with a massive heap of junk. Sometimes you’d hear him play drum’n’bass music through some shitty speaker. He never really bothered anyone I guess, which is why he stayed around. I don’t know where he is now, probably dead, he was pretty old.

Tracking down Acker/Boat Man, or even anyone else who knew him was going to be difficult. To begin with I started walking up and down the towpaths around Matt’s childhood house. There was a single step lock, a footbridge and a fairly long tunnel within a few miles of each other. This canal was only recently connected to the wider network, and was likely isolated for a long time. The Canal & River Trust has cleared and dredged hundreds of miles of canal sections in recent years, so the old canal of Matt’s youth may have substantially changed.

After walking the length a number of times I began talking to boaters and tourists who had moored up. Without a doubt the full time canal dwellers have a huge stock of folk-memory which has barely been explored or documented. I’ve included some choice examples from informal interviews.

Me dad grew up on the boats, but had his family in a house. I came back to it after work failed, just a nicer pace of life. Was a lot harder back in the day though, no electric lights, I think dad was just old enough to remember the last of the boat gypsies flogging coal off their little butty. Go back farther and it was all donkeys of course on the towpaths, the eldest lad walking em up and down the cut, feeding em.

Yes, if you want solar panels it works well enough, some boaters also put them little wind turbines up. You have to mess around with twelve volt inverters though, square waves were always cheaper for just running a kettle and charging a phone. Some guys get really into the electrical side of it all, proper nerds! I know one bloke who builds twelve volt power tools, drills, what have you. He went to that training place in Wales - CAT - now he can rig up whatever you want, he probably cheers when there’s a power cut in town!

One thing that stood out to me after a while was the artwork style on many of the permanent houseboaters. A sort of bright, chocolate box style (Roses & Castles) on the doors and objects which adorned the rooves and decks. I learnt through conversation that this niche painting style is still well preserved, and some people even make a living through commissions.

Many who choose to live on the canals full time come across as escapees, people fleeing city and contemporary life. The canals are often centrally located within towns and urban areas, but are somehow overlooked, and people sail up and down without feeling the same pressure and pace. That said, several mentioned burglaries and thefts and almost all of those I spoke to owned a dog or two. One is not a ‘real boater’ until the dog has chased a cyclist miles down the towpath.

I gathered enough descriptive anecdotes of canal life to fill a book - watching a cow give birth, stopping for a pint at a waterside pub, boats crashing into kayakers, getting the moor rope tangled around your leg and being dragged underwater, the many creative ways of fixing an engine on the cheap, a guy who bred ferrets on his boat, the endless battles over CRT cruising licenses and facilities. But in all this rich slice of life, I never heard about Boat Man. No-one seemed to remember him, or cared to tell me. The canals have hundreds of ghosts and water-wights - screams in tunnels, restless drowned children, bargemen eternally walking the cut, the clanking of the windlass on locks - and perhaps my man had gone to join them. One set of stories I found particularly haunting were about the little boys employed to lie on their backs on top of the old commercial narrow barges, and literally walk the boats through miles of pitch black tunnel using their legs. It still makes me shudder to imagine those boys being crushed and scraped against the cold brickwork when the passageways started to shrink, or when a boat rocked them overboard.

Many weeks after returning back from the canals I received a voicemail from Matt, evidently our lines of communication had been failing to meet for a while now, but he did have something to say.

Hey man, so uh yeah I tried phoning before about the uh conversation we had, about the canals and er Boat Man, I don’t know if you remember? Well I did go to see my mum recently and I remembered that you were interested in what happened to Boat Man, so I asked her. She uh, told me that he disappeared not long after I went to uni. She said that he started getting bothered by travelers, pikey lads, that they were nicking stuff off his boat and taking scrap, and he would go after them and sometimes there were fights. He was hard as nails but he was only one bloke. She said something about a gypsy horse getting loose one time and then his boat got on fire and he moved on, she didn’t know. Sorry its not much man, maybe we’ll catch up some other time? Hope all’s well?

Monday: Grey. Light rain. Second week of walking the pavement but no success. Had an unusual encounter today with a homeless girl. The underpass into the city is normally occupied three times a week by a man who hangs up bedsheets with handwritten messages, invectives against the Pope, God, priests, something about children. He sits mutely all day and then packs it all down and goes home. I’ve never seen anyone stop to talk to him. Today I walked past and out towards the road and there was a young homeless girl, a teenager, sat on the floor cross-legged with a coffee cup in front of her, scrolling a smartphone.

I approached her and struck up a conversation. She had lank blonde hair, shortish, wearing jeans, old converse trainers and a half-zip shell jacket, although she seemed oblivious to the wind. As I’ve noted before in other cases, the posture, movements, direction of gaze and other small features on homeless or begging people immediately tell you whether they are new to this, and feel vulnerable, or if they seem relaxed and unbothered. She didn’t even look up when I approached.

“Hi, do you want me to get you a coffee or something?”. My opening line, a simple invitation.

“Nah, I’ve had one” she nodded to her cup, kept in place by some loose change, “but I’d take a sausage roll thanks?”

I obliged at the nearest Greggs and got her a bottle of coke to go with it. She didn’t eat, but stuffed both into her jacket pockets. Was that going to be her dinner? The wind turned to light spitting of rain.

“not often you see a woman out on the street” I tried to make some conversation. Awkward, an adult male talking to a young girl.

“I’m never going back to that shelter”, she ran a hand through her hair

“which one is that?”

“the big one in town. It’s just an open room space with beds, everyone comes in off their face, fighting and shit”

“that’s awful” I tried to sound sympathetic, inwardly wandering what that experience would be like, a young woman in a dark school hall with drunk strangers, “won’t the council give you a room?”

“they don’t know I’m here, I come down from up north, get away from my stepdad yknow?”. As she spoke she rattled the cup and then slid the coins into her hand and pocketed them. She stood up, letting the wind take the cup into the road. “the council would just make me go back anyway”

What she said started ringing alarm bells in my head, a teenage runaway maybe? She shouldn’t be sleeping outside. Was she lying? Was she looking for money?

“you shouldn’t be sleeping outside though, its dangerous”. She had started walking back through the underpass away from town, I put my hands in my pockets and made to walk alongside her.

“its fine” her voice got louder, “I’ve slept out for years like, it dunt matter, I’ve been jumped before an that. One time some fucking kids set me on fire”

I stopped in my tracks, “wait, what? Set you on fire? Why?”

She shrugged and continued walking, “thought it was funny? I was in my sleeping bag like and then woke up fire like this”, she made a big gesture with her arms, nearly catching a passer-by in the face. She was animated, loud, walking very fast. “they couldve at least pissed on it put it out like. Shit happens tho yknow?”

I needed to go a different route, but I stopped and turned, “I don’t want your number, but please, take mine. If you need anything or want some help, just message me”. She had a wry smile, rain on her face, but she did put my number in her phone. “it’s Beth by the way”, the words were half obscured by the cigarette in her mouth, while her hands searched for a lighter. I produced one and she lit up, the flint and steel popping in the rain. She held it between her fingers, “can I have it?”.

“its all yours”. I walked back to my lodgings. The weather got worse, more heavy rain and some thunder.

Wednesday: breezy morning, cloud then storms in the afternoon. Beth didn't message yesterday, I didn't really expect her to, but part of me thought that not insisting on her number might make her feel comfortable. What is this conceit? That she would recognise my purity of intention and yield to my offer of help with gratitude?

4pm: She has messaged, she wants to meet around the corner. It's pouring with rain but maybe she needs help?

7.30pm: I've returned from our meeting. The rain was relentless, the kind that forms puddles up to your ankles and you stop worrying about how wet you are because you're soaked through. We met at the intersection, she was wearing the same clothes as Mon, she wanted £20 for some food. I didn't trust her not to buy alcohol so I said I'd go with her to pick up some supplies. We walked to the nearest Tesco Express, and she was quite lucid and candid about sleeping out in the rain, creepy guys trying to approach her. £20 was not going to stretch far to cover a few bags of crisps, dairylea dunkers and other simple snack things. I tried to steer her to fresh foods but she laughed and asked me where I'd keep them, same with multibags of things. I ended up paying over £40 to fill her rucksack. She seemed happy but agitated, always moving.

As she stood drenched in the shop doorway about to head outside I couldn't help but offer to find her somewhere to stay.

“Oh yeah? With you is it?” she was sniggering at me.

“No no, no I meant I'd pay for you to get a room?” I said hurriedly

“So you'll know where I am tonight eh, keeping me all for yourself?” she was enjoying teasing me, putting me in my place by instantly highlighting what my intentions could be. I was caught off guard.

“I just meant, can I find you somewhere out of the rain, that's all?”.

Her eyes were still amused, “ok then mister, what's the plan?”

I had no idea where I could take her - “erm, what about a hotel, or a hostel? Somewhere with a room for you without sharing?”

We settled on the YMCA. I suggested that I go to visit the place and ask about the rooms, their condition, but she went straight in and asked to go to sleep somewhere. They agreed to one night. I paid up for her and left, the two receptionists staring daggers as I exited.

11.45pm: Got a text from Beth saying she had left the hostel and was sleeping out tonight. I phoned several times before I got through. She half explained a scenario whereby another resident had asked her for drugs, to which she said she didn't have any. The other woman didn't believe her and tried to barge into her room, then tried to tell the staff that Beth had been dealing in the corridor, at which point she just picked up her bags and walked out. (Note - fear of sleeping rough animates most people to find a way to stay indoors, once you get over that fear, I guess it doesn't matter anymore?) She said she felt safer outside, less trapped, less rules. I tried one last time to reason with her, but she stayed silent and finally said “yeah, but it smelt really fuckin weird in there, like bleach and toast”.

Saturday: Brighter weather, wind but no rain. Worked for the last few days, typed up previous notes. Went out for coffee, to read some papers. Beth messaged me at lunchtime, I hadn't heard from her since wednesday night - she wanted to meet in town. I walked back past the coffee shop from home, she was sat cross-legged on the floor, another small cup by her feet. She was on the phone, same jeans and trainers, a thin faded pink hoodie pulled up half covering her hair. Again her demeanor was almost comically dismissive of everyone around her, when she saw me she stood up, even as someone tried to drop some coins for her.

“Come on I want you to meet someone”. She grabbed my forearm and pulled.

“Oh, that's cool, are you ok though, you've been out for the last few nights?”

“Yeah but my mate Nobby is back now, I'll crash on his sofa tonight. I want you to meet him”

Her impossibly fast walk, a pace that made no sense given her diminutive stature. I was almost running. We walked for about 45 minutes through town, then into some housing areas, then finally past some warehouse units and towards a group of older council flat tower blocks.

“It's a shithole but whatever” said Beth almost to no one as we pushed past some old bike frames and wheelie bins to access the mouldering stairwell. The place hadn’t seen any help for decades - rubbish, greenish puddles, bare concrete with fading paint daubs, the ubiquitous safety glass and emergency exit signs framing the doors between floors.

“Nobby is proper sound, I think you'll like him”. Beth had turned onto a pebble-dashed balcony walkway, exposed to the elements, crossing towards yet more decaying doorways. At the end of a long row of flat doors stood a tall figure leaning over the railings, smoking a roll-up. This was Nobby. As he casually straightened up and turned towards us, he seemed to expand and fill the entire space. He was indeed a very tall, wiry man - wearing oversized combat trousers and boots with a thick padded hooded jacket over a military green t shirt. His face was almost impossible to age - his eyes and white-blonde hair were youthful but his skin looked leathery, and when he smiled he showed only a handful of teeth. In fact his smile was like a frog, wide and gaping, and his eyes crinkled up until they practically disappeared. The almost-geriatric puckering lines around his mouth clashed with his easy relaxed gait. As we stopped still Beth squealed and threw her arms around his neck, forcing him to stoop.

“Fuckin g’off Beth”. He sounded playful, and she laughed in delight, trying to slap his face as he pulled his hood up and wriggled around, “g’off before I fuckin chuck you over the rail y’crazy cow!”.

Eventually he stood up straight again, a broad serene grin over his entire face.

“Yes mate alright yes, alright mate, how's it going? I’m Nobby. Beff said you’re like helping her out and that, fair mate”

I barely had time to open my mouth for a response when he turned and toe-punted the door open, sweeping aside old beer cans before striding inside, ducking slightly. Beth tried to jump on his back and failed. I crossed into the house, which smelt damp and of stale cigarette smoke. I followed them across a floor with no carpet, turning right into the open plan living room and kitchen area. A well worn sofa and coffee table were pointed at a flatscreen TV on the wall, but aside from them there was no furniture. In one corner of the room near a closed room stood a washing machine in pieces, partially taken apart, the curving glass door balanced against the wall. A few tins of cat food had been dropped near the sofa, and some black rubbish bags were heaped around the other side of the arm.

Nobby seated himself like the king of his castle, in the middle of the sofa, legs wide and pulled the coffee table closer. Beth was on her knees, arms crossed over the table, leaning in. Nobby produced a small clear bag of weed, and proceeded to unwrap it in front of her. She bent her head over it and inhaled deeply, twice. Then she got up and busied herself with the kettle and coffee cups. Nobby turned to me, pulling out some large size rolling papers from the pack without looking.

“Beff don’t even smoke it like, she just likes the smell, don’t you Beff!?”. He shouted the last few words, and Beth shouted back over her shoulder “I love it!”. The kettle was beginning to boil. Nobby was pulling out chunks of tobacco and lining them up in the papers on the table. I looked around a bit, then sat down on a camping stool next to the proceedings.

“So, how do you guys know each other?”

Nobby didn’t answer, concentrating on crumbling up the dried mixture, before raising the whole thing to his mouth and licking down the glue strip. He then lit the end and took an enormous inhale. The end of the joint glowed a dull red and crackled. Finally he let out a huge cloud of smoke through his nose and turned to me again, as if suddenly realising I was still there.

“thanks for helping her out brother, she’s had it rough y’know, we all have, but she dont deserve everything thats happened, I appreciate it”

He stretched out his huge hand again and I went to shake it. He put his joint in his mouth then placed the other hand over the top of mine. His hands felt rough.

“really though, its amazing, what you did”

“I don’t feel like I really did anything to be honest, just a few bags of crisps and such”

He was still smiling when he released my hands and turned back to his joint, just as Beth placed a mug of instant coffee down on the surface.

“D’you want one?” she offered, “its not all fancy nice stuff like, just tesco”

“No no, that would be great, milk and sugar if you have it?”

“Got sugar, no milk. You need to get some food in its shocking in here” she half-shouted at Nobby, who seemed to be falling asleep. He took a sip of the black coffee and his eyes flickered back to life.

“Yeah yeah, there’s some stuff there for sandwiches though, I’m proper starvin, you hungry mate?”

“I could eat”

Beth put down a packet of sliced white, a bottle of mayonnaise and some cheap ham. Nobby reached out like a giant playing with kid’s toys, and squeezed half the bottle out onto the bread, tipped some meat on top and pressed another slice down over it all with his palm. He seemed to inhale the whole thing, and then another. Beth motioned for me to make my own, which I did. Nobby seemed to conjure up a can of Carling out of somewhere within or underneath the sofa and cracked it open, a look of satisfaction seeped over him as he sipped first from the can, then the coffee, then the can again, and finally rolled up another joint.

“Top scran, magic”. He spread his arms over the back of the sofa and leant back on the cushion, closing his eyes as he breathed out another huge cloud of smoke.

“So you don’t smoke Beth?”. I broke the silence.

“Not weed, obviously fags n’that but I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink…”

Nobby let out a huge guffaw of a laugh, his frog-like mouth taking over most of his head as he pitched sideways. Beth reached over a smacked him on the thigh.

“Fuck off Nobby, I don’t drink, just like on birthdays and that”

He carried on wheezing and laughing to himself, then leant up and found his coffee.

“Y’ever been in the forces mate?”. I shook my head. “Didn’t think so, I drank so fucking much when I was in Afghan mate, unreal. Rat pack food was so shit we’d just get munted every day”. He stopped to re-light his joint.

“I’m being a cunt to her, she’s never been that bad with drinking like, I’m supposed to be on these pills and that but I can’t not drink and smoke. The doctor always going on at me, gotta eat right, gotta stop smoking. I said to him, mate I have post traumatic disorder, I wake up screaming and shitting the bed every night mate, like, leave me in peace”. Beth was sat cross-legged nursing her coffee, her eyes fixed on him with pity.

“There were two darkies in our section when I was deployed, big lads like, whenever one of em would take a piss they’d be shouting at anyone near em stop trying to look at my dick”, he started laughing again, showing his few teeth, before taking another inhale, “then they’d both run around steaming the PBs bollock naked, fighting about who had the most massive. One time our section went to watch, what’s that fuckin film where the black gets stomped on his teeth on the pavement?”

He clicked his fingers, trying to remember.

“American History X?” I said hesitantly

“That’s the fuckin one!”, his grin seemed to swallow up his eyes, “aw mate, we all packed in the screen, fucking hollering, stomp on that nigger! The two black guys were right at the front proper screaming and cheering, stamp on that fuckin nigger man!”, he rolled back in his seat, clapping and whooping himself. Beth was laughing. They both carried on when they saw my expression, “ahh don’t be like that, its not like that”. He lit up again, almost spitting the cloud out as he chuckled.

“It was good like, good times, everything else was so shit gotta have some laughs together, get fucking mortal. I miss the piss taking y’know. Civvy life is awful mate. I dunno how you do it”

Beth made more coffee and they talked between themselves for a while. Jobcentre, forms to fill in, medication he should be taking, the homeless shelter. His eyes turned dark when she mentioned the shelter, like an angry dad. He drank more cans, smoked more, then went into the room behind the sofa and closed the door.

“Is he ok?”

“Yeah, he’ll sleep until tomorrow night probably. He takes so much stuff, smokes too much”

“What about you? What are you going to do now?”

“Head back into town, see some people about a few things”

“Can I use the bathroom?”

“Mmmhmm”, she had a mouthful of coffee but pointed towards the only other door in the flat. She swallowed, “its in a state though”

I got up and walked across the room, turned the handle and stepped into a tiny bathroom with a corner shower and a sink that almost blocked the door from opening. The toilet bowl was smashed and broken around the rim, someone had attempted to wedge the seat back into the chipped broken remains. Underfoot was crunchy with shards of ceramic. The shower door was also resting on the floor, the hinges unscrewed.

We left the flat together shortly afterwards, walking at a normal pace back into the city centre. Beth seemed quiet, more thoughtful and less agitated. She scuffed her feet on the pavement.

“Y’know, its not normal for a guy from the university to come down here and hang out with the likes of us”

“How do you know I work at a university?”

She laughed and pointed at my neck, “seriously? who else would have these and that bag? C’mon?”

Every time I’d seen her I had been wearing my large headphones, which still straddled my neck like a pair of ear muffs. I also had my leather satchel bag over my shoulder with some books and papers.

“Fair” I muttered, “makes sense”. She laughed again and poked me in the ribs, “don’t be a twat, it’s funny, you hanging out with me and Nobby, and you’re a nice guy”. We walked some more, she kept trying to stand on the top of my foot with each step, a game she found very funny.

“So you’re staying with your friend then, for a while?”

“Hope so”, she swept her hair behind her ear, “he’s got issues and that but he’s never hurt me or anything, he’s a good guy, lets me sleep in his bed while he watches TV all night. Should be sorted there for a bit anyway”

“What about after that? What’s your plan?”

She shrugged and put her hands in her pockets, “just carry on, maybe my stepdad’ll get banged up this time and I’ll go home, I dunno. Have to see”

We parted ways in town, I offered her more money for food but she refused this time.

Wednesday: light sunshine and cloud. Just a few messages from Beth over the last few days. Simple one-liners: “sleeping in flat”, “yes”, “no”. Around 2am today she texted “on the bus meet me there?”. I responded but there was no reply.