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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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