The celestial canvas of human dread: why the night sky is populated by monsters

“ In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. ”

“ Through its vault the seven planets keep their marches:
Rising, shining, setting, with no change or turning;
Never once forgetting—wasted not with burning.
On and on, unceasing, move the constellations,
Lessening nor increasing since the birth of nations:
Sun and moon unfailing keep their times and seasons,—
But man, unavailing, pleads to thee for reasons. ”

“ That we may more perfectly realize this strange revolution of ideas, we must throw ourselves as far as possible into the feeling and spirit of our ancestors, when, without the knowledge we now possess, they contemplated, as they could not fail to do, the marvellous and awe-inspiring phenomena of the heavens by night. To them, for many an age, the sun and moon and stars, with all the planets, seemed absolutely to rise, to shine, and to set; the constellations to burst out by night in the east, and travel slowly and in silence to the west ”

“ Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men,
And heaven with slaves!
Thou taintest all thou lookest upon!—the stars,
Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet,
Were gods to the distempered playfulness
Of thy untutored infancy: the trees,
The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea,
All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly,
Were gods: the sun had homage, and the moon
Her worshipper. Then thou becamest, a boy,
More daring in thy frenzies: every shape,
Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild,
Which, from sensation's relics, fancy culls ”

“ Frequently, as they sat together on the terrace at night, contemplating that assembly of glorious stars, whose beauty first misled mankind into idolatry, she would explain to the young listener by what gradations it was that the worship, thus transferred from the Creator to the creature, sunk lower and lower in the scale of being, till man, at length, presumed to deify man, and by the most monstrous of inversions, heaven was made the mirror of earth, reflecting all its most earthly features. ”

“ For the creeping things on the earth, and those that swim in the waters, and the quadrupeds on the mountains, with which they lived when expelled from heaven,—these they dignified with celestial honour, in order that they might themselves be thought to remain in heaven, and, by placing the constellations there, might make to appear rational the irrational course of life on earth. ”

“ The star marked Pi (π) is an interesting double, which can be separated by a good eye without artificial aid, and which, with an opera-glass, presents a fine appearance.
And now we come to our third little map, representing the constellations Cetus, Pisces, Aries, and the Triangles. In consulting it the observer is supposed to face the southeast. Cetus is a very large constellation, and from the peculiar conformation of its principal stars it can be readily recognized. The head is to the east, the star Alpha (α) , called Menkar, being in the nose of this imaginary monster of the sky-depths. ”

“ An immeasurable monster, the sea rushes with its mighty waves upon the rock-bound coast, sends clouds of spray high into the air, telling in tones of thunder of the majesty and strength of the ocean that refuses to be fettered or conciliated.
You may cultivate the arts and sciences on the land, you may bring the earth into subjection, and make it yield up its treasures; the sea has bounded in freedom since the beginning, and it will not be conquered, will not be tamed. The mind of man has learned to command all things on the land, knows the secrets of the depths of the earth, and uses them ”

“ The unsheltered sea heaves and heaves and blanches into foam. It sets me thinking of some tied-up monster straining at its bonds, in front of whose gaping jaws we build our homes on the shore and watch it lashing its tail. What immense strength, with waves swelling like the muscles of a giant!
From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land and water: the dry earth slowly and silently adding to its domain and spreading a broader and broader lap for its children; the ocean receding step by step, heaving and sobbing and beating its breast in despair. ”

“ Therefore 'twas Men would take refuge in consigning all Unto divinities, and in feigning all Was guided by their nod. And in the sky They set the seats and vaults of gods, because Across the sky night and the moon are seen To roll along—moon, day, and night, and night's Old awesome constellations evermore, And the night-wandering fireballs of the sky, And flying flames, clouds, and the sun, the rains, Snow and the winds, the lightnings, and the hail, And the swift rumblings, and the hollow roar Of mighty menacings forevermore. ”

“ Now the grandest, brightest, and largest of all the constellations is named Orion. It is supposed to represent a giant, with a girdle and a sword, and is rather more like what is fancied than most of the constellations are. You are now going to read the story of Orion, and how he came to be placed among the stars. You may notice, by the way, that the planets, the sun, and the moon are named after gods and goddesses; the fixed stars after mortals who were raised to the skies. ”

“ If they are stars, the sands of the seashore are as inferior in numbers as the surface of earth is inferior in dimensions to the arch of heaven. But if these faint dots and stipplings are not single stars!—if they are star-clouds—galaxies—firmaments, like our Milky Way—our infinity is multiplied by millions upon millions! Imagination pants, reason grows dizzy, arithmetic fails to fathom, and human eyes fear to look into the abyss. No wonder that this profound astronomer, when a glimpse of infinity flashed on his eye, retired from the telescope, trembling in every nerve, afraid to behold. ”

“ From first to last, the processes of phantasy have been at work; but where the savage could see phantasms, the civilized man has come to amuse himself with fancies.
316 CHAPTER IX.
MYTHOLOGY (continued) . Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, preservation of original sense and significant names—Nature-myths of upper savage races compared with related forms among barbaric and civilized nations—Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents—Sun and Moon: Eclipse and Sunset, as Hero or Maiden swallowed by Monster; Rising of Sun from Sea and Descent to Under-World ”

“ To look on all things with a master eye And mind at peace. For when we gaze aloft Upon the skiey vaults of yon great world And ether, fixed high o'er twinkling stars, And into our thought there come the journeyings Of sun and moon, O then into our breasts, O'erburdened already with their other ills, Begins forthwith to rear its sudden head One more misgiving: lest o'er us, percase, It be the gods' immeasurable power That rolls, with varied motion, round and round The far white constellations. ”

“ The wonderful power of life which these animals possess renders them dreadful; their very track in the mud or sand, which we have sometimes found eleven inches long and seven and one-fourth wide, exclusive of the talons, is alarming; and we had rather encounter two Indians than meet a single brown bear. There is no chance of killing them by a single shot unless the ball goes through the brain, and this is very difficult on account of two large muscles which cover the side of the forehead and the sharp projection of the centre of the frontal bone, which is also thick. ”

“ Those important events which give reputation to a warrior, and entitle him to a new name, are: killing a white (or grizzly) bear, stealing individually the horses of the enemy, leading a party who happen to be successful either in plundering horses or destroying the enemy, and lastly, scalping a warrior. These acts seem of nearly equal dignity, but the last, that of taking an enemy’s scalp, is an honor quite independent of the act of vanquishing him. To kill your adversary is of no importance unless the scalp is brought from the field of battle ”

“ It is a terrible and dangerous thing to go on pondering for long solitary hours on any one subject of deep interest. It is dangerous even in the open air, under the broad, ever-varying sky, with the birds upon the bough, and the breeze amongst the trees, and a thousand objects in bright nature to breathe harmonies to the human heart. It is dangerous in the midst of crowds and gay scenes of active life so to shut the spirit up with one solitary idea, which, like the fabled dragon's egg, is hatched into a monster by long looking at it. ”

“ There was something more grand in the contemplation than in the actual appearance of the scene, when we reflected where we were—on the confines of those two great seas which encompass the earth, and which wash the shores of nations so different in character—the one having attained the height of civilisation, the other being still sunk in the depths of a barbarism too terrible almost for contemplation, as I afterwards had good reason to know. Then there was that strange, vast, dreamy swell—the breathings, as it were, of some giant monster. ”

“ But there is one monster, very treacherous and dangerous. In Latin its name is Cetus. It is a bad neighbor for sailors. The upper part of its back looks like sand, and when it rises from the sea, the mariners think it is an island. Deceived by its size they sail toward it for refuge, when the storm comes upon them. They cast anchor, disembark upon the back of the whale, cook their food, build a fire, and in order to fasten their boat they drive great stakes into what seems to them to be sand. ”

“ By heaven, he echoes me, As if there were some monster in his thought Too hideous to be shown. ”

“ You with ourselves have looked upon a very ugly thing since we last met in the pages of The Continental. A Briareus-handed, multiple-formed, Proteus-faced monster, of huge dimensions, wickedly scheming brain, myriad fanged, and every fang imbued with virulent copperhead poison, stormed through our streets in the light of day and in the gloom of night, during many ghastly hours, knowing no law save its own wicked will, while Treason, Cruelty, House-breaking and House-burning, Robbery, Assassination, Torture, Hanging, Murder, stalked on in its wild train of horror. ”

“ It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. ”

“ Men, women, and children running pell-mell, and yelling. They say one old woman broke her leg, or something, shinning over a fence. Then he went right out on the main street, and an Irish girl threw a fit, and there was a sort of a riot. He began to run, and a big crowd chased him, firing rocks. ”

“ Hannigan cast a piercing glance over the group, stared with a bitter face at the Trescott house, as if this new and handsome edifice was insulting her, and then followed her son.
There was wavering in the party. An inroad by one mother always caused them to carefully sweep the horizon to see if there were more coming. "This is my yard," said Jimmie, proudly. "We don't have to go home."
The monster on the box had turned its black crêpe countenance toward the sky, and was waving its arms in time to a religious chant. "Look at him now," cried a little boy. ”

“ The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of every thing into every other thing. Facts which had never before left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language. ”

“ In the poetic stage of thought we may see that ideal conceptions once shaped in the mind must have assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vividness with which, as a child, I fancied I might look through a great telescope, and see the constellations stand round the sky, red, green, and yellow, as I had just been shown them on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic fancy may be brought even more nearly home to our minds by comparing it with the morbid subjectivity of illness. ”

“ Like Zeus, and Indra, and the Australian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself under the shape of a beast, a roebuck, and approached his own daughter, who had assumed the form of a doe. The gods, in anger at the awful crime, made a monster to punish Pragapati. The monster sent an arrow through the god’s body; he sprang into heaven, and, like the Arcadian bear, this Aryan roebuck became a constellation. He is among the stars of Orion, and his punisher, also now a star, is, like the Greek Orion, a hunter. ”

“ If we allow the four stars of the “square of Pegasus” still to mark the body of the horse, and [250] think of the upper lines of faint stars as marking its neck and head and of the lower ones as marking its fore legs and hoofs, the figure exactly reversed will still fit within the limiting lines of the constellation, with the satisfactory result that the winged steed, not miserably floundering on its back but upright and alert, will be seen in our mental vision night after night pursuing its course from east to west across the heavens. ”

“ But now turning our thoughts to the constellation Pegasus, a difficulty confronts us at every date from 6000 B.C. downwards even to this present A.D. 1903: Pegasus as depicted on the globe has held and still holds a reversed position in the heavens. The very fact that for all the other ancient constellations which represent living beings, it has been possible to find some season and some date at which they could have been observed upright in the sky, makes it a more imperative need to seek for some explanation of the anomalous treatment meted out by astronomers of old to the winged steed. ”

“ How sweet the smell of the warm earth, after the stench of the looted town! How calm and lovely the stars.
Stewart, staring up at them, felt a great serenity descend upon him. After all, what did it matter to the universe—this trivial disturbance upon this tiny planet? Men might kill each other, nations disappear; but the stars would swing on in their courses, the constellations go their predestined ways. Of what significance was man in the great scheme of things? ”

“ Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under the clouds, under that vast diffusion of force, under that mysterious firmament of wings, of stars, of gulfs, having around him and beneath him the ocean, above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, lay down upon the rock, his face towards the stars, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible depths, he cried aloud, “Have mercy.” ”

“ There, the planets cast a faint shadow, as the young moon does with us: and these planets, and the constellations of the sky, as they silently glide over from peak to peak of these rocky passes, are imaged on the waters so clearly that the fisherman, as he unmoors his boat for his evening task, feels as if he were about to shoot forth his vessel into another heaven, and to cleave his way among the stars. ”

“ The infinite spaces of the constellations seem to intervene between the earth and the presence-chamber of God; its doors are guarded against prayer and faith by inexorable laws; the awful Being, who dwells within, has become “unmeasured in height, undistinguished into form.” ”