Monstrosity

“ But I am sure of this—that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly analysed and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become. ”

“ Again, monstrosities “may be produced artificially by injuries done to the fœtus or to the ovum. Nature has no means of remedying such an injury. The impulse once given is, on the contrary, followed in a false direction, and in due time a monstrosity is produced. The purely mechanical process, in such cases, can be easily recognized. Can the idea of a conscious power acting with design be reconciled with such a result? And is it possible that the hand of the Creator should thus be bound by the arbitrary act of man?” ”

“ A knowledge of the origin of many other domesticated plants now lost, may be eventually recovered by similar methods to those described above. It has been shown of the grain of the cultivated wheat, that like the useful portions of many other plants, it is a monstrosity, but a most useful and important one. To prove that it is really a monstrosity, we have only to consider that the seed is more than ten times its natural bulk, while the husk is reduced to proportions far inferior to those of the typical plant. ”

“ Then, as truth stared at her and she at truth, so monstrous was its aspect that, with one shuddering intake of the breath, life withered within her, light vanished without.
When ultimately, without knowing who she was; when, conscious only of an objective self struggling in darkness with the intangible and the void, when then life and light returned, she was on the floor, the monster peering at her. ”

“ Rather must that monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in unbounded space throughout the eons past and to come–and those eldritch symbols be vile sentient ikons endowed with a morbid life of their own and ready to wrest themselves from the parchment for the reader's destruction. To the meaning of that monster and of those hieroglyphs I had no clue, but I knew that both had been traced with a hellish precision and for no namable purpose. As I studied the leering characters, their kinship to the symbols on that ominous lock in the cellar became more and more manifest. ”

“ Some shape of horror, some monster born of the terror I was in; a diseased imagining of my mental, moral, physical paralysis; a creature, neither human nor inhuman, but wholly horrible, which should come stealing, resistless, in, to force me, in my agony, to welcome death. ”

“ Merciful God! it makes the blood boil to think that this is no over-drawn picture—that there is no exaggeration in these details; but that there really exist monsters in a human form—wearing often, too, the female shape—who make the infancy and early youth of their offspring one continued hell—one perpetual scene of blows, curses, and cruelties! Oh! for how many of our fellow-creatures have we to blush:—how many demons are there who have assumed our mortal appearance, who dwell amongst us, and who set us examples the most hideous—the most appalling! ”

“ And the ancient demon, the spirit of prehistoric confusion, of hoary chaos, rejoiced in the destruction of things, while the wild eyes of the madman reflected horror, like the horror of the death agonies of some monster. ”

“ Buts at the boulder-ribbed bottom, staggers and rears at the shock;
Leaps like a terrified monster, writhes in its fury and pain;
Then with the crash of a demon springs to the onset again.
Dared we that ravening terror; heard we its din in our ears ”

“ And could the darkness be so concentrated as the light is, what an incomprehensible and dreadfull monster (such as Death, the Devil, and the infernal Pit are) should we see, which God in mercy prevent. ”

“ Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable? ”

“ It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unheard of, without resemblance to any conglomeration ever seen before, whether of men or things; a pell-mell so strange, so violent and incongruous, that it exceeded the most troubled dreams of nightmare. All the ugliness of the eternal islet, all the shameful vices, all the stupors; all the spasms and all the deformities of the baptized flesh, all the tears of repentance, all the mockery of the debauchee; insanity, cupidity, cunning, lewdness, stupidity, fear, mortal fatigue, stony indifference, silent despair ”

“ Or, it may be, with demons, who impair The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey In melancholy bosoms, such as were Of moody texture from their earliest day, And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay, Deeming themselves predestined to a doom Which is not of the pangs that pass away; Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb, The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom. ”

“ CONSIDER, that there is not upon earth, nor even in hell itself, a monster more hideous, more filthy and abominable than mortal sin: a monster that is the first-born of the devil; or to speak more properly, is the parent both of the devil and hell. ”

“ What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,—though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,—may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves. ”

“ Balancing hell, on the left hand of the spectator, is brute earth, the grave, the forming and the swallowing clay, out of which souls, not yet acquitted or condemned, emerge with difficulty, in varied forms of skeletons or corpses, slowly thawing into life eternal. ”

“ Visions of eternal torment rose in her mind, a tangible searing hell alive with flame and devils, a sea of liquid fire, an ocean of boiling pitch, Satan commanding in the midst, and a myriad of fiends working his tormenting will. ”

“ Some readers may think of it as a frantic revel of grim skeletons, or perhaps—like me in my boyish musings—imagine nameless shapes with Death and Hell gleaming in their faces, each clasping a mortal beguiled to its embrace, all flitting and floating round and round to unearthly music, and gradually receding through vast mysterious gloom till they are lost in its horrible obscurity. ”

“ In the middle ages they were treated in the fullest spirit of superstition, and many relics from such a point of view still survive. The human monstrosities were regarded as having been engendered in women by the devil who had commerce with them either in his own form or in the guise of some animal. ”

“ These devils are life-size, and so are the nude male and female figures suffering torments. The mouth of hell is represented as a yawning beast, vomiting fire and smoke, into the jaws of which the nude wicked are tumbling. ”

“ A. Pride, Fulness of Bread, and abundance of Idleness, and I may say earthly Mindedness or Covetousness, that mighty, mighty, almost Almighty Monster, the chiefest of the Seven Devils and Supream Ruler, Head and Governor in Hell, Babylon and Bottomless Pit. The other Six Devils have Slain their Thousands and Tens of Thousands; but this cursed, ugly, hateful, damned piece of Deformity, and Mother Midwife, and Nurse of Enormities, has destroyed more Millions of Thousands, as it is thought and hath been thought by discerning and observing Men. ”

“ One can hardly imagine the frightful state of the human mind during these long centuries of darkness and superstition. To them, these things were awful and frightful realities. Hovering above them in the air, in their houses, in the bosoms of friends, in their very bodies, in all the darkness of night, everywhere, around, above and below, were innumerable hosts of unclean and malignant devils. ”

“ The monstrous blasphemy of creeds
Which represent an angry God,
Who tempts man sorely through his needs,
And meets his failings with a rod—
Eternal wrath, through blood appeased,
The curse of God, salvation’s plan,
Are nightmare visions, which have seized
The slumbering consciousness of man. ”

“ Monsters are mysteries in their concrete form. Portions of shade issue from the mass, and something within detaches itself, rolls, floats, condenses, borrows elements from the ambient darkness, becomes subject to unknown polarisations, assumes a kind of life, furnishes itself with some unimagined form from the obscurity, and with some terrible spirit from the miasma, and wanders ghostlike among living things. ”

“ Their angels were grotesque, not from want of imagination, but from want of models of form and proportion; their men are full of all kinds of expression, with their heads too large and their limbs too short; but their attitudes are lively, their faces grotesquely keen. ”

“ Hast never heard tell of foul monsters that wed with the daughters of men, and come to them only in the night season, when the darkness can hide their deformity? They cast a spell about their victims, and by their wiles and enchantments they make all things about them seem fair. ”

“ Cursed—always blood—and witchery—you cannot get rid of it—the thought of Hell—and the faces of your dead who died foully—your disfigured dead—and your child slaying your child—both damned—and singeing in Hell! ”

“ Finds monstrous forms no human eye should see;
Hints of those blasphemies whose countenance
Spreads death and madness through infinity.
What limner he who braves black gulfs alone
And lives to wake their alien horrors known? ”

“ As if counting and hesitating what course to pursue for their relief, he paces up and down the grotesque mass, touching one, and gazing upon the haggard features of another, who looks up to see what it is that disturbs her. ”

“ The maddened damned, crowded together like a herd of sheep, demons grabbing shrieking souls who hide their eyes and ears with horror, the falling of bodies which come down like masses of lead, and in the extreme right-hand corner Minos, evil and undisturbed. ”

“ Stony forms, monstrous, enigmatic, reared like symbolic tokens of defeated gods, or of the worn-out evil passions that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment. ”

“ She has come from the burial-place, walking forth a monster, as if the spirit of evil had corrupted the carcass of her departed humanity; noxious and noisome an object of abhorrence and dismay to all who are not leagued with her in iniquity."—Report of the Rev. ”

“ The inferior demons—the rabble rout of Hell, amused themselves by drilling holes in the skulls of some of their victims, and inserting a spoonful of fused metal—the extract of a heap of books which were seething in a bulky black cauldron, a hell-broth of heretical ideas. ”

“ You were startled by the monster which man would be were your own theory possible; and in order to reconcile the contradictions in this very monster, you account for knowledge, and for powers that mind without soul could not have attained, by ascribing to this prodigy broken memories of a former existence, demon attributes from former proficiency in evil magic. ”

“ Grotesque after grotesque came into the light: the man with the head of a wolf, the woman with a bat spreading its wings across her eyes, the demons, the damned, the beatified exulting over the damned, fox and goat and ape crossed with man and woman. ”

“ For the truth shall be spoken; since of old these evil demons, effecting apparitions of themselves, both defiled women and corrupted boys, and showed such fearful sights to men, that those who did not use their reason in judging of the actions that were done, were struck with terror; and being carried away by fear, and not knowing that these were demons, they called them gods, and gave to each the name which each of the demons chose for himself. ”

“ But there is very little of gentleness or compassion, in view of the protracted torments of the sufferers. We stand aghast in view of the miseries and monsters, furies and gorgons, snakes and fires, demons, filth, lakes of pitch, pools of blood, plains of scorching sands, circles, and chimeras dire,—a physical hell of utter and unspeakable dreariness and despair, awfully and powerfully described, but still repulsive. ”

“ How could creatures shaped like men prove themselves such fiends, such hideous devils of malignity? It sickened me with horror, and I shrank from those dead bodies as if each had been a grim and threatening ghost. ”

“ The monster that poisoned six husbands, and sits meditating the death of a seventh, is now dressed in the latest Paris finery, and is a saint. The old miser, who laid up such hoards while he starved himself to death, is here placed among saints ”

“ The medieval craftsman could invent demons—veritable monsters who breathed and struggled in wood and stone, and looked good-naturedly diabolical with leering, wicked eyes, yet hardly dreadful—monsters that appeared quite possible in some other and most undesirable world—these were pure creations, but his angels were simply winged humanity, neither original nor interesting, for their even placid features, if without guile, were equally without character. ”

“ Yes, a thousand years, and a thousand in horror, if it be most for the honor of God, the torment of my body being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment of my mind being vastly greater. ”

“ Thus there is a Divine beauty, and a terribleness or sublimity coequal with it in rank, which are the subjects of the highest art; and there is an inferior or ornamental beauty, and an inferior terribleness coequal with it in rank, which are the subjects of grotesque art. And the state of mind in which the terrible form of the grotesque is developed, is that which in some irregular manner, dwells upon certain conditions of terribleness, into the complete depth of which it does not enter for the time. ”

“ And what greater madness can there be than for the flesh, being but dust and ashes, a filthy dunghill, a swarm of worms and rottenness itself, to presume to injure the supreme Spirit of immense majesty, before whom the powers and all the other blessed spirits tremble? ”