The Slayer

for his bravery and his resolve. And Raiko had in his service a companion named Watanabe note Suna, who was also courageous, and he was a formidable fighter in his own right, and he wielded a bow and arrow and wore a suit of armor. And one day Raiko and Suna were traveling on the road to Kita Yama when they saw a skull floating in the sky, flying in

and out of the clouds above. Now Rico and Sooner were curious how such a thing could be, so they decided let's follow the skull, and they followed the flying skull all the way to Cagaroka, where it led them to a crumbling old mansion from ancient times. The decaying manner was surrounded by wild overgrown weeds and an old gate choked by vines. So Rico ordered Souna to wait for him outside, and Rico entered the mansion alone. As he approached the threshold, he started to become aware of

a presence. There was an old woman lurking behind the door, and he called out, who are you? She replied, I've been living here for a good long time. I am two hundred and ninety years old and have served in their turn nine lords of this house. And then Rico saw her. She was a horrible sight to behold before the warrior's eyes. The old woman grasped her own eyelids with a tool, and she flipped her eyelids back over

the top of her head like a hat. Then she pushed her mouth open with a large hairpin, and her lips became gigantic, and she took her lips and she tied them around her own neck, and her breasts began to sag down into her lap like rags. The old woman began to speak again. She said, spring comes and autumn goes, but my sad thoughts remained the same. Years begin an end, but my misery is eternal. This place is a demon's den. No human dares passed through our gates.

My sorrowful youth has gone, but my old self sadly remains. I lament that bush warbler's depart, and swallows on the beam fly off. In her sorrow, the wretched old woman begged Rycho to kill her with his sword and put

her out of her misery. Rycho could see that the old woman was out of her mind, so he left her alone, and he instead decided to go into the house to see what had happened and solve the mystery of the flying skull and what was afflicting this woman and making her think she lived in a demon's den. So he went inside the house, and outside the sky

dark and fierce, and winds began to blow. But Sooner waited loyally for his master, And inside the house, Rycho began to hear the sounds of footsteps echoing like the beat of a hand drum. Then he saw a coterie of spirits and goblins coming into the room with him, but the creatures didn't attack. Instead, they only danced around and then laughed at his fear before passing out through

another door. In their place, there came into the room a tiny woman, no more than three ft tall, but with a gigantic face more than two thirds of her whole height. And she had thick, heavy eyebrows, and when she opened her mouth, Rycho could see that her front teeth were black. She wore a purple hat and a red hakama with nothing underneath. Her arms were so thin they were like strings, and her skin was as pale as snowfall. Then that woman disappeared, and Raiko realized dawn

was nearing. Almost as soon as the strange woman had left, another woman came into the room. This time the woman was graceful and calm, and so beautiful that Rycho could barely believe his eyes. He thought that this woman must be the true mistress of the old house, finally coming out to welcome him, and her eyes shone as bright as the reflection of a bonfire and black lacquer. But when Rico was distracted by the woman's beauty, she got

the better of him. She lifted up the hymn of her hakama, and from underneath it she heaved at the swordsman some kind of material what looks like balls of white cloud, And the balls of white cloud blinded him. They got in his eyes, and in a rage, Raiko drew his sword and he slashed at the woman, but she evaporated into thin air. He slashed so mightily that his sword passed through the floorboards and cut a foundation stone, and the tip of the blade broke off where the

woman had been. There was now nothing but a pool of white blood on the floor, with a trail of more white blood leading off somewhere else. Raiko and soon had joined together again, and they followed the trail of white blood out of the house and up into the mountains, and finally to the mouth of a dark cave, out

of which white blood was flowing like a river. As soon as suggestion, the two of them made an effigy of ratan and vines in the shape of a man, and they carried it before them as they entered the cave. Inside the cave, they found a gigantic monster in the form of a mountain spider, but nearly two hundred feet tall, and it wore a brocade on its head. Its eyes were as bright as the sun and the moon. The giant monster bellowed, what has happened to my body? It

is so painful. Then the monster hurled something at them in the dark, and the projectile hit the effigy that they carried in front of them and knocked it down. Rico and Sona examined the object that the monster had shot at them, and they discovered that it was the broken tip of Rico's sword. Together, they took hold of the creature and they began to drag it out of the cave. And the monster put up a good fight, and it was a terrible monster. Indeed, it's strong enough

to move boulders with its legs. So Rico said a prayer to the sun goddess Amaterasu and asked her for aid with the fight. Rico and Sooner pulled and pulled, and eventually the monster collapsed and fell belly up on the earth without hesitation. Rico drew his sword and chopped off the monster's head. Sooner ran to slash open the monster's belly, but found when he got there that it

had already been opened by a deep gash. This was the wound Richo had given it inside the house when it was in the form of the woman, and this proved that the giant spider truly was the beautiful woman that he had seen from the gash in the giant spider's belly, one thousand, nine hundred and ninety heads tumbled out onto the ground. The warriors cut open another part of the spider's body, and many smaller spider monsters swarmed out, each about the size of a seven or eight year

old child. When the warriors looked further in the stomach of the spider beast, they found twenty human skulls. Knowing it had to be done, Riicho and soon a dug a grave in the ground and buried the twenty skulls, and then burned the giant spider's din. When the Emperor heard what Richo and Suna had done in eliminating this heinous monster that had been plaguing the country, he gave them promotions and appointed them governors of their own provinces. And this is the story of Minamoto no Riiko and

the Giant Spider. That is a fabulous story. I love it, just like the the the layers of the adventure and then just the the revelations about the horrific monstrosity that they're faced with. I like how it's weird and rambling, like it takes a long time to get to the final form of the monster. You don't really know where it's gonna go. It takes you to a haunted house first.

Uh something about that feels both unusual and intuitive. Um So that they start off seeing the skull, and I have to assume that I guess the skull was some form of the monster. I don't know. But but also I like how in a lot of the monster slayer stories you come across, there's a more specific reason that the that the hero must undergo the quest to slay

the monster. They have to rescue a princess or something. Here, this time, they're just detectives investigating something weird that they saw, and it eventually leads them into the monster's cave to kill it, which also ultimately kind of makes you feel bad for the monster, Like it didn't even kidnap anybody they knew, They just like made their way to it. Yeah,

it was. It seems to be entirely recreational on their part. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it kind of makes them like some kind of roving police force almost in a way. Or maybe they just needed the experience points. I mean, that's that's true. Uh So, this giant spider story comes from an early fourteenth century Japanese picture scroll called the Sushi Gumo Soshi, and the version of the story that I read is as translated by the scholar Dr. Nariko t writer who we've referenced on the show before. I

think in our episode about cuteness and strocity. That make sense? Uh yeah, so that so my version of the story I just told was based on her translation of this fourteenth century scroll. And this is not the only legend about giant spiders in early modern Japan. The sushi gumo or earth spider, was a common monster found in no

plays and in supernatural narratives in the following centuries. But there are also other spider monsters like the ushi one, which was sometimes described as like a giant spider with the head of a bull, and it attacks fishermen at

the water's edge. And then there's also the juro gumo, which is the literally the prostitute spider, and it's another sort of ghost like creature that appears in the literature of the Ato period, shape shifting like the sushi gumo between the forms of a beautiful woman and a voracious arachneid,

luring men to their deaths. So a classic trope of of monsters appearing as is desirable humans or even non human entities, of course, and you see that too in in the Sushi Gumo in the story where the spider monster appears as this beautiful woman in the house and distracts the swordsman with her beauty just long enough to throw clouds of white matter in his eyes. Who knows what that's supposed to be. I don't know if I guess it's the silk, right, Oh? Maybe? Yeah, I don't

know it's supposed to be said. I mean, it's it's described as literally like clouds, so it's hard to know exactly what it's referring to. It seems to be some kind of magical substance. But yeah, So we're doing something a little bit different today than we usually do in our October episodes where we love to focus on monsters. Today we wanted to take a look at the immortal

enemy of our beloved monsters, the monster Slayer. Yeah, it's it's often an essential part of the story and sometimes the thing sometimes they define like define each other, right, Sometimes the monster is really the thing that defines the hero. Other times there's not a lot to say about the monster itself, except that a certain hero of note gave it a good slaying at some point. Yeah, and it's almost as deep and as old as the monster mythology itself. Right.

The oldest monster stories you can find when you go back in time very often are monster slayers stories. There's a monster, and there's a hero who must venture out, often alone or with a faithful companion, uh, to face the monster and destroy it. And the monster slayer archetype is actually classed as a particular type of like you know, myth archetype, the the princess and the dragon type story

which appears all over the world in different cultures. Uh. And and you know, and that that's the very broad take. You know, that there's like a princess who's being held captive or being threatened by some kind of monster, and a hero must venture out with courage and face the monster, though of course clearly not all the monsters in these

types of stories are dragons. And then there's just the bigger myth architecture of whether or not there's a princess, there's very often a slayer who must face down the beast. And and we're gonna, we're gonna explore some different versions of this where the beast has you know, varying degrees of symbolic uh power. I guess you would say uh in other times less so uh. Again, it often comes down to like why is why? Why is this hero killing this monster? That's often the question, like what is

gained by this story? Uh? And in doing that you have to look at what the monster represents, what the hero represents. And then there are certain complexities that seemed to come along just as storytelling evolves. Yeah. So, another one I wanted to focus on, to go even much deeper into history is the story of mar Duke the

Monster Slayer. Now mar Duke, of course, is an ancient Near Eastern god uh, and I want to I want to focus on the story of mar Duke the Monster Slayer as told from the Enema a Leash the ancient Babylonian Epic of Creation, which of course is a great story we've explored on the podcast before and I'm excited to explore it again. So the general story, Robert, you're remember the outlines. You've got the primordial creators in the Babylonian epic, right, You've got Tiamat and Opsu, which represents

saltwater and freshwater respectively. They're these gods and also kind of monster creatures. They're sort of dragon gods that are also saltwater and freshwater, and they and they embody a lot of natural might, a lot of are also potentially chaotic might, right, yeah, yeah. They represent the sort of chaos before the creation of the order of the world today. And what they do is uh the sweetwater in the saltwater.

Together they create a race of gods, but end up finding those gods they've created unpleasant and loud, and eventually, um the gods turn on their creators and they slay Opsu, the sort of freshwater deity, and Tiamat, the saltwater deity. She is enraged, and she tries to make revenge on the gods for slaying Opsu, attacking them in the form of a giant sea monster or a salt water dragon and making a team of evil monsters to do wickedness

on her behalf and the gods. Of course, because of her power, they're too afraid to go out and fight Tiamat themselves, but eventually they convinced the storm god mar Duke to go out himself and fight her on their behalf. So in exchange for risking his life in this fight, mar Duke's what's in it for Marduke? Right? Mar Duke demands that the gods make him their king, so he that that's the deal. Right, I'll go out and slay the monster if you guys make me the boss, which

sounds like a good deal. You need a king, you want one that's going to actually slay your monsters, right. So mar Duke is armed with special weapons imbued with some kind of storm power, a bow and arrow, a mace and net, and then there are these powers of the winds that he commands, including the winds of the cardinal directions north, southeast and west, but also these other kinds of wind magic, Like there's one wind weapon he

has just called the Evil Wind. And I guess we're supposed to imagine just some sort of like cosmic fart here um. The fart jokes do kind of present themselves at this point. So from here, I think I will just read some lines from the enemy Alish has the as translated by E. A. Spicer, Robert, would you like to read with me? Of course? Then the Lord raised up the floodstorm, his mighty weapon he mounted the storm chariot,

irresistible and terrifying. He harnessed and yoked it to a team of four, the Killer, the Relentless, the trampler, the swift sharp, where their poison bearing teeth they were versed in ravage, skilled, and destruction. On his right he posted the smider, fearsome in battle. On the left, the combat which repels all the zealous. His cloak was an armor of terror. His head was turbaned with his fearsome halo. The lord went forth and followed his course. He set

his face towards the raging Tiamat. He held a spell between his lips. A plant to put out poison was grasp in his hand. And then we'll skip a bit. Marduk approaches Uh and Tiamat's consort, Kingu. This monster Kingu and her allied gods and monsters become fearful, and then Tiamat taunts Marduk, and then Marduke gives a speech rebuking Tiamat and challenging her to single combat. And then we'll pick up with the lines again. When Tiamat heard this,

she was like one possessed. She took leave of her senses in fury, Tiamat cried aloud to the roots of her legs, shook both together. She recites a charm, keeps casting her spell while the gods of battle sharpen their weapons. Tiamat and Marduk, wisest of God's, then joined battle. They strove in single combat. Locked in conflict, the lord spread out his net to unfold her. He let loose in her face the evil wind, which followed behind. When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him, he drove in the

evil wind, and she could not close her lips. As the fierce winds encumbered her belly. Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open. He released an arrow. It tore her belly, It cut through her inside, splitting her heart. Having subdued her, he blotted out her life. He threw down her carcass and stood upon it. Oh, you gotta stand on it. That's that's just uh, that's

absolutely necessary. Well, we've hit on this before, like the they see that trope in both the Western and Eastern art with a demon or devil or monster trampled beneath the feet or sat upon as if it were thrown. You know, it's still a thing when you see. I mean, I almost hate to bring this up because it makes me mad whenever I see it. But like those like Safari hunting pictures where people like shoot a lion or something like that, and then they're like standing there with

their foot on it. Yes, I am not crazy about that either, but they put their foot on it. This is still a thing. It's like you and now Earth. It's it's like it's instinctive. Almost. I put my foot on this thing to show I have beaten it. And then, of course, the next thing in this story, because it becomes of course, the epic of creation is that mar Duke makes the heavens and the earth out of Tiamat's

dead body. Ah. This is another thing we see time and time again in different uh myths, the idea of some primordial being being overcome and then their body being repurposed in creation. Yeah, it is. It's an interesting repeating theme. And I don't know, I wonder what that says, Like, why do we have the the inherent suspicion that the ground on which we walk was once a living being? We should come back and doing a whole episode on

dead gods at some point. Oh, absolutely, now here's another thing I was thinking about, which is that in most of these pre modern stories, the monster slayers always a dude. It's always male. Not always. I want to get to a counter example that I was able to find. And it's also not uncommon for the monster that is getting slain to be female. Think about the Sushi Gumo, the woman in the house and slayed by the swordsman Tiamat, the female monster slayed by marduk Uh and the Medusa. Yeah,

we can. We can discuss more about what is meant by that in a bit. But I was on the hunt for some good pre modern, ancient female monster slayers, and I think I found at least one good example that that I turned up sort of a pre Buffy Buffy if you will, right, Well, I mean, yeah, that's one of the many great things about Buffy. Of course, Yeah, she's she's one of the greatest vampire slayers monster slayers of all time. But then she is she has a female which you, as you pointed out, you don't see

a lot of in the ancient myth cycles. It's a nice change up on the gender dynamics of that. Yeah, but so another ancient Mesopotamian monster slayer would be in an A the glorious and ann a crusher of heads. In Anna was a Sumerian goddess also known as the Accadian ishtar got us of many things. We we've mentioned her on the podcast before, but you know, got us of the storehouse and the products of ag culture, but

also it seems of fertility, sex, war and slaughter. And in Anna is maybe my favorite ancient god or goddess due to those awesome hymns in her praise written by the priestess in Headuana, perhaps the earliest known piece of writing with a named author. In Headuana was a twenty third century b c. Mesopotamian high priestess and poet, the daughter of the Acadian king Sargon the Great. And so she wrote these hymns to Anna that are just spectacular to read. Um, But okay, what kind of monster slang

does Anna do? Well? The story here is more obscure, more complex, but it's also interesting. It comes down to this Sumerian concept called kor And my source here is a couple of pieces by the twentieth century ancient Neary scholar Samuel in Kramer. So everything I'm saying here comes from Kramer. Kramer writes that kore can be a really confusing word in ancient Sumerian literature because of its many

different meanings. First of all, it seems to have a primary literal meaning of mountain, right, so got coor the mountain. It's also used to mean foreign land, presumably because the peoples of the mountains bordering Summer were a constant threat. But then core also appears to just mean land in general, like territory. Uh. But also it has cosmic and religious connotations.

So the word core is also used to signify the Great Below or the nether world, to quote, the empty space between the Earth's crust and the primeval sea, and Kramer writes quote Moreover, it is not improbable that the monstrous creature that lived at the bottom of the Great Below immediately over the primeval waters is also called cour if. So this monster Core would correspond to a certain extent to the Babylonian Tiamat. So this is another version of

the Tiamat sea monster legend. And Kramer writes about kind of in the tradition of Marduk, that there are multiple ancient stories and fragments of stories we have in which monster slayers attack the monster Core. In one the hero is the god Inky, in another one it's Ninerta. But in a third it appears to be in Anna. And so there's this passage where Anna threatens the Core who

does who does not recognize her might? And in Anna says, the long spear, I shall hurl upon it the throwing stick, the weapon I shall direct against it, at its neighboring forests. I shall strike up fire at its And then there's an illusion. I shall set up the bronze axe all its waters, like Jibil, the fire god, the purifier, I shall dry up, like the mountain Rata, which no hand can reach. I shall And then there's another illusion, like

a city cursed by Anu. It will not be restored, like a city on which in Lill frowns, it shall not rise up. And then the god Anu warns her how terrible the Core monster is quote against the standing place of the gods. It has directed its terror in the sitting place of the ann Hockey. It has led forth fearfulness. It's fearful terror. It has hurled upon Sumer. It's fearful glory. It has directed against all the lands.

But of course, mighty and Anna is not discouraged, and she quote opens the house of battle against the Core and slays the monster and stands upon it and speaks to him. To her own magnificence. These ancient goddesses were serious business. Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, and I love But she stands on it too. She's still doing putting her foot on it. It's got that's got to happen. Um. And So I think the issue that Kramer highlights with the different meanings of the word cour here is very illuminating.

According to Kramer, again, it literally means mountain, also means enemy territory, also just means lander. Territory in general, also means the nether world or the underworld. Also the name of the monster that inhabits the nether world and brings destruction against Summer. So when you hear the story of in Hona slaying the cour if you're hearing it in the original language, you would be directly receiving all of

these connotations. She conquers the mountain, she conquers the enemy lands, she conquers the land itself, she conquers the realm of the dead and maybe death. Um. It's interesting the way that you know, we go later into monster slang legends, looking for the allegories and saying like, you know, what, does what does this monster represent? It usually does seem to represent something more than just a beast, either intentionally

or accidentally. Yeah, but but here it's like you've got all these connotations of the same word, meaning that it's almost just completely baked into the story at the face value level. That is fascinating. It's like the idea of the monster has yet to like congeal, you know, it's still more free flowing well the monster. I mean, you usually think of ancient stories as being more concrete and modern storytelling is being more abstract. But I wonder, I

don't know if that's always the case. Yeah, this really flies in the face of those some of the ideas we've discussed where like, oh, the monster is inspired by a hustle, you know, or or something to that effect, Like like this is more the it's ideas, uh that are you know, congealing into a symbolic form. Yeah, I would say this might be inspired less by a fossil and more by a family of concepts, all of which cause discomfort and fear, And the fear is key. Fear

will definitely come into play later in this episode. All Right, well, I think we should take a quick break and when we come back we will explore more monsters and monster slayers than all right, we're back. So another famous monster and slayer combo that this is a combo that we could easily do the whole podcast on. You could do multiple podcasts on, because a lot of people have written about this duo. I'm talking about Beowulf and Grendel, the

great romance of Anglo Saxon literature. Yes, I don't probably don't have to remind everyone about this too much. It's a a violent tale in which a brutish automaton of a human disrupts an ancient and terminally endangered creature in the process of its predation. Predation I should remind everyone that targets only the loudest, fittest, and warlike human males

for the most part. Uh. The brute ends up tearing the arm off of the creature and then follows it home as it retreats to its layer and then dies. Uh and uh, our hero follows. The blood follows the you know, the howls of pain, dives down to the deep layer and there kills the creature's mother as well. It's uh, I'm being a little cheeky in my description, because it is you're just accurately describing the story. Beowulf is a jerk, He's well, he is, he's kind of

the mind kind of you know, partial. I guess to John Gardner's Grendel, who plays up these themes a lot by humanizing the monster well at the same time retaining its monstrous qualities, but portraying Beowulf is just is this holy wrath of a character? Yeah, I I guess it's a it's a modern thing for us to sympathize more with the monster. And why why is it like that now? Why do we sympathize with the monster more these days?

I'm not sure? I mean, well, part of it is that, yeah, tales like this kind of speak to all of us and continue to resonate today, but it's it's still a tale that was speaking to a probably more specific audience as opposed to you know, humanity in general. Maybe the reason that we're more inclined to sympathize with Grendel and sympathize with monsters these days is that we more people now are sort of conditioned to the idea that history

as written might not always be fair. You know that it maybe is written to benefit the people who are writing it and make them look good. Unless you always kind of wonder when you get a heroic tale of a slaying, is it actually a tale of an unfair and undeserved slaughter? Yeah? Or sometimes maybe a monster just doesn't need slay anymore. Um. I was looking around, and again, there's a tremendous amount of literature about Grindel and Beowolf. Tons of people have written about J. R. Tolkien wrote

about Beowulf and Grendel. I was looking at one particular author, though English professor and also a medieval dragon expert, Joyce Tally uh lion urns I believe it is her last name, and she points out that there's a lot to be said in interpreting Grendel and his mother Uh And some of the earlier interpretations were certainly more seeing them as personifications of natural threats, very much in keeping with what we discussed in the mar Duke's story. Already there what's

outside the firelight? They are the wilderness and bodies. Yeah, they're the wilderness, they're the dark. They are perhaps more specifically the North Sea of the Bog, the marsh long winter nights, I mean, ultimately a cousin of Jenny Green Teeth in many respects, right. Uh. And then the monster dies and Spring emerges again, while Beowulf's eventual death battling a Aagon is a tale of Autumn's descent. A lot of people don't uh. I mean, I guess this is

referenced in the most recent film adaptation. But a lot of people forget about the dragon. Yeah, this is the second half of the story. But Beowolf grows old, and in the second half of the story, a young a young Wiggloff has to take up the mantle of the monster Slayer because Beowolf can't hack it anymore. Literally, can't hack into those monster hides like you used to, can't

tear those arms off like you used to. Um, you know. Uh. I can't help but be reminded and thinking about like these older monster stories, monster and slayer tales, and then trying to think about their their analogs and uh in modern popular culture. I can't help but think of a little story in which a band of professional warmakers and Central America are targeted by an alien hunter that that only praise on the fittest and warlike of its target species.

But only through through trick career does the human A man named Dutch prevail. Oh he's Dutch. Oh yeah, one of his name is Dutch. I don't know. Is he's supposed to be Dutch? I thought, maybe who? I don't I don't know, but that sort of solidifies the Baowolf connection. Oh well, interesting, But anyway, Dutch ends up probably dying from radiation exposure, I think, since the monster self detonation.

But I of course talking about the film Predator, man, you have taken me to a sacred and surprising place today. I never expected to connect Predator and Beowulf, but but I see it. I mean there, I think there are certain connections you can make. But at the same time, the contrast is very interesting because Grendel is fearsome but is ultimately easily overcome by the hero. Right. Predator is

fearsome and basically wins. I mean, he slays everybody except Dutch, and Dutch is really only able to barely achieve victor

in the end. He tricks him trickery. Trickery, yeah, which is which is also something you see a lot of times, and generally speaking, and we're talking about like the masculinity of the hero, that it's very hard to find examples, especially in the older stories where the hero is something other than than first of all male, but also the warrior, the soldier, you know, and perhaps the soldier ends up using trickery or enchanted items, and both of those may be actually given to him by the gods or in

some cases a gods, But in any effect, I feel like they tend to have tended to have an easier time of it, whereas nowadays, really I'm gonna I'm personally going to be disappointed if the hero uh really takes

out the monster too soon. I mean, you want to see the struggle, right, well, right, I mean maybe now people are more likely to want to see different values like uh, maybe now you put more emphasis on, say the courage and cleverness of a hero than on just like they're absolutely unbeatable strength, or certainly maybe just the things that the monsters represent for us now are less severe, like maybe it's like if Grendel is representing just the

the harsh realities behind the campfire, maybe you want to hear you need a hero that just tears into it like a nightmare. You know, you don't want to. You don't want a weak hero that's gonna, you know, take a beating for forty five minutes before building a proper bow and arrow out of twigs. Well, I say, I certainly appreciate vulnerable heroes. I mean, I find stories where the hero is too powerful and too good and too strong, very boring, and then you run the risk of the

monster being more relatable. Yeah, well you y'all out there no our monster sympathies, so we can't pretend to hide that. So of course I'm talking about slayers. We can't help but talk about dragon slayers. And there's one particular dragon slayer that it's probably, if not the definitely one of the most famous dragon slayers in Western traditions, of course, and this is St. George, Yes, the the subject of many a painting and engraving, often failing to make the

dragon fearsome. Yeah, the dragon, the kill, the slaying of the dragon, I I find, and some of these paintings it often feels more like the execution of a pet salamander or something, you know, like there's a dog like quality to this small creature. That is crushed under the heel of a of a giant horse and a top and there's a mounted night atop just you know, skewering it with a sword or a spear. Yeah, there's one image I attached here or St George's attacking It is snarling,

but it does look like a dog with wings. If you're not familiar, maybe I should go ahead and tell the story of St. George. You ready for that? Okay, so this comes. So now here's one thing actually about the legend of St. George as a Christian saint long predates any written version of this story of the dragon slaying.

We have, uh the as far as I know, the earliest written version of the dragon slaying comes from the Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, compiled by Jacobus Devourogene, Archbishop of Genoa, in twelve seventy five, and the first edition in English was published in fourteen seventy, translated by William Caxton. But here's the story. Okay, So you got St. George, and St George's a wandering knight. He's a he's a soldier,

and he's a knight. He's born in a Cappadocia, which is a region of Turkey, which Robert, have you ever seen the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, I believe so yes, they're beautiful looking. I mean it looks you just look up the landscape of this place and you can imagine it's the kind of place a magical hero would come from. So he comes from Cappadocia, and as a traveling night, one day he wandered into the vicinity of a city

called Silene, which was in the province of Libya. Now by the city of Silene was a great pond where there was a dragon that and venomed all the country, and it would attack the city mercilessly, breathing venom that sickened and killed the people. And the citizens of Silene had tried to slay the dragon, but so terrible was the beast, and so poisonous was its breath that the fighters all ran away before they could fight it. So all that was left to do was to try to

bribe the dragon to leave them alone. At first, they would feed it too sheep every day, but eventually this failed, so they started to feed the dragon a man into sheep each day, and Eventually they decided that they had to offer their children one at a time to keep the dragon at bay. So the king made an ordinance that each day there would be a lottery of the children in the town, and whichever child the lot fell to, whether rich or poor, would be offered up to the dragon.

But then one day the lot fell to the princess, to the king's own daughter, and he begged the people, saying, quote, for the love of the gods, take gold and silver and all that I have, but let me have my daughter. And the people answered, how sir, ye have made and ordained the law, and our children be now dead, and ye would do the contrary. Your daughter shall be given, or else we shall burn you and your house. There

was a reasonable response to this policy. Yeah yeah, I mean he can, he can set the policy, but then doesn't want it to apply to him. Uh so, Yeah, So then the king was very sad. He wept and begged for eight days respite. The people granted that to him, but in those eight days the dragon envenomed the city terribly. So when the time was up, the king dressed his daughter up as a bride, and he kissed her, and he gave her a benediction and then led her out

to the dragon's lair at the pond. So the princess is alone at the pond, dressed in a bridal gown, waiting to be eaten by the dragon. But then St. George happens to pass by, and he asked her what she's doing out there by herself in the wilderness, and she says, go ye your way, fair young man, that ye perish not also, and he applies by, asking why she's crying, and eventually she tells him the truth that

she had been delivered as a tribute to the dragon. Uh. And then, to quote from the this version of the Golden Lives, Uh then said St. George, fair daughter, doubt ye no thing hereof for I shall help thee in the name of Ya Zu Christ. She said, for God's sake, good night, go your way and abide not with me, for ye may not deliver me. So she's doubting his power, but he's got to display it because he's already sworn in the name of ye Zu Crease to that he

can do it. So as they're speaking, the dragon suddenly appears and it begins to charge at them. And then so St. George draws his sword and he makes the sign of the cross. And then he quote rode heartily against the dragon, which came toward him and smote him with his spear and hurt him sore and threw him to the ground. So the dragon is mortally injured. And then George asks the princess to remove her girdle and

tie it around the neck of the dragon. Quote. When she had done so, the dragon followed her as it had been a meek beast, and debonair. Then she led him into the city, and the people fled by mountains and valleys and said, alas alas, we shall all be dead. Then St. George said to them, nay, ye doubt no thing without more, believe ye in God, YESU Christ, and do ye to be baptized, and I shall slay the dragon. So the king then and all his people got baptized

as Christians. And quote St. George slew the dragon and smote off his head and commanded that he should be thrown in the fields. And they took four carts with oxen that drew him out of the city. And as a result of this, there's a whole bunch of people get baptized become Christians, and then there's a bunch of like healings of the sick and stuff, and then of course the legend goes on and tells about the martyrdom of St. George after that. But that's the story of St. George,

the Princess and the Dragon. It's pretty good. I enjoyed the build up more than the payoff. I think, you know, the lot ree system was pretty engaging. Well, there's no I mean St. George doesn't have a trick up his sleeve except prayer. That seems to be the thing. He's just like, well, he prays and yay zu Chreast comes through and it slays the dragon. He doesn't have a trick, you know, or maybe prayer is like a trick here. I'm not sure. Yeah, I guess prayer is the trick.

I mean again, a lot of these stories, you look at some of the Greek myths, to defeat the monster, one must use wisdom or weapons that are a gift of the gods. So what is the difference I guess ultimately between that in prayer right, Well, I guess it would just make a better story, like if ye zu Chreast came down and gave him a magical weapon or something. Yeah, given a you know, the the Armor of Christ or something, or you know, some sort of fancy sword, and then

we can get the idea. It's like, oh, yeah, if you're on God's side, you can slay dragons. I get the same message, but it's a little more entertaining at least you know, from me, right. But of course, as we mentioned earlier, this is sort of part of a genre of stories that pro liferate around the world. There are all these dragon slang stories especially there of course, medieval dragon slaying stories. Yeah, and I mentioned Joyce tally land Rand's earlier. I mentioned that she was an expert

on medieval dragon slangs and medieval dragons. I was reading on uh something she wrote titled the Sign of a Hero Theodoric Saga of Burn uh and uh. In this she points out, and I'm a number of interesting things about some of the tales we've discussed, though more specifically Theodoric, Theodoric, the Great Beowulf and Siegfried. So she points out that in German literature, especially, dragon slaying becomes something of a defining characteristic of any hero. But so like you're like

I'm a hero. It's like, I don't know, did just lay a dragon? Exactly? I mean, that's the that's the problem, because then how do you draw the line between standard heroes and truly mighty heroes if they're all monster slangs? And in doing so, also that the act of swaying a dragon ends up serving perhaps less of a symbolic uh purpose, right, I mean, you're not defeating chaos or the devil or the the you know, the powers of the dark um or. It's not serving as a you know,

mark of passage into adulthood. It's just like a necessary um upgrade in the arms race of storytelling. So uh. In the particular old Norse saga that she's dealing with here in this paper, she points out, uh that it tackles the problems of including both Theodoric the Great and Sigfried in the same story. So what the what the story does is it makes Siegfried into Theodoric's vassal and makes him kind of the sidekick, right, kind of wig kind of kind yeah, but also gives Theodoric two dragons

and three baby dragons to kill. So in doing this, you know, killing a dragon becomes less an impressive act in and of itself. A real hero has to kill like upwards of five dragons. This is how we get Blade where you've got monster monster slayers that are like the vampire slayers, they gotta kill tons of vampires. Well yeah, I think also you're touched on something you get like maybe you get specific types of monster slayers and specific

types of monsters. Like, oh, that's a good point. Yeah, Like you know, I guess in the Marvel universe, I imagine Captain America could kill a vampire, but if you're dealing with multiple vampires, it's got to be blayed every time, right, Yeah. Yeah, he's he's specialized labor. You know, he's got all the

tricks and the tools and the knowledge. So in this paper she also points out there's a distinction in the types of dragons dealt with, some natural and other supernatural, some flightless worms and other winged some and others are winged beasts. Uh. Demonica connotations, for example, are reserved in

this tale for the otter Ricks dragon foes. Well yeah, I mean that's when in the original version of the King George story that I was reading up there, did we receive any indication that the dragon could even fly. I mean it might have just been like a big poison crocodile for right. I mean that makes would would certainly match up with these depictions in which it is

very much on the ground beneath the horse. By the way, in that particular story, um uh, these two heroes eventually dual, and of course, uh, theoto Ic the Great wins, Theodoric kills Siegfried. Well, no, no, just defeats him. I could say,

to the death. They're not okay, But it's interesting that they're kind of dealing with some of the probably some of the problems that that the comic books have dealt with in modern times, Like what happens when you when you have two heroes in the same story, How do you how do you balance their powers or how do you show clear? Um, how do you have positioned one above the other in a way that doesn't diminish the other one too much? Well, you've gotta have what Captain

America and Iron Man fight. Yeah, it's kind of the same deal, right, yeah? Or is it Thor and Iron Man? I don't keep up with those, Um, I think may and I don't mean, I guess they've all fought each other. You can't help but have heroes fight each other. But I I believe leave Captain America and Iron Man they're the ones who who end up fighting each other in

the movie. You know another thing I was thinking about when you mentioned how Lion Arn's highlighted that eventually they have to start killing more and more monsters to show how great they are, because just killing one monster and yeah, it's not that impressive anymore. I obviously have to go to Hercules. Hercules had a bunch of what what percent of his twelve labors were monster slayings, A lot of them, right, Well,

we're about to go through them, so let's find out. Okay, everyone can keep track at home and uh and and do do the math, please show your work. Hercules or Heracles is of course one of the greatest monsters slayers in Greek and Roman traditions. Now granted he didn't take out Medusa. That was Perseus, who of course used a goddess given tactics and weapons to overcome the Gorgon. But he eat did a hell of a lot during the

labors of Hercules. And there's I should point out, there's a wonderful video game themed shore about this from ted Ed. If you go to you know, YouTube or the ted ed website you will find it. It's absolutely delightful. Yeah, it's like so you say, video game themed, it's like pixel art. It looks like a classic Nintendo game. Yeah, they are some sort of sixteen bit thing. I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly which bit it would be, but it looks like a fabulous game. It makes me want

to play it. So basically, here's the rundown. You have Hercules, this uh, this you know, semi divine hero. You know, I like to picture the classic uh cinema Hercules with the big beard and the big muscles. You know, he's very much in the you know, the class of of masculine warrior heroes. And so he ends up going on these labors. And these labors are an act of atonement after the goddess Hera drives him mad, resulting in the murder of his own children, and these labors were assigned

to him by his name Nemesis Eurystheus. So these are the labors. First labor, uh, he has to take out the Nimi and lion, which is a monstrous lion. Yeah. Second labor is the Learnaean hydra, and this is a classic monster that is sometimes described as a mere multi headed snake monster, but later it takes on regenerative features as well. So yeah, you cut off one head to grow back in its place. Big Hurk had to get hell from his nephew on this one, I believe, so

yes uh. And the solution here is a fabulous work of team a bit of teamwork. Hirk slices off the head and then the nephew jumps in and burns the stump. Third labor Serenian hind. Not a monster really, but a very special deer. Fourth labor is the Aramathean boar, which is a monstrous boar, just another giant sized animal for him to deal with. Fifth labor he cleans out the Agean stables, so just lots of animal poop. Uh. Not a monster, but a monstrous task. Uh. Sixth labor were

the Stemfalian bird words. Uh, these were pretty monsters. These were the sacred metal war birds of aries bronze of beak and feather, and they could launch their their metal feathers like flying daggers. Seventh labor was the Cretan bull, which is there any connection with the minotaur there. I I mean, I would assume we're talking about crete, right, and it's a bull. Yeah, but it's just a monstrous bull,

it's not a minatar um. Then the eighth labor was were the mayors of Diometes, and these were flesh eating horses. So they're pretty monsters now granted they were they were trained to eat flesh, they were encouraged to eat flesh. And uh, and he's able to overcome this one and essentially gets their their masters eating instead. Ninth labor the belt of Hippolyta monster the Amazon queen, right. Tenth labor the cattle of Garyon, and Garon was a giant with

three faces. Eleventh labor the golden apples of Hesperites. And then twelve labor, uh Cerebus, the three headed hellhound. So here we have a good monster for him to to tackle and literally tackle and wrestle and overcome. So these are all these are all fun little adventures and uh, we would need a lot more time to really talk about all of them in depth and what they mean, etcetera. Um, you know, and heck, we have a full episode on

Hydras in the vault. But one of the things that strikes me here is that that her Again, it's very much a male warrior hero, and he uses strength and cunning to overcome his enemies. But at the same time, herc is a divine being. He's a demigod, a hybrid born of the god Zeus and immortal Mother, so he's touched by the other worldly and therefore the perfect slayer of other worldly enemies. I mean this highlights a couple

of different ways that monster slayers can be. One is the courageous type, and the other is the fearless type, which is a very different thing. Right. Uh. I mean, does is there ever any indication that Hercules feels fear when he goes to fight these monsters or does his godlike nature, the fact that he's half god sort of make him able to face these with a sense of invulnerability? Yeah? I feel like it's it's a fearless uh situation. Fear

fearless and largely invulnerable because he is half god. Um, you know, I can't help me be reminded again of Blade. Uh, the specifically the Wesley Snipes blade. Uh? Is there another blade? And there was like a TV blade played by what sticky fingers I think or Fingers, Uh, the the Rapper

played him. Uh, and I don't know, I never saw the show, but uh, as far as I'm concerned, Wesley Snipes is the only blade um but in that he is half vampire, so he has I think it's said that he has um all of their strengths but none of their weaknesses. Right, so he's the day Walker? Yeah, well who who else but the day Walker? The DayWalker is the perfect slayer of all of these vampires. Now, Robert, I'm sure you would love to talk about some of

the monster slayers of Chinese myth and legend. Oh yeah, there there are some good ones. One of them is actually a character we've talked about on the show before, uh in our episode on the Great Flood, because we talked about the Chinese mythic hero uh You the Great

or die you. Um. He's also you know emperor and founded uh the Shiah dynasty, which was two b C. We talked about him on the show before about in regards to his his his role in overcoming the ravages of the Great Flood, not by building a boat or anything like we see in you know, Mesopotamian and Old Testament traditions, but by sort of tackling it with irrigation and engineering, uh, but also through like having his father having pilfered the secrets from the gods. So there's this

Promethean vibe to it as well. But he was also something of a monster slayer. Uh. He is said to have killed then nine headed serpent hng Lu, who is a minister of the defeated chaotic water deity Gong Gong uh and who was defeated in a battle for divine supremacy against the against jen Zou, the grandson of the

mythical Yellow Emperor. As described by the authors Young and On in Handbook of Chinese Mythology, Jiang Lu, the great back black serpent here had nine human heads, and the nine heads eight food from the nine mountains, and everywhere it went it left impassable marshes in hostile gullies in its path. Now do you think that the the idea of like the nine heads with they're they're sort of snaking necks has anything to do with rivers there with

river imagery, I assume, yeah. I didn't. I didn't. They didn't go into into any more extended detail on the possible symbolism of the of the of the nine heads, etcetera. But it does bring to mind this idea of like branching rivers does. Now, obviously, I think everyone can see where we're going here. Like you, the Great overcomes floods and the dangers of flood and here we have the monster personification of floods and flood hazards. So you end

up slaying the monster. But the creature's blood is so poisonous that it poisons the spot where it dies, so that life can find no purchase there. And you wants to overcome this so so the crops can be grown there and and dug and so he digs out the poisoned earth not once, not twice, but three times, and each time the blood sinks down even deeper. And eventually he just has to build a terrace from the excavated soil. Uh and uh and atop this uh you know it's

it is. It's like a temple that's uh devoted to the great gods. Now. Yang and On mentioned that this story is not really told that much in modern China, but it's some versions of it still survive, such as one from Sichuan Province in which Jen Zou survives battle with the our god wrong and continues to bring flooding and death to the earth, forcing the mother goddess Nuah to slay it. So here we get to a godess

getting involved in the slaying again. Um Nah also more famously defeated the Black Dragon, also a being of chaotic water and flood energy. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention the archer who ye who killed a number of different monsters, and of course shot down the nine surplus sons that were roasting the earth, and in some tellings he actually shot and killed nine great crows that

carried these sons. Now, it's also interesting is that during this age of ten Sons, not only is it just really hot and difficult to grow crops, it's also said to be a time of cosmic imbalance, and during this time a lot of unnatural monsters rise up, and so the emperor ends up tasking uh ye the archer with

their destruction uh and us. Just just a few of the monsters that he ends up killing include uh uh There's a monster with the dragon's head and the leopard's body, a monster with teeth a sharp as chisels that are unbreakable. There is a nine headed monster, there's a giant bird, a giant bore, a giant snake. Uh So again all manner of unnatural creatures who rose up during a time of cosmic imbalance. He also punishes a couple of damaging elemental gods with a well placed to arrow or two.

For instance, he shot the damaging win god he bow in the eye, and he took out both knees of the damaging river god Fingbo, and in other versions he kills Fingbo outright. So once again we have like river water elemental monsters that have to be dealt with by a hero. Yeah, and the idea of them coming out of a time of cosmic imbalance um seems to somehow echoed, you know, the very ancient monster concepts of like the

chaos monster, like like TMA NAPSU. Al Right, well, on that note, let's take one more break and we come back. Let's talk about what the slayer means to us. Thank you, thank you, all right, we're back. Okay. So we've been looking at a lot of great examples of monsters and their slayers, the monster slayers stories from throughout human history, and now we wanted to take a look at what what what the monster slayer means? Why do we keep

telling stories like this? Why is this so common? And what purpose psychologically and culturally does it serve when we

do so. One of the things I want to say at the outside, just as a kind of disclaimer, is that, um, I feel like when we try to explain what stories and myths mean from a kind of evolutionary psychology perspective, we always need to remember to understand the difference between like proving a theory with direct evidence and sort of simply telling a plausible story and arguing it to be

consistent with what we know now. I'm actually all for having arguments over plausible stories and evo psych and all that, but it's imperative for us to remember that that's what they are. I think sometimes people get carried away with this project and they jump from I've told a plausible story about why we have this cultural thing or the

psychological thing too. I have discovered the biological origin of this element of human psychology or culture, and we I think we just always need to be careful not to do that. Sometimes you see people taking like almost Joseph Campbelly kind of observations to the point of saying like this is just science and that you know, you know what I mean that said, all these kind of like Joseph Campbelly sort of observations can be a lot of fun, right, and and he of course had lots to say and

think about the role of monster slayers. Yeah, I mean, likewise, um, Julian Jays the by camera mind, which I'll actually touch on in a bit like if you if you go entirely down the Jane's well of interpreting everything, then yeah, it can be a lot of fun. Then you have cut off all other perspectives on what the thing is. Well, I mean, so one thing that uh, somebody I think, like Joseph Campbell would say is that the role of the monster slayer in fiction is about like facing the ego.

It's like this ego struggle and that you've got to face yourself and overcome your fears and and change something about yourself. You know that that kind of thing. And so I I do agree at least that it's totally plausible that monster slayer stories are very prominent and very common because stories about facing dangers and facing fears are

psychologically very salient. To us. You know, we're constantly in our lives faced with situations where we don't want to do something, but in order to to get what we want, we have to do that thing we don't want to do. You know, you've got to face your fears and overcome your discomfort to I don't know, save the princess, or to do whatever. And I think that's a totally plausible basis for for starting a conversation about what monster slayer

miths mean. So another way to get deeper on this subject, I guess would be to look a little bit more at what the monsters in these stories mean. And I want to posit a place for us to start there. I would pose it that the monsters in these stories, most often, I would say, UH, seem to come from a combination of two main psychological UH components, biological threats

and category confusions. And if we've talked about category confusion quite a bit on the show, the idea that it's go back to hercules, right, Yeah, it's like a snake but it has way too many heads, or it's like a boar but it's gigantic. What's going on? Right? And there are reasons I think that would be significant. I'll get to that in just a minute now. Obviously, the

fear of biological threats is pretty straightforward. There's a natural fear of predatory or venomous animals and of human rivals. And this doesn't need much explaining. In the basic sense, predators are dangerous and thus a deeply ingrained archetype from the natural world. But there there are also some relevant questions like why are certain forms such as snakes, which you've seen all throughout these monsters and spiders. Also, why are those things readily seen as monstrous or incorporated in

parts into chimerical monsters? Why so easily a spider monster or a serpentine monster, why not more often like a bear monster. You might have one of those every now and then. That's true, because, of course, the argument with the the snake or the or the spider is that if it bites you, you could die. Depending on the variety of snake or spider, If the bear bites you, there's also a very good chance you'll die, right Yeah, uh so, yeah, this is actually long been a question.

There's been this big question about whether these common fears, especially if things like spiders and snakes are are learned or in aid and Robert, I know you've looked at research like this too. Obviously, some part of any widespread fear will be based on cultural conditioning, so I think it's pretty inarguable that some part of this fear is learned, right,

But could there also be a biological factor. Could there also be some in built part of the brain that is prone to recognize the shapes of spiders and snakes and react fearfully without any prior knowledge or conditioning. And I'd say that the question still isn't totally settled, but there's been some interesting research suggesting, especially recently, that yes,

recognition could be an eight. One example is uh study from in Frontiers and Psychology called Etsy Bitsy Spider infants react with increased arousal spider and snakes spiders and snakes, So of course what they did in the study here was they threw babies into cribs full of spiders and snakes they did not, And the study showed six month old infants images with similar shapes and colors. So visually these images were very close to each other, but with

different ontological content. Some of them were pictures of spiders versus flowers. That looked very similar, and others were pictures of snakes versus fish that looked very similar. And the researchers measured the baby's differential pupillary response to these images, the dilation of the pupils, and that's accepted as a pretty good indicator of activation of the nero dreenergenic system, which is a physiological fear response. You know, it commands

your attention and your body responds physiologically. Uh. And the author's right quote, infants reacted with increased pupillary dilation, indicating arousal to spiders and snakes compared with flowers and fish. Results support the notion of an evolved preparedness for developing fear of these ancestral threats. So if even six month old babies show a stress response to images of spiders and snakes, it would seem that those forms could in

some way be hardwired into us. There's at least part of us that is naturally biologically afraid of those things, and it's not just cultural conditioning. Uh. And another question there is why spiders and snakes, Right, we brought this up a minute ago. There are much more dangerous animals. Uh. One possible answer offered in a CBC interview by study author Stephanie hull Is quote, what's really interesting about spiders and snakes is that they have been posing a threat

to our ancestors for an immensely long time. Spiders and snakes developed a venomous bites forty to sixty million years ago. This is a really long long time of coevolution, and we think that this enables primates, not only humans, but other primates as well, to develop mechanisms that enable us to detect these animals very quickly, to respond to them, to put our bodies into fight or flight mode. This may really have posed an advantage. Nowadays, it doesn't make

so much sense. So the idea there is that, well, maybe it's not that we naturally respond to spiders and snakes because they're the most dangerous animals, but because they're the dangerous forms we've been around the longest and have stayed looking the same the longest. Does that make sense? Yeah, The the basic formula, the basic the basic uh proposition of a snake or spider has not changed in human

history or even in primate history. Yes, But I might just note, on the other hand, there's also some evidence pointing against the hard coded phylogenetic threat hypothesis. For example, I found a study from two thousand nine in which adults recognized images of guns just as efficiently as they recognized images of snakes. Now, of course, guns aren't part of our biological neurohistory, so they couldn't. There couldn't be like a hardwired gun response in the brain that has

to be culturally learned. But then again, maybe maybe it's just that are cognitively based or learned fears become every bit as efficient in the brain as the hardwired, evolved ones. That could be. How about fulsa dooms bow that shoots snakes from common the barbarian that see that is the ultimate physiological threat arousal trigger. I mean, I couldn't react

with anything but worship. There, you know, in that movie we have another great example of monster slang because one of Conan's early UH trials is the slaying of the giant snake that also Doom keeps as a pet in one of the temples. Yeah, what is he does? He strangle it? He eventually chops its head off. There's some wrestling there, for sure, There's some There's some wrestling, But of course it's a snake. I mean, dragons are essentially snakes.

We always have these snake forms reappearing as monsters over and over. It's got a snake for a head, or the whole thing is a snake with wings or you know. Well, now, in Western traditions, but as we've mentioned, in Eastern traditions, there's I feel like there's enhanced, uh there's an enhanced hybrid nature to the dragons. Yeah, the the Eastern dragon becomes, I would argue, an even more fascinating creature with more more valences, you know, more like it's more like the

core maybe and having multiple significances at different levels. But I would also think that, you know, the Eastern dragon tends to be less of a monster, it's more of a I mean, it's it's very very often you know, it is definitely an elemental force. It's tied to floods and storms and waters in the ocean, but it does have more of a divine presence than you find in uh in Western traditions. Yeah, uh so, So anyway back to the idea of the basis of these monster fears.

So one, you've got these elements that are so often taken from what appear to be at least maybe hard coded form threats, phylogenetic threats that are, you know, part of our evolutionary history, and they at least at some level maybe hard coded in the brain, if not hard coded in the brain, very well coded into culture. Uh. And the other thing, of course, we feel we mentioned

a minute ago, is the discomfort with category confusion. So let's say we're defending ourselves from a natural threat, whether that's a venomous snake or a lepard or a wolf. One of our greatest defense mechanisms is not our muscles but our brains, right awareness and recognition, the ability to cognitively pick out signs of threats and avoid them. And then, of course also if we must face a threat, like

cleverness and strategic thinking to overcome the threat. But most of our defensive thinking is actually one form or another of category sorting. Right, you see a shape and you immediately start to sort what kind of thing is that? Is that a harmless bunny or a venomous snake? And so perhaps one reason we fear monsters so much is that they not only represent aspects of real biological threats and predators, but that they defy our normal categorical sorting

mechanisms by blurring the lines between categories of things. So a spider a hundred times bigger than it should be, a snake with wings, a lion that can talk uh, And by the way, they defy intuitive sorting. These creatures resist easy cognitive understanding, and thus they cause discomfort and fear. Like a creature that has aspects of biological threats like predatory or venomous forms, and also simultaneously messes with our cognitive defenses by violating category coherence. That's sort of the

ultimate threat, right it. It beats your greatest defense, and it is the most threatening kind of thing. Thus the monster slayer has to overcome more than the normal warrior. They have to face primordial fears and square off against an enemy that normally makes us feel weak and helpless and afraid at the deepest level. And in this respect, you can you can sort of look at it. Any myth is is simply a situation where you know, you sit around the fire and one guy's like, yeah, I'm

kind of afraid of the darkness. It seems, you know, kind of it seems kind of intense. I mean, who knows what's out there, and it's what all that's out there? It might try to eat me and one day I'm gonna die anyway. And then the the other soldiers sit around the fire says, well, let me tell you a story, because this story has a hero in it, and all that stuff that you're afraid of he just cuts its head off. It's that, it's that simple. And so here's a hero that you can you can you can ruminate on.

Do you think that inherently the monster slayer story is more often empowering to the audience, to the person listening, like you can be like that hero, or is it more often uh, commanding kind of submission and obedience, like look at what our heroes are like, you must bow down before them. I don't know, do you know what

I mean? Well that it could be like chill out, we have it, there's a hero out there doing this for you, or chill out like the power behind the behind the hero, the god or the gods or the goddess that if you're behind that god, then hey, that God's got to hero. You don't have to worry about it.

But then in later it's certainly more more modern understanding is like yeah, I'm kind of like Blade, right, I can you know, like at least on some level, like we're we're supposed to uh, I mean we're rooting for the hero. We're rooting for Blade or Dutch or whoever. Uh, And and we are kind of living the story through them. And yeah, you kind of leave those those pictures, those stories feeling I can slay the monsters in my life, the blood suckers in my life. I think they might

have a steak coming. Quick note, I'm not encouraging anyone to stake anybody. Oh no, no, no, we're not trying to create Martin's out there or wait no, not Martin's what it's Martin's uncle or whatever. Right, are you talking about the Romero film? Yeah? Oh yeah, It's been a long time since I've seen that. We don't be like anybody in that movie. Just don't don't imitate any part

of it, all right. So in order to overcome the monster, though, the hero is probably gonna need a certain amount of courage. I mean, arguably, if you're getting into like, are they

do they have any fear to begin with? If they have any amount of fear, they're gonna have to summon courage or they're gonna have to exhibit courage that is beyond that which the normal person would seem to have, right, because if you're Baowulf, otherwise, why would you go into the dark, Why would you dive down into the deep and find the layer? Well, so there there are a couple of different ways you can go in to face

the monster, right. I guess one would be to to have courage to overcome your fear, because I guess that's sort of the definition of courage, right. Courage is a cognitive overriding of anxiety that prevents the physiological fear response or or overcomes the physiological fear response and prevents you

from running away. It makes you you know you've got control and you make yourself face the fear inducing thing like the I think a great example of this is an Aliens where ripley Uh, well, she certainly she's returning to the world of the Zeno more from the first half, but in the later half of the film she is going back in to save news. She is descending into the monster's world in facing something that it has been

well established she is terrified of. That is that is a great example, and in fact, I will say, while I have mixed feelings about a lot of monster slayers, you know, I'm like, I don't know if I like Beowulf, maybe I think Grendel, grind Maybe Grindel At a point, Ripley I think is a is a truly holy monster slayer. I am one hundred percent behind Ripley in her slaying quest, right, I mean that's a really a straight up Beowolf story

because she also ends up essentially fighting Grendel's mother. Yes, in aliens, Yeah, but if it were terminator versus alien, then that that would be the other half, right, that would be the the hero that doesn't feel fear to begin with. And sometimes you don't know, I mean sometimes you kind of feel that way. Is that what Beowulf's like? Is that what Herchilles are like? Are these heroes supposed to be people who just are incapable of feeling afraid

in the face of this monster? Uh? You do think? You know? You wonder if is mar Duke. Is mar Duke courageous or is he just fearless? I wonder if mar Duke is actually courageous because mar Duke makes a bargain, right, He's like, look if I'm going to put this all online and risk it. You at least got to make me king of the gods. Or he's just following operating for seizure, you know. Yeah maybe oh yeah, maybe he's

a robot. Yeah, but yeah. So to think about this, you can think about it in a couple of ways in the brain. So, like, I want to start off by mentioning the amygdala, the you know, the little almond shaped subcortical brain network of the amygdalas sometimes referred to, I think not quite accurately as the brain's fear center or something like that. As usual with these kinds of appellations,

that's a bit of an oversimplication. The brain's fear response is complex and it involves multiple brain regions, but there are multiple lines of evidence that indicate that the amygdala does appear to play some important role in fear. It's something it does something important in generating the physiological fear

response in the body. For example, brain imaging studies show that fear inducing images like pictures of animals like spiders and snakes, trigger activation in the amygdala, but that the brain can also recruit other regions to inhibit a magdala response, which seems to be correlated with resistance to the fear response. Both animals and people with damage to amygdala's seemed to

show a diminished sense of the fear response. Like One example is the classic case of patient s M I think we've talked about on the show so um famous case of a woman who experienced bilateral amygdala damage during childhood, and she shows very little, if any fear response in situations like haunted houses and stuff, and and in response to scary movies. She she just lacks a fear response that is very common among pretty much everybody else. Uh, And this seems to have something to do with the

damage to her amygdala. Again, this does not necessarily mean that fear is quote in the amygdala, but it does indicate that the amygdala plays this important role in generating the threat avoidance behavior we associate with fear. So I mean, I wonder if you saw somebody who inspired you to tell a story of somebody like Hercules, Ease or Beowulf

who was just fearless, not courageous, but fearless. Is this I wonder, is this inspired by the idea of somebody with the damage to Miguela You know, people who just don't even flinch in the face of something scary. I mean, well, we do have the you know, additional information about Hercules being driven mad and slaying his children. Oh yeah, I don't know. That doesn't that perhaps speaks to the possibility

of additional neurological damage. I want to be clear, I'm not suggesting that Hercules is based on a historical figure or something like that. But I mean with all these kinds of stories, you wonder if somebody saw something that inspired the story or is it just pure creative imagination.

It could be either one or you know, so you see something you or you're looking at somebody being courageous, and if all you see is the courageous act, you could well interpreted his fearlessness, like look at that guy, He's never afraid in his life. You're just not privy to the part where after he defeats the enemy, he goes back and like vomits and weeps in his tent

because he's just been through this horrific experience. I mean, you know, we often talk about the monster slang is like this this this rite of passage for the hero. You know that it makes them um and this of course, reminds me of the you know, the line that which does not kill you almost kills you and is therefore inherently traumatic. Huh uh well, yeah, I mean that's the

other model. Maybe it is that somebody saw somebody who was just being courageous and facing their fears, and they did it so well that people saw that and interpreted it as them being fearless, Like they couldn't even see through to what the person was feeling. Um, and so you know, I wonder, like what's going on in the

brain with courage. There have actually been studies on this. Uh, there was one I was looking at by Uri Neely, Haggard Goldberg, Abraham Wiseman, and Yahdin do die in neuron in two Thousen called fear thou not activity of frontal and temporal circuits in moments of real life courage. So this is a snake on a trolley experiment. You know, you gotta love a good snake on a trolley experiment. You the trolley operator is the subject of the experiment. They're sitting down in an FMR I. So this is

an fmr I study. You know, with all the caveats we know about some of these neuro imaging studies, assuming that their results are are are valid and useful. Here, the subject's goal is The subject's goal is to lay in the f m R I get the brain imaged while they are attempting to move a trolley with a snake on it as close as possible to their head so it's on a track and they can control it, and they're trying to get the snake close to them.

And the researchers found that courage, overcoming fear and moving the snake closer to the head was associated with activity in the sub genual anterior singulate cortex or the s G A c C, and also in the right temporal poll and the author's right quote. Further, activity in the s G A c C was positively correl a did with the level of fear upon choosing to overcome fear, but not upon succumbing to it. So like you've got

a lot of fear and you overcome it. You say like I'm really afraid, I'm terrified of snakes, but I'm gonna keep moving the snake closer to my head. That was positively correlated with more activity in this region the

subgenual anterior singulate cortex. And so they finally say that the courage behavior seems to attenuate activity in the amygdala and other regions associated with fear response, and it inhibits the autonomic physiological fear response in that we normally have in response to fear inducing stimuli promoting the courage behavior. It's like when you experience courage, that is a process in the brain, and it's one part of the brain apparently inhibiting what would normally be going on in another

part of the brain, saying shut that down. We're going to do it anyway. Now, another illuminating study this, this is one that that you found. Uh. This one comes said from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from it's by mobs at All titled Neural activity associated

with monitoring the oscillating threat value of a Tarantula. Okay, so we get another perhaps of phylogenetic threat here, right, And phylogenetic threats these are of course threats that are hardwired into his vo evolution, like we've been discussioning, discussing especially the fear of spiders and snakes. Assuming that's correct.

So if I'm reading the study correctly, what the two thousand ten study is saying is that in their experiment, moving the object of fear, a tarantula, closer to the subject produced a cascade of fear responses in the brain, including activity in the amygdala quote associated with under prediction of the tarantula's threat value um UH. And by the way, one of the authors in the study that the main author here Dean Mobs, Assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at

cal Tech. He has a two thousand eighteen paper titled how cognitive and reactive fear circuits optimize escape A decisions in humans and it drives home how the brain responds to fear via or seems to respond to fear via two distinct fear circuits uh studied in the in this study via fm R I and a virtual predator video game. No connection to Dutch, This would be like a phylogenetic predator, right. So this is what what he lays out. We have

the cognitive fear circuit. This is distant threats front brain regions, asserting risk and making decisions. This is a conscious exercise. And then there's the reactive fear circuit. This is a related to central brain structures. This is fight, flight or freeze. This is a subconscious respect response. So, in the words of Mobs quote, you don't think your way out of a tiger attack, all right, So yeah, if you stop to think when a tiger is assaulting you, you're debt.

You react instead via the reactive fear circuit, which is subconscious and unthinking. Yeah. I mean, that's why fear is often characterized as like a sort of involuntary physiological body response, not just like the thought I am afraid. Yeah, like this, I couldn't help but think about this in terms of flying.

With one of our other episodes this month, we talked a little bit about the fear flying, and there is a distinct difference between the fear one will have on the plane and the fear one has um the day before the flight or a different day before, the day before the flighty um. So, you know, I wonder to what extent we might apply this model to where our monster slaying heroes men or more mostly men of action

and reaction. So sometimes they plan, uh, certainly, But but but the planning is again oftentimes the work of a god or goddess. And I can't imagine, I can't help but imagine what Julian Jane so I would have would have said about all this, the kind of funny would have would have had with this I was looking around. I'm not sure that he ever really tackled monsters and monsters slang specifically, but he was very interested in the

role between of course heroes and gods. Well, yeah, certainly, I mean what we're saying here, if we're assuming that Mobs is correct about this, that you've got the cognitive fear circuit and the reactive fear circuit, I'm sure James would have imagined that as like, you know, the automatic unconscious brain circuit and then the like the god fear circuit. Yeah, like did to give you an idea everyone, an idea of like what he might have said about this kind

of thing. He did touch on fear and terror in his nine essay Remembrance of Things Far Past. He said, quote fear and terror, once easily dissipated, stretch out into anxiety that can last a lifetime. And all because men can now automatically, and even against their wishes, reconstruct and hold as if present in this new spatialized time, the unalterable experience of the past and its possibility in the future. Now,

of course that's James playing with the bicameral model. Obviously, you don't need to accept the bicameral model to see that there's something interesting going on humans. You know, you don't get the sense that most animals experience anxiety in quite the same way humans do they. I mean, you can't know for sure, but you don't get the sense that they are like cognitively working over their fear scenarios the way we do, right, I mean, I don't know.

I guess there's something to be said for certainly cases say zukosis, where an animal is uh is behaving abnormally because it is in captivity, where it's kind of undergoing a continuous challenge to its mental stability, I guess. But but yeah, I think it's it's safe to say that that animals process things these things differently. There's definitely a human dimension to the way we deal with threats, in

the way we respond mentally to them. And it's interesting the way so many of these stories we've talked about show different people reacting to the threat in different ways, like the story of St. George and the Dragon. First, the villagers go out to fight the dragon, but then they can't overcome their fear and they're forced to run away. You know, they think they can fight it, but then their fear gets the better of them and we see

who they really are and they're they're driven back. But St. George has the courage, and he has the you know, he has Christ on his side. A similar thing I think with mar Duke, right, you know, the other gods were too afraid to fight Timat, but Marduke overcame his fear, Yeah, and did. To come back to to Mob's division of the two responses, I can't help but wonder of our monster slaying heroes are models of our ideal reactive fear

network self. So as we engage with our cognitive fear network to anticipate threats in the natural world, we ruminate on the model and symbol of these embodiments of just like pure ideal subconscious reaction, you know, just pure monster not only monster slayers, but monster destroyers. Yeah, Like you have you ever played with that scenario? Um? You know, what would I do if there was like somebody attacking

me or something like that. You know, you'd like to imagine like, oh I do this and that you know, I'd i'd be strong, and i'd be smart, and i'd be brave. But then, like when that really happens to people, you know, the cower and fear, and like you, it's a thing that you can't even know what you would do. You can hope you would be one way, but you can't know until it happens because these involuntary processes take over.

So yeah, so you're saying like that, we're trying to imagine the way we hope we would be when those automatic processes take over and just guide your action without you thinking about it, and maybe to a certain extent, were even actively saying, let me be Beowulf when the time comes. Hum well, and I can't help but wonder if having fictional models makes it more likely. Yeah, that's possible. I don't know. Let me be the Hulk when the

time comes, you know. Yeah, like if you've if you've had a model that you can picture in your mind, does it make it more likely that you will actually act that way? I don't know, but it's uh, that's interesting food for thought. Uh. Either way, there there there is truth to the matter that that when when the terror comes, when the monster comes, we don't know unless we've rehearsed for it, like actively, not mentally, but like physically. You know, we probably don't have a clear idea of

how we will respond. You know, we have our our our intentions and our hopes regarding our response, but maybe we haven't actually been tested yet. I'm reminded of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson, uh specifically the lyrics he wrote for a Warren Zevon song of the of the same name, where he said, quote, you're a whole different person when you're scared, and so you're saying you want to know what that person is going to be, like,

maybe they can be like Hercules exactly. Yeah, that's why. Yeah, I'm going to picture Hercules in my mind and hopefully maybe that is what the gods will make of me when the time comes. So I didn't find a study like this, but I would be kind of surprised if there isn't one somewhere out there, a study of like, does thinking about monster slayers or heroes of any kind

make you more courageous? Do do the snake trolley test again, but just like see if there's any difference when you like prime people beforehand with the story of a monster slayer or something. Be got to watch season two of Buffy. Yeah, prior to uh handling the snake trolley. Yeah. Maybe, so so you're season two guy? Huh? Well, I mean season

one is necessary. I love the Master um. But even as I was watching it, people were like, you just gotta press on three season one and get to season two and then yeah from from there, From from there on, it's it's gravy. I'd go season three. Yeah, yeah, that's where it really like, that's the Mayor season. Oh, the Mayor is good. I forgot about the Mayor. Yeah. I need to rewatch some of them. I'm not going to say all of them, but I do. I should go

back and rewatch some of There's some great episodes in there. Yeah. Alright. So there you have it, the monster slayer, monsters and the fabulous slayers who slay them. Uh. This was a fun one to put together. Obviously, we couldn't look at every amazing monster slay myth or legend or modern interpretation out there. There's just so much good stuff. Hey, send us, send us your favorite monster slayer stories, and I want to hear more of those, especially the ones you hear

less often, especially ones with great female monster slayers. I want to know more of those stories for sure. I should also point out there there were some There are some really good ones that I ran across in um Native American traditions that time will include here. But maybe that's something we can do again in the future if everyone really digs a good monster slayer tale. Yeah, there there's some good ones there all right. In the meantime, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, uh, as well as just a lot of extra monster content, a whole bunch of monster blogs that I wrote over the years, UH, some Monster Science videos. Links out to our social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, as well as a link for our door go check that out. A great way to support the show is to buy some of that merchandise. We have one related to release a recent episode on the basilisk. You can check that out.

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