Heartless Voids and Infinities: Why We Fear

Sea Monsters

Evelyn Miner

Content Warning: mentions of drowning, thalassophobia, sea creatures, natural disasters

“The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices.”

TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages, I

It is currently unknown if there are any truly universal myths among humankind, but if there are, the sea monster is a likely candidate. Virtually every culture with coastal access has filled the oceans with all kinds of fabulous and fearful creatures: Scylla, the Kraken, Aspidochelone, Umibōzu, Lotan, and the Bakunawa, to name just a few. Sea monsters have appeared in warnings, creations, apocalypses, voyages, theomachies, and all other kinds of myths, usually as embodiments of chaos, violence, and natural disaster.

Like the wildebeest inspiring Pliny the Elder’s mythical Catoblepas, many of these monsters are based on actual creatures of the sea, appearing as gigantic fish, tentacled creatures, or lengthy serpents. In fact, perhaps more so than any other sort of animal, creatures of the ocean tend to be interpreted primarily as strange and fearsome. Bears were often mythologically interpreted as predators or monsters, but also as sacred animals and embodiments of strength –there are no such mixed feelings for squids. Throughout human cultures, we see a familiar pattern regarding creatures of the ocean: one of danger, malice, and disorder.

In this essay, I hope to investigate the reasons behind our aversion to aquatic life. We will necessarily touch on topics of psychology, anthropology, biology, and even the philosophy of horror, all in pursuit of a single question: why are we so fascinated by, and afraid of, sea monsters?

“No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.”

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 59: The Squid

To begin, we might examine the various evolutionary explanations for this collective fear of sea creatures. Thalassophobia, the intense fear of deep bodies of water, is one possible cause. It has long been known that humans are much more predisposed to certain fears than others – termed prepared fears. This term refers not to fears that are biologically innate in humans, such as those of quickly moving things (the “jumpscare” response), but rather ones that are more easily learned by humans in response to stimuli.1 These fears are universally those which would aid in the survival of humans, such as fear of disease, snakes, or social ostracization. Thalassophobia is a prominent example of a prepared fear, easily acquired through traumatic or otherwise formative events involving deep water.2 To terrestrial animals, aversion to oceans and other bodies of water can provide a useful advantage in regards to avoiding drowning, and thus predisposition to thalassophobia was selected for survival.

Those with prepared phobias need not directly experience the stimulus to acquire such fears: through a process called “vicarious conditioning”, a child might, for instance, gain a fear of a certain animal if they witness an older relative also being afraid of it.3 Given widespread cultural depictions of drowning, violent storms, and hidden predators, one might vicariously develop thalassophobia without any personal stimulus at all. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the 1975 film Jaws, which is often credited with inducing a fear of beaches and oceans in a large portion of its audience.

Still, while the prepared fear theory might explain cultural fears of deep water, it does little to address fears of sea creatures specifically. With the exception of specifically predatory animals which fall under their own prepared fears, such as sharks, most sea creatures pose little direct threat to humans, and it is often the less threatening creatures (octopuses, starfish, whales, etc) that inform our cultural ideas of sea beasts. Squids, oarfish, and whales inspire monsters just as often as sharks or jellyfish. One might argue that these sea creatures simply acquire latent thalassophobic associations, but that seems hardly sufficient to explain humanity’s collective fear and fascination with such creatures – after all, we do not collectively fear birds, even as we have a predisposition towards fears of heights.

Perhaps there is another explanation to be gained from evolutionary psychology, however – one characterizing our imaginative fears of abyssal creatures not as evolutionary self-preservation, but as a lack of empathy. In other words, our aversions to creatures of the deep sea are not caused by a common thalassophobia, but a sort of species-xenophobia that finds us less able to emotionally connect with such creatures. According to a 2019 study by A. Miralles et. al., our ability to empathize with nonhuman animals is directly correlated with how recently we evolutionarily diverged from each other. In this study, researchers asked subjects to decide which of two animals they could more easily empathize with, and used the aggregate responses to assign the various animals empathy scores from 0 to 1.0. Humans received the highest score of .874, with nearly all mammals getting a value of at least .70. On the other end, empathy scores seemed to hit a floor at a value of about .20, with virtually all invertebrates receiving scores at about that level. The bony fish and other aquatic vertebrates scored only slightly better, receiving scores of about .35-.40. Put another way, according to this study’s results, humans are able to empathize with creatures like lampreys, urchins, and jellyfish about as well as they can with a rosebush (empathy score .246).

This research suggests a wide gap in empathy between most creatures of the deep sea and humans, one caused by the wildly divergent biologies of each. This alone is still not enough to explain our vivid reactions to these marine animals and their ilk; after all, there are no mythical monsters modeled on the common rosebush. However, it is still useful as a foundation on which to build further explanations. Perhaps our collective fear is in fact “prepared” – not by an evolutionary adaptation, but by the limits of our empathetic understanding.

“But I have long regretted that I... used [the] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process.— It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.”

Charles Darwin, Letter to JD Hooker 29 March 1863

In 2004, biologist Neil Shubin led a fossil-hunting exhibition to Ellesmere Island, a Canadian isle 600 miles from the north pole. There, his team discovered a curious specimen preserved in the rock. While at first the fossil might have seemed to just be a flat-headed fish, closer inspection revealed several curiosities – an unusually large pelvis, and fins with familiar, almost dextrous skeletal structures.4 It turns out that the Tiktaalik, as it was named, is an organic example of a key moment in evolutionary history – the development of terrestrial animal life. These large pelvises and hand-like fins would eventually develop into the skeletons of the tetrapods, who first emerged from the water in the late Devonian period approximately 375 million years ago. Those tetrapods would in turn evolve into all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals we know today.5

While evolutionary knowledge of our origins is of course very recent, the overall impression that sea creatures are somehow older than us appears in many different cultures and contexts. In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a sea serpent and the goddess of the primordial saltwater, from which the first gods and monsters sprung.6 In Jewish and Christian mythology, God creates all sea creatures and “monsters” alongside the birds, one day before the terrestrial animals and two days before humans.7 In Hawaiian mythology, the starfish, sea cucumbers, and urchins are the first animals born, followed by the fish.8

And yet, the idea that humans are themselves descended from sea creatures is seemingly entirely absent. In all of these myths, monstrous sea creatures are fundamentally different from land animals, and especially from humans. Indeed, many of these tales involve the killing of aquatic life as a precondition for humanity; Marduk fashions the earth and the sky out of Tiamat’s corpse, as in Māori mythology Māui creates the first islands from a fish he caught.9

Looking at a giant squid or a tangle of jellyfish tentacles, one can forgive our ancestors’ misunderstandings. These monstrous sea creatures do not merely look different from humans, they look different from what we think of as “animals.” In many regards, certain abyssal organisms seem to violate laws about life itself.

For instance, let us consider abyssal gigantism, the trend that creatures from deeper underwater tend to be larger than their shallower counterparts. Biologically, this trend is a sensible adaptation in many ways. Kleiber’s Law observes that metabolic rate increases according to about the 3/4 power of mass increase; that is, that larger creatures are more energy efficient, a useful adaptation in the often food-scarce ocean depths. 10 Similarly, Bergmann’s Rule points out that colder temperatures tend to select for larger creatures as well, as they have a larger weight-to-surface-area ratio which decreases the relative rate of body heat loss.11

Despite this evolutionary sensibility, many deep-sea creatures that exhibit this trait seem larger than animals should be. The largest land animal is the African Bush Elephant, which weighs approx. 6 tons and can reach lengths of 24 feet.12 Compared to many deep-sea animals, this is hardly notable – among the whales alone, there are 15 species heavier and 14 species longer than the African Elephant.13 A smaller yet more dramatic example is the Giant Isopod, a deep-sea creature that strongly resembles the common woodlouse (aka the Pill Bug) but is about 30 times larger.14

There are, of course, many other strange and fearful ways in which deep-sea life can differ so sharply from familiar fauna. From the biological agelessness of the Immortal Jellyfish, to asexual reproduction of the Sea Sponge, to the incredible regeneration of the Starfish, many seemingly universal traits of the animal kingdom – aging, sex, physical vulnerability – are absent in certain sea creatures.

When this biological strangeness is combined with the impossible oldness of sea life and supported by the aquatic empathy gap, it produces the impression, even subconsciously, that deep-sea creatures are a fundamentally different sort of life to “normal” earthly animalia. Because they are so incredibly different from us, they must not be related to us at all. Little wonder, then, that when humans imagine what extraterrestrial life looks like, we so often turn to tentacles, suckers, and slime.

“From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land and water... Remember the sea was once sole monarch, utterly free. Land rose from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury of the elements.”

Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal, “Bandora, By The Sea”

On August 12, 1819, First Mate Owen Chase departed Nantucket aboard the whale-ship Essex for a two-and-a-half year journey. Her 21-strong crew sailed the Gulf Stream, reaching Cape Horn on the 18th of December, before proceeding to hunt 800 oil-barrels’ worth of whales along the western coast of South America from January to November 1820.

On November 20th, 1820, the whale-boats were lowered once again in pursuit of a shoal spotted off the lee-bow. Chase struck the first whale, but was forced to cut the line and return to the ship when its tail knocked a hole in the whaleboat. The captain and second mate soon harpooned another – but as Chase began to steer the ship in pursuit, he spotted a massive sperm whale, 85 feet in length, heading towards the ship. It soon struck the vessel with a massive blow from its head, causing the boat to begin to sink.

Just as Chase ordered the pumps started and the hole inspected, the whale returned “with twice his ordinary speed, and... with tenfold fury and vengeance.”15 Ceaselessly thrashing and whirring, the whale again smashed the boat.

Less than two minutes later, the Essex was underwater.

In his memoir of the event, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex of Nantucket, Owen Chase wrote: “I have no language to paint out the horrors of our situation... His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”16

Stories and legends of the ocean seeking revenge are surprisingly common cross-culturally. In Mapuche mythology, the sea serpent Kaikai vilu becomes enraged with humans and resolves to exterminate them and flood the world.17 In the Atrahasis epic of Akkad, Enlil threatens to flood the world because humans have become too noisy.18 In the lore of Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, the Aboleths are a race of tentacled sea monsters who, resenting that terrestrial life has superseded their ancient species, plot to conquer the world.19

The concept of an inherent enmity between humanity and ocean life is a strange one, as sea creatures generally pose little direct threat to humans, at least compared to many terrestrial creatures. Perhaps this idea is indicative of a larg- er relationship with the sea itself – throughout history, the ocean is the one terrain that has thoroughly resisted human settlement. While activities like boating and fishing are possible, even they are never truly safe. Waves, swells, storms, earthquakes, starvation, thirst, and drowning have all kept humans from venturing too far from the coast; in the words of Lord Byron, “Man marks the earth with ruin – his control stops with the shore.”20 To the imaginative mind, it is a small leap to consider these as not just natural features, but as vengeful forces meant to keep mankind within its limits.

“The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We’re afraid of the body under the sheet. It’s our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.”

Stephen King, Night Shift, Foreword

The specter of HP Lovecraft has loomed large over this essay. Considered one of the greatest horror writers of all time by many, his works perfectly embody the concepts we have discussed. Lovecraft famously begins his essay Su- pernatural Horror in Literature with the proclamation that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He believed that the horror of his work was of a specific type he called “cosmic horror” – the fear that human lives and perspectives are so insignificant as to be meaningless in the grand scope of the universe. The true horror was not evil, but indifference: “There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature—nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate—automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability.”21

The ultimate problem with Lovecraft’s model, though, is that it completely fails to accurately understand horror, both his own and the genre more broadly. Say what you will about Nyarlathotep, or Shub-Niggurath, or the Elder Things, but they are not ambivalent – cosmic, certainly, but not amoral. They demand human sacrifices, drive people mad, and wait for opportunities to destroy the world. The terror of the Aboleths or the Essex whale is not that they disregard humans, but that they feel active malice towards us. There is a reason The Call of Cthulu ends with humans trying and failing to stop Cthulu – the terror is not merely that there is something out there too large to care about us, but that there is something out there too old, strange, and violent to ever be controlled.

In his opus In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker identifies three spheres into which we can divide the world. The world-for-us refers to the portion that aligns with our perceptions – that we interpret as human subjects, and understand anthropocentrically. It is the portion that is, in some sense, for us. The world-in-itself refers to the concept of the “objective” world, that portion that is sought after by the sciences, that is in theory independent of human subjectivity. Finally, the world-without-us refers to existence as it occurs outside of our mental frameworks. It is the vision of a universe too large for humans, of depths that cannot be plumbed, deserts that cannot be crossed, equations that cannot be solved – that is not only independent of our perceptions, but actively avoidant of them.

In his usage of this framework, Thacker suggests that horror is in fact an attempt to understand the existence of the world-without-us, to catch a glimpse of it as through a mirror:

Briefly, the argument of this book is that “horror” is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the worldwithout-us philosophically. Here culture is the terrain on which we find attempts to confront an impersonal and indifferent world-without-us, an irresolvable gulf between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself...what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract con- cepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms –mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck. Or, as Plato once put it, “hair, mud, and dirt.”22

Once viewed in this way, all of our points about the horror of deep sea life come together into a clear picture. Because we struggle to empathize with them, they seem to be a form of life entirely separate from humanity. Their incredible age and strange biological features remind us of humanity’s biological and temporal limits. Their habitat remains the one location on Earth unconquered by humans, indicating our inability to fully understand or control our environment.

This, it seems, is the true reason we fear sea creatures so much. They are so unfathomably old, so biologically different, so unempathetic, so deep and inaccessible, they represent a living example of the philosophy of horror. They resist categorization, capture, or mutual understanding. They indicate a world that is so close to us, and yet opposes us. The sea and its creatures are, in a sense, the first monsters – grotesque, fantastical, perhaps impossible, and yet undeniably alive.*