A Dictionary of the Paranormal, the Supernatural, and the Otherworldly (G - I)

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: Unless otherwise noted, definitions are courtesy of dictionary.die.net, an Internet dictionary in the public domain.

G

Gaia--the planet earth, personified, often as a mother (the author).

Geller, Uri--a supposed psychic with telekinetic powers; famous for bending spoons with nothing more, allegedly, than his mind (the author).

Ghost--a spirit of the dead which sometimes are said to haunt the living (the author).

Global warming--the doctrine that the earth’s climate is warming, partially as a result of human activities and pollutants (the author).

Goatsucker, Puerto Rico--a mysterious animal in Puerto Rico, also known as the chupacabra, said to bite the necks of goats (and other animals) and suck their blood (the author).

God

God--in Christianity, Judaism, Muslim, and other faiths, the supreme being (the author).

Griffin--winged monster with an eagle-like head and body of a lion.

Gurdjieff, G. I.--a mystic; he established The Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man (presumably, women aren’t included) in Russia), based on lessons he’d learned from other mystics while he was traveling in central Asia (the author).

Guillotining, and life after death--the theory that the brain remains conscious for one or more moments after it has been severed from the body by a falling guillotine blade (the author).

H

Hades--in Greek mythology, the underworld, home of the dead, ruled by Pluto (the author).

Hallucination--illusory perception; a common symptom of severe mental disorder.

Healing, faith--healing of blindness, deafness, disease, mental illness, demonic possession, and other physical, mental, and spiritual conditions by faith in God’s ability and desire to deliver or heal one from these conditions (the author).

Heaven--in Christianity, the abode of the souls redeemed by Christ (the author).

Hecate--the Greek goddess of witchcraft (the author).

Hel--in Norse mythology, the name of both the underworld to which those who were not selected as residents of Asgard lived after death and the name of the goddess who ruled it (the author).

Hell--in Christianity, the abode of the damned; named for the Norse underworld, Hel (the author).

Hill, Betty and Barney--a couple who, under hypnosis, claimed that they were abducted by extraterrestrial aliens and subjected to bizarre medical experiments and tests (the author).

Hoax--a fraud perpetuated upon the stupid, naïve, and desperate by charlatans, some of whom claim to possess paranormal or supernatural powers and abilities (the author).

Home, levitating

Home, Daniel--a Scottish spiritualist and medium who claimed to be able to levitate, to communicate with the dead, and to cause rapping sounds by the power of his mind alone; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was one of his many supporters (the author).

Homeopathy--a method of treating disease with small amounts of remedies that, in large amounts in healthy people, produce symptoms similar to those being treated.

Hot reading--fortune telling that involves the surreptitious solicitation of personal information related to the medium’s or psychic’s client or an audience which is included in the fortune subsequently told (the author).

Houris--Muslim virgins waiting to serve faithful male adherents of the faith, especially martyrs (the author).

Houses, haunted--residences (and, sometimes, commercial properties) that are said to be haunted by ghosts, demons, or other paranormal or supernatural entities or forces (the author).

Houston, Jean and the Mystery School--a New Age self-help program that fosters self-development and social progress (the author).

Howe, Linda Moulton--an investigative journalist who writes what crtics characterize as sensational articles and books and produces lurid documentaries, and films about UFO’s and related topics (the author).

Hubbard, L. Ron--science fiction author and founder of Scientology (the author).

Hundredth monkey phenomenon-”a sudden spontaneous and mysterious leap of consciousness achieved when an allegedly "critical mass" point is reached” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hybrids, alien program to breed--an alleged program by extraterrestrial aliens and/or the United States government to breed hybrid alien-humans, possibly to fill roles of authority within the world’s governments (the author).

Hypersensory perception (HSP)--intuition, such as may be displayed in interpreting body language (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnagogic state--the “state between being awake and falling asleep. For some people, this is a time of visual and auditory hallucination” and may explain some accounts of ghosts, demons, UFO abductions, and the like (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnopompic state--“the transition state of semi-consciousness between sleeping and waking. For some people, this is a time of visual and auditory hallucination” and may explain some accounts of ghosts, demons, UFO abductions, and the like (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

Hypnosis--a state that resembles sleep but that is induced by suggestion.

Hysteria--neurotic disorder characterized by violent emotional outbreaks and disturbances of sensory and motor functions.

Hysterio-epilepsy--“an alleged disease discovered by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), one of the founders of modern neurology” (The Skeptic’s Dictionary).

I

I Ching

I Ching--a set of principles and symbols by the use of which people seek to balance opposite forces and find order in seemingly random incidents (the author).

Illuminati--literally, “enlightened ones”; a secret society often identified as participants in an international conspiracy to rule the world, openly or secretly (the author).

Incantation--a chant, sometimes in verse, by which sorcerers and witches sometimes cast spells (the author).

Incorruptibility of sacred bodies--bodies of saints that remain perfectly preserved, with no evidence of decay, for prolonged periods after their deaths and entombment or burial (the author).

Indian rope trick (levitation)--a magic trick in which an Indian fakir seems to climb a levitating rope (the author).

Indigo children--children of a higher degree of evolution than normal children and who are said to have paranormal powers, such as clairvoyance; they are identifiable by the indigo aura that surrounds them (the author).

Infrasound--sound below the threshold of human hearing (the author).

Intelligent design--the doctrine that the order and structure of the universe presupposes intelligent design; the basis of the argument from design, or the teleological argument (the author).

Everyday Horrors: Cornfields

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

Southeast Kansas crop circles captured by NASA satellite

Cornfields don’t seem all that menacing, do they? After all, green stalks standing tall against a high blue sky, tasseled husked cobs full of golden nuggets hanging amid large, elliptical leaves are, for many, one of the symbols of the heartland, right? We speak of wholesome corn-fed girls and boys (and--a note of the eerie enters--corn-fed livestock). However, quite a few movies (and some novels) are set, in part--usually, the terrifying and horrible parts--in cornfields, as is a disturbing scene in my own novel, A Whole World Full of Hurt.

Remember Stephen King’s Children of the Corn? Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night? Jonathan Maberry has also set part of the action of his novel Ghost Road Blues in cornfields. So has Norman Partridge, in Dark Harvest.

Television shows and movies sometimes use cornfields as settings, too, although not all are chillers or thrillers. Smallville is a case in point. I’m Not Scared is another movie set, at times, in cornfields. Others movies that include cornfields as places where the action is include:

High Tension
Freddy vs. Jason: A Match Made in Hell
Hallowed Ground
The Silence of the Lambs
Scarecrow
Jeepers Creepers II
The Corn Stalker
I Walked with a Zombie
The Stand
Night of the Scarecrow
Shallow Ground

Okay, if cornfields spring up as settings in so many horror stories, there must be something horrific about them that’s not obvious enough to present itself upon one’s first consideration of the crop. Ergo, let’s reconsider them.

• They’re vast, covering acres and acres, and the corn stalks are tall--sometimes ten or twelve feet high. When a character is inside one, it’s like being in a forest of regularly spaced trees that go on, seemingly, forever, in all directions, and getting lost isn’t merely easy, it’s almost guaranteed.
• If the good guys can get lost in a cornfield, the bad guys in the cornfield can run into them. Maybe they’re even lying in wait in the cornfield, in multiple places, even, waiting for the lost ones to come their way!
• Other things can be in the cornfield, too--unexpected, nameless, and unimaginable things that are furious at having their territory disturbed and that are ravenous.
• There could be landmines, ditches, craters, and other booby traps in store among the ranks of corn.
• Cornfields can be claustrophobic, because the stalks are close and evenly spaced and, well, just everywhere, like a trap or a vegetative cage.
• At night, cornfields are dark and foreboding. A full moon, especially one moving among dark clouds, isn’t reassuring; quite the contrary, it’s ominous and eerie. The ground is uneven, and the cornstalks are everywhere, always in one’s face, no matter what direction one may take, and, of course, one is bound to get lost and stay lost. If one’s adversary is human, he will be equipped with night-vision goggles. If the enemy is not human--if it’s an animal, an extraterrestrial creature, a monster, or worse--it will have vision like a cat’s or be able to sense the good guys through its radar sense, like a bat, or sniff them out with their heightened sense of smell, like a wolf.
• Cornfields attract aliens. (Remember Signs?)

What do those strange crop circles mean, anyway, that have popped up in pastures and, yes, cornfields, the world over?

Maybe we don’t want to know.


“Everyday Horrors: Cornfields” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured in Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.

A History of Hell, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume IV, The Age of Faith, of The Story of Civilization:

• Al Ghazali claimed that theists considered heaven and hell to be “spiritual conditions only,” rather than actual places.
• The Sufi Moslems held that hell is but temporary and that, ultimately, salvation is universal.
• Arab descriptions served as part of the basis for Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy.
• For their inspiration for hell, the Hebrews referred to He Hinnom or Sheol, a valley in which rubbish heaps were continuously ablaze to prevent the spread of disease. Sheol, Durant observes, “was conceived of as a subterranean region of darkness that received all the dead.” The Hebrew hell consisted of seven stories , “with graduated degrees of torment.” It was a place of temporary torment for all but adulterers, those who shamed others publicly, and those who slandered or libeled others.
• Irishman Johannes Scotus Eringena believed that heaven and hell were spiritual conditions, not physical locations.
• Pope Gregory the Great held that hell is a physical place, wherein fire eternally burns the damned, tormenting them without destroying them; their suffering is increased, he maintained, by their being made to witness the torment of any of their loved ones who have also been damned and by their despair at ever being liberated or delivered from their suffering.
• Durant says that medieval Catholic men and women “hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.” The Bulgarian king, Boris, was converted, it is said, by seeing a mural of hell that an artist painted upon his palace wall. Mystics claimed to have visions in which they saw the “geography of hell.” Satan, chained upon “a burning gridiron,” was alleged to snatch suffering sinners and crush them in his teeth, swallowing “them down his burning throat,” as “assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth.” A sumptuous stench permeated the damned and their environs, and the flames gave no light, the darkness adding to the terror and the suffering of the damned. Christ was feared in his aspect of the judge of the living and the dead, for he could send or deliver the souls of the dead to eternal bliss or to everlasting damnation. “The devil,” Durant points out, “was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil.” He was also quite the ladies’ man, fathering monstrous children, one of whom is alleged to have had “a wolf’s head and a scorpion’s tail.” His many assistants also tempted people and liked to lie with women as incubi, or sex demons. Although the people feared the greater demons, “a saving sense of humor saved this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror,” and one exhausted demon, resting “on a head of lettuce. . . was inadvertently eaten by a nun.” Limbo was introduced as the abode of the unapprised infant, although St. Augustine had believed that they also went to hell. There was debate as to whether more souls would be saved and go to heaven or more souls would be damned and go to hell, and Moslems believed most Christians would go to hell, while Christians believed the opposite. No soul could be saved, the Roman Catholic Church contended, except through itself. Volcanoes were assumed to be “the mouths of hell,” and “their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned.” According to Pope Gregory, “the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.” Pope Gregory IX held as heretical Raymond Lully’s assertion that the greatness of Christ’s love ensured the salvation, rather than the damnation, of the vast majority of souls. “The last moment of life” was considered to be “decisive for all eternity,” which added to the terror of life that many felt. Purgatory offered slight hope to the living. According to a legend, St. Patrick had a great pit dug, into which monks descended; “some returned. . . And described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness.” Many other travelogues of hell also existed. As Durant notes, “Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity,” and priests, such as Peter Damian, delivered “fiery sermons on the pains of hell.” Nevertheless, some challenged these doctrines of the faith--and, indeed, the faith itself, asking, for example, why God should have created the devil if he’d known in advance that the devil would sin and fall, whether a just and loving God could “punish finite sin with infinite pain,” and whether hell-fire would not at some point render the damned insensitive to its pain.
• The doctrine of original sin was a theological attempt to account for “the biological theory of primitive instincts” and “the preaching of this doctrine” led to a diminishing of the “fear of hell. . . till the Reformation,” when it was “to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.”
• St. Anselm said that only the “infinite atonement” of Christ could atone for the “infinite offense” of Adam and Eve, their sin being “infinite” because it had been directed “against an infinite being,” God. Therefore, only “the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. . . . and restore the moral balance of the world.”
• For medieval people, “the earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God.”
• Roger Bacon endorsed the study and use of mathematics because this subject “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell.”
• Dante used many Arab sources as inspirations for his descriptions of hell, including the Koran, “the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala a;-Ma’arri’s Irisalat al-Ghufran. . . . and Ibn Arabi’s Futubat.
• The hell of Dante’s Inferno is entered through an opening in the earth near a forest. The opening leads to the gates of hell, where an inscription reads, in part, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the poem, “hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth,” imagined by the poet as featuring “dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howling winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans.” The funnel leads through nine levels. Nearer the surface, the lesser sinners reside, whereas the greater sinners dwell at the lower levels. At the lowest level, the ninth circle of hell, traitors are housed, and, at the lowest of all points, “Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitors in each of three jaws--Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.” Dante included actual people among the damned, including, in addition to popes. His Divine Comedy also describes purgatory and heaven, or paradise.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? Many sources have formed the idea of hell, including mythological, pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones.

For the first time, the idea is formed that hell may signify a spiritual condition, rather than a literal place. Theology seems to be losing out to psychology as an explanation of human behavior.

The idea that hell is permanent and eternal rubs some the wrong way, and the doctrine of universal salvation appears, both in Moslem and Christian faith, only to be condemned in Roman Catholicism as heretical. However, Limbo is allowed for unapprised infants, to spare their innocent souls from hell. For those who maintain faith in the existence of an actual, physical hell, the torment of the damned becomes more extreme, the imagination supplying many details as to the nature and effects of the suffering that the lost souls must endure there, forever, as if the catalogue of horrors somehow ensures their reality and, therefore, the reality of the hell in which they occur.

Many write of their supposed journeys to heaven and hell, as if they are reporting trips to foreign lands. Locating heaven and hell becomes a motive for the study of science and mathematics.

Satan and the lesser demons are believed to be incarnate and to be able, in fact, to have sexual relations with women, as incubi (and with men, as succubi). Lesser demons are considered mischievous rather than malignant.

Churchmen argue whether more souls will be saved or damned, with more supporting the latter over the former view.

Dante’s Inferno, borrowing from many earlier sources, Christian and otherwise, offers the most detailed geography of hell, populating it with both imaginary and actual historical figures, including popes, suggesting that hell is a real place to which anyone, including leaders of the church itself, may be tormented in a variety of real and agonizing ways.

Today, the imagining of hell continues in sermons and in books written by people who claim to have undergone near-death experiences, and the debate continues as well as to whether a literal hell exists or, whether, for that matter, literal demons live and stalk the earth.

Those who appear as damned in literary texts represent the values of the society or the poet or other writer in whose work the damned appear, for the values of the lost souls are the values that are rejected by these creators of hell. Therefore, hell can be thought of, in the Jungian sense, as representing a psychic reservoir, akin to the universal mind, in which humanity’s collective shadow archetype lives, in bits and pieces, disguised as this or that individual or type of person. For example, in Dante’s hell, from least (closest to the surface) to the greatest (farthest down), these are the damned; whose values represent the opposites of those embraced by the poet himself:

1. Unbaptized infants
2. Lustful
3. Gluttonous
4. Greedy and wasteful
5. Wrathful and sullen
6. Heretical
7. Violent
8. Fraudulent
9. Treacherous

Plus, did anyone notice the historical references to "mouths of hell"? Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently did, because at least two are mentioned in his television series, one of which was located beneath the Sunnydale High School library (or, in the high school later built on the same site, the principal's office)!

A History of Hell, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume III, Caesar and Christ, of The Story of Civilization.

• Etruscan soldiers believed that they could free one relative’s soul for every foe whom they slew in battle.


• The Etruscan concept of the afterlife included the judgment of the dead, an eternity of torment in hell or of bliss in heaven, and a purgatory of sorts. Their ideas concerning the suffering of the damned haunted Virgil and Dante.


• By far, most of the dead, in Greek belief, went to Hades, but a few spent eternity in paradise, in the Islands of the Blessed or (in Roman mythology) the Elysian Fields.


• Hades, for whom the underworld realm of the dead was named, ruled the subterranean world, and was armed with a mallet by which he could stun the dead.


• Although the Romans sometimes conceived of Hades as a place of punishment, they generally thought of it, as did the Greeks, as a twilight realm in which the dead existed as shadowy figures.


• Dreary Hades as the final destination of almost all the dead disappointed the Roman poet Virgil, and, in The Aeneid, along with “ideas of reincarnation and a future life,“ he sought to describe three alternatives: “a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.”


• Plutarch wrote of the existence or evil spirits who were the source of all chaos and wickedness in nature and humanity and, like Virgil, believed in both heaven and purgatory as well as hell. He believed that even Nero, after his soul had been purified in purgatory, might enter heaven and hoped that the vast majority, rather than a tiny minority, might enjoy a blessed eternity. He rebuked the Stoics for seeking to replace faith in hell with a doctrine of death as annihilation.


• Jesus of Nazareth argued that, upon damnation, hell is eternal, punishing, and irrevocable. In hell, he said, the fire is not quenched, nor is the worm sated. Not the least comfort or compassion is permitted.


• The book of Revelation declares that God’s great enemy, Satan, and his followers, the demons, reside in hell, but will be loosed upon the earth in its final days before being defeated forever and cast, along with the souls of the damned, into hell again, this time for eternity.
  

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? We see that many of the earlier ideas concerning judgment, purgatory, heaven, and hell continue and are developed more specifically. In addition, we learn that Jesus held a strict view of a literal and eternal hell of endless punishment and suffering and that God’s enemy, Satan, and his demons reside in hell along with the souls of the damned. The idea of the afterlife as a shadowy place full of shadowy figures living insubstantial half-lives is gone, replaced with the idea that the souls of the dead are fully alive and subject either to endless bliss or to eternal torment.

In “A History of Hell, Part III,” we will summarize Will Durant's survey of hell as it was conceived during The Age of Faith.

A History of Hell, Part I

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume II, The Life of Greece, of The Story of Civilization.

• According to Greek myth, once they’d died and taken up residence in Hades, kings became judges of the dead.


• Tantalus was damned to Hades by Zeus for a series of offenses which includes having stolen the drink and the food of the gods, nectar and ambrosia , respectively, and attempting to serve his own son, Pelops, boiled and sliced, to the gods. His punishments fit his crimes. Forced to stand forever in a lake, the water drew back from him whenever he tried to slake his thirst and the fruits growing from the vines over his head retreated from his grasp. Moreover, a boulder, suspended above him, threatened at any moment to fall upon him.
  
• One of Hercules’ twelve labors was to descend into Hades and rescue Theseus and Ascalaphus from the torment that these heroes suffered there. In some ways, Hercules is a forerunner to Christ, for he “is the beloved son of a god who suffers for mankind, raises the dead to life, descends into Hades, and then ascends into heaven.”


• Men can enter Hades through a land of eternal darkness that forms a sort of vestibule to the underworld. Using this gateway, Odysseus entered Hades, where he conversed with the shades of Agamemnon, Achilles, and his mother. Hades, or “Hell,” could be also be reached “through southern Epirus,” by way of “the river Acheron,” which “flowed. . . amid ravines so dark and deep that Greek poets spoke of it as the portal or very scene of Hell.”


• Zeus’ brother Pluto ruled Hades. He once complained to his brother that the god Asclepius cured so many of the sick that the underworld wasn’t being populated as well as it once had been, whereupon, lest the gods be inconvenienced by a population explosion among mortals, Zeus slew Asclepius with a thunderbolt.


• According to the Durants, Pythagoras taught that, following the death of the body, “the soul undergoes a period of purgation in Hades; then it returns to earth and enters a new body in a chain of transmigration that can be ended only by a completely virtuous life.”


• Pluto’s kidnapping of Persephone and his later agreement to allow her to split her time between Hades and earth is understood to represent “the annual death and rebirth of the soil.”


• The gods of the underworld were “the most terrible” and were not so much worshiped as appeased.


• According to the hymns and rituals associated with the hero Orpheus, after death, the soul, as a shade, is judged in Hades, after which, depending upon the tradition consulted, the shade undergoes eternal punishment; the transmigrated soul of the dead is reborn repeatedly until it attains moral perfection, whereupon it is admitted to the Isles of the Blessed; or the dead or his friends may gain his release from punishment by performing acts of penance.


• Although notions of an abode for the blessed dead appeared in Greek myth, mention of such places--the Isle of the Blessed Dead or the Elysian Fields--were relatively rare and those who enjoyed their existence in them were few; the bast majority of the departed lived a shadowy existence as wanderers within the gloomy subterranean world of Hades, where the guilty suffered and the others merely existed as shadows of their former, earthly selves.


• Socrates planned to continue his earthly mission as a gadfly in Hades, questioning the dead to see which, if any, of the shades had attained wisdom and helping to enlighten those who, even in death, remained foolish and ignorant.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? We see that the ancient Greek idea of Hades, as the abode of the dead, included both judgment and punishment. The themes of purgation and reincarnation are part of the Greek concept of the hereafter. The deities of the underworld may have been the precursors to Jewish and Christian demons, the fierce, feared denizens of the pit. Atonement as a means of righting a wrong is seen in Zeus’ transformation of Orpheus’ lyre into a constellation to expiate the wrong done to Orpheus. In Orphic hymns and rituals, ideas such as eternal punishment, or hell, reincarnation and the transmigration of the soul, and purgatory and the selling of indulgences all have predecessors or parallels to similar doctrines of Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It seems that, in Greek myth, people, in death, are pretty much the same way as they were in life. Socrates, a gadfly during his living days, intends to be one in Hades as well, testing the wisdom of the shades therein. Jewish, Christian, Norse, and perhaps even Eastern religious concepts of the afterlife, of posthumous judgment, of hell as a place of torment, of purgatory, of atonement, of resurrection, of heaven, and the afterlife seem to stem, in part, from the Greek conceptions of these states and places.

Body Horror

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

A type of fiction, known as body horror, is based upon the fear that something may be amiss with one’s body. One may be sick. One may be disfigured. One may have been born with a physical defect. One may give birth to a deformed baby. One may undergo some sort of hideous physical transformation. A number of horror films and literary texts fit this subgenre of horror.

Sometimes, body horror references men's fear of castration and the twin fears of sex, erotophobia (fear of the erotic) and genophobia (fear of sexual intercourse). The motif of the vagina with teeth, or the vagina dentata, is an example. This story has a moral. It's a cautionary tale, warning young men to be wary of having sex with women whom they do not know: not only may such a young man acquire a venereal disease, but he may also suffer a fate worse than John Wayne Bobbitt’s. (At least his wife used a knife!) In one such story, a bestial element is added: the vagina is not itself armed, as it were, with fangs, but is inhabited by a fish with teeth.

The movie Teeth (2007) is based upon the vagina dentata theme: a chaste, innocent young woman, Dawn, discovers that her vagina is equipped with teeth. (The movie’s tagline is “Every rose has its thorns.”)

As the movie’s official website points out:

Looking into, touching or entering the female orifice seems fraught with hidden fears, signified by the confusion of sex with death in overwhelming numbers of male minds and myths. Since vulvas have labia, "lips," many men have believed that behind the lips lie teeth. Christian authorities of the middle ages taught that certain witches, with the help of the moon and magic spells, could grow fangs in their vaginas. They likened women's genitals to the "yawning" mouth of hell.

As odd as it may seem, like many of the other horrors of horror fiction, the vagina dentata motif may also have a factual (and physical) basis. Dr. Dean Edell reports one of his colleague’s experiences: “a gynecologist. . . reported that he actually saw some teeth in a vagina.”

She had a dermatoid cyst, Edell explains:

Dermoid cysts are derived from the outer layers of embryonic skin, and they are
capable of growing hair and teeth and bones, anything that comes from the outer layers of the embryo. They can occur anywhere.

So this woman had one in the pelvic region and the cyst grew teeth, and when it ruptured through the wall where her uterus joins her vagina--there were the teeth.

Edell himself also saw a patient who was a victim of dermoid cystitis: “In my practice once, I saw one in the eyelid."

Science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer wrote a pornographic sci-fi-horror novel, The Image of the Beast, that features a character, Vivienne, with a vagina dentata of sorts. A sharp-toothed snake-like creature, reminiscent of the lamia of Greek mythology, lives inside her womb, devouring various body parts of her male lovers. She appears again in a sequel, Blown: Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind.

The vagina dentata is one of the more shocking examples that show that things can and do go wrong with the body. However, it is certainly not the only example that is horrible, as any number of birth defects, physical abnormalities, genetic anomalies, and medical conditions indicate.

Several other such conditions involve primary or secondary sexual characteristics. Normal human males (with the requisite X-Y chromosome combination) have been born without penises; others have been born without testicles. Human females have been born with multiple nipples (multiple nipples syndrome, or supernumerary nipples) or with multiple, or accessory, breasts (multiple breast syndrome; also called polymastia, supernumerary breasts, and mammae erraticae).

Body horror recognizes that the body is subject to these, and worse, conditions. Even before Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “The Birthmark” and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” there were stories that demonstrated that, with regard to the body (as is true of the mind and the soul as well), sometimes whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

Value as a Clue to Horror

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

Life is always fragile. One might suppose, however, that, before the advancements in science and technology that we enjoy (sometimes) today, the world must have been fraught with many more perils. Human life must have been especially precarious without the benefits of such modern marvels as antibiotics, computers, incandescent light, and firearms, to name but a few. Pneumonia, tornados, the blindness imposed by darkness, and inefficient or unreliable weapons must have caused many deaths that, today, could be averted or avoided. No wonder Gilgamesh sought immortality. Life in his day must have been both mean and brief. What did others seek? The treasures that were the objects of their quests tell us the things their societies valued most. Whatever threatened these treasures represented their fears, because we fear what we may lose (or want but may never gain). If Gilgamesh sought immortality, he valued life and, consequently, feared death, which may be the greatest loss of all.

“The wages of sin,” the Bible tells us, “is death,” and this is frequently the punishment that God metes out to the unrepentant, as he did with regard to Adam and Eve, to the civilization that existed at the time of the flood, to the residents of Sodom, and to many others throughout the pages of both Testaments. However, according to Christian thought, there are two types of death: physical and spiritual, as the following scripture suggests:

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both the soul and body in hell. --
Matthew 10:28

The one who can destroy both the body and the soul in hell is God, and, many times, the Bible warns the faithful to “fear God,” as does Matthew 10:20. There is a worse condition that death and a worse place than the grave, as the damned find out when they arrive to spend an eternity’s torment in hell. If hell is considered the state of the soul as it exists apart from God, then its opposite is the value that the existence of hell threatens, namely, being in the presence of God (or love, for “God is love”) for eternity. To be an eternal outcast of love is hell.

A threat to one’s whole way of life, which the Trojan War represented to the ancient Greeks, indicates that a people--in this case, the ancient Greeks--valued their culture. Although war is horrible, it’s not usually a horror story’s antagonist, because the monsters of horror fiction are, as we see in another post, metaphorical in nature. They’re symbolic of something else. Instead of a war threatening one’s way of life, therefore, a horror story might posit an extraterrestrial race, as in The War of the Worlds or Alien, as the antagonist, but, make no mistake, these monsters aren’t going to be satisfied with killing only a handful of victims; they want nothing less than a whole nation or, perhaps, the entire planet. In Marvel Comics’ Fantastic Four, Galactus represents such a threat to humanity. Following the lead of his herald, the Silver Surfer, who locates inhabited planets, Galactus literally devours the energy that sustains the planets’ life forms, whether they are human or otherwise, going from planet to planet to appease his hunger. Since Galactus threatens humanity itself, as do, or could, the Martians or the extraterrestrial monsters of Alien, he represents the destruction of a whole way of life, or a civilization and its culture. This same monster--the threat to culture--appears in Beowulf, in the guise of Grendel,

Grendel’s mother, and the dragon.

Such monsters, in a more specific mask and costume, showed up in the horror films of the 1950’s. After World War II, which culminated in the nuclear destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world feared wholesale annihilation, a worldwide nuclear holocaust, and the monsters of horror represented such a threat in the guise of Godzilla, giant ants (Them!), and aliens with enormous destructive capabilities (Invaders from Mars).

The post-war decades (1960’s-present) of horror produced more personal monsters, products of the decade’s emphases on sex, drugs, and rock and roll--experiments with sexual freedom (or license), altered consciousness, and the pursuit of passion, adventure, and excitement for their own sake: deranged serial killers, cannibals, and paranormal or supernatural aberrations and entities who acted, as often as not, on the bases of vengeance, lust, or sadism, rather than on the basis of any rational purpose. Again, the monsters are the threats to the values that the writers, filmmakers, and audiences hold dear. It’s hard to exercise one’s sexual freedom when there’s a sadistic serial killer on the loose or to enjoy one’s emotions when doing so could attract an alien or a demon who feeds off human feelings or the energy associated with them.

What’s to come? Time alone, it seems, has the answer. Whatever the new monster’s shape, though, it will be the shadow of the values of the society of the day that spawns it.

The God of Desperation

Copyright 2007 by Gary L. Pullman

And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both the soul and body in hell. -- Matthew 10:28

Some say that the most frightening character in Stephen King’s Desperation is not the demon Tak or any of his human hosts but God.

The God of Desperation is not the Sunday school God, and he’s inscrutable and alien, unknowable and mysterious. He’s also omniscient and omnipotent. Everyone, it seems, underestimates him, including his servant, the pre-teen David, whom, because God’s power is evident in the boy, Tak fears and loathes.
When one of the characters is hesitant to follow the plan God, through David, lays out, saying that doing so could cost all of them their lives, David replies that God doesn’t care whether any of them lives or dies; all he wants is to stop Tak, and he’s prepared to do whatever he must to accomplish his purpose.

By the end of the story, most of the townspeople are dead, as are David’s family--both parents and his younger sister--and David concludes, “God is cruel.” The reader has seen that Tak rejoices in cruelty as well as death and destruction. What might have happened had the demon escaped from the Nevada desert town? Stopping him, even at so great a cost as the lives of those who resisted the demon, might have been worth it.

Years before, having been released early from school, David had nailed his pass to a tree outside his tree house, hundreds of miles from Desperation. At the end of the story, another character finds the same pass in his pocket and gives it to David. On the pass the words “God is love” appear. Which God seems, cruel or loving, is a matter of perspective, it seems, and perspective, in this world, is always finite.

Tak learns that, far from there being no God in Desperation, as he’d supposed, it was God who, from the beginning, had ordered all the events that transpired since--and maybe even before--the demon escaped from his imprisonment in the collapsed copper mine outside the town. Tak was defeated before he began his campaign of terror. For the demon, God seems to rule by virtue of his might. The God of Desperation is like the elephant in the parable of the blind men. Whatever part of the animal one happens to touch suggests the nature of the animal, but it is none of the things the men imagine it to be; it is more, and other.

By bringing God to Desperation to battle a demon never heard of before, rather than a familiar spirit such as Satan, King renews the mystery and the majesty of God. The God of Desperation is, again, transcendent and unknowable--mighty, cruel, loving, all of these things and much, much more. In Desperation, it is a terrible thing, once again, to fall into the hands of the living God.