ABSTRACT
Unlike cities, money, and writing, monsters are a phenomenon that has not featured prominently (or as a central element) in conventional accounts of civilisation. However, monsters and the monstrous can be seen to lurk around different corners of civilisation and signifying the weirder dimensions of civilisation and its entanglement with the non-rational and otherworldly. This chapter explores the role and significance of monsters from the Bronze Age to the present day as reflections of the ‘weird’ and ‘uncanny’ undercurrents of civilisation. The discussion in this chapter also puts monsters and the associated ‘weirdly weird’ phenomena of the Anthropocene in a deeper context. This chapter examines monsters and the monstrous from a long-term perspective of civilisation. Monsters are simultaneously ‘this-worldly’ and ‘otherworldly’ and they evidently play a significant role in society, as evidenced by their incredible persistence through millennia. This chapter discusses, for instance, the significance of snakes and dragons as an expression of the ‘monstrous’ from the Ancient world to the present day; the ‘chthonic’ divinities of Greek mythology and their places of worship, often located in underground caverns; the Cretan labyrinth inhabited by the Minotaur; griffins, gorgons, and other creatures of the ‘monster revolution’ of Archaic Greece; and finally the modern world and its monsters.
