Consolation Now

Monster

A monster is often a hideously grotesque animal or human, or a hybrid of both, whose appearance frightens and whose powers of destruction threaten the human world's social or moral order. Animal monsters are outside the moral order, but sometimes have their origin in some human violation of the moral law (e.g. in the Greek myth, Minos does not sacrifice the white bull Poseidon sent him to the god, so as punishment Poseidon makes Minos' wife, Pasiphaë, fall in love with the bull, and she copulates with the beast, and gives birth to the man with a bull's head, the Minotaur). Human monsters are those who by birth were never fully human (Medusa and her sisters) or who through some supernatural or unnatural act lost their humanity (werewolves, Frankenstein's monst… more »