The map lost its monsters
The map lost its monsters
The collapse of the unknown and the loss of our porous connection to the world.
Today, maps of our physical territory are ubiquitous in a way they were not even 15 years ago. Sure, in 2006, I could hit up Mapquest and print out directions to get from point A to point B. And consumer-grade GPS devices were beginning to enter the scene (I fondly remember my Garmin Nuvi 360 that I paid for a lifetime maps subscription on; who knows where it is now). But today, with services like Google Maps and Apple Maps widely used, advanced mapping through GIS readily available, and more augmented reality on the horizon, maps are ubiquitous.
With maps so readily available today, it’s easy to forget that if you go back 500 years, humanity had a much different relationship with what was known (mapped) and what was unknown. Today, we feel like we can wrap our minds around most anything if we work at it and break down the organic whole into individual parts that become plottable. Our ability to make things mappable leads us to the modern world we know and enjoy.
But as we know by now, all media and technologies change us. And the nature of our changing relationship with maps can also tell us a lot about how we think about ourselves.
Hic Sunt Dracones
Before our modern times, maps contained the rough shapes of places and the names of some countries and cities, but they also had purely speculative things because there was a lot that people didn’t know. It’s somewhat challenging for us to imagine a world where no one society knew what lied beyond the ocean (or if there was even something there at all), but we are only removed from that time by 500 years.
Maps from the late Middle Ages denoted areas with things like “hic sunt dracones” (Latin, “there be dragons”)1 or “terra incognita” (Latin, “unknown land”)2 to denote the edges of human knowledge. But people being practical, we needed to put something there.
Maps were designed for decoration but also served as documentations of knowledge or as objects of economic or military value; it is clear that many were deliberately designed or commissioned to be attractive or even entertaining, the number and position of the creatures shown upon them mostly being the result of financial and/or aesthetic decision.3
So mapmakers filled in the gaps of their knowledge with speculation, filling the spaces with creatures from mythology and using monsters elsewhere to help navigators avoid dangerous places. Some examples of mythical creatures:
Contemporary authors are careful to point out that premodern mapmakers’ belief in any specific mythical creature was likely minimal, but the overall mindset of “there being more to discover than was known” hints at their attitudes. There were unknown lands out there. There were creatures, people, islands, and whole continents that needed exploring. There was great mystery in the world. That was just how it was.
Where did the sea monsters go?
As the premodern world began to turn into the modern world during the Age of the Enlightenment, things began to shift. As one book reviewer put it,
As the world became ‘smaller’ due to exploration, technological improvement and geographical knowledge, and as its living things became better documented, the idea that sea monsters might really exist became ever more untenable – not only as genuine species that might really await discovery, but also as psychological ploys used to depict the unknown or dangerous.4
There is a bit of mutual shaping that happens here. As more and more territory is discovered, our knowledge of the world expands, leaving less to be found. Until we finally feel like we know what there is to know. And once we can “wrap our minds” around the thing, it becomes “contained.” As another book reviewer puts it,
Some of the mystery is gone as the sea becomes another resource rather than a churning darkness to be feared.5
So the once unknown and endless void becomes a resource, something to be used as a tool rather than marveled at.6 There’s a convenience to this; it’s what allowed the western world to develop as it did. But like any technological innovation, trade-offs happened.
James K. A. Smith, writing about Charles Taylor’s work A Secular Age, brings out Taylor’s notion of the porous self vs. the buffered self in talking about premodern and modern Western culture, respectively. Talking about the porous, premodern Westerner:
Just as premodern nature is always already intermixed with its beyond, and just as things are intermixed with mind and meaning, so the premodern self’s porosity means the self is essentially vulnerable (and hence also “healable”). To be human is to be essentially open to an outside (whether benevolent or malevolent), open to blessing or curse, possession or grace.7
So individuals living in the premodern world, not focused so much on trying to wrap their minds around everything, were much more connected to their worlds on the whole. We can think back to the notion of suspension of disbelief from a few weeks back: we accept the reality presented to us as a whole until we start questioning parts of it, at which point the whole thing starts to crumble.
People more or less lived in a world where things happened beyond their explanation. And efforts to explain those things didn’t tend to dilly dally in the particulars but explained phenomenon as a whole. Their lack of knowledge removed boundaries that we today take for granted. One way to think about our modern world is as a place where we’ve put boxes around things to separate cause and effect; we have imposed on the world with the knowledge we have.
What Taylor is getting at goes even beyond this:
We make a sharp distinction between inner and outer, what is in the “mind” and what is out there in the world. Whatever has to do with thought, purpose, human meanings, has to be in the mind, rather than in the world. Some chemical can cause hormonal change, and thus alter the psyche. There can be an aphrodisiac, but not a love potion, that is, a chemical that determines the human/moral meaning of the experience it enables. A phial of liquid can cure a specific disease, but there can’t be something like the phials brought back from pilgrimage at Canterbury, which contained a miniscule drop of the blood of Thomas à Beckett, and which could cure anything, and even make us better people; that is, the liquid was not the locus of certain specific chemical properties, but of a generalized beneficence.
Modern Westerners have a clear boundary between mind and world, even mind and body. Moral and other meanings are “in the mind.” They cannot reside outside, and thus the boundary is firm…
A modern is feeling depressed, melancholy. He is told: it’s just your body chemistry, you’re hungry, or there is a hormone malfunction, or whatever. Straightway, he feels relieved. He can take a distance from this feeling, which is… declared not justified. Things don’t really have this meaning; it just feels this way, which is the result of a causal action utterly unrelated to the meanings of things. This step of disengagement depends on our modern mind/body distinction, and the relegation of the physical to being “just” a contingent cause of the psychic.
Here is the contrast between the modern, bounded, buffered self and the porous self of the earlier enchanted world. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer, such that the things beyond don’t need to “get to me,” to use the contemporary expression. That’s the sense to my use of the term “buffered” here and in A Secular Age. This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.8
So, where did the sea monsters go? They went the way of black bile, love potions, and the healing power of the blood of saints: as the world became disenchanted, our ability to conceive of a world that contained such marvelous creatures also disappeared. As our knowledge of the world expanded and we imposed a structure onto that knowledge, there was no more room for the unknown. So the monsters had to go.
You may be thinking: is that such a bad thing? That depends on your perspective. While our world has become mostly disenchanted, we still long for enchantment. So perhaps it’s better to think about the porous vs. buffered self as a technological tradeoff: all technologies take from us as well as give. It’s easy to see the shortcomings of the premodern world, but what did we lose in the process of modernity?
And with that, thanks for reading. See you again next week.
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Notes and Further Reading
If you are tempted to read A Secular Age, let it be known: this is a monster of a volume. I would highly recommend James K. A. Smith’s How (Not) To Be Secular, which is itself a summary of Taylor’s work in a (more) concise form. You can also watch this Youtube video:
This Youtube video had another interesting take on sea monsters.
I mentioned the article on suspension of disbelief. You can find the whole article here:
This dives right up against discussions of the work of Martin Heidegger, of which I’ve read a little. You can see an excellent discussion of this from Mark Blitz here. For the sake of a cleaner narrative, however, I’m going to leave this alone for now.