Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (13 page)

But even this examination of Charybdis’s origin might be too simplistic. Homer specifically points out that the monster vomited forth water three times a day and sucked it back down again three times
a day. This is odd, since tsunami-formed whirlpools are one-time events that ultimately vanish, as the Japanese tsunami-formed whirlpool did. What Homer’s description suggests is a whirlpool formed by tidal activity.

Reasonably strong whirlpools of this sort—where water rushing out with the tide from one location encounters water rushing in with the tide from another—do exist in a few places along the coasts of Scotland, the United States, and Japan. Just as with tsunami-formed whirlpools, these interactions create a vortex. However, these whirlpools strengthen and weaken on a set schedule that runs like clockwork with the tides. Since there are typically two high tides and two low tides per day, it is a bit baffling that Homer describes Charybdis as sucking in water, presumably through a vortex, three times a day. However, in some parts of the world, including the Mediterranean Sea, there can be unusual numbers of tides per day, with six (three high and three low) a possibility. Alternatively, by saying “three times a day,” Homer may have simply been referring to tides noticed during “daytime,” in which case it would be common for at least one of the whirlpool formations at tidal sites to take place during the dark of night and thus not be seen.

Exactly which real-world tidal whirlpool Homer was considering when describing Charybdis is a difficult question to answer since the existence of whirlpools elsewhere in the world would have been unknown to the Greeks, and most regions of the Mediterranean do not have tides of any significant strength. A naval chart produced by the Italian government in 1881 includes a tiny whirlpool drawing just south of Sicily’s Capo Peloro. It is labeled “Charybdis” and marked as a hazard. Another chart, created in 1823 by Captain W. H. Smyth of the Royal Navy, places a whirlpool drawing with the “Charybdis” label in exactly the same place. Yet another, made in 1810, places the monster slightly farther north. Was legend leading people to mark the monster on maps even if no real monster was there? Or were real navigational conditions once so terrible in the area as to warrant the making of a monster?

Today, British admiralty charts mention whirlpools as regularly forming in the Strait of Messina, which separates mainland Italy and Sicily. Known locally as
garofali
, these whirlpools are actually tidal in nature because, while tides in the Mediterranean are very weak, the narrow strait amplifies the mild tidal effects that are present there. This amplified tide also runs across an unusual submarine ridge that allows it to sometimes drag up cold, dense water from deep below. After being dragged up and moved a short distance on the surface by the tide, this cold water quickly sinks back down to the depths and buoyant warm water swiftly rushes in to fill its place. This process is responsible for the creation of whirlpools. Moreover, the British admiralty specifically identifies one whirlpool, near Torre Faro on Sicily, as particularly large and permanent, and states that it is widely believed to be the Charybdis of Greek lore. What is odd is that this “Charybdis” is listed as hazardous only to small watercraft during
the most extreme tides. How could something so minor have been viewed as a monster?

One possibility, suggested by modern oceanographers, is that a major earthquake of 7.2 magnitude on the Richter scale took place in 1908 in the Messina region, killed between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people, and altered the submarine ridge such that less deep water was brought to the surface. And if a recent major quake could change the bathymetry of the area and lead to the weakening of a whirlpool that eighteenth-century sailors thought worrying enough to note on charts as a monster, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether older earthquakes reduced the whirlpool’s intensity long before even they saw it. A combination of geological clues and human records indicates that a series of powerful earthquakes hit the area in 1783. Were these earthquakes the first to weaken the Charybdis of ancient history, or had the monster already been weakened by even earlier earthquakes? For all we know, Homer may not have been exaggerating at all. Tides in the area could have once brought up so much cold water from the deep that they produced a whirlpool large enough to present a major threat to vessels of all sizes.
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Yet Charybdis is rare among sea monsters by being composed of water and killing people by drowning them. Far more often the danger presented by the ocean takes shape in the human imagination as something physical and predatory. Really, when left adrift in dark waters of seemingly limitless depth, there is nothing more horrible than feeling something swim just past the soles of your feet or, worse, having that something swim in for a bite. And it is from this fear that the legendary and vile Leviathan comes.

Huge, hulking, and powerful, Leviathan is staggeringly different from Charybdis in having a physical form capable of swimming long distances and causing tremendous destruction. Unlike Charybdis, which occupies only two lines in the
Odyssey,
the biblical description of Leviathan in the book of Job is considerable:

Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight of him is overpowering…

I will not fail to speak of his limbs, his strength and his graceful form.

Who can strip off his outer coat? Who would approach him with a bridle?

Who dares open the doors of his mouth, ringed about with his fearsome teeth?

His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together;

each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.

They are joined fast to one another; they cling together and cannot be parted.

His snorting throws out flashes of light; his eyes are like the rays of dawn.

Firebrands stream from his mouth; sparks of fire shoot out.

Smoke pours from his nostrils as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.

His breath sets coals ablaze, and flames dart from his mouth.

Strength resides in his neck; dismay goes before him.

The folds of his flesh are tightly joined; they are firm and immovable.

His chest is hard as rock, hard as a lower millstone.

When he rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before his thrashing.

The sword that reaches him has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.

Iron he treats like straw and bronze like rotten wood.

Arrows do not make him flee; slingstones are like chaff to him.

A club seems to him but a piece of straw; he laughs at the rattling of the lance.

It is an unusually long description for a monster, but it is very much worth taking apart to understand how humanity moved from conjuring up a living whirlpool to a creature like this.

Consider “His back has rows of shields tightly sealed together; each is so close to the next that no air can pass between.” While the image of an animal with shields for skin is vivid, it is hard for the mind not to wander to thoughts of reptiles when reading something like this. Whether Leviathan’s skin is inspired by the large, hard scales of the crocodile or the scutes on a sea turtle’s shell is tough to tell from the description. But anyone paddling along the Nile would have had a chance to tangle with crocodiles of substantial size, and anyone sailing near the Egyptian coast would have likely seen the backs of sea turtles making their way through the water. From just this description of Leviathan, it would seem that such reptile encounters found their way into the biblical texts.

At first glance, the description of sparks of fire shooting out of Leviathan’s mouth seems the stuff of pure fantasy, but then follows, “Smoke pours from his nostrils as from a boiling pot over a fire of reeds.” The critical thing to correct, of course, is that smoke does not actually come from a boiling pot. What is meant here is probably steam, though this makes little sense since the only features in the natural world that produce steam are geothermal in origin, and it would be difficult to mistake a volcanic eruption or a geyser for a sea monster. But steam and mist look awfully similar when seen from a distance, and whales, when they exhale through their blowholes, could easily be mistaken for releasing steam by early sailors who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get close enough to feel that the steam was actually cool to the touch.

The possibility of a whale inspiring the Leviathan myth is supported by other parts of the biblical description. For example, “When he rises up, the mighty are terrified; they retreat before his thrashing” seems to be an account of a whale breaching from beneath the waves. And the arrows, clubs, and slingstones being unable to harm Leviathan further support this idea, since whales have incredibly thick skins and usually require harpoons to be killed.

Several whale populations might have inspired these elements of
Leviathan. It might seem sailors would have to leave the Mediterranean and head out into the Atlantic to see anything bigger than a dolphin, but this is not true. Even though whales are not often seen by locals today, there are a few whale populations that have adapted to survive in the Mediterranean. A population of fin whales, large and docile animals that passively feed off of plankton much as blue whales do, live in the region and are seen from time to time. More intriguingly, there is a sperm whale population, the huge carnivorous whale species featured in
Moby-Dick,
living off the shore of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. Modern biologists’ realization that the whales of Zakynthos are sperm whales came as quite a shock, since male sperm whales are well known for making incredibly long migrations between the near-freezing waters found at the poles and the warm waters near the equator. As it turns out, the male sperm whales near Zakynthos don’t migrate at all but instead stay in the warm Mediterranean water with the females and young of the population throughout the year.
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These whale populations were probably present between 1500 and 500 BC, when Leviathan took shape in biblical writings, since lots of pottery from that time depict monsters that mix whale characteristics with those of reptiles, hinting that the artists of these works had at least caught glimpses of whales. Moreover, archaeological studies have revealed a whale shoulder bone that was used as a chopping board in an ancient Greek marketplace around 900 BC, roughly a hundred years before Homer. While it is possible that the bone was collected from the coast of the Atlantic and brought to Greece, it is more likely that it was part of a whale’s body that washed up locally.

So Leviathan looks to have arisen from a mix of fears. Some sailors must have encountered large marine or river-dwelling reptiles and had no idea what they were. Others must have seen whales and been utterly terrified by their size, breaching behaviors, and misty exhalations. The result was the creation of a monster with mixed traits that blended features of animals that nobody could make sense of.

And Leviathan was only the first of many. In Greek mythology, the princess Andromeda was to be sacrificed to a flesh-and-blood sea monster named Cetus and saved only at the last moment by Perseus, who held up the severed head of Medusa to turn the monster to stone (in the film versions of this tale,
Clash of the Titans,
Cetus is renamed Kraken, but the monster is effectively the same). Artistic renditions of this vary, and many focus only on the curvaceous Andromeda with Cetus either in the distance or out of sight completely. One piece of art that does give the monster a lot of attention is a ceramic jar made around 510 BC. On it, the figure of a hero, probably Perseus, prepares to do battle with an enormous sea monster, probably Cetus (some suggest this is Hercules preparing to battle a sea monster, but nobody is sure). What is remarkable about this art is that there are so many sea animals drawn with such accuracy. The dolphins above and below Cetus, the octopus in the lower left corner, and the seal in the far left are all immediately recognizable. Cetus, on the other hand, is a mess. The monster has the highly maneuverable pectoral fins (the ones in the front left and front right of the body) that a whale has. However, the snakelike undulating body and the spinal frill clash with the idea of this beast being a whale. It also has large gill slits behind the jaw and an anal fin sticking out from the base of its body just a bit in front of the tail. These are not whale traits at all; they are fish characteristics that are easily seen on sharks, hinting that the artist had seen a shark at some point in time. Given the artist’s superb drawings of the dolphins, seal, and octopus, it seems doubtful the drawing of Cetus was just the result of an animal like a sperm whale being drawn incorrectly. This is more likely to be an artistic attempt at creating something truly scary by combining the characteristics of multiple animals.