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From Aesop to Bugs Bunny and Orwell to Viral Videos

Aesop's The Tortoise and the Eagle
Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Eagle

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.

Fables, fairy tales, cartoons, and viral videos are full of talking animals. Foxes flatter, lions boast, tortoises aspire to fly. For thousands of years, storytellers have preferred animals to people when telling us stories about ourselves.

A fable is a short tale featuring animals or other non-human entities—the sun, the wind, trees—and concluding with an explicit moral lesson, often expressed as a pithy maxim or saying.

The animals are anthropomorphised: they are given human qualities, especially speech and reason, and usually a vice or two. But otherwise the fable is fairly realistic, with much humbler characters and more commonplace events than legend or myth.

According to Plato, Socrates spent the days leading up to his execution putting Aesop’s fables into verse—which is all the more surprising when one considers that Socrates never wrote anything down.

Other famous collections of fables include the Buddhist Jataka Tales and the Hindu Panchatantra, and there is likely to have been some crossover between the fabulary of Greece and that of India.

For instance, there are both Greek and Indian versions of The Tortoise and the Birds, not to mention a number of African variants. Fables travel well, in both space and time: because they feature animals, they are timeless and universal. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) might be considered a modern and extended adaptation of the fable form.

Here is Aesop’s version of The Tortoise and the Birds, entitled The Tortoise and the Eagle:

A tortoise, unhappy with his lowly station, begged an eagle to teach him to fly. At last, the eagle put his reservations to one side and consented. He picked the tortoise up in his talons, carried him up to a great height, and released his grip. But instead of flying or gliding, the tortoise fell headlong to the ground and was dashed to pieces on a rock.

Moral: After vanity comes a downfall.

Similar to the fable in extrapolating from the particular to the general to extract a moral lesson is the parable, the difference between the two forms being that the parable relies on human rather than animal actors—although many fables, particularly in India, also feature humans: a brahmin, a prince, a storyteller, a merchant, an unfaithful or ungrateful wife…

The parable is especially associated with the 37 or so related by Jesus in the Gospels of Luke, Matthew, and Mark. Curiously, the Gospel of John, although it contains allegories, is not held to contain any parables. In Matthew 13, the disciples ask Jesus why he speaks in parables to the multitudes. Jesus replies, ‘Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.’

So, why does the fable favour animal over human protagonists?

Consider this short fable by Aesop, The Fox and the Mask:

A fox broke into the house of an actor and noticed a mask in the midst of a pile of stage accessories. The fox dragged out the mask and nuzzled and swatted it for a few moments, before saying, ‘What a handsome face, pity he has no brains.’

What are the advantages here and elsewhere of preferring animal over man?

The use of animals creates new and striking possibilities. This stokes the imagination, making the tale seem more original and entertaining, even charming, without which it might fall flat as moralising or patronising.

The use of animals also enables the fabulist to isolate the vice and to caricature it, while at the same time providing a fresh perspective on it.

On a deeper level, it creates a continuum between human and animal, revealing us as a part of nature and at one with it, while also highlighting that which sets us apart from the rest of creation, namely, speech and reason (Greek, logos) and the ethical faculty (Greek, sophrosyne).

Talking animals appeal most to children, possibly because blurring the lines between human and animal is a form of pre-logical, magical thinking.

Finally, the use of animals can serve as a cover, a means of escaping censorship, or of generalising or universalising. For instance, Jean de la Fontaine (d. 1695) used the fable form to satirise French society, and Orwell to satirise communism and other forms of totalitarianism.

Animals delight us still today, every day, if only in cartoons and viral videos, because, as the fabulist might say, ‘So it is with men, too.’

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A Psychiatrist and Philosopher Interprets the Myth of Narcissus

Narcissus, by Caravaggio

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

I have long been fascinated by the myth of Echo and Narcissus, and may finally have cracked its meaning.

The Story of Narcissus

First, let’s remind ourselves of the myth. In Ovid’s version, the nymph Echo falls in love with Narcissus, a youth of remarkable beauty. As a child, Narcissus had been prophesied by Teiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, to ‘live to a ripe old age, so long as he never knows himself’.

One day, Echo followed Narcissus through the woods as he hunted for stags. She longed to speak to him but dared not utter the first word. Overhearing her footsteps, the youth cried out, “Who’s there?”—to which she responded, “Who’s there?” When at last she revealed herself, she leapt out to embrace Narcissus, but he scorned her and cast her off.

Echo spent the rest of her days pining for Narcissus, and slowly withered away until there was nothing left of her but her voice.

Some time after his encounter with Echo, Narcissus went to quench his thirst at a pool of water. Seeing his own image in the water, he fell in love with it. But each time he bent down to kiss it, it seemed to disappear. Narcissus grew ever more thirsty but would not leave or disturb the pool of water for fear of losing sight of his fine features. 

At length, he died of thirst, and there, on the very spot, appeared the narcissus flower, with its bright face and bowed neck.

A daffodil or Narcissus flower

Interpretation of the Myth

So what could this myth mean? 

On one level, it is an admonition to treat others as we would ourself be treated—and in particular to be considerate in responding to the affections of others, which, as with Echo, are often so raw and visceral as to be existential.

Poor Echo had no self and no being outside of Narcissus, and after being rejected by him ‘slowly withered away until there was nothing left of her but her voice’.

Even her voice, the only thing that remained of her, was his rather than her own.

On another level, the myth is a warning against vanity and self-love. Often, we get so caught up in our being, in our little ego [Latin, ‘I am’], that we lose sight of the bigger picture and, as a result, pass over the beauty and bounty that is life.

By being too wrapped up in ourself, we actually restrict our range of perception and action and, ultimately, our potential as human beings. And so, in some sense, we kill ourself, like so many ambitious or self-centred people.

Treating other people badly, as Narcissus did, is a sure sign of still being trapped in ourself.

Teiresias prophesied that Narcissus would ‘live to a ripe old age, as long as he never knows himself ’, because to truly know ourself is also to know that there is nothing to know. Our self, our ego, is nothing but an illusion, nothing more substantial than the unstable reflection that Narcissus tried in vain to kiss. 

Narcissus’s ego boundaries only dissolved in death, when he merged back into creation in the form of a daffodil—which, like us, flowers too early and too briefly, and often too brashly, if it flowers at all.

Echo had not enough ego, and Narcissus far too much. The key is to find the right and dynamic equilibrium, to be secure in ourself and yet to be able to dissociate from the envelope that we happen to have been born into.

In Greek myth, the hero has to die and travel through the underworld before re-emerging as a hero. He has to conquer himself, to die to himself, to become more than merely human. For nothing is harder than to come back from hell.

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The History and Psychology of Labyrinths

A golden labyrinth or maze
The labyrinth symbolizes the winding path of life: not a puzzle to be solved, but a journey to be lived.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 22 July 2026.

What’s the difference between a maze and a labyrinth—and why are they making a comeback? Once thought of as little more than decorative curiosities, they are increasingly being rediscovered as places of reflection, meditation, and healing. To understand why, we must go back to the most famous labyrinth of them all.

The Cretan Labyrinth

In Greek myth, King Minos, to consolidate his position on the Cretan throne, asked the god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of divine favour. But instead of sacrificing the bull as he ought to have done, he decided to keep it for his stud farm. Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife Pasiphaë lust for the bull.

Pasiphaë pleaded with the master craftsman Daedalus to build her a hollow cow in which to hide out with the bull. Daedalus’ cow seemed so true to life that the bull mounted it. Some time later, Pasiphaë gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man.

The Minotaur, as he grew, became increasingly violent and even began eating people. Fearing that his subjects would rise against him, Minos sought to contain his stepson in a series of ever stronger cages; but after he broke out of the strongest cage, he asked Daedalus to build a maze of tunnels beneath his palace.

The Labyrinth, as it came to be called, was so intricate that even Daedalus, having built it, struggled to escape from it. The Labyrinth served Minos well, enabling him to intimidate and dispose of his enemies while also hiding and feeding the Minotaur—who now would eat nothing but human flesh.

Theseus to the Rescue

Minos, Minotaur aside, was a great king. Under his rule, Crete prospered and grew into a naval power. When his eldest son Androgeus came of age, he travelled to Athens to partake in the Panathenaic Games. Somehow Androgeus died—or was killed—and Minos held Athens responsible for his loss.

In reparation, and as the price for peace, King Minos required that King Aegeus send him, every nine years, a tribute of seven of the most noble youths and seven of the most virtuous maidens of Athens. These unfortunates, drawn by lots, would be sent to Crete in a ship with black sails, paraded before the people, and cast into the Labyrinth.

When the time came for the third nine-yearly tribute to Crete, Theseus, the son and heir of Aegeus, volunteered to take the place of one of the fourteen unfortunates and confront the Minotaur. He sailed for Crete in a ship with black sails, promising his ailing father that, if victorious, he would return on white sails. As he was paraded through the streets of the Cretan capital, Minos’ daughter Ariadne saw him and immediately fell in love with him. He and the other Athenians were locked up in a dungeon to await morning, when they would be fed to the Minotaur.

That evening, Ariadne begged Daedalus, until he relented, to disclose the secret of the Labyrinth. Under the cover of darkness, she ran past the guards to Theseus and slipped him a sword and a clew of crimson thread. She instructed him to tie the thread at the mouth of the Labyrinth and unfurl the clew as he went along, ‘always straight, always down, and never left or right.’ 

Before leaving, she made him promise that, if he came out alive, he would take her with him and marry her.

As Theseus descended into the darkness, the air became putrid and he began tripping over what must have been human remains. He could hear the thumping of the Minotaur, but could not locate him until he could also hear his breathing. He may never have seen him had it not been for the blood-tinged ivory of his eyes and horns.

With his head down, the Minotaur made to gore him, but he leapt in Cretan style over his horns, rolled over, drew out his sword, and drove it up to where he imagined he had his heart. 

He then picked up the clew and wound it back up to find his way out of the Labyrinth… and into the waiting arms of Ariadne.

History or Myth?

In the early twentieth century, the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, working on Crete, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people he called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos.

Minoan Crete flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE and came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island. The palace at Knossos covered an area of around six acres (or three football pitches) and contained some 1,300 rooms connected by various corridors and stairways, leading Evans to speculate that the mythical Labyrinth was none other than the palace itself.

Pottery and frescoes unearthed by Evans and his team featured bulls and bull-leaping, and the most common symbol on palace walls was the labrys, or double axe—and it has been suggested, including by Evans himself, that Labyrinth might mean something like ‘Sanctuary of the Double Axe’.

The reconstructed palace at Knossos. Its network of rooms and corridors may have inspired the legend of the Labyrinth. Photo: Neel Burton.

Maze or Labyrinth?

Although the Labyrinth was clearly a branching, multicursal maze, it has long been represented—for example, on Cretan coins—as a single-path, unicursal maze in which it is impossible to get lost.

As a result, the word ‘labyrinth’, although essentially synonymous with ‘maze’, has come to connote unicursality, while the word ‘maze’ has come to connote multicursality.

In short, a maze offers choices; a labyrinth offers a single path.

A Universal Symbol

In his Natural History, the naturalist Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) describes four ancient labyrinths—in Egypt, Crete, Lemnos, and Italy—all of which seem to have been enclosed multicursal complexes, confirming that this is the ancient, original meaning of the word ‘labyrinth’.

In the Histories, the historian Herodotus (d. 425 BCE) claims that the Egyptian labyrinth surpassed even the pyramids in scale and ambition:

I myself have seen [the Egyptian labyrinth], and no words can tell its wonders: the sum of all that the Greeks have built and wrought would be a matter of less labour and cost than was this single labyrinth…

Far from a mere folly, the labyrinth is, like the serpent, the flood, and the trinity, something of a Jungian archetype, found in prehistoric rock drawings at, for example, Pontevedra in Galicia (Spain), Val Camonica in Lombardy (Italy), and Rocky Valley in Cornwall (England).

In medieval Europe, cathedrals sometimes contained a labyrinth traced out in the nave from contrasting paving stones. Those that have survived, such as the striking one in Chartres Cathedral, can still be walked today. Cathedral labyrinths were not simply ludic or ornamental but represented the spiritual path to God and provided a substitute for going on pilgrimage. Cathedral labyrinths were therefore unicursal, as were the first hedge mazes, which evolved from Renaissance knot gardens.

The Journey of Life

As I argue in The Meaning of Myth, mazes and labyrinths are in fact spiritual tools. Multicursal mazes such as the Cretan Labyrinth may have been built not only to guard against gold diggers but also to deter or trap evil spirits, including the Minotaur. Unicursal labyrinths, on the other hand, may have been traced to guide rituals or dances.

The circular unicursal labyrinth symbolizes the cosmos, completeness, and unity, and, by extension, the spiritual path or journey of life. More than a simple garden, it is a removed, secluded, and liminal space that serves to calm and concentrate the mind—which is why labyrinths, often simply mown into a summer field, are increasingly to be found in therapeutic settings such as hospitals and hospices. Labyrinths, especially single-path, unicursal ones, serve not only as a thing of beauty but also, above all, as an aid to meditation and mindfulness.

Ariadne’s Thread

To walk the labyrinth is to re-enter the womb and travel inward, and to come back out is a kind of rebirth. Ariadne’s crimson thread is thus an umbilical cord that ties Theseus to the world while he undertakes the hero’s journey into the underworld and slays the monster.

To escape the Labyrinth, Theseus simply followed the clew, or clue. This revised spelling of clew, ‘a ball of thread or yarn’, underwent a sense shift from around 1600 in reference to Theseus and the Minotaur, giving us the modern word clue and, more recently, clueless.

The path to wisdom is never a straight one; every twist and turn, every up and down, is part of the journey.

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How the Serpent Came to Represent Life and Death, Poison and Cure, Fear and Wisdom

A hissing snake on a staff

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

Few creatures carry as many contradictory meanings as the snake. Across cultures, the serpent has come to represent life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom.

A snake is an animal; a serpent is also an idea.

For thousands of years, snakes have slithered through our myths and dreams, sometimes as monsters or tempters, sometimes as healers, protectors, and teachers. Even today, more than two thousand years after Hippocrates, the snake remains the pre-eminent symbol of medicine and allied professions.

How did one animal come to represent so many apparently contradictory things?

Snakes and Seers

In myth, snakes, or serpents, are often connected to seers and oracles.

Teiresias is the most notorious seer in Greek myth. As a young man, he came upon a pair of coupling serpents on Mount Cithaeron and, in disgust, struck them with his staff. This offended the goddess Hera, who turned him into a woman.

Teiresias spent the next seven years as a priestess of Hera, and even married and had children in that time. After seven years as a woman, he once again chanced upon a pair of coupling serpents, but this time gave them a wide berth. Seeing this, Hera released him from her curse.

Later, Zeus and Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the more pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.

Already, the serpent is associated with transgression, gender, sexuality, punishment, and knowledge or wisdom.

Ancient Oracles

The ancients took divination extremely seriously. Leaders would consult an oracle or seer before any major undertaking. Aristotle, that paragon of logic and reason, even wrote a lesser-known treatise entitled On Divination in Sleep.

Oracles were considered superior to seers because they had a direct channel to God, or a god. They were, however, difficult to consult, each with their own seasons and capricious conditions, such that most of the demand for divination was met by seers like Teiresias.

The oracular tradition may have originated with the oracle of the Egyptian goddess Wadjet at Per-Wadjet, near modern-day Alexandria. Wadjet was depicted as a snake—usually an Egyptian cobra—or as a combined woman and snake. She nursed the infant Horus and protected Ra by coiling herself upon his head.

The snake goddess figurines excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos may have been connected to Wadjet, as may the uraeus, the stylised upright cobra used as a symbol of sovereignty and divine authority, and mounted upon the crowns and masks of the pharaohs—including, famously, Tutankhamun.

So long before the serpent came to symbolise evil in the Christian imagination, it could represent protection, sovereignty, divinity, secret knowledge, and insight or wisdom.

The Fear of Snakes

But there is a more primitive reason for the snake’s hold upon our imagination: snakes frighten us.

Ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, is one of the most common specific phobias. Whereas many anxiety disorders tend to take hold in adulthood, specific phobias such as ophidiophobia and arachnophobia often go back to early childhood, perhaps because they relate to the sorts of dangers that threatened our remote ancestors.

Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us down, yet our most primitive fears remain disproportionately attached to natural dangers. Unlike snakes, technological innovations have not been around for long enough to haunt us—sorry, ‘imprint themselves onto our genomes’.

The snake strikes our imagination not despite our fear of it, but in part because of that fear. What can kill us must command our attention. 

Poison and Cure

Although the snake can kill us, it can also cure us.

Snake venom is a deadly poison, but its constituents can also have medicinal properties—having been used, for example, to control pain or stem haemorrhage. According to the Book of Numbers, Moses erected a bronze serpent upon a pole to save Israelites bitten by the ‘fiery serpents’ sent by God in retribution—thereby turning one snake against another, or others.

The same archetype recurs in the two symbols of the medical profession: the more traditional Rod of Asclepius, god of healing, with one snake; and the more commercial Rod of Hermes, or Caduceus, with two snakes. The rod or staff represents control over the dual nature of the snake, or the Moses-like harnessing of its powers. 

It is one of medicine’s oldest truisms, that many a substance is a cure, until it becomes a poison. Like a sorcerer, a doctor is an expert at measuring poisons.

Death and Rebirth

It is for more than their venom that serpents came to stand at the threshold of life and death. Snakes live close to the ground and disappear into holes and crevices, connecting them in the imagination with the nourishing earth and the underworld. More strikingly, they shed their skins, seeming to cast off their old bodies and emerge anew. It is not difficult to see how they became symbols of rebirth and immortality—and, by extension, of creativity, culture, and wisdom.

The ouroboros—Greek for ‘tail eater’—depicts a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in Egypt and later passing into the Greek mystery cults, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, it symbolises the circle of life: destruction continually giving rise to creation, death folding back into birth. The ouroboros may also symbolise sexual intercourse, with the tail representing the male organ and the mouth the female one.

The Serpent of Eden

The most notorious serpent of all is the one in Eden, at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

According to the Book of Genesis, the serpent is the most ‘subtil’ of all the beasts in God’s creation and, like Adam and Eve, has the ability to speak and reason. The only other animal that speaks in the Pentateuch is Balaam’s ass, and then only because God opened its mouth. Seduced by the serpent, Eve, and then Adam, ate of the tree, and ‘the eyes of them both were opened.’ As well as casting Adam and Eve out of Eden, as we remember only too well, God cursed the serpent to go on his belly and eat dust, and put enmity between the serpent and man:

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The serpent introduces poison, death, and seduction into Eden, but, like the tree itself, it also brings knowledge and enlightenment. Unlike the lamb or the lion, the snake cannot easily be made to stand for one thing. Instead, it stands for the antinomies of the human condition: life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom. And so it endures.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Horror

Portrait of a monster

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 9 September 2026.

According to Forbes, horror movies rake in around a billion dollars a year. The meat of horror [Latin, ‘a trembling, a shaking’] is, of course, the monster [Latin, ‘bad omen’], whether the great white shark in Jaws or the White Walkers in Game of Thrones, or, in Greek myth, the Gorgon Medusa, the sea-monster Cetus, or the Minotaur.

So, what makes for a good monster?

An effective monster is not only terrifying, like a roaring lion or stampeding elephant might be, but also revolting. Adapting the insights on ritual impurity of the anthropologist Mary Douglas (d. 2007), the philosopher Noël Carroll argued that a good monster displays one or more of four sometimes overlapping forms of impurity:

1. Categorical interstitiality is when something is more than one thing. Greek myth is full of interstitial monsters such as the chimera (part lion, part goat, part snake), the griffin (part lion, part eagle), and the harpy (part bird, part human).

2. Categorical contradictoriness is when something violates binary classes of existence, in particular, something that is both dead and alive, like Frankenstein’s monster or Count Dracula, or something that is both animate and inanimate, like a haunted house or even, at a stretch, the Temple of Doom in Indiana Jones with all its elaborate booby traps. The ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate is acquired at just six months of age, and is so basic as to be built into language. For example, although this usually goes unnoticed even by native speakers, English restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has seen’…) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead. A dead person cannot ‘have been’ or ‘have seen’ anything.

3. Incompleteness is when something is missing a part or parts, like an eye or limbs, or even an entire body in the case of the cannibalistic Flying Head of the Iroquois Indians. In antiquity and later, people believed distant lands to be inhabited by headless men called akephaloi with their facial features in their chest, and monopods with a single leg ending in a gigantic foot. To incompleteness, I would add ‘overcompleteness’, like Cerberus, the three-headed Hound of Hell, or sharks with their several rows of triangular teeth.

4. Formlessness is when something lacks clear boundaries, and therefore, as with interstitiality and contradictoriness, eludes categorization. Examples include werewolves, Dr Jeykll/Mr Hyde, the Blob, the Nothing, and the Fog.

Carroll added that, for extra horrific effect, a monster may be magnified or massified, that is, made larger in size like Fenrir, King Kong, or Godzilla, or multiplied in number like the army of the dead in Lord of the Rings.

Many monsters also have a trait that Sigmund Freud called ‘the uncanny’. In 1970, the professor of robotics Masahiro Mori posited the theory of the uncanny valley. He observed that, for the most part, our emotional response towards machines is fairly neutral, while our emotional response towards human beings and objects such as teddy bears is fairly positive. But if an entity looks almost but not quite human, it arouses negative feelings of eeriness and revulsion.

How to account for the uncanny valley? It could be that humanoids such as the Joker, or cyclops or satyrs, evoke death or illness. Or that they ‘mess with the mind’ in some way—perhaps by violating norms and expectations, or by being deceptive or difficult to read. The Joker wears a flower that can squirt deadly venom: that a flower is normally harmless, even delightful, underscores his deeply deceptive nature.

What is the function, and the appeal, of horror, both in myth and elsewhere? On one level, horror excites our curiosity and imagination, notably through the violation of norms and expectations, the exploration of taboos, and the creation of dramatic suspense. On another level, it gives us licence to unleash our darker side, that is, our Freudian id or Jungian shadow. Shapeshifters such as werewolves and Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde are commonly interpreted, in their different aspects, as the psychic layers of one, same person. Other monsters, often supervillains such as the Joker, are so overrun by their shadow as to be nothing but darkness.

But the main attraction of horror is, of course, the fear to which it gives rise. Both fear and disgust are among the six basic emotions proposed by the psychologist Paul Ekman—the other four being happiness, sadness, anger, and surprise. Basic emotions evolved in response to the ecological challenges faced by our remote ancestors and are so primal as to be ‘hardwired’, with each basic emotion corresponding to a more or less distinct and dedicated neurological circuit. 

Still today, specific phobias are generally for the natural dangers that commonly threatened our ancestors, such as spiders (arachnophobia), snakes (ophidiophobia), and blood (haematophobia), even though in the modern world man-made hazards such as guns, cars, and electric cables are far more likely to strike us down. For most of our evolutionary history, our greatest fear was to fall prey to a predator, to become someone else’s dinner, someone else’s meat.

Horror reawakens that primal fear of falling prey to a predator, and this can serve a number of functions.

First, it can help us rehearse for danger, like children do when they chase one another and pierce our ears with their screams.

Second, it can help us confront and process past experiences by, in some sense, replaying or reawakening them.

Third, and most important, it can give us pleasure, if not perhaps in itself, then at least in the release and relief that follow after it.

When I visited the remote Cederberg winery in South Africa, more than 20 miles down a gravel track off the Cape-Namibia Route, I was handed the key to a nearby cave complex containing prehistoric Bushmen paintings, which I proceeded to explore on my own, without so much as a telephone signal. I still remember the intense ‘joy-safety’ that I experienced upon returning to my Jeep and shutting the door on all the venomous vipers and spiders that had been closing in on my imagination.

Also worth noting is that intense negative emotions can become pleasant if their object or conditions are a simulacrum, which is why people turn not only to horror but also to things like rollercoasters and sadomasochism—which, when poorly executed, can, like horror, quickly descend into farce.

In myth especially, the monster may variously represent: our fears, death, nature, our parents, society, our ego, our id or shadow, our former self, our body, greed, lust, envy, and/or a threat to humanity. 

The monster is, in short, everything that petrifies us—quite literally in the case of the Gorgon Medusa.

And it is the thing that every hero must slay.

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