"Monster" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot! It’s the spooky season and the monsters are on the loose! Release the Kraken!

The word monster came into Middle English through Old French from Latin monstrum, which could refer to a “monster” or something with an abnormal shape, but really had the more general sense of “omen” or “portent”, since such abnormalities were taken as a, usually bad, sign of what was to come. The word comes from the verb monere “to remind, admonish, warn, instruct”, so literally a monster is a warning. Ultimately it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *men- “to think, mind, spiritual activity”, a root with many English derivatives such as mind, mention, and music. The word omen also comes from Latin, in this case with no change in form, but the ultimate source of this word is debated. The Romans themselves connected it with the word os “mouth” (also the source of English oral), which comes from PIE *os- “mouth”, but more recent suggestions connect it instead with Greek oiomai “think, believe, suppose” from the root *o- “to believe, hold as true” (also attested in Hittite as ha- “to consider true”), or to the root *au- “to perceive”, also source of Latin audire “to hear” from which comes English audible. The word portent is a little more straight forward, coming from Latin portendere “to predict, foretell” from the roots *per- “forward” and *ten- “to stretch”.

So if monsters are a warning, what are they a warning of, and what is their cultural role? One of the best ways to begin to answer these questions is to have a look at Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory and consider his seven theses about how to read cultures from their monsters. Thesis I: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body, in other words a monster is a cultural symbol or representation of a society, reflecting a particular location in time and place, and as such a monster is a thing to be read, it reveals, it warns. Thesis II: The Monster Always Escapes. Not only do monster stories often end on a note of ambiguity as to the actual fate of the monster, but they are continually being reinvented with each new era, each new cultural moment, and we can tell a lot about those cultural moments by looking at which monsters are revived and how they are different. Thesis III: The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis. People have an inherent desire to classify and categorize, particularly into binaries such as alive/dead, human/animal, and so forth, and monsters can span those divides — they can be undead like a vampire or zombie, they can be hybrids like a werewolf or the Minotaur — and this makes monsters profoundly unsettling. Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference, in other words monsters reflect and amplify cultural differences, they represent the fear or revulsion people have of the abnormal, the different, whether those differences are cultural, political, racial, economic, or sexual. Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible, in other words monsters represent the unknown, and warn us away from exploring what lies outside of what we know, what we are comfortable with, and thereby reinforce the boundaries of “normal” society. Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire. Since monsters are outside the boundaries of society, they are free from social taboos, and this freedom is attractive — we desire that freedom, most clearly exemplified by dressing up at Halloween to, however briefly, transgress those boundaries. And finally Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold… of Becoming. Monsters force us to reexamine and reevaluate ourselves and our place in society.

So let’s start with one of the classic monsters, the vampire, to see how all this works. The word vampire comes into English in the 18th century through French and German from Hungarian vampir, which in turn comes from the Slavic family of languages, with cognates, for instance, in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Bulgarian, and with the Old Church Slavonic form opiri. It’s ultimate source is uncertain, but it has been suggested to have come from the word uber, no not Uber, but the word uber or ubyr meaning “witch” from the Tartar Kazan language of the Turkic family of languages, though other connections, such as a Slovak verb meaning “to stick, thrust into” thus giving the sense of “someone who bites”, have been suggested. While the modern vampire comes specifically from eastern European folkloric tradition, similar traditions of creatures that feed on the vital essence of the living can be found in many other parts of the world as well.

The vampire as we know it today has its origins in the 18th century, from a variety of related traditions, rising to the level of mass hysteria. One of the common elements is the bloated and dark or ruddy appearance of the corpse with fresh blood on the face, giving the impression that it was recently well fed on someone’s blood. It’s been hypothesized that this reflects the decomposition process in which accumulating gasses cause bloating, forcing blood out of the mouth and nose. This folklore aspect is quite different from the modern fictional depiction of vampires as pale and thin. Similarly the hair, nails, and teeth would appear to have grown, likely due to the skin receding as it lost moisture, though it should be noted that the fangs of the fictional vampires were not generally a part of the folkloric tradition. Staking or piercing the corpse of the suspected vampire were common responses, which would naturally deflate the body, as was decapitation with the head placed between the feet or behind the buttocks, or items being placed in the mouth. In addition to garlic, various other plants and herbs were used to protect against vampirism, and in some traditions, poppy seeds, millet, or sand over the grave was believed to slow down the vampire who was compelled to count every grain (one grain, ahahah, two grains, ahahah…).

However, the vampire we all know now was largely transformed by fictional representations. The first real work of modern vampire fiction is The Vampyre written by John Polidori, the personal physician of the poet Lord Byron, as his contribution to a ghost story writing contest between Byron, Polidori, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley, to entertain themselves when they were kept indoors due to unusually rainy weather on their holiday in Switzerland in 1816, caused surprisingly by the tremendous volcanic eruption of Mt Tamboura on the other side of the planet. Mary Shelley’s effort eventually became her famous novel Frankenstein. Polidori’s story features the British nobleman Lord Ruthven as the vampire, the name coming from a character in Byron’s ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s gothic novel Glenarvon who was an unflattering parody of Byron himself, and also based on the character Augustus Darvell from Byron’s own unfinished vampire story “Fragment of a Novel”. So it’s here that we first see the vampire as the suave and alluring aristocratic character, which would later inspire Bram Stoker to create Count Dracula. Stoker’s Dracula, however, doesn’t take part in all of the trappings of an aristocrat, having no servants and not partaking in the conspicuous consumption of lavish food and drink. The other source of inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though perhaps in not much more than name, is the historical bloodthirsty medieval ruler of Wallachia Vlad the Impaler, also known Vlad Dracula. His father Vlad II, known as Vlad Dracul, spent his youth at the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg, king of Hungary and later Holy Roman Emperor, who had founded the Order of the Dragon, hence the sobriquet Dracul, based on the military orders of the Crusades, to defend against foreign threats, particularly the Ottomans, and shore up his political position at home. The symbols of the Order were the red cross and the Ouroboros, the mystical symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail. The word dragon comes through Old French from Latin draco and Greek dracon, ultimately from the PIE root *derk- “to see” from the idea of the “monster with an evil eye”. So Dracula, the prototypical vampire name, means literally “little dragon”.

Dragons are of course the quintessential monster, being found in many cultures around the world. One way of looking at monsters is as exaggerations of genuine real world threats, so poisonous snakes can become dragons. Some have also postulated the idea that dinosaur fossils might have been taken as the remnants of fantastical beasts like dragons. Whatever the reason, dragons have taken on many different cultural meanings around the world. For instance, in China dragons are benign and beloved, whereas European dragon stories often feature a great hero slaying the dangerous dragon. Many, though not all, dragon traditions feature fire-breathing dragons, including the Leviathan of the Hebrew Bible, Typhon of Greek mythology, the Russian Zmei Gorynych, and the dragon Beowulf fights in the Old English heroic poem. Another element we commonly associate with dragons is their greed and desire for treasure, perhaps most famously demonstrated in JRR Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. In addition to being one of the most famous fantasy writers, Tolkien was also a medievalist, particularly focusing on medieval Germanic literatures, and the treasure hoarding dragon is a particular feature of those literatures, such as the dragon Fafnir of the Old Norse Völsunga saga, or the wyrm in Beowulf, who is accidentally awoken by an escaped slave who stumbles upon his barrow and takes a cup from his treasure hoard. Beowulf ends up losing his life from the venomous dragon fangs in his efforts to save his people by killing the dragon, but as it turns out the treasure he won was cursed, and his people bury it with him at the poem’s end.

Now you might ask, why does a monster like a dragon like things such as treasure, gold, and material wealth? Well, this may be connected to Germanic burial customs. In the Germanic heroic age of the 4th to 6th centuries, it was customary to have burial mounds containing all manner of treasure and weaponry for the well-to-do, such as Beowulf. For the most part the treasure consisted of such things as brooches, buckles, knives, purses, jewellery, spears, shields, and swords, though occasionally old Romans coins might be included as well. After the fall of western Roman empire, the production of coinage dropped dramatically in Europe, and virtually no coins made their way to Britain during this period. From the early 5th century until the end of the 6th century, Britain had ceased to be a money economy, and coin production in England didn’t really pick up again until the 630s. In the burial at Sutton Hoo, around 620 or 625, there were no English coins, but 37 gold Merovingian coins from the continent. Subsequently, buried coin hoards became a fairly common thing, especially around times of conflict and disruption, such as during the Viking raids or around the Norman Invasion of 1066. The first non-Roman coins produced in England were the gold scillingas or shillings, a word with an uncertain etymology, though it might come from the PIE root *(s)kel- “to cut”, also the source of words such as half, shell, scale, and shield, either from the notion of a division of currency, or perhaps from a resemblance to a shield. However, there wasn’t really enough gold in England to support a currency based on gold coins, so around 675 the silver penny was introduced. The etymology of the word penny is also uncertain, though there are a number of suggestions. There’s a folk tradition that tied the word penny to Penda, the 7th century king of Mercia in England, but given the widespread use of cognates of this word over the various Germanic lands, this is unlikely. Some have connected it to the word pan, either on account of the shape or because of the pans into which molten metal was poured in the manufacturing process. The word pan is a general West Germanic root, but was probably an early borrowing from Latin patina “dish”, from Greek patane “plate, dish”, ultimately from the PIE root *petə- “to spread”. Or penny might be connected with pawn, as in a pawnshop, in the sense of something left as a security, from Old French pan “pledge, security”, which is itself of uncertain origin, perhaps from a Germanic root, or perhaps from Latin pannus “piece of cloth”, which itself could be the source of penny, since cloth could be used as a means of payment, in which case it could be traced back to the PIE root *pan- “cloth”, also the source of words such as panel, pane, and vane, as in a weather vane. But another possibility is that penny might be an early borrowing of Latin pondus meaning “a weight”, in other words related to the word pound, both the unit of weight and the unit of currency, which came from the notion of a pound weight of silver, therefore going back ultimately to the PIE root *(s)pen- “to draw, stretch, spin”. The pound as a unit of currency, by the way, didn’t originally refer to a denomination of coin or anything like that, but was just a unit of account, which goes back to Old English in which it was defined as equivalent to 240 silver pennies. The gold shilling, by the way, was reckoned as equivalent to 12 silver pennies, and if you wanted an amount smaller than a penny, sometimes they would cut the penny in half or into quarters, which was called a farthing or feorþing in Old English, literally a fourth part of something. But to tie this back to where we started, the accumulation of coins of various metals such as gold and silver, often won from fighting a dragon, is part of the basic mechanics of the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons — you gain experience points and go up levels both from killing monsters and from gaining treasure — and D&D is a game largely based on the fiction of JRR Tolkien.

Now getting back to vampires, and specifically Dracula, since as we’ve seen monsters are continually reinvented for each new era, we should consider what Bram Stoker did with the vampire in his novel Dracula, which became influential to all later reinventions of the vampire figure. The specific association of vampires with Transylvania comes from Stoker’s novel, and we should therefore consider what that association implies in the context of Victorian England of Stoker’s day. This was a time when British imperialism and colonialism was at its height, and the novel’s protagonist Jonathan Harker begins the novel with a trip to Transylvania, where he encounters the Count, who later on comes to England. The novel draws not only on the conventions of gothic fiction, but also on those of travel literature, with Harker the typical Victorian traveller perceiving the other cultures of the world through his English lens. But Dracula is shown to have studied English culture too, from his external perspective. It is the usual trope in fiction of the period, that the English can masquerade as locals by taking on the appropriate disguise, but that “foreigners” can never pass for being truly “English” and always stand out as being “other”. But in Dracula, the Count boasts of his knowledge of English culture and his ability to blend in. The term orientalism is used to refer to the western adoption, appropriation, and romanticization of eastern cultures through the colonial lens, but here we see an example of occidentalism, the reception of western culture by the east. So the novel can thus be seen as expressing the anxiety of reverse colonialism. What’s more with blood as the standard sign of race, then not only does Dracula feed on the blood of his victims, he also transforms them through the mixing of blood, expressing the anxiety over miscegenation, or the blending of races, a particular racist concern of the 19th century.

Another 19th century way of reading the novel Dracula is to see the vampire as a monopoly capitalist. As Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital in 1867, some thirty years before the publication of Stoker’s novel, “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. The words capitalism and capital come ultimately from Latin caput “head” and the adjective form capitalis “of the head, chief, foremost”, from the PIE root *kaput- “head”, also source of the word head through the Germanic branch as Old English heafod, but the different senses of capital took slightly different routes on the way to English. From Old French capital we get senses such as capital crime or punishment and capital letter, but it’s through Italian capitale that we get the financial sense of the word, originally expressing the difference between the principal part of a loan and the interest. But it’s worth comparing this sense development with another word we get from a Latin root, pecuniary meaning “having to do with money”, which comes from Latin pecunia “money, wealth, property”, from pecu “cattle”, ultimately from the PIE root *peku- “wealth, movable property”, since livestock was the measure of wealth in the ancient world. This same sense shift happened in the opposite direction with the root of capital, as Latin capitalis became Medieval Latin capitale “property, stock”, and then Old French chatal “wealth, property, profit, cattle”, from which we get the word chattel, as well as Anglo-Norman French catal “property”, from which we get the word cattle. Incidentally, another word we get from Latin pecu, through Latin peculium “private property” and peculiaris “of private property, one’s own”, is peculiar, which originally meant “belonging exclusively to one person” before coming to mean “individual” and then “unusual, strange”. The root *peku- also comes into English through the Germanic branch, becoming Proto-Germanic *fehu “cattle, livestock”, which became Old English feoh “cattle, property, money, price”, which merged with Anglo-Norman fee, also from the same Germanic root having been borrowed into French through Frankish, to produce the English word fee, eventually coming to mean “monetary payment”. But fee had a particular sense in the feudal system of the middle ages, referring to a feudal estate, land granted as a reward for feudal service to one’s lord, and the word feudal itself, coming through Old French from that same Germanic root, brings us back to Dracula. After all, Dracula is figured in the novel as an aristocrat with ancient origins, his namesake being a medieval king, and one way of conceiving of the monopolist as opposed to the free market capitalist, is as a blend of that vampiric capitalism of Marx with a kind of feudal monopoly. Dracula’s converts are enslaved to him for life, just like a feudal serf.

Now another word that comes from Latin caput “head” is the word captain, through Late Latin capitaneus “prominent, chief” and Old French capitaine “captain, leader”, which in terms of soldiering is the rank between lieutenant and major in charge of a company of soldiers, and in terms of sailing is the rank between commander and commodore in charge of a single ship, and relevant to our discussion today of Dracula and Victorian England is the phrase Captain of Industry, which was used to refer to 19th century business leaders who, in addition to amassing wealth, also contributed positively to society and the country. In his book Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle coined the term Captain of Industry, comparing the current state of laissez-faire capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in England with the feudal system of the middle ages, criticizing the uncontrolled industrialization of his time and its consequences of poverty, exploitation, and misery, and what he elsewhere described as “a gang of industrial buccaneers and pirates”, suggesting instead that Captains of Industry should take adequate care of their employees with more ethical labour practises. Later on in the century Captains of Industry came to be used in opposition to the term Robber Barons, unscrupulous industrialists who’d do anything to expand their wealth, a term which references medieval feudal lords who profits from excessively taxing or robbing those in their land. It’s important to note though that there was a distinct overlap between those who were referred to as Captains of Industry and those who were referred to as Robber Barons in the 19th century. The word baron, by the way, comes into English through Old French barun in reference to the feudal vassal of the king, perhaps going back to Medieval Latin baro “man”, which further might come from Classical Latin baro “simpleton, blockhead, dunce”, but its ultimate etymology is uncertain. Some derive it from the PIE root *bher- meaning “to carry” which is also the source of Old English bearn “child” which survives as the Scots word bairn, while others have connected it with the Old English word beorn, a poetic word for “hero”, which seems to be phonologically equivalent to Norse björn “bear”. While it would make sense for a poetic word for “warrior” to be derived from a fierce animal, the Norse word is never used to refer to a warrior, and the Old English word is never used to refer to the animal. Interestingly, the Old English word eofor “wild boar” corresponds to the Old Norse word jöfurr “warrior, hero”, so there might be something to this etymology. In any case, in addition to possibly being heroic warriors — Beowulf himself is referred to as beorn when fighting the dragon — barons can also take advantage of those under them, whether they’re medieval feudal lords or vampiric capitalists. So maybe Uber wasn’t so inappropriate after all.

But getting back to the other entry into that ghost story contest, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it also seems to be a reflection of and warning about the worst consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The Romantic poets, including Mary’s husband Percy Shelley, as well as Lord Byron, were critics of the destruction of nature and human relationships caused by the Industrial Revolution, the “dark Satanic mills” as poet William Blake wrote. This is also reflective of the anxiety over unbridled and potentially dangerous scientific progress, again a usurpation of nature’s prerogative in the eyes of the Romantics, and one way this has been recast in our current day is over the fear of GMO foods, referred to as Frankenfood. We can see this same anxiety reflected in the more recent movie monster Godzilla, inspired by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as an incident in 1954 in which a Japanese fishing boat was exposed to the radiation from an American nuclear test on Bikini Island, warning against the dangers of nuclear weapons and radiation. The name Godzilla, by the way, is a portmanteau of gorira (from the word gorilla) and the Japanese word kujira meaning “whale”. But getting back to Frankenstein, the monster, who is only rarely referred to as “monster” in the novel, more often called “creature”, but also referred to by Victor Frankenstein with such diabolical or dehumanizing terms such as “fiend”, “devil”, “demon”, “thing”, “it”, “vile insect”, is crucially unnamed, like the nameless proletariat. To the Marxist critic, the relationship of fear and loathing that Victor has towards his creation represents the relationship between the capitalist and worker. The creature, who in the novel is articulate, even poetic, unlike the shuffling monster incapable of speech introduced in the movie adaptations, pleads with Victor for equality, or at least an equally deformed mate, but is rejected by his creator. Of course the other way of understanding the creature in terms of Mary Shelley’s own life is as an unwanted or parentless child. Mary’s own mother died in giving birth to her, and when Mary herself gave birth prematurely to their child who died shortly thereafter, Percy cared nothing for the child and took off with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont and had a lurid affair. The creature also falls into the category of the misunderstood monster. We feel pity for the creature who was “born” innocent, but because he was treated as a monster by humans, he became a monster. This has become quite a trope in our own time, with classic monsters being reinterpreted this way in modern retellings. For instance modern novelizations and film adaptations of Beowulf have cast the first monster the hero fights, Grendel, as a misunderstood monster who is excluded and mistreated by the humans, like Frankenstein’s creation banished to the margins looking in on humans but unable to take part in their society. The “othering” of monsters of the past has been given contexts so we feel sympathy for them. We even see vampires in terms of their exclusion and torment in modern revivals such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight.

Now although Frankenstein is the name of the creator, not the monster, in some ways we might consider the creature, as essentially the son of Victor Frankenstein, a Frankenstein as well, so it’s worth considering for a moment the etymology of that name. This German name means literally “stone of the Franks”, the Franks being one of the Germanic tribes that dates back to the middle ages. It’s a common enough German name, often being used to refer to a rocky mountainous terrain, and there are a number of old fortifications in Germany named Burg Frankenstein or Castle Frankenstein. This hasn’t stopped at least one scholar, Radu Florescu, who was also the one to posit a connection between Vlad Dracula and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, from drawing a connection between Mary Shelley and one particular Frankenstein Castle that they speculate she might have visited when holidaying with Percy, the one in the Odenwald overlooking the city of Darmstadt, though there is no actual evidence she had done so, and she could have gotten the name from anywhere. Nevertheless, this identification is tempting in part because of a number of legends that have grown up around the Castle, in particular about the alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel, who was born in the Castle in 1673 and was a student there. He claimed to know the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone and to have produced an Elixir of Life, known as Dippel’s Oil, a nitrogenous by-product of the destructive distillation of bones, which though it didn’t have all the miraculous effects he claimed it did, was later used as a component in dyes (in particular Prussian blue), as an animal and insect repellent, and was even used in chemical warfare in the desert campaign in WWII and to render wells undrinkable to the enemy, getting around the Geneva Protocol by not being actually lethal. Dippel had tried to purchase Frankenstein Castle in exchange for his elixir but was turned down. He was also rumoured to have been experimenting on cadavers, and soul-transference from one body to another, and this has been suggested as the inspiration for the novel Frankenstein.

Now similar to the shuffling reanimated corpse of Frankenstein movies is the shuffling reanimated corpses of zombie movies. The zombie apocalypse scenario is vigorous and alive in the current zeitgeist in exactly the way zombies aren’t. But this undead version version of the zombie is mostly a modern reinvention of the traditional versions of the zombie. This reinvention tells us much about our current concerns and preoccupations, reflecting for instance fears of disease, but we also see the examples of humanized zombies in pop culture in which they are represented as marginalized groups struggling for equality, and as friends and even romantic partners of humans, reflecting a desire for sexual liberation and freedom from societal taboos. We also have the popular figurative notion of the brain dead zombie in modern capitalist society, unthinkingly and unquestioningly following the cultural norms while mindlessly absorbing the pop culture from our tv sets, the opiate of the masses, a mindless worker under the control of its master. On the other end of the political spectrum, the zombie apocalypse metaphor can be used to engender fear of the invading hoards against which we need to construct walls and barriers. So again, we can read our culture in these modern instances of the zombie figure.

To understand the traditional zombie and its cultural role, we have to take a closer look at the Vodou religion of Haiti that produced it. The word zombie comes from a West African word akin to Kimbundu znambi and Kongo zumbi and meaning “god” or “fetish”, originally referring to a snake god. The word may also have been influenced by a Louisiana creole word from Spanish sombra “shade, shadow, ghost” from Latin sub- “under” plus the umbra “shade, shadow”. The word made it into English in the 19th century, and it was really only in Haitian folklore that the zombie became the reanimated corpse that we know today, and then was further transformed by zombie films, particularly George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, from which we get the undead mindlessly attacking humans in order to eat their flesh or brains. Vodou or Voodoo, a word from a West African language, such as Fon vodu “spirit, demon, deity”, perhaps from vo meaning “to be afraid” or vo meaning “harmful”, is the blending of the West African Vodun religion with elements of Catholicism, as a result of the West African slave trade which brought enslaved African to Haiti and other parts of the New World. This blending of religious traditions is called syncretism. In Haitian Vodou, zombies are the dead reanimated by a bokor, essentially a witch or sorcerer, and remain under the control of the bokor with no will of their own. Another way the zombie figures into the Hatian Vodou religion has to do with the figure Baron Samedi. In Vodou, the supreme creator god, called Bondye from French Bon Dieu meaning “Good God”, remains aloof, not becoming involved in human affairs, what’s known as a transcendent god, as opposed to an immanent god who might answer prayers or punish someone who offended them in some way. But standing between the transcendent Bondye and mortal people are gods known as Loas, from French les lois “the laws”, who must be served, not just prayed to, in a variety of ways. There are many loas, each with their own concerns and rituals, so how you serve any specific loa will vary, but could include things like songs, dances, food, drink, or even allowing the loa to possess you. Baron Samedi, who usually appears with a top hat, tails, dark glasses, cotton plugs in the nostrils thus talking with a very nasal voice, and as a skeleton or with skull facepaint or mask on, is a loa associated with death and the afterlife. Baron Samedi’s name, by the way, means “Baron Saturday” from that word baron we saw before in the robber barons of capitalism, and the French word samedi “Saturday” ultimately from the Hebrew word Sabbath (see my video). The Baron collects the dead from their graves to bring them to the heavenly afterlife called lan guinée, in other words Guinea in Africa, unless they have offended him in some way, in which case they are left forever as a zombie slave after death, and this may have arisen from the experience of slavery in Haiti in which a slave driver, who was often enslaved themselves, might use such threats to control those under them. As an enslaved person, death could be seen as a kind of release; but if one believed they might remain a enslaved person after death and not return to Africa in the afterlife they would be less likely to commit suicide. When Haiti’s notorious dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier was in power from 1957 to 1971, he built up his cult of personality by styling himself on Baron Samedi, with dark glasses, hat, and suit, and speaking in a nasal voice, thereby instilling fear in the people of Haiti. Because according to tradition a zombie could be freed and saved by feeding it salt, after Duvalier’s son and heir was ousted from power, a literacy primer called “A Taste of Salt” was put out by the liberation theologians’ wing of the Roman Catholic Church in Haiti in response to the country’s new freedom.

Part of the reason behind the salt cure may be its social implications. Salt is very highly valued and therefore a marker of social status. It would make sense for a bokor master to give salt-free food to his zombie slave. The word salt, which comes from Old English sealt from the PIE root *sal- “salt”, is thereby related to the word salary, from Latin salarium “saltmoney, allowance, salary” from the adjective salarius “of or pertaining to salt”. There seems to have been a practise of giving Roman soldiers salt-money to pay for salt and other such things to supplement their grain ration. So in a very real sense then, to be given salt is to be paid money. The word soldier, itself, also tells us something about the status of a person. It comes from Old French soudier “mercenary”, from post-classical Latin solidarius “soldier (one having pay)” and solidus, a gold coin originally worth 25 denarii. You see in the early days of the Roman Republic, the army was entirely made up of citizens, that is land holders. It was considered your civic duty to fight for the state, and you weren’t paid for it. But as Rome grew, soldiering became a paid profession, hence the word soldier, and Rome employed both citizens and mercenaries in its armies, and of course now all soldiers are paid to fight, overseen by a captain, as we’ve already seen. The word mercenary, by the way, comes from Latin merx “goods, wares, commodities, merchandise”, also the source of the words merchandise and market, and perhaps of the name of the Roman god Mercury, who was, among other things, the god of travellers and merchants, coming ultimately from either a PIE root *mark- meaning “to grab” or to an Etruscan root referring to aspects of commerce, though another possible connection might be to the PIE root *merg- meaning “boundary, border”, which also gives us the words margin and mark as in a boundary mark. The solidus was so called, coming from the adjective solidus “solid, whole, thick”, because a solidus was coin made of solid gold, not plate. The full term was actually solidus nummus “solid coin”, with the word nummus coming from Greek nomos “custom, law” from the verb nemo “to distribute, allot, assign”, ultimately from the PIE root *nem- “to assign, allot, take”. The related word nomisma also passed through Latin to give us the word numismatics, the historical study of coins. Greek nomos also becomes the suffix -nomy as in words such as astronomy and economy meaning “system of laws governing or a body of knowledge about a specified field”. So economy is literally the “laws governing the household”, from Greek oikonomia meant “household management”. In ancient Greece an oikonomos was the manager of a household, from oikos meaning “house, household” from the PIE *weik- meaning “clan”, and this was the original sense of English economy too, until it broadened to mean the management of a nation’s resources in the 17th century. It was the Greek philosopher Xenophon, student of Socrates, who first used the adjective form oikonomikos as the title of his book Economics, in which he described in detail the running of a home. As a side note one of Socrates’s other students, Plato, was distrustful of the whole idea of money and wealth, believing the richer a man was the less honest and virtuous he must be, since dishonesty paid better than honesty. He wanted to outlaw the possession of gold, silver, and other foreign money and make it illegal for one to sell their land, and argued for a strictly regulated marketplace. His student Aristotle, though not as into regulations as Plato, thought that richer people should have to pay higher prices at the market than poorer people. So as you can see, the idea of a market economy had its detractors even in the ancient world.

As for the word astronomy, the first element is from Greek astron “star” from the root *ster- “star”, also the source of the English word star through the Germanic branch. As an interesting quirk of history, one of the most important early astronomers, Nicolaus Copernicus, who gave us the heliocentric model with the sun in the middle and the planets, including Earth, rotating around it, challenging the Ptolemaic geocentric universe with the Earth in the centre, formulated by Ptolemy from Aristotle and accepted for centuries, long after ancient Greece, also gave us one of the fundamental theories of modern economics, the quantity theory of money, which states that the general price level of goods and services is directly proportional to the amount of money in circulation, or money supply. Though not universally accepted, unlike Copernicus’s other theory, the quantity theory of money is important to understanding the relationship between money, services, and commodities. The word commodity, by the way, comes from Latin commoditas “fitness, adaptation, convenience, advantage” from commodus “proper, fit, appropriate, convenient, satisfactory”, made up of the intensifying prefix com- and modus meaning “measure, manner”, ultimately from the PIE root *med- “take appropriate measures”. This root has a number of other derivatives, but the most interesting one for our purposes is Greek medein “to rule” which has the feminine participle form medousa from which we get the monster Medusa. One of the three Gorgons, Medusa had wings and venomous snakes for hair, and whoever looked upon her would be transformed into stone. She herself had been transformed from a normal human woman into this monster because she was raped by Poseidon in the temple of Athena, who was enraged by the defilement of her temple and so transformed this poor woman in a peak example of victim blaming. After the hero Perseus kills Medusa, avoiding her gaze by looking at her reflection on the inside of his shield, he removes her head and uses it to kill another monster, not the Kraken but Cetus. He eventually gives it to Athena who puts it on her shield. Interpretations of this myth range from the idea that it reflects the patriarchal Greeks replacing an earlier goddess cult, the Freudian idea of castration anxiety, and more recently an expression of female rage.

Now transformations, like Medusa’s, are a frequent element to monster stories. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is able to shapeshift into a bat or a wolf, a detail he probably borrowed from the werewolf tradition, since it’s not typically part of vampire folklore. Werewolves are of course the most famous example of people transforming into animals. Examples of humans transforming to animals can be found in various parts of the world — such as werecats in places like India, China, and Thailand or werefoxes in Japan — but the werewolf is particularly common in European traditions, and seems to stem from an Indo-European belief, and some scholars have posited on this basis an Indo-European initiation ritual in the warrior class, which also lies behind the Viking berserkers, literally “bear-shirts”, and their wolf equivalents the úlfhéðnar, who wore the skins of powerful animals to gain their strength. In ancient Greece there is the myth of Lycaon, king of Arcadia, who tries to test Zeus’s omniscience by serving to him the cooked flesh of his own son, and Zeus punishes him for this by transforming him into a wolf. This myth and the name Lycaon was the explanation of the word lycanthropos, literally “wolf-man” from Greek lykos “wolf” and anthropos “man”, from which we get the English word lycanthropy. The Roman author Pliny tells a story of someone chosen by lot who is led to a swamp, hangs his clothes on a tree, swims across the swamp and is then transformed into a wolf for nine years. At the end of that time, if he hasn’t had any contact with humans, he can then swim back across, transform back into a human, and put his still waiting clothes back on again. Pliny is skeptical about this story, but only because of the element of him putting his nine-year-old clothes back on again, not because of the transformation. But most of our modern conceptions of werewolves come from more northern traditions such as the Germanic and Slavic ones. Werewolf folklore is also tied to the witch hunt phenomenon of the early modern era, in which people were accused of and persecuted for being werewolves. There were various protections against werewolves, such as the plant wolfsbane. The idea of the silver bullet was propagated through fictional werewolf stories, but has its roots in folklore. The magical efficacy of silver weapons in general can be traced at least as far back as ancient Greece (the Delphic Oracle gives such a recommendation to Philip of Macedon, for instance), and there are stories in early modern Europe of silver buttons, goblets, belt buckles, and so forth being gathered up to make bullets.

The English word silver, from Old English seolfor, does not come from a PIE root, but instead through probably Akkadian ?arpu “refined silver” from the Proto-Semitic root *?rp meaning “to burn, smelt, refine”, which in the Germanic and Slavic languages replaced the usual PIE root *arg- “to shine, white, the shining or white metal, silver” which is the basis for words for silver in many other Indo-European languages, such as Latin argentum from which we get the country name Argentina from which the Spanish plundered all their silver. This Latin word also lies behind the French word argent “money”, and is also related to the Latin verb arguere “to make clear, demonstrate” from which we get English argue. This root also makes it into Greek in a number of words, including the ship Argo and its sailors the Argonauts, in the sense “swift” because swift motion was thought to cause a kind of glancing or flickering light. In Greek mythology, the hero Jason has the Argo built and recruits the Argonauts to help him retrieve the Golden Fleece, which is guarded by a dragon that doesn’t sleep. Using a sleeping potion given to him by his new girlfriend Medea, he is able to accomplish his task. There are numerous interpretations of the Golden Fleece, including the idea that it reflected the use of fleeces to collect gold dust in alluvial mining. Years later, during the California Gold Rush of 1848, prospectors used the similar panning technique to collect gold dust, and they were popularly referred to as Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece.

But getting back to werewolves, the word werewolf comes from Old English, from wer meaning “man” and wulf literally “man-wolf”, the mirror of lycanthrope “wolf-man”. Old English wer “man”, related to the word virile from Latin vir “man”, can also be found in the Old English compound word wergeld, which in early Germanic law was the monetary compensation one would be required to pay for causing the death or injury of a person in order to avoid the otherwise inevitable blood feud with each family bumping off a member of the other family in retributive reciprocal violence. So a wergeld was essentially a “man price”, but it was a sliding scale, so a noble was worth more than a peasant. The second element of that compound word is related to Modern English yield, coming from the PIE root *gheldh- “to pay”. And this makes sense, since the word pay also shows this same connection, coming through Old French from Latin pacare “to make peaceful, pacify” and pax “treaty, peace”, from the PIE root *pag- “to fasten”, also source of the word pact, because a treaty or pact binds two parties together in peace. There are a number of other words that come from this root, including, through the Germanic branch, the word fang, which originally meant “booty, spoils” but came to refer to the sharp canine teeth because they were the catching or grasping teeth. Of course wolves and werewolves are known for their fangs, as are many other monsters, such as dragons and vampires.

Another word which comes from that root *gheldh- “to pay” is the word guild, which is a blending of Old English gield “service, payment, tribute” and Old Norse gildi “guild, brotherhood”, in reference to the membership fee one would have to pay. Guilds in early medieval England were more religious in nature and were more like burial societies, providing for masses for the souls of deceased members, and they would also pay the wergeld on behalf of members in instances of justified homicide. But after the Norman Conquest, the word came to be applied to the now more familiar trade guilds as part of the feudal system, in French called corps de métiers.These medieval trade guilds governed the practises of a particular profession, such as carpenters or tanners, and did things such as establish minimum and maximum prices for their goods or services, ensure the availability of their raw materials, and maintain trade secrets, and would often obtain letters of patent from the monarch ensuring they held a monopoly for their members. By the Age of Enlightenment, these guilds came under criticism of such writers and thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, as limiting freedom, since they opposed government control over trades in favour of laissez-faire free-market systems, and they eventually died out. It has been argued, however, that guilds were a kind of forerunner of the modern trade unions, though it should be remembered that they operated under very different economic systems, feudalism and capitalism, and guilds really existed to protect the monopolies of the self-employed, rather than defend the rights of workers from their employers, as in unions, and indeed Karl Marx also criticized the guild system for maintaining hierarchies and social ranks and the oppressor/oppressed dynamic.

Now there were actually ancient precedents of the medieval trade guilds, such as the collegium or corpus in Rome, voluntary groups of organized merchants or tradesmen, such as the corpus naviculariorum of long-distance shippers based at the port of Ostia. And according to one theory, the Cyclopes as described by Hesiod represent a smith guild. Hesiod in his Theogony describes the Cyclopes as three brothers, the sons of Ouranos, the sky, and Gaia, the earth, who are giants with one large eye in the centre of their foreheads. Their names are Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, meaning “thunder”, “lightning”, and “bright”, and they are blacksmiths who constructed lightning bolts for Zeus. Initially, fearing them, Ouranos had imprisoned them, but Zeus later freed them and received his trademark weapon from them, which he used to overthrow the Titans, including his father Cronus, who had earlier castrated Ouranos, his own father. But the more famous account is the story in Homer’s Odyssey of the Cyclops named Polyphemus, son of Poseidon. In this version of the ancient Greek monster, the Cyclopes are lawless, uncivilized herdsmen. Odysseus and his men come across the cave of Polyphemus and help themselves to his food. When the monster returns, he seals the entrance to the cave with a large stone and proceeds to eat Odysseus’s men one by one, until Odysseus is able to get Polyphemus drunk and then blinds him, so that he and his remaining men can escape clinging to the bellies of Polyphemus’s equally giant sheep. This story demonstrates two very important elements about ancient Greek culture. First is the concept of Xenia, the reciprocal guest-host relationship in which the guest and host share a kind of quasi-kinship bond. On the one hand Odysseus and his men show themselves to be poor guests, but Polyphemus doesn’t partake in the concept of Xenia at all, marking himself out as barbaric, as to the Greeks those who don’t share their cultural customs are by definition barbaric. The Cyclopes are unfamiliar with wine, another marker of civilization, and Odysseus is able to take advantage of this to get Polyphemus drunk. Zeus himself is in charge of Xenia but Homer’s Cyclopes, unlike Hesiod’s, care nothing for the chief god. And secondly, this story demonstrates the xenophobia of the ancient Greeks. As I said, all non Greeks were considered barbarians and “others”, so this marginalized monster demonstrates the dehumanization of one’s enemies. We can see a similar “othering” in the poem Beowulf with the monster Grendel, who like Polyphemus is a man-eater, feasting on the Danish warriors one by one, and who also doesn’t take part in a central cultural norm, in this case the wergeld, so the Danish king Hrothgar is unable to make a settlement with him. Polyphemus, like Grendel, has been more recently interpreted by some as the victim, not the monster, with Odysseus as a pirate and colonialist invader.

Now according to another theory, the Cyclopes may indeed have had a non-human inspiration. The Austrian paleontologist Othenio Abel suggested that the large nasal cavity of fossilized mammoths or elephants might have been taken as a large eye socket, inspiring the mythological Cyclops. Furthermore, classicist Adrienne Mayor suggests that the fossil skeleton of a protocerotops with its prominent beak but carnivorous looking quadruped body might have inspired the half-eagle half-lion Griffin, another monster from the ancient world, and other dinosaurs with their reptilian appearance, horns, large teeth, and so forth, might have been the inspiration for dragons. Mayor also speculates that those mammoth fossils, with their long tusks, might also have suggested the monstrous Caledonian boar of Greek myth, and that the giant bones uncovered in 560 BCE and taken for the remains of the mythical hero Orestes might have been from some Ice Age megafauna. Since prehistoric fossils weren’t always entirely preserved, it’s possible that such a creature might be taken for a giant sized human.

Of course there are also fossil remains of actual prehistoric hominids such as the famous Neanderthal. The Neaderthal is so called because it was first discovered in the Neader Valley, T(h)al being a German word meaning valley, from the PIE root *dhel- “hollow”, also the source of the English words dell and dale. That valley was named after a hymn writer named Joachim Neander — well actually his real name in German would have been Neumann meaning literally “new man”, but his grandfather had translated the name Neumann into Greek Neander or in other words neo-ander meaning literally “new man”. Funny then that an older form of human, the Neanderthal, is named after this “new man”. Coincidentally, Neander’s first name Joachim, from St Joachim, who according to the non-biblical gospel of James was the father of the Virgin Mary, and was known as a rich man who gave to the poor, is also the name of another German valley, Joachimsthal, a town in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. As it so happens, there was a coin made from the silver mined in Joachimsthal that came to be known as the Joachimsthaler. The coin was a popular one — you could say the town of Joachimsthal made a mint from it — and the word Joachimsthaler was shortened to simply Taler in German, and this eventually gave rise to the English word dollar, bringing us back once again to the subject of money. As a side note, one of the theories of where the American dollar sign comes from is that it’s the monogram of St Joachim, with the S and J or I overlaid on each other, though the more well known theories are that it comes from the abbreviation ps for the Spanish American peso, another popular coin in the early days of America, or that it comes from the monogram US for obvious reasons.

Now getting back to the griffin, this monster, along with the hippogriff with the front half of an eagle and the hind half of a horse, obtained by breeding a griffin with a horse, are examples of hybrid monsters of which there are many. Indeed many of the monsters of Greek mythology are hybrid animals, such as the famous Minotaur with the head of a bull and body of a man, born to King Minos’s wife Pasiphaë, after he failed to sacrifice the Cretan Bull to Poseidon, who in revenge caused the queen to mate with the bull. We can also consider the werewolf and Frankenstein’s monster as examples of hybridity. In the novel, we are told that Victor Frankenstein gets the materials he needs to create the monster from charnel houses, where they keep dead human bodies, and slaughter houses, where animals are slaughtered for food, so the creature is made up from the bodies of various humans and animals. As we’ve already seen, monsters that don’t fit neatly into categories challenge the human propensity for clear categorization, and hybrid monsters are the perfect example of this. And it’s another instance of the anxiety over miscegenation. In 19th century Louisiana, griffin and the shortened form griff were used to define a specific racial category of being three quarters black and one quarter white. They had an array of terms categorizing the precise degree of miscegenation.

Perhaps the peak example of monstrous hybridity is the Chimera, mentioned by both Homer and Hesiod, a three headed hybrid made up of a lion with with the head of a goat protruding from its back and a snake for a tail. It’s certainly one of the most unwieldy and outlandish examples of a hybrid monster, so much so that the words chimera and chimerical have come to mean “whimsical, fanciful, imaginary”. The word chimera has also gained a scientific sense, referring to organisms made up of more than one genetically distinct set of cells, for instance when two separately fertilized eggs, in other words fraternal twins, merge into one embryo, and scientists are already experimenting with artificially created chimeras made up of more than one distinct species, including using human cells, with the ultimate goal of using pigs to grow human tissue for things such as organ transplants. Unsurprisingly this raises the same sort of warning and ethical questions of unbridled scientific experimentation as we saw with Frankenstein.

Now the ancient Greek Chimera, whose name was also used to refer to a she-goat in Greek, ultimately from a root that means winter, indicating a yearling animal, and related to the English word hibernate, was the offspring of two other monsters, the serpentine Typhon and half woman half snake Echidna, and also has monstrous siblings, the Lernaean Hydra which Hercules faces, which grows two new heads whenever one is cut off, and the three headed hellhound Cerberus which Hercules has to bring up from the underworld, with multiple heads being another example of hybridity and liminality. The name Hydra is from Greek hydor meaning “water”, which goes back to the PIE root *wed- “water, wet”, which, appropriately enough given the etymology of Chimera, also gives us the English word winter. As for Cerberus, the etymology is unknown. Some have compared this hellhound with the dog Sharvara of the Hindu god of Death Yama. The word sharvara means “varicoloured, spotted”, and appears in Sanskrit as karvara, with the proposed reconstructed root that lies behind Sharvara and Cerberus being *kerbero- meaning “variegated”, which in turn might come from the root *ker- “heat, fire”, also the source of the English words carbon, cremate, hearth, and ceramic. By the way, the name of the god Yama means “twin” and seems to come from the root *yem- “to pair”, also the source of the words geminate and Gemini, and perhaps also of the name Ymir, a figure in the Old Norse creation story, in which Odin and his brothers kill the primordial being Ymir and use his body parts to create the universe. Ymir was also the ancestor of all the jötnar, that is the giants, a word which comes from the PIE root *ed- “to eat” also source of the word eat. Giants, like the Norse jötnar and Greek Cyclopes, are of course another type of monster found in many parts of the world. Beyond the name though, it’s hard to find another connection between Ymir and Yama. However, there’s another proposed etymology for Cerberus that would connect the hellhound with Norse mythology. Cerberus might instead come from a PIE root meaning “to growl” and thereby be related to the hellhound of Norse mythology Garmr. However, this might involve two separate roots, *ker-, an onomatopoeic root that’s also the source of words such as scream, screech, and raven, and *gerə- meaning “to cry hoarsely”, also the source of words such as crack, cur, and crow. Garmr guards the gates of Hel, the Norse underworld, which shares its name with the Norse goddess of death Hel. For her part, Hel is one of the three monstrous offspring of Loki and the jötun Angrboða, whose name means “harm-bidder”, along with Jörmungandr the Midgard Serpent, and the wolf Fenrir, both important figures in the Norse doomsday battle Ragnarok. Jörmungandr generally falls under our monster category of dragons. A sea serpent, like the Hydra, Jörmungandr grew so large that it encircled the whole world, grasping its own tail in its mouth, thus also making it an example of an Ouroboros, a serpent or dragon that eats its own tail, a symbol found in various cultures, and, as we’ve already seen, one of the symbols of the Order of the Dragon from which Dracula gets his name. The earliest appearance seems to be in Egyptian iconography, from which it spread to Greek magic and then Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and alchemy, representing the cyclical nature of time, both the beginning and end of time. Jörmungandr is the archenemy of Thor, and the two end up killing each other at Ragnarok.

Another example of hybridity from Greek mythology is found in the story of Midas. Midas, the king of Phrygia, was at one point witness to a music contest between Pan with his pipes and Apollo with his lyre. The mountain god Tmolus was the judge and awarded the victory to Apollo, but Midas, a worshipper of Pan, disagreed. So a pissed-off Apollo said he must have the ears of an ass, and immediately the king’s ears grew into donkey’s ears. Embarrassed about this, Midas kept his ears covered with elaborate headgear, but of course his barber knew the truth. Though sworn to secrecy, the barber was consumed by this scandalously funny knowledge, and feeling he couldn’t keep it in any longer he dug a hole in the ground, whispered the secret inside it, and then covered up the hole. But reeds grew up from that spot and wind blowing through the reeds could be heard saying “King Midas has an ass’s ears”. This story demonstrates quite literally monstrosity as a warning. But of course the more famous story about Midas is about his greed. Before Midas rejected his avarice and life of luxury and became a worshipper of Pan, he worshipped Dionysus, probably the most unrestrainedly luxurious of the Greek gods, and was so favoured by him that the god granted Midas one wish, and Midas, rather unwisely as it turned out, wished that everything he touched turned to gold. Initially he delighted in touching everything in his palace, immediately giving himself mega-wealth, but when he got hungry he found to his dismay that any food he touched also turned to gold. And in some versions of the story, to his horror he also accidentally turned his beloved daughter to gold. Begging for relief from this boon turned curse, he was told by Dionysus that if he washed his hands in the river Pactolus he could remove his golden touch. Now this story is one of those “just so” types of stories, explaining the fact that the river Pactolus was full of alluvial gold dust, which they could have collected using a fleece you’ll remember, and electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver, and was the source of wealth of the kingdom of Lydia. What’s more, Midas’s wife Damodice or Hermodike II, depending on which source you’re looking at, is legendarily credited with the invention of coinage. And since we’ve been led yet again from monstrosity to money, we should have a look at what money actually is and ask the question where did money come from.

Simply put, money is a way of representing value. It can have a number of functions, such as a medium of exchange (for things like goods and services), a unit of account (such as a bank balance), and a store of value (which unlike many commodities has an indefinite shelf life. But it’s also important to remember that money is a social institution and derives its value from its cultural and social context. It used to be believed that before money was invented economies functioned through barter or trade but more recent research has indicated that there is no evidence of this, either historically or in non-monetary societies today, and that gift economies are the norm in non-monetary societies. Many different types of objects can function as money, and the earliest types are commodity money. Commodity money is when an important trade item begins to be used itself as a medium of exchange, thus setting standard values for other trade goods. We’ve already seen how the words pecu/pecuniary, cattle/capital, feoh/fee, and salt/salary indicate the deep connection between certain commodities and wealth, and this also reflects the use of cows and salt as commodity money in various societies around the world. Of course the advantage of commodity money is that it never loses its value and can simply be used for its inherent purpose at any point. Another example of commodity money is cacao beans, used to make chocolate, in the Aztec empire, but outside of that cultural context the beans might not have been seen as having value — as when European pirates seized a ship load of cacao bean, and mistaking the beans for rabbit dung simply threw them overboard. Sea shells, such as cowrie shells, have been used as commodity money in parts of the world, but shell money still relies on cultural appreciation of their decorative value in order for them to function as currency. Another example of commodity money that did leave an etymological trace behind in English is the use of a buckskin as a unit of trade between Native Americans and European frontiersmen from the 18th century, and was eventually shortened to buck, now a slang term for a dollar, coming ultimately from the PIE root *bhugo- which referred to a number of different male animals such as a stag, ram, or billy goat. But one form of commodity did cross over successfully into proper currency: precious metals, such as gold and silver. Metals are particularly useful for this purpose since they can be made into smaller or larger pieces as necessary, and unlike food-based commodities they have an indefinite shelf life and can be used by being made into something useful, such as jewelry or a cup, but still retain their value and be converted back into money again afterwards. Mesopotamians of the 3rd millennium BCE used unmarked ingots (basically metal bars) of gold and silver as a sort of proto-money, though they were only useful for larger sums by merchants and traders rather than for everyday transactions, though this problem would be solved in China by using baser metals such as bronze or copper, often in the shape of cowrie shells or items such as knives or spades, though this then made them cumbersome to deal with in larger quantities. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, actual coins made of metal were first invented by King Croesus of Lydia (remember Midas’s Lydian connection in that other Greek origin story). Rather than the large ingots of metal this new Lydian currency was small, and the metals were stamped with the emblem of a lion’s head to ensure authenticity, and this coincidentally flattened them out thus making them more like the flat coins we know today. And that’s why they’re called coins, a word which comes through Old French coing from Latin cuneus “wedge”. The word originally referred to the wedge-shaped die used to stamp the money, eventually being transferred to the money itself. The etymology of cuneus is uncertain, but one suggestion is that it is related to Latin culex “gnat, midge” in reference to the sting, and this in turn might come from the PIE root *ak- “sharp”. As we saw before, the metal the Lydians had was primarily electrum, that natural alloy of gold and silver, so called because it was similar in colour to amber, fossilized tree resin, which is what electrum or Greek electron originally meant. The ultimate etymology of Greek electron is uncertain, but one suggestion is that it might be related to the Greek word helios meaning “sun” (and therefore also related to the English word helium, so called because the element was first identified during an observation of a solar eclipse) again because of its appearance, thus ultimately coming from PIE *sawel-, also the source of the English word sun. The English words electron and electricity came about because early experiments with electricity involved the rubbing of amber to produce a static electric charge. In any case, as the Lydians improved their metallurgical skills they were able to separate the gold and silver and thus had both gold and silver coins in circulation thus being credited with the first bimetallic coinage. Now in mentioning Croesus and the Lydians, Herodotus was not actually giving praise. He was criticizing them for their commercialism and all the social ills, as he saw it, that came with it. They had the first permanent retail shops, the first brothels (with poorer unmarried women working in them to earn dowries for marriage), and extensive gambling. And with this new cash economy money could now represent something other than a commodity, abstractions like tax or labour. The word cash, by the way, comes through Middle French caisse “money box”, ultimately from Latin capsa “box” from capere “to take”, from the PIE root *kap- “to grasp”, which is also the source through the Germanic branch of the English word have.

Now as we’ve seen, after the end of the ancient period cash money went into decline in some parts of medieval Europe, particularly England. But the cash economy eventually made a return, and as medieval Europe expanded its reach it became necessary to have a way of transferring money around more easily. Interestingly, the first banking institution didn’t come from the merchant community but from an order of religious knights, the Templars. Essentially warrior monks, the Knights Templar order was founded in Jerusalem in 1118 during the Crusades with the intended mission of protecting pilgrims and defending the Holy Land. Though they started in poverty, being made up primarily of younger sons of nobles who therefore would inherit no title or property and having taken vows of poverty (as well as chastity), they eventually became a massive international financial institution, having received large donations from royalty and other wealthy faithful back home, and were thus beyond the control of any one nation or king. Since they were some of the fiercest fighters around and their castles some of the most well defended, they were the ideal protectors of wealth gathered from plunder in the Holy Land. And a knight back home in Europe could deposit money or take out a mortgage and then receive the cash in gold upon arrival in Jerusalem, with of course the Templars charging a transaction fee in the process, making the order even wealthier. They were thus in a position to make rather large loans of money to royalty, and this was ultimately their downfall. In order to cancel his debt with them, King Phillip IV of France, based on trumped up accusations of heresy, devil worship, and sexual deviancy, rounded them up, tortured them, and burned them at the stake in 1307. But the destruction of this international financial institution left a void that needed to be filled. And in the late 14th century, the wealthy families of central and north Italian city states like Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Siena, Venice, Verona, and Genoa, filled it by offering, at a much smaller scale, the same sorts of financial services that the Knights Templar did. And it’s from them that the word bank comes. These Italian bankers did their transactions at markets on tables or benches called banca in Old Italian, and eventually the word came to refer to the financial institution itself, coming into French as banque and English as bank. The word comes ultimately from a Germanic source, Proto-Germanic *bankiz- “shelf”, from the PIE root *bheg- “to break” and is thus related to bench (through Old English) and bank as in a riverbank which resembles a kind of bench. Now to get around the religious prohibition against usury, that is lending money at interest, they instead traded bills of exchange (or cambium per lettras in Latin, literally “exchange through written documents or bills”), which was technically a sale of one kind of money for another to be payed in a different currency at a specified future date. Sneaky. And what’s more, the use of these bills of exchange had the knock-on effect of not having to deal with large numbers of coins all the time. Now value could be transferred on pieces of paper instead of metal coins. And it’s from these bank issued bills of exchange that paper money developed in Europe, with the Bank of England printing the first permanent issue banknotes in 1695, though the Europeans had already known about Chinese paper currency as early as Marco Polo’s account of China in the 13th century. Paper money in China had developed from similar promissory notes from the 7th century in the Tang Dynasty, with the first true paper money, called jiaozi, appearing by the 11th century, during the Song dynasty.

As for the origin of the word money itself, we have to go back to the ancient world for that, in particular ancient Rome. The mint in Rome where coins were struck was located on the Capitoline Hill at the Temple of the goddess Juno Moneta. Coins were produced with her visage and the name Moneta, and after passing through Old French this became the English word money, as well as the word mint. The Roman goddess Juno married to Jupiter, was often equated with the Greek goddess Hera (wife to Zeus). Roman gods and goddesses, however, are often given epithets to emphasize different aspects of their responsibilities, such as Juno Pronuba, who watched over marriage negotiations, or Juno Lucina, who protected pregnant women, or Juno Sospita, who presided over labour and childbirth. Well the name Moneta applied to a couple of different goddesses, one of whom was the equivalent of Greek Mnemosyne mother of the Muses. The other was a goddess of advising and warning who became associated with Juno producing the name Juno Moneta. There are a couple of different myths that are used to explain this association and the purpose behind her temple, the most famous being that in 390 BCE, when the Gauls attempted a surprise nighttime attack on Rome, the sacred geese around Juno’s temple honked loudly alerting the Romans of the attack — geese, better than guard dogs! — and was thus given the epithet Moneta from the Latin word monere “to warn”. And that word monere, if you can remember all the way back to the beginning of this monstrous video, is the very same word that lies behind monster. So perhaps this whole story can be a warning to you, that the money under your mattress might actually be a monster under your bed.

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