Monsters in the Cave

Liminal Bodies and Radical Religious Experience

Abstract

In this article, we analyze texts from Early Christianity in which ascetics encounter monstrous beings, especially demons, in caves (or similar spaces, such as tombs). There, the demons assume animalistic or hybrid forms. These caves (or tombs) are located in liminal spaces, most often outside cities and in deserts, which are places of transition between humans and animals, humans and demons, the living and the dead. In these encounters, these monstrous beings provoke the ascetics, physically and psychologically, to leave themselves behind, throwing them into networks of dangerous and connective relationships. We understand that the encounter with these threatening, violent and monstrous beings in caves and tombs shapes the experience of the world and the very self of its readers, throwing them into the world, constituting them as alterities, as a self torn apart from the outside. In this sense, this symbolic and mythopoetic field of encounters with monsters in caves articulates a type of radical religious experience that is corporal, connective and ecological. Our sources are: Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, sentences of the desert fathers, texts by Evagrius Ponticus and apocrypha of Early Christianity, dating from the 3rd to the 5th centuries. Our method was literary analysis and procedures of comparative history of religions, accompanied by concepts of the theory of monstrosity.