To devour the divine

“A taste of you slipped into me like moonlight in a locked church.”

To Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens

Both religious experience and horror are char­acterized as encounters with something simultaneously awesome and awful—a feeling captured in the older spelling, "aweful", which still retains its sense of awe.

Likewise, the experience of horror in relation to the monstrous is often described in terms reminiscent of religious experience. Both are often characterized as an encounter with mysterious otherness that elicits a vertigo-like combination of both fear and desire, repul­sion and attraction.

the Latin root of the word ‘monster’ is related to the verb monstrare, which means to show or reveal. a monstrum is a message that breaks into this world from the realm of the divine’

The monster is a paradoxical embodiment of both Otherness and sameness, seeming to reflect our fears that we are not really as different from the Other as we would like to think.