Class Struggle and the Loch Ness Monster

An episode under the former podcast name of Sh** Gets Weird.


What does the social history of Scotland tell us about the mysterious monster of Loch Ness? In this episode, we explore the earliest documentation of something weird in the lake, discuss the monstrous denizens of Highland folklore, and discuss how the monster we know today emerged in the Great Depression.

Bonus content: Irresistible demonic ponies

Transcript

It is told that deep within the cold, dark depths of a Scottish lake lives an elusive monster. Over the decades this monster has been a source of intrigue for people all over the world and the name of the lake has almost become synonymous with the monster itself. Receiving over 300,000 tourists each year, the Loch Ness has become one of the most visited lakes in the world. Many of the lake’s guests visit for no other reason than to try to spot the monster, who has become affectionately known as Nessie. 

Some believe that the earliest sighting of the famous Loch Ness Monster was in 565 AD. According to legend, 1455 years ago St. Columba and his companions had encountered some men digging a grave near the River Ness. When the Saint asked the men what had happened they told him that their friend had been attacked by a fearsome water beast in the river. Columba bravely sent one of his followers to act as live bait and swim across the river to lure the beast. The creature then appeared and apparently began to approach the man. Before it could get to him, Columba held up the sign of the cross and shouted “Go no further. Do not touch the man. Go back at once.” According to the story the beast miraculously seemed as if it had been “pulled back by ropes” and quickly fled.

Many have claimed to have seen Nessie on the Loch since the story of St. Columba’s encounter and there have been numerous attempts to try to capture the shifty monster.

t sightings occurred in the early 1930s. It was around this time that the famous Surgeon’s Photo was first featured in the London Daily Mail. Taken in 1934, this photo featured a long necked creature with a small head emerging from the waters of Loch Ness. The Surgeon’s Photo has become the most recognized picture of what is said to be Nessie and is what many have considered proof of the creature’s existence. Unfortunately for the Nessie enthusiasts the photo was proven to be a fake in 1993 when a man named Christian Spurling had admitted to creating the figure in the photograph using wood putty and a toy submarine. It was all an elaborate hoax started by movie maker and big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell who wished to take revenge on the Daily Mail because they had ridiculed him for giving them false Nessie “evidence” a year prior.

In his book “The Enigma of Loch Ness” Professor Henry Bauer assembled a list of sightings from 565 AD to 1985. Interestingly, there is a large cluster of sightings in one decade in particular. This spike happened during the 1930’s with over 200 sightings between 1933 and 1934. The United Kingdom was one of many places hard hit by the Great Depression at this time.

The taming of the water beast by Saint Columba is not as straightforward of a story as it might seem. The story was first recounted a century after Columba’s death in St. Adamnan's book, The Life of Saint Columba. Within this text there is a deeper narrative of power struggle between early medieval picts--a pagan society that most likely spoke a language similar to modern Welsh, and the Gaels, a Christian society that spoke a language similar to Irish Gaeilge and Scottish Gaelic today.

For centuries prior to this alleged event, Christianity had been steadily spreading through neighboring Ireland. Unlike other parts of pagan Europe, the Christianization process in Ireland was peaceful. This is why the island for example produced no martyrs. Centuries after the death of Saint Patrick, his conversion of Ireland was mythologized as the result of him outcompeting the native Druid priests in a series of competitions between their pagan magic and Patricks Christian miracles. So instead of violent struggle between two religions, we instead have a supernatural struggle for the belief of the Irish people.  In reality, early Christian priests were probably former Druids themselves. Basically, Christianity had the mystique and organizational power of the Roman Empire, which had never conquered Ireland but certainly traded goods and ideas with the Island.

A large factor of the Christianization process was the monastery. Monasteries  brought a community of faithful men together to think about how to spread their new faith. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the monastery developed new centers of economic production that could outcompete the latifundias--or agrarian estates, of late antiquity elites.

A newly emergent class of Christian abbots began to control an increasing amount of land and wealth in early medieval ireland. German Marxist politician and intellectual Karl Kautsky analyzed the development of the monastery in his 1908 text “Foundations of Christianity.”

He argued that what he calls monastic latifundias made better products at lower prices than their competitors, since they held the house and its property in common. As such, unlike the slaves of landowners, they viewed each other as comrades and therefore worked more diligently. Kautsky also argued that because monasteries held so many workers, they could better divide the labor among them. Finally, the monastery was eternal, tied to a belief in God rather than the lifespan of one landowning family. Bundled together, according to Kautsky, the spread of Christianity was tied to the spread of monastic life, and both were undergirded by an economic shift towards a new, monastic mode of production. 

Monasteries were particularly successful in Ireland, which was at the time completely agrarian. The episcople system of governing bishops that gained power in the urban centers of the late Roman Empire simply did not apply to the Irish. Moreover, monasteries absorbed aspects of the native Irish tribal system. Those who founded monasteries were considered Saintly, and Columba is significant for bringing the Irish Monastic system across the sea to the far north of the British Isles. His move from Ireland was part of a larger trend of Irish Gaels settling along the west bank of Britain. Here, the Gaelic speaking Scoti formed the early Medieval kingdom of Dál Riata, encompassing the north east coast of Ireland and the western islands and edge of modern day Scotland.


Scoti, the Latin name for the Gaels, eventually became hegemonic over all of Northern Britain, forming Scotland. It was in Dal Riata that Columba founded the Iona Abbey, which formed the heart of Christian Scotland and served as a launch pad for Columba’s missionary work with the pagan picts.

It is in this context that the story of Columba's confrontation with the monster in the River Ness takes place. The story itself almost certainly never happened, but the essential narrative of the Saint using the power of the Christian God to banish the monster was extremely powerful. Nearly all Indo-European people--that is, people who speak one of the family of languages that spread from Ireland to India--have a myth where a god slays a great serpent. It's generally interpreted as a metaphor for a deity overcoming chaos. Adamnans recounting of this miracle is using the tropes of the Pict’s pagan religion to underscore the power of his new God. Conflict--in this case between the traditional beliefs and economies of the Picts and christianity with its accompanying mode of economic production--lay at the heart of what many consider to be the original Nessie story.

Interestingly, the Picts are now known for the intricate carved stone monuments they left behind. One common motif is what’s been named the “pictish beast.” This beast appears to represent some kind of horse-face flippered creature, leading to speculation that it may be an early representation of the Scottish aquatic fairy-horse known as a Kelpie.

Christianity, along with the political and linguistic hegemony of the Gaels, overtook the lands of the Picts. But even after converting to Christianity, the gaelic speaking Highland Scots held on to a deep faith in an otherworld composed of a host of spirits which occasionally penetrated our reality. Special, enchanted places where the veil between our world and theirs were held with fear and reverence. Loch Ness was one of such places.

Our understanding of Highland folklore comes from 19th century folklorists who sought to preserve what they saw as an ancient fairy faith declining in the face of industrial modernity. The beliefs of the Highland Scots were particularly endangered. Between around 1750 to 1850 the Highlands were cleared of inhabitants to make room for capitalist land management. The traditionally communal Run Rig system of land tenure gave way to privately owned enclosed fields. The land was then devoted to the production of sheep to feed wool to England's industrial mills. The traditional Clan chiefs became a new landlord class, and masses of their clansmen were evicted to live in smaller crofting communities or to emigrate to America or Australia. Subsequently, the symbols and myths of the Highlanders were used by a new, capitalist elite to build a coherent Scottish national identity. This process created a mythos of a “vanished race” and has bred a pop culture image of the Scottish Highlands as a magical, enchanted land. A land that might hide a monster.

, one such eth-no-graphic account, J.M McKinley's 1893 book Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs notes that Loch Ness was the retreat of a particularly vicious water spirit known as the Each-Uisge, or Water Horse. Similar to the Kelpies that haunted streams and rivers, these shape shifting beings would take the form of a particularly rideable horse. This horse would be irresistible to humans, who could not stop themselves from mounting the handsome steed. As soon as they did, the horse's skin would adhere to the rider, and it would gallop off into its watery abode to devour it’s victim. Nessie researcher Roland Watson notes in his 2011 book, “The Water Horses of Loch Ness,” that 43.6 percent of all references to water horses in Scotland before the 1933 appearance of Nessie made reference to Loch Ness. Prior to the invention of the long necked monster we all know and love, the Loch was seen as a mythical place that held spirits in its vast depths.

This brings us to the glorious story of Willox The Warlock

Thanks to Watson’s book we have a wild story that originally appeared in the 1823 book “The Popular Superstitions of the Highlanders” by W. Grant Stewart. This tale is told by Gregor Willox MacGregor who was, at the time, famously known as Willox The Warlock. Willox allegedly had magical powers which he claimed he received from the bridle bit of the an niseag (an nish ak-- which is the gaelic word for the loch ness water horse). Apparently The Warlock’s ancestor Mr. James Macgrigor (their exact relation was unclear) had been travelling alone along a road near Inverness when he came across a beautiful horse grazing on the roadside. Mr. Macgrigor was no idiot; he knew that the alluring beast was more than it appeared to be. After marching up the horse, Macgrigor unsheathed his sword and swung it at the beast’s nose, cutting through the horse’s bridle and releasing one of its bits which then fell to the ground. Macgrigor then picked up the bit which landed at his feet and shoved it into his pocket. Astoundingly the horse did not fight back, instead it asked “What is your business with me Mr. Macgrigor”. After the two argued a bit about who was in the wrong in their current situation, the kelpie asked for his bit back. Noticing the kelpie’s urgency to retrieve the stolen bit, MacGrigor assumed it must be of some great importance. The man then struck a deal with the beast; he will exchange the bit for information about it’s magical properties. The kelpie accepted the man’s proposition and admitted that if it had not been for the broken bridle the kelpie “would have broken every bone” in the man's body. Although with the bit in MacGrigor’s possession he had become much stronger than the water beast and, according to the kelpie, could become half-kelpie at his leisure. The man also learned that if he were to look through the bit, it acted similarly to an adder stone or hag stone, in which you could see “myriads of invisible agents, faeries, witches, and devils, all flying around you, the same as if you had been gifted with the second sight” and like a typical human tricked to creature and stole the bit.

Roland Watson is one of the few living proponents of an actual, flesh and blood animal hiding in the depths of the Loch. Water Horses of Loch Ness attempts to build a continuity between later accounts of the plesiosaur-esque monster we know and the creatures documented by folklorists. Nessie skeptic Ronald Binns, in his book Loch Ness Mystery Reloaded, argues that by trying to combine the water horse with contemporary Nessie folklore, Roland Watson fails to understand the historical circumstances that defined both. The Each-Uisge and the Kelpies of Scotland’s rivers and lakes are part of a broader European tradition of magical, aquatic horses. While these stories appear in the folklore of every celtic language speaking people, they also appear in Denmark in the form of nykur, a water horse whose tail stickers to those unlucky enough to pet it while it walks along shorelines. In the north Scottish Islands of Orkney, Scandinavian and Celtic folk monsters blend into the Nuckelavee-described as having the body of a demonic horse with a man's torso attached permanently to its back. In Shetland, a little island south of Orkney, there is the Nuggle, which is another demonic horse. Both islands speak of the Tangie, which can take the form of a merman or a horse.The magical water-horse in Highland tradition can also shapeshift into a giant carnivorous bird known as a Boobrie. There is a welsh equivalent, and the people of Brittany, a celtic region in Northern France speak of a water horse that elongates its back to fit multiple children before drowning them. Ancient mediterranean peoples had a belief in the hippocampi--aquatic horses associated with various deities.

The creature that comes to mind when we envision the Loch Ness Monster did not appear until July 22, 1933. On this day George Spicer and his wife saw a strange creature wander across the road in front of their car while on Vacation from London. They described a creature with a long narrow neck that lumbered across the road before disappearing onto the banks of the Loch. In November of that year, local aluminum company worker Hugh Gray took a photograph of something seemingly large splashing in the water. Over the next few years, there would be many more sightings of the mysterious beast, including the infamous Surgeon's Photograph of 1934.

One such sighting was in January 1934 by one Arthur Grant, a veterinary student who had been riding his motorbike at night on a road along the Ness. In the dark, Grant claimed to have nearly hit a creature which had a small head and a long neck. Once the strange beast saw him it darted back into Loch Ness. Grant got off his bike to follow the creature but only ripples were left in the moonlight lake. He later made a drawing of this creature who he claimed looked like a cross between a plesiosaur and an otter or seal. This drawing was later examined by zoologist Maurice Burton who was unimpressed and stated that the creature’s behavior and appearance resembled that of an otter. 

To help explain why this phenomenon became so popular in the early 1930s, it's useful to look at the socio-economic world it took place in. Chris Bambery, in his book  People’s History of Scotland, notes that “The 1930s were a decade of unemployment, substandard housing and poor levels of health in Scotland.” Between 1931 and 1933, a quarter of the Scottish workforce was unemployed--as opposed to the UK average of 1 out of 5. Children of the unemployed faced malnourishment, diphtheria infections, and flea, lice and scabies infestations. In 1930, socialists and communists organized hunger marches from Scotland to London to raise awareness of their condition. It was in this dire context that the strange denison of Loch Ness reared its head. The link between moments of social stress and anomalous experiences is unexplored, but stressful environments have been definitely linked to mass hysteria in schools and factories, and individual trauma and stress have been shown to predispose people to hallucinations. Nicola Lasikiewicz at the Department of Psychology, James Cook University Singapore, notes that “Paranormal beliefs often become stronger in times of stress.” It was a time ripe for monsters.

A few months before the Spicers saw a monstrous amphibious beast amble in front of their car, the movie King Kong became an international hit. The Spicers admitted to seeing the film and even compared their sighting to the serpentine Plesiosaur in the movie.
Millions were exposed to the idea of the relic dinosaurs of Skull Island. It was perhaps this cinematic moment that transformed Nessie from a folkloric horse monster to a surviving plesiosaur. folklorists Roger Grimshaw and Paul Lester, in their 1976 monograph “the Meaning of the Loch Ness Monster published by University of Birmingham’s Center for Cultural Studies, argue that the idea of a population of mesozoic reptiles surviving in the murky waters of Depression era Scotland signified the possibility of the impossible, quote “If anything can be true, there is no obstacle to our wildest imaginings…” This observation would have been particularly relevant to such an uncertain era. The monster, then, held a liberatory sentiment of another possible world.

This period also marks the birth of the Loch Ness Monster enthusiast, a group who we would now refer to as cryptozoologists. It was these industrious researchers that pulled St. Columba’s miracles and the Each-Uisge out of time to help explain the modern mystery. The discovery of the Coelacanth in 1938--a fish believed to be extinct for 60 million years--bolstered the idea of living fossils haunting our planet.

 Grimshaw and Lester argue that the concept of the prehistoric monster, the result of enlightenment era enquiry, entered popular consciousness in the 19th century. Particularly the 1823 discovery of a giant plesiosaur fossil in England that fascinated the public. The authors note that Victorian naturalists and folklorists were engaging what they call the scientification of folklore, founded upon the findings of the very natural sciences that had arisen to supplant it...since the object of the scientific project was to make the world definable and predictable, it had to rid the world of monsters, so that real creatures that had previously been shrouded in  legends and mystery could be demystified…” The authors also point out that as early as 1855 English natural historian Philip Henry Gosse proposed the plesiosaur as an explanation for the sea serpents increasingly seen by sailors in a growing maritime economy. They argue that an analogous process played out in Sweden, where 19th century naturalists speculated about the zoological origins of their own troll, dragon, and lake monster traditions.

In December of 1975,, co-authors Robert Rines and Sir Peter Scott in the esteemed journal nature named the creature Nessiteras rhombopteryx. That basically translates to “Ness monster with diamond fins.” They did this in hopes that if the creature was ever found it would be protected under UK conservation laws. This is an extreme example of the scientification of folklore.

The mythical, perhaps unconscious and visionary nature of the monster as experienced by feudal peasants could no longer be an acceptable explanation for the monster. The project for both the skeptic and believer was to find the “real” origins of the creature. Folklorists Michel Meurger and Clauder Gagnon, in their 1982 classic “Lake Monster Traditions: A Cross Cultural Analysis” point out that skeptical arguments about misidentified objects in lakes and believer arguments about literal unknown animals miss the folkloric reality--or perhaps irreality-- of the creature. The bourgeois rationality that became hegemonic with the rise of capitalism simply cannot co-exist with the experience of seeing a lake monster as something outside an empirical view of the world. 

Clashing social and economic models lay at the heart of Nessie. While it's a stretch to link St. Columba’s taming of a water beast to the Highland Kelpie or contemporary stories of an enigmatic plesiosaur, all share the social history of Scotland. St. Columba’s story represents the ideological conquest of the Pictish pagans, attached to a new monastic economic model. The Highland clearances and the consequent Victorian obsession of preserving the dying beliefs of the dying clan system brought to life traditional stories of water-horses. This also began the era of the bourgeois drive to “scientize” everything, a consequence of a new, industrial mode of production.

The rise of Nessie as we know it emerged during the deprivation and class struggle of the Great Depression, an impossible vision for an impossible time.