When I became a man, I would like to believe that I put away childish things. Video games, scooter races, building with Legos; these are activities that have been relegated to my past. There is, however, one interest of my youth I have maintained, stories about animals whose existence have not been proven. There is an innate fascination in man with the unknown, the unexplored, the unseen. Mysteries and myths, particularly when mixed with an element of danger, have a magnetic pull that will captivate and draw the interest of man regardless of background. Some of these popular myths and mysteries involve threatening creatures said to live where man does not dwell. Across the entire globe, cultures as old as humanity have maintained myths of monsters lurking in the sea, lakes, forests, and underground.
Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster serve as perhaps the two Greatest examples in Western culture, and in Asia the Nepalese believe in the Yeti, the Chinese believe in dragons (also popular in Western myth), and the list goes on. These cultures, that were for great lengths of time without contact, developed images, stories, and beliefs about unseen animals, often of the deadly variety, which have near identical representations across cultures. There are two likely explanations for this, the first less likely than the latter, despite its convenience to our ability to understand the physical world.
The first potential explanation is that these animals are real, that men have seen and encountered Bigfoot and men have seen and encountered dragons, unicorns, the Loch Ness Monster and more. There is of course fossil evidence of great serpentine reptiles that one could associate with the mythical description of a dragon, and there are known examples of great apes that exist today and even larger ones that have existed historically, which one could mistake for a Yeti or Bigfoot if ever seen. The likelihood, however, of a dinosaur or massive ape having survived a known extinction without being seen, photographed, or recorded for thousands of years is extremely low, albeit admittedly hard to quantify. While possible, we must work with the evidence at hand and assume that these creatures are simply not real, or at least no longer living.
If these creatures are only mythological, how then can one explain their similarities across distant cultures? If an explorer in the Pacific Northwest described seeing or hearing Bigfoot in a comparable way to how a Nepalese villager with whom he has never had contact with describes a Yeti, how can we chalk this up to myth? For this discussion, we will work off the assumption that most of those describing great apes, sea monsters, and lake monsters are doing so in an honest fashion and are not conspiring across cultures to maintain consistency in their descriptions. Absent collusion or these creatures being real, how can we explain the remarkable similarities between these myths? We must turn to the subconscious, and the second likely reason for these mythical and symbolic creatures existing across unrelated peoples.
We ought to begin by considering what all these creatures, regardless of their physical descriptions, have in common: darkness and danger. Bigfoot, sea monsters, even the Mexican Chupacabra, these creatures are associated with darkness and causing threats in the night to humans and livestock or are believed to lurk in the darkness and depth of lakes, oceans, and seas. If we turn to Jung and consider his beliefs on the subconscious, synchronicity, and the shadow self, the concept of humans creating similar myths across cultures becomes less mysterious. Nepalese villagers and explorers in the remote Northwest of the United States have something in common in that they are frequently at physical threat of the elements and the wild. These groups, and all groups, also have a historical understanding of primates aside from humans and there is of course an evolutionary reason for this.
With these concepts in mind, the ideas of a threatening great ape in the forest or a deadly Kraken lurking in the sea become far from nonsensical. There is a biological urge towards self-defense and the creation of myths can be seen as man’s attempt at creating stories to aid in civilization’s survival. For man to concoct a myth with honest intent, and without the understanding that they are doing so, is not a challenging process to describe using evolutionary and Jungian concepts. For example, we can consider a logical flow of this process: man hears of or experiences and then shares information about danger encountered in the depths of the forest or on the open sea, man is aware of dangerous animals in both settings, and therefore man concocts stories involving alleged creatures like Bigfoot and Krakens to explain the cause of a failed hunt for food or open sea exploration to protect themself and others from an early demise.
Perhaps getting lost and overcome by the elements were the cause of deaths of friends and family of the people who concocted these myths but given their locations and the darkness of those settings (the forest and the open sea) there is something that awakens the subconscious and causes an innate primal fear associated with ancestral predators. This contribution of the subconscious, with its similarities shared across all civilizations of man, is, I believe, the primary explanation for the similarity in descriptions of mythical creatures across these unrelated cultures. While two cultures may be unlinked by language, tradition, religion, or location, they have the human link of an apparently shared subconscious. How else could you describe two individuals from cultures who have never communicated and were perhaps unaware of one another’s existence, producing stories that they believe to be true of mythical creatures with such similarities?
Bigfoot, Krakens, and other mythological predators may not be real but what is real are the threats that these mythical beings posed to man on a subconscious and level. If we were to accept that these mythological creatures are in fact not myths at all but are real and lurking in the darkness, we must reconsider future travel and hiking plans. If we are to accept that these myths are not real but are based on a subconscious shared understanding of primitive threats, then it is worth digging deeper into attempting to understand this oneness of innate understanding shared across civilization. The latter is far more fascinating, and perhaps far more threatening than the risk posed by the former.
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