Lake Monster Traditions - A Cross-Cultural Analysis

Howdy, the first half-dozen or so of my posts act as mirrors for Reddit posts and adhere largely to that style, just modifying the contents of these posts slightly, I will eventually come back and amend these when I decide on a cohesive format for my posting.

Recently, an acquaintance of mine took the time to scan, compile, and upload their copy of an incredibly significant, what may in fact be the most significant, cryptozoological book ever published - Michel Meurger and Claude Gagnon’s “Lake Monster Traditions - A Cross-Cultural Analysis”, first published in English in 1988. The 1982 French version has been available on the Internet Archive for some time, but now the English version is accessible for all. I cannot emphasize how necessary it is to read this book if you have any genuine interest in cryptozoology, this is the book that pushed cryptozoology forward into modern cultural anthropology. I’ve collected a section of relevant notes below for those who may not immediately have the time to read the entire book. You should still read the book, though.

Link - https://archive.org/details/lakemonstertraditions1/

Please read the book! Here's an interesting companion article - archive.org/details/FT1987no49/page/60/mode/1up

A Dragon Hunt In Sweden

During six months in 1981, French folklorist Michel Meurger and Quebecian professor of scientific philosophy Claude Gagnon conducted a joint study of lake monster folklore across roughly twenty Canadian lakes. This study revealed numerous flaws in the methodologies of both Heuvelmans-era cryptozoologists and their hard-headed skeptic counterparts, both of which miss the forest for the trees and neglect the actual, cultural phenomenon at play. No study of this sort has been conducted since, making Lake Monster Traditions invaluable for this kind of insight gained from actual, in-person surveys from relevantly qualified academics.

Lake monster stories are exactly that - stories, they are discourses trying to interpret misinterpretations of natural phenomena within a cultural context. Furthermore, it’s not the actual moment of the sighting which is the most important, it’s what comes after. The search for answers leads to distorted memories, mismatches, and the subconscious pressure to fit into the culturally familiar. Boat wakes become plesiosaurs, logs become horse-headed serpents, drowning victims become the victims of giant fish. The lake monsters are primarily mental, not empirical. The same can be said of a handful of popular cryptids, Sasquatch and British Big Cats being key among them. This line of thought adds a whole new dimension to cryptozoology.

To start looking at these cryptids you have to take a step back and realize that essentially all literature focusing on them is biased rather than agnostic - Heuvelmansian cryptozoologists advocate that witnesses have seen undiscovered animals while kneejerk skeptics suggest that these witnesses have seen nothing more than logs, debris, or known animals. Regardless of whether the object is a floating log or an undiscovered animal, the crucial point in these polemic jousts is that there is something out there to be tracked or identified. But is there?

This objectivization is only half the story, and a painfully patronizing half. A witness may have “only” seen a log or unknown animal, but they believe they saw a monster and tell the story as such. Scientists, in their search for what is real, neglect what people believe is real. This is especially an issue when dealing with other, non-Western cultures; see my post from yesterday for some insight on that issue. This is scientification, the over-rationalization of cultural images. Mythical creatures became dinosaur bones and ghosts became infrasound frequencies when they never really were at all. Scientists either dismantle reports and discredit the reliability of the witness or, in the case of cryptozoologists, take them entirely at their word. Folkloric informants become scientific witnesses or “primitive”, uncultured fools. Both approaches are flawed. Reasonable people believe unreasonable things, misidentifying something doesn’t make you a fool. Even the most experienced and trained field biologists misidentify things on occasion, and everybody is susceptible to bias, misremembering, hoaxes, and cultural pressure.

Empirical explanations - that the lake monster is actually a sturgeon - only resolve part of the problem, because they only account for part of the observation. The empirical half of a sighting is not even always significant, sometimes it is not an accessible half at all - one can rattle off the potential phenomena that were misidentified or the likely taxonomic affiliations of the unknown animal potentially seen, but in many cases we cannot reliably provide the exact thing a witness has seen. The interpretation overrides the event as time goes on. Sea serpents, at least from what I have seen, are the only cryptids where we can reliably identify exactly what was seen, and even then it is still speculative a majority of the time. There is never going to be a broad, total solution. There may be many cases and individual instances which are unresolved due to a lack of data. This is just an unfortunate reality with the kind of data cryptozoology deals with.

As such, these sightings are not two-dimensional, but are complex cultural three-dimensional puzzles. Personal knowledge, cultural influences, the objects present within the environment, interest by the media, and a variety of other factors connect to one another to create a lake monster narrative. Information is strained through what I like to call the cultural colander; the bits that can be identified with prior knowledge are kept, as are ones relevant to the emotional experience - fear, wonder, confusion, etc. The rest leak out of the holes in the bottom, not forgotten, as they can later be recalled with further inquiry, but they are incredibly prone to leak out of the bottom and be lost to time, or worse be replaced by bits and pieces of knowledge used to fill in the gaps. Reality becomes myth, and further reality proves myth. The cultural colander makes a full meal, a monster tradition. 

We have to carefully dismantle the cultural puzzle to be able to understand the complexity of its structure, and we have to be relativistic while doing so - isolating each bit and working with them on their own. We also ought to keep the pieces intact enough for them to be able to go back together when we’re done - science has a way of killing traditions and beliefs.

If the common way of thinking is so flawed and inadequate, why do these empirical explanations persist? Tradition and authority play a big part. 

Many academics are not trained in cultural anthropology, much less most enthusiasts. When they approach these fields, they approach them like you would any other non-cultural hypothesis, the tradition of science. Skeptics specifically consume literature that near-solely handles anecdotal and cultural data this way. Cryptozoologists grow up on Heuvelmans, Shuker, MonsterQuest, and online forums where speculating about identities is a significant part of the fun. The “what is it?” takes a life of its own, this is cryptozoological tradition. It’s completely flawed scientifically but an incredibly engaging pastime - see Darren Naish’s wonderful Cryptozoologicon Volume 1 for a detailed critique on the matter.

Many people follow authority. The academics not versed in cultural anthropology, or the cryptozoologists engaging in speculation, share their flawed hypotheses in non peer-reviewed (on in some cases even peer-reviewed!) settings. Documentaries and newspieces are key among them. Egregious examples like this one use apparent credibility (“Oxford scientist”) as a way to validate laughably ill-informed sentiments (“Find another hobby”, Bigfoot and Nessie’s existence is a “scientific impossibility”). "If the scientists are approaching it this way, maybe I should too" says the impressionable enthusiast. To quote Lake Monster Traditions -

“Pressmen know no more, and often they know less, than our witnesses, about the nature of lake monsters, but they have one advantage over these simple testimonies: the authority of the written word. This authority makes their explanations, whether for or against, acceptable. Even those who have witnessed the phenomenon can succumb to the weight of learned ignorance. When the printed page says “No,” the witnesses often change their opinions.” (Examples are given immediately preceding and following this excerpt, found on page 59. Examples of the press “killing” a local cryptid can be found on page 98 and 146.)

More academic works ought to rely on Meurger and Gagnon’s approach, and especially, in the lack of a dedicated academic body, amateur enthusiast communities like ours ought to embrace this way of thinking. I recall reading that Heuvelmans thoroughly enjoyed the book, despite it being so critical of him.

Hopefully, this is an engaging read! I’ve neglected to add specific examples or sources for a majority of this article because they can be found in Lake Monster Traditions where they are fully explored. Please read the book, not just my cliffnotes - especially because I’ve primarily just summarized the introductory section, not touching on the actual inquiry at all.