Best iaries—literally "books of beasts"—were among the most exquisite written products of the middle ages (see Ben Lewis's Private View this month). Lavishly illustrated guides to the animal kingdom, they melded fact and rumour to create mystically charged taxonomies of nature, based largely upon readings of the Bible and the ancient authors of Rome and Greece. Within them, the whale, or leviathan, was a Satanic creature whose belly represented hell on earth to those, like Jonah, whom it swallowed; while the bear gave birth to shapeless, eyeless lumps of flesh, then licked these into the form of cubs. As well as bestiaries' beauty and spiritual force, their pre-scientific systems of correspondence helped to make a seemingly limitless world comprehensible. Today, in an age some are starting to think of as post-rationalist, we're seeing a revival of this kind of thought and language in the most unlikely of places—online.
Readers will be familiar with some of the terms in question: virus, worm, infection, zombie, trojan, daemon… It's a lexicon for when things go wrong—and is peculiarly zoomorphic and mythological in its flavour. A "zombie," for instance, is a computer that has been taken over by malicious software and turned into a mindless slave, spewing out spam emails and viruses; a "trojan" takes its name from the Aeneid's Trojan horse, and is a malicious programme hidden within a benign exterior. Scientifically, these beasts are knowable. And yet, in both the internet itself and its swelling variety of perils, we have regained an uncharted frontier—an ever-expanding realm of wild reports and sinister predations, in the face of which we reach once again for myths and symbols to give form where mastery is impossible. As the maps once said: here be monsters.
