# Posted 1:55 PM by Patrick Belton  

LEVIATHAN WHOM THOU HAST MADE: Milton writes of "Leviathan, hugest of living creatures on the deep," that "stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, and seems a moving land." A Russian fishing trawler in the icy sub-Antarctic Ross Sea recently uncovered a real-life leviathan, a colossal squid which at a size twice that of cinema's King Kong, dwarves the maritime monsters of Verne and Melville. Found 2200 miles south of Wellington, the leviathan boasts eyes the size of dinner plates - the largest of any animal's - and in its formidable arsenal figure 25 teeth-like razorous hooks on eight arms and two tentacles, each deeply rooted into muscle and capable of rotating 360 degrees. The "squid of colossal dimensions" which attacked Captain Nemo's Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was by comparison a mere "giant" squid, based on a historical giant squid which had attacked a French naval ship in 1861, thereby fueling Verne's imagination. Imagination is where such creatures generally stay - the icy depths in which they live keeps them shrouded in mystery, and only few specimens have ever wandered up to where we might observe them. One notable other wanderer was the colossal octopus which washed ashore in Florida in November 1896, and had a scarcely-believable estimated diameter of one hundred and fifty feet and weight of four or five tons.

What is it about these monstruous creatures from the deep that gives them such unmatched ability to arouse our human capability for wonder? Perhaps it is the wonder engendered by intellectual humility in confronting something that compels us to realize how little we actually do understand about our world. As such, the experience of wonder is one of the most deeply human of human potentialities, without which we are reduced to a life which may be easily recognizable in models of economics or sociobiology but isn't quite fully human. Wonder lies at the heart of those deeply human endeavors, literature, art, and religion. As, incidentally, do these leviathans that make us feel such wonder. The term leviathan first occurs in the Hebrew "liwyatan," as when the Psalmist writes "There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein." The concept of leviathan has stuck in imagination since, with Isaiah applying it to Satan, Hobbes to the commonwealth, and Bulgakov applying Behemoth to the magical feline trickster which accompanied his Mephistopholes. The pedigree of "monster" is similar - it derives from old French monstre, from monstrum, a divine portent or warning, as an unnatural prodigy was understood to be. The sea's leviathans appear prominently in all religious literature of the west and near orient - the entirety of the Book of Jonah is read the afternoon of Yom Kippur during the Mincha service, at the end of the ten days of awe. In the Qur'an the leviathan-engulfed prophet appears as Yunus, and gives his name to the tenth Surah, also appearing in As-Saffat (which actually presents the Jonah story) and Al-Qalam. The basis of the mermen of myth may perhaps lie in colossal behemoths from the bottom of the sea, washed to the surface - this was the conclusion of a nineteenth-century Danish professor, based on comparing colossal squids with extant villagers' descriptions of mermen stranded in 16th century Norway. Melville arrives at the subject well aware of its history and potential to instill wonder in a rationalistic age too certain of its ability to understand a world in which reason must, as in Goya's etchings, at times pause before monsters.

Steve O'Shea, the Auckland-based world expert in these wonder-inducing creatures from the deep, sums up their attraction to us: "We know so little about the marine environment in general. If animals like this are turning up [near the surface], what's going to be at 3,000-meters depth? We don't know," O'Shea said. And thus wonder. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion