[cyclops roar]
[crash]
[cyclops roar]
[grunt in agony]
[cyclops roar]
[static]
Hello there. My name is Dr. Anton Jessup, curator of Monster Studies here at the university.
Now I don’t want to go into a whole bunch of university business here. I don't want
to talk about missing graduate students and their bizarre interest in antique mirrors.
No, I am here to discuss the illuminating power of monsters. Behold the Cyclops, a mythic
myopic menace of the highest order. I obtained this specimen through a Greek sailor and if
we analyse its eye sockets, we can reveal much about its curious biology.
What are we to make of that strange, solitary eye? Discounting birth defects and injuries,
most sighted natural-world organisms boast two eyes rather than just one. In humans and
many other creatures, both eyes work together to provide binocular vision. Still other creatures,
such as various lizards and birds, use their eyes separately in monocular vision. But do
any other natural-world creatures boast a single eye? Yes, but we have to do a bit of
evolutionary backtracking to find such a departure from biological norms. There’s an entire
genus of copepod fittingly called “cyclops” because the 400 odd species boast a single
red or black eye. They’re highly successful creatures,
but grow no larger than 5 mm in length.
But already we’ve drifted too far from the monster at hand. To understand the Cyclops,
we mustn’t fixate on a single eye – but rather on the third eye.
By some accounts, the mythic cyclopes gave up one eye - or perhaps both their stereoscopic
eyes - in order to gain the gift of prophesy. This is especially interesting since Western
depictions of the cyclops often feature the fleshed-over sockets of atrophied peepers
beneath a centralized forehead organ, the very spot where Eastern traditions place the
“third eye” of supernatural sight. We often equate that invisible third eye with
the pineal gland, a pine cone shaped organ buried in the skull that grows no longer than
.8 centimeters. It produces several important hormones, including melatonin in response
to environmental lighting. In lower vertebrates such as fish and lizards, the optically-engaged
pineal gland actually stems into a parietal eye. Parietal eyes typically appear as a grey
oval on the foreheads of certain burrowing lizards - among other creatures. While the
animal doesn’t quite see out of this structure, the parietal eye is photosensitive and influences
circadian rhythm. One can’t help but wonder if the cyclops boasts a highly-evolved parietal
eye. Perhaps these giants lost their sight as they evolved to thrive in subterranean
habitats and the dark pits of Tartarus. This is a common adaptation of troglofauna in the
natural world, afterall, as creatures adapt to a lightless world. In the dark, the cyclops’s
parietral eye “opened” over time and quickly evolved into a higher sight organ when the
cyclopes once more emerged into the sunlit world. And if one were to factor in alleged
connections between the pineal gland and the production of the psychedelic compound DMT?
Well, perhaps that’s why these one-eyed beings see stranger and farther than most…
There’s a lesson in all of this. The monstrous is not a reduction, but rather an elevation.
Nature always selects for the more efficient form, no matter how strange it may appear
to the human eye. Now I love this specimen, but I need more to dissect with you here,
so please share you suggestions with me. End transmission. Maxwell, end trans...
[static]