Moby Dick is a Cryptid
or What I'm Talking About When I Talk About Bigfoot
Yonder is the sea, great and wide, which teems with creatures innumerable, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it.
- Psalm 104: 25-26
Okay, I’ll admit it: I am into cryptids.
Mothman, Bigfoot, Nessie, my own local Lake Worth Monster. I love them all. My wife and I visited the International Cryptozoology Museum on our trip to Maine. We have a Bigfoot in the garden, baby cryptid books on our daughter’s bookshelf. In this house, John Keel is a hero. Yes, I am a cryptid guy1, but I’m not crazy. I don’t believe there is a breeding population of ten foot tall bipedal primates walking around the woods of North America or some kind of mutant humanoid insect flying about West Virginia.
What the hell am I talking about, then, when I talk about Bigfoot? To tell the truth, I am not sure. It is the Mystery that attracts me, not the possibility of solution. As Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner, authors of Where the Footprints End: High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon, write: “those seeking definitive answers will likely be disappointed. No one knows exactly where the footprints end.”
But that doesn’t mean we cannot speculate wildly.
Allow me to run through a list of what I consider plausible explanations for the phenomenon using an excerpt from my Bigfoot story, The Ghost’s Leavetaking2:
“If not a primate, then what are we looking for?” Barry asks, and not for the first time.
“We are looking for Bigfoot,” Riley says flatly, and we laugh.
“But what is Bigfoot?” Barry insists.
“A constellation,” I say. We enjoy teasing Barry. He is game for anything. For him, understanding is second to experience.
“A pattern,” José answers at the same time, the two of us enjoying our own secret language.
“A fairy,” I continue, and José takes the challenge.
“A manifestation of Pan.”
“The Green Man’s pet.”
“An ultradimensional being.”
“The greys’ beast of burden.”
“A tulpa, the crystallization of the wildman archetype.”
“A nature spirit.”
“So maybe they are like all of these things?” Laura asks. “Like a sort of QR code that takes the expected shape of whoever scans it, depending on their cultural background?”
“Exactly.”
“Or he could be a big hairy guy,” Riley says.
“We should never rule that out,” I concur.
“Could he be an angel?” Riley asks.
“Sure, could be,” José shrugs.
“A demon?” Laura adds, and her and Riley have now started their own secret game.
“Maybe so, yeah.”
“A daemon?”
“Definitely.
“So what you are saying,” Barry interrupts, perhaps feeling left out by the flirtatious teasing, “is that we have no idea.”
“Not the slightest.”
“So what are we looking for, then, exactly?”
“Bigfoot!” Riley says again, and we all laugh.
While I may not believe in an oversized man-ape, I do believe in people, and people have been reporting weird sightings in the woods for millennia. Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner’s two volume Where the Footprints End is full of such stories. There are the classic Bigfoot sightings, but then there are far stranger examples: Bigfoot and UFOs, Bigfoot and orbs, Bigfoot dematerializing, Bigfoot shape-shifting, mermaid Bigfoot, Bigfoot and Elvis, Bigfoot and witches, Bigfoot and poltergeists, etc. Such encounters occur not only in the woods, but in lakes, rivers, deserts, the outskirts of town, and at sea.
As Gary P. Hansen discusses at length in The Trickster and the Paranormal, there is something about being beyond the grid of civilization that makes unexplainable occurrences, such as these encounters, more likely. Things are less overcoded out there, less pre-determined, more, dare I say? . . . liminal.
What more perfect example of this than Moby-Dick?
There are few places more remote than the sea, especially in the case of a nineteenth century whaling voyage. These trips were multi-year, globe-spanning ventures in which the sailors might not touch land again until returning home. Communication with the outside world came down to a mail bag and a prayer, hoping the ship carrying a given letter might just happen across another ship carrying the addressee. For all intents and purposes, whalers were absent to the rest of the world for the length of their voyage. They were beyond the reality-setting limits of society, cast back into the infinite, into the wilderness that has not been whittled down by a lifeworld.
In such a place, a murderous white whale is perfectly plausible. So what if the only proof of its existence is the eye-witness account of a madman, and corroboration by a few random strangers met at sea? We readers accept its (fictional) reality as readily as the whalers even though it is relayed to us by the sole survivor of another encounter with the beast, a man who will not even tell us his real name.
It all sounds a bit fishy. . .
But this is the way encounter stories come to us, loaded down with asterisks, not really meant to be believed. Cryptids are experiential. Perhaps encounter stories are meant only to titillate so that they might be passed on memetically, as if this is how cryptids reproduce. The stories keep them alive, allow them to manifest through the ages, a constellation of symbols kept together by myth, a loose enough container to allow for constant metamorphosis, renewed periodically by otherworldly visions. As the stories change, the cryptids, too, change. Over the long churn of centuries, Leviathan has submerged and resurfaced in myriad forms. One of these, we have given the name Moby Dick.
Hello Trickster, My Old Friend
As Cutchin and Renner catalog, this understanding of cryptids moves Bigfoot and co. from the realm of flesh-and-bone creatures and into the world of High Strangeness. That is, into Mystery. As we have discussed before, Mysteries cannot be solved. They only continue to deepen as one wades further in.
