The Bane of Evil Spirits...and Water

I've always had a thing for gargoyles. They, along with carved stone and brick facades and other labor intensive building ornamentations are sorely lacking in today's modern cities. When I did my European tour in 2001 this idea was cemented for me. I remember being flabbergasted by the carvings and gargoyles decorating the Cathédrale Notre Dame in Paris, and the intricate moorish etchings and routed stone patterns scattered everywhere around the Alhambra in Spain. Stark modern concrete and glass building facades would do well to revisit the "modern" architect of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which embraced these architectural elements, though with a 21st century sensibility. It would seem that having to construct everything by hand, as was the case before mass production and modern building techniques, caused artisans to work even harder than necessary to pull beauty from their materials.


Here's something I learned this morning. Gargoyles are any grotesque figure with a trough or route carved into their backs, placed near the roof of a building with the express purpose of funneling rain water away. Gargoyle comes from the French, gargouille, meaning "throat" or "gullet." Without this water guttering function it's not a gargoyle. It's just a grotesque. Most people lump all building-mounted monsters into the gargoyle category, which is fine, but architects still maintain the distinction between the two terms.


So here's why, beyond their ornamental value, I really like gargoyles (or grotesques.) I love the window into the medieval mind they provide. People ornamented structures with hideous, grotesque figures because it was thought they would scare off evil spirits. I would imagine, if there were evil spirits, they themselves would be hideous, grotesque characters (if my experience with Ghostbusters has taught me anything) not likely to be scared off by portraits of themselves. And the fact that people felt the need to adorn churches with gargoyles is even more interesting. If there was a place where, in the medieval mind, you never had to worry about evil, I would think it would be in the great stone cathedrals. God, for them, would have been a much stronger deterrent to malevolent spirits than a bunch of stone monsters, you'd think. But people felt the need to add them to many of the largest cathedrals around Europe. What that points to is the overwhelming fear pervasive at that time. Fear that I think we've largely overcome, thankfully.

I suppose that's why you no longer see gargoyles and grotesques dotting cityscapes. We don't need them anymore. We know there's nothing nasty to hold at bay, and therefore don't need to invest the time and effort into creating elaborate stone wards. And I suppose that if fear is what it takes to motivate this sort of ornamentation in architecture then I'm glad they're gone, banished to the dustbin of history along with the ignorance that created them.