User:David Gerard/Motif of harmful sensation

The motif of harmful sensation involves harm befalling a person directly from the mere fact of their experiencing a sensation that would not normally be harmful; it appears in both traditional and authored stories.

This is an idea with close affinities to the sight that harms is the gaze that harms, and the evil eye: the harm is thought to be caused by, respectively, seeing something or being seen by it. (A parallel topic is the contrast between metaphysical or vitalist conceptions that treat vision as an active function of the eye, and the scientific conception of the eye as passively receiving light that is present even when vision does not occur.)

While this motif is largely imaginary, a real-world parallel is epileptic seizures triggered by strobe lights. Light flashing at a specific frequency can "pump" EEG rhythms at the same frequency and induce a seizure. Examples include flashing screens in video games and an episode of the cartoon Pokémon.

Recently, some nonlethal weapons have used sounds to induce paralysis or extreme discomfort.

Mythology and legend

Viewing a deity

A Judeo-Christian tradition claims that viewing God's face will result in death (see Exodus 33:20). For example, when the wife of Lot defies the orders of an angel and watches God destroy a city, she is turned into a "pillar of salt" (Genesis 16–26).

Death caused by seeing the true form of a deity is a common belief in mythologies. In Greek mythology, for example, when Heracles meets his father Zeus, the god appears behind the mask of a ram. Showing his true form would cause the death of his son, even though Heracles is a demigod.

In many religious systems, a deity's nature cannot be understood by the inferior human senses nor by the human mind. To experience what God is, one must commune with God by leaving the ego and the body behind—this is one of the aims of yoga, tantra, and other Gnostic practices.

Peeping

Peeping on a deity or a deity-like creature or a secret rite can have dire consequences in myths.

In multiple Balkanic mythologies, seeing a faerie without performing preventive rituals, or, even worse, being spotted by a faerie at the time and place where faeries appear, breaks a faerie taboo and the person may receive movement-related illnesses such as epilepsy, problems in legs, feet, or madness. These can be cured by going back to the same place at the same time with a person that is on good terms with faeries (eg. a shaman initiated by faeries) or who is able to cure these illnesses.
In the Lady Godiva legend, Peeping Tom is the character who peeped at the naked Lady who rode through the streets of Coventry and as punishment was blinded. In other versions, Tom was struck by lightning.

The eye that can kill

On the other side of the motif, the eye is many times an instrument of death, an instrument that some gods possess in a number of mythologies. In Hindu mythology, for example, Shiva can use his third eye to release a beam of some sort of energy which instantly burns the target.

Creatures connected to the motif in Greek mythology

In Greek mythology, anyone directly viewing Medusa would be turned to stone, but Perseus avoided this fate by viewing her in a mirror in order to guide his sword attack.
In both the Odyssey and the tale of the Argonauts, the singing of the sirens drew to them, heedless of harm, any mariner who heard it; the stories describe countermeasures such as being physically restrained, plugging one's ears, and listening to even more beautiful music. Narcissus was so paralyzed at the mere sight of his beautiful reflection that he could not look away, and eventually starved.

The harp of Daghda in Celtic lore

In Celtic mythology, the gods known as the Tuatha Dé Danann bring with them five magical items from the North to Ireland for use against the Fomorians. The fifth item is the harp of Daghda, which is used later by Lugh against the Fomorians in battle.

The harp can play three songs, one of sorrow, one of joy, and one of peace. The song of sorrow causes pain when heard, the song of joy causes laughter and the song of peace causes calmness. The amount each song is played changes the effect -- if the song of peace is played too much, it leads to sleep and, ultimately, eternal sleep, equaling death.

It is also said that the three songs of sorrow, joy and peace must not be played at once or else the ultimate song will be played, added up from the three individual songs, and because of that the world will cease to exist.

Mediaeval appearances of the motif

The basilisk, dating back to classical Greek myths, has a rich tradition, sometimes including a harmful breath; fatal gazes are generally attributed both to basilisks, and to the cockatrices that may be derived from variations on basilisk tales or a female counterpart to the original basilisk.
It was once believed that when the mandrake was pulled from the ground, it emitted a shriek so horrible that anyone who heard it was deafened, driven mad, or even killed. The acquiring of mandrake thus had a number of precautions, as illustrated in Niccolò Machiavelli's play, La Mandragola (1518), where a dog is used to get the mandrake out of the ground so it dies from the scream instead of the ones who want to use it.
One version of the legend of the Rhine siren Lorelei says that the man who sees her loses sight of reason, while he who listens is condemned to wander with her for ever.
Legend had it that anyone who reads the whole of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights will become mad.

Urban legends

The Nigerian phone call

Belief in the harmful sensation is still developing in urban legends. In a modern twist on the old motif in mid-2004, stories became widespread in Lagos, Nigeria that answering phone calls made from a certain number would result in instant death.[1]

The haunted eBay painting

A painting, Hands Resist Him [2], sold on eBay was rumored to be haunted and carrying negative powers. [3] [4] The painter, Bill Stoneham, believes that the reasons for the belief that it was cursed were simply ghastly coincidences.

Gloomy Sunday

A song written by the Hungarian self-taught pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933. It allegedly inspired hundreds of suicides and so quickly became known as the "Hungarian suicide song". (Seress himself jumped to his death from his apartment in 1968.)

In fiction

19th century

In Stendhal's 1817 Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio is outlined the so-called Stendhal syndrome.
Mark Twain's 1876 short story A Literary Nightmare concerns a notice seen on a railway car that, once heard, obsesses the hearer, who cannot forget about it until he or she repeats it to someone else.
An 1895 collection of stories by Robert W. Chambers about a fictional play (the book and the play within it are both entitled The King in Yellow) described the play cursing each of its readers and driving many of them mad.

Early 20th century

In H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, a fictional book of magic called The Necronomicon is dangerous to both the health and the sanity of those who read it. Likewise, the presence of creatures known as the Great Old Ones can also drive people insane. The mythos also incorporates references to a maddening work known as The King in Yellow (see '19th Century' above).

Clark Ashton Smith, a correspondent of Lovecraft, wrote a short story entitled "Ubbo-Sathla" (1933), which was about an age-old scrying stone that offered the protagonist addictive visions of deeper and deeper epochs of time. The stone merged the protagonist's consciousness with that of the previous viewer, each in turn regressing into the distant past. Through "aeons of anterior sensation", the viewer became increasingly primitive and devolved until nothing was left but a primordial "thing that crawled in the ooze" and "fought and ravened blindly". After repeated viewings, the obsessed protagonist, helpless to resist or escape, ceased to exist in his own time.

In 1929, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story, "The Zahir", about objects which, when seen, destroy the viewers with obsession until the point where they cannot think of anything else. The Zahir of the story was a twenty-centavo coin.

1950s

In the 1956 novel The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, the protagonist protects himself from telepaths by learning a song so catchy that anyone who hears it will have it stuck in their head for three days.
On the syndicated television series, Science Fiction Theater, in the May 19 1956 episode entitled "The Flicker" police detectives attempted to prove that a man had been driven to murder by the hypnotic effect of a movie flickering on the screen.
In the 1957 Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Ultimate Melody" (collected in Tales from the White Hart), a continuous computer-generated "perfect song" has the unintended consequence of completely ensnaring all listeners who fall into earshot.
Fritz Leiber's 1958 short story "Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee" suggested the appearance of a rhythm and corresponding splatter painting that have contagious effects on anyone that hears them, until they have infected the entire population of the world, greatly reducing their capacity to do anything but imitate the rhythm and the forms of the painting.

1960s

J. G. Ballard's 1964 short story "The Reptile Enclosure" describes a near-future in which the launch of telecommunications satellites triggers "innate releasing mechanisms" that cause people to commit mass suicide by walking into the sea.
In Michael Crichton's 1968 novel The Andromeda Strain and its movie adaptation, an important plot point revolves around a scientist's epilepsy being triggered by a blinking red alarm light, triggering an absence seizure.
In 1969, Monty Python performed a joke-warfare sketch in which a writer produces a joke so funny that he, and anyone else who reads or hears it, dies laughing, while anyone who sees a few words requires a period of convalescence. The joke is eventually translated from English into German, one word at a time, by military authorities, and monolingual English-speakers read it by rote to the German troops they face on the battlefield, killing so many of them as to quickly end the war. The Germans invent their own joke of that kind; it doesn't work, Germans being stereotypically known for their lack of humour.
The central device of Piers Anthony's 1969 novel Macroscope is an instrument capable of viewing anywhere in the Galaxy, and which could be used for eavesdropping upon the communications of advanced civilizations. The effects of massively advanced technology in the hands of immature species were so bad that advanced civilizations permanently jammed the macroscope's "channel" with a video signal that destroyed the mind of any sufficiently intelligent viewer (those not intelligent enough to be vulnerable would be unable to use the technologies discoverable by the macroscope).

1970s

Ursula K. LeGuin's 1973 short story The Field of Vision features an alien artifact on Mars; its purpose is unexplained, but its physical proportions interact with the human nervous system to cause the deaths of investigating astronauts, leaving one survivor in a state of religious ecstasy, and later triggering a religious revival on Earth.
In 1977 Jerzy Skolimowski directed the horror film The Shout (based on a short story by Robert Graves) which told the story of a man who had learned (from a witch doctor) to produce a "terror shout" as he called it, that would kill anyone who heard it unprotected.
Robert McCloskey published Centerburg Tales in 1977, a collection of children's stories as a sequel to Homer Price. One of the short stories deals with a catchy juke box song that a person is compelled to sing forever, infecting other people along the way.
In Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, listening to Vogon poetry is described as an experience similar to torture. In the same SF work, the Total Perspective Vortex is the most horrible torture device a sentient being can be subjected to. As a result of its operation, the knowledge attained by the subject on the proportion of his existence in relation to the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe is mind-shattering.

1980s

Christopher Cherniak's short story The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution (appearing in The Mind's I) tells of a research project in computer science which includes content that makes anyone who views it become permanently catatonic. Only after the deadly files have had their tragic effect on a team who fetches them remotely — hoping to avoid what they believe is a normal contagious disease — is their true dangerous nature realised. Efforts to use apes to discover which part of the files has this effect fail — the deadly effect is limited to humans. There is occasionally an incubation period, in which an exposed subject is apparently unaffected; the last thing said by them, some time later, before slipping irrevocably into a coma, is "Aha!"
One of the science fiction elements in the film Looker (Michael Crichton, 1981) involved a device (gun) that is used to force a victim into a temporary (30-120 min) catatonic state by flashing a focused light into a victim's eyes at a specific frequency. The victim would not be aware of the event and would perceive the time spent in catatonia as passing instantly.
The 1983 film Videodrome, which stars James Woods, focuses on a series of television programs that take control of Woods' body, deforming it and bending it to an evil will that ultimately forces him to commit suicide.
In the 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami, the main character of Hard-boiled Wonderland discovers that an unanticipated malfunction of a chip in his head, set off by hearing a specific series of musical tones, will end his life as he knows it.
On the Album The Whole Story (1986) by Kate Bush the song "Experiment IV" describes working with the military to create "a sound that could kill someone at a distance".
In the first season (1985 - 1986) episode "Need to Know" of the first revival of The Twilight Zone a town is infected by a secret message which causes insanity as well as the compulsion to spread the secret message to others.
The first episode of the 1987 TV series Max Headroom is about blipverts, television commercials which are compressed into a few seconds. Sometimes, people who watch blipverts explode.
A number of stories by David Langford are set in a future containing images, colloquially called "basilisks", which crash the human mind by triggering thoughts that the mind is physically or logically incapable of thinking. The first of these stories was "BLIT" (Interzone, 1988); others include "What Happened at Cambridge IV" (Digital Dreams, 1990); "comp.basilisk FAQ" (Nature, 1999), and the Hugo-winning "Different Kinds of Darkness" (F&SF, 2000).

1990s

In Thomas Ligotti's 1991 short story "Nethescurial" from the collection Grimscribe, the eponymous god reveals itself through the ink of a manuscript telling of it, which is stained with the greenish-brown patina of its idol. This horrible revelation destroys the narrator.
In the fifth season (1992) Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "I, Borg", the Enterprise crew capture a young Borg, dubbed "Hugh", and consider exploiting him to attack the Borg collective. The plan involves implanting him with a "virus": the plans for a geometric shape that cannot exist. When Hugh returns to the collective, he will be re-assimilated and the impossible shape will obsess and destroy the entire race.
In 1992 Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash described one of the lost ancient Sumerian texts as having had the power to reprogram the reader's brain by exploiting a backdoor in language processing; as well as a digital image resembling black-and-white "snow" that can cripple the minds of computer programmers who deeply understand binary code.
In 1993 Greg Bear's novel Moving Mars a system is tested that has the ability to change the basic physical laws of our universe. After a bad edit one character views space directly and as a consequence, enters a short duration fugue state. The other characters are unaffected because they only view space through monitors, and the monitors being unable to process the information, show only nonsense.
In 1994 Ian McDonald's novel Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone posited "fracters", computer-generated images that variously induce religious awe, terror, ecstasy, obedience, and death.
In the 1995 film In the Mouth of Madness the works of the (fictional) horror writer Sutter Cane break through into the reality of those who read them.
An episode of the 1995 anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion shows the character Asuka being attacked with a beam of light that causes her to go into mental shock and recall memories of her dysfunctional childhood.
In the 1995 novelette TAP, by Greg Egan, religious and cultural groups think that a poet has been killed by a word in an all-encompassing thought-language.
Infinite Jest, a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace, revolves around a film so entertaining that anyone who sees it is put into a stupor, from which they can never recover.
The theme also appears in the 1997 children's book Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The magical Mirror of Erised traps viewers by showing them their hearts' deepest desires. Total captivation is not immediate, but the sights are highly addictive, leading people to return ever more frequently and to eventually waste away.
The Koji Suzuki novel Ring and its subsequent film adaptations depicts a video cassette which, when watched, will cause the viewer to die horribly exactly one week later. The horror films FeardotCom and Jisatsu Circle (2002) used a similar idea: an evil web site that kills those who view it after 48 hours have passed.
Curse of the body spirits, a 1998 story in Russian by Leonid Kaganov, centers around a report of a military project to create a deadly message.
In the 1998 movie Pi, the protagonist's tutor dies from a stroke induced by studying the secrets of the number pi. Also, it is believed by a small group of Cabbalists that a number discovered by the protagonist is the true name of God and if any but the anointed reads this number aloud, they will be smitten.
The 1998 computer game Fallout 2 was intended to include an outpost of the Environmental Protection Agency which, among other projects, would have included a method of curing epilepsy: speaking a series of letters that would cure any epileptics within earshot by rewiring their neural patterns. [5]
In the 1999 book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Ron informs Harry that "Some of the books the Ministry [of Magic]'s confiscated... burned your eyes out. And everyone who read Sonnets of a Sorceror spoke in limericks for the rest of their lives." He goes on to mention "... a book you could never stop reading! You just had to walk around with your nose in it trying to do everything one-handed."
Battle Angel Alita, also known as Gunnm, has a major plot point, in which a closely guarded secret of the elite city of Tiphares/Zalem is that it's citizens, after being eugenically screened and rigorously tested in a maturity ritual, have their brains scanned, removed and replaced with chips. When revealed to a Tipharean/Zalem citizen, the internalized philosophical debate causes most citizens to go insane.

2000s

The 2000 fantasy novel Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville, concerns a flock of winged monsters whose wings have a hypnotic effect on those who see them. Miéville's short story "Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia" describes a disease called Buscard's Murrain or Wormword, which is caused by speaking a single word called the wormword and causes its victims to preach the wormword in the hope of inducing others to speak it. (See also wormwood.)
The 2001 manga and subsequent OVA Read or Die involves a plot to recover a lost Beethoven symphony that induces compulsive and violent suicide in all listeners.
The 2001 Harry Potter school book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them written by J.K. Rowling (under the pseudoname "Newt Scamander") has an entry about the Fwooper. The Fwooper is an African bird, its song "...will eventually drive the listener to insanity".
In 2002, Chuck Palahniuk's horror-satire novel Lullaby describes a "culling song", which causes the death of people who hear it (or even have it thought in their direction). In 2003, Palahniuk published the novel Diary, in which Stendhal syndrome plays a major role.
The 2002 video game Xenosaga, the Song of Nephilim could drive androids insane, and also summon beings known as the Gnosis into the universe.
"Invasive", issue #3 (December 2002) of the comic Global Frequency by Warren Ellis, features an invading alien meme picked up from a copy of SETI@home that causes its victims to hemorrhage from the eyes from the "physical stress of the takeover."
The darkly humorous Flash animation "Banana Phone" is centered around the motif of harmful sensation, based on one of Raffi Cavoukian's songs. The "Banana Phone" clip (Caution: contains violence and profanity)
Ted Chiang's short story "Understand" is about a man who becomes more and more intelligent, and is ultimately destroyed by the things he sees.
Episode 12 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex featured a movie (in the form of a simulated theater within a "box" into which the user would ghost-dive) which was so compelling that all those who entered remained of their own free will (leaving their bodies behind, defenseless).
The prank flash video Red Room details the story of a protagonist searching on the internet the existence of a website that kills anyone who learns of its existence.