Old Boneless (and Hegel)

Our mother’s maids have so frayed us with Bull-beggars, Spirits, Witches, Urchins, Elves, Hags, Faeries, Satyrs, Pans, Faunes, Sylens, Kit-wi-the-Canstick, Tritons, Centaurs, Dwarfs, Gyants, Impes, Calcars, Conjurors, Nymphs, Changelings, Incubus, Robin Groodfellow, the Spoorn, the Mare, the Man-in-the-Oak, the Hell-wain, the Firedrake, the Puckle, Tom-thombe, Hobgoblin, Tom-tumbler, Boneless, and such other Bugs, that we are afraid of our shadow (Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcrafte, vii. 15, 1584)

Couldn't be, could there?

Without the common courtesy to maintain a discernible shape (so run away, screaming 'A formless thing! Save yourselves!') or to represent something, from the folklore of Scotland, Ireland, England, and the Hebrides comes an amorphous horror slithering and floating along desolate roads.

Old Boneless represents absolutely nothing, that is, absolutely nothing human or animal beyond predatory devouring of the unsuspecting. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature makes provision for two kinds of monsters. On the one hand it accounts for monstrous deviations as necessary components of the richness of nature itself. Although these monsters exceed derivation from the concept directly, they do not resist its movement and therefore are nothing more than contingent particularities. Such monsters do not impede the demonstration of the science.

On the other hand, the Philosophy of Nature is also afflicted by a kind of deviation that exceeds this determination of acceptable and accountable monsters. These second-order monsters resist the movement of the concept insofar as they constitute aberrations that deform the very method of rationality. A shapeless, insubstantial, mindless, motivationless monster that will nonetheless eat you defies categorization, eternally taxonomically identified as “other” or “miscellaneous”. Most monsters are described by what they are (an undead human, a half-man half beast, the souls of the departed), even if that is a deformation of the category of existence. Old Boneless is described by what he is not. What could be more monstrous than a thing whose ontological status cannot even be named? Could anything be more monstrous than a creature that steadfastly refuses to participate in the order of the universe? Old Boneless not only rejects order, he pretends it doesn’t exist at all as he floats in an amorphous mass on the back roads of the British Isles, absorbing the odd human into his absolute negation.