February 10, 2024 • 40 mins
Join Robert and Joe in this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind as they discuss heart removal rituals, supernatural concepts of the heart and the European tradition of heart burial. (originally published 02/14/2023)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for
a vault episode. This originally aired February fourteenth, twenty twenty three,
and it's called Because It Is My Heart Part one.
This is the first part of a series we did
about heart removal and heart burial and such concepts.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, because it's that time of year, you know, it's
Valentine's it's a pon us. So get in there and
enjoy this heart related content.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Let's jump right in.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
In the Desert, I saw a creature, naked bestial who's
squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands
and ate of it. I said, is it good? Friend?
It is bitter, bitter, he answered, But I like it
because it is bitter and because it is my heart.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that, of
course is the poem in the Desert by Stephen Crane,
a poem that I've long found nice and creepy and
thought provoking.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think a lot of it depends on which word
in the last sentence you emphasize. Does he like it
because it is my heart or because it is my heart?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, there are several ways to piece it apart there.
But it's also the perfect poem for Valentine's Day. Today
is Valentine's Day. I don't know if anyone has ever
taken in the desert and transformed it into a Valentine,
but I think that's a fabulous idea. Depending on who
you're giving it to, you want to make sure that
they're going to understand the cleverness of this. But it's
(02:03):
just the right length. You know. You could put you know,
half of it on the front, half of it inside.
You could draw the best youal creature there consuming its
own heart. Somebody has to have done this before. I'm
sure someone will send links to this effect to us.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
You could put it on those little heart shaped candies
that look like they're like made of chalk.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Basically, Oh yeah, that would be clever. I mean, it
has to have been done. It's such a great idea.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Does anybody eat those? By the way, that does somebody
like the taste of chalk enough that they would consume that.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I remember eating them when I was a child, you know,
and maybe and I don't know if they're bitter, that
would but they are shaped like hearts. Yeah, at a
time when you ate a lot of candy, it made
sense to at least try a few of them. But
I think then you realize there were better candies to eat,
easier candies to eat.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, that's such a childhood mentality. It's like, well, it's
not good, but it is candy, so I guess I
have to eat it.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I should at least at least try it. It's just polite. Yeah. So, yes,
it's Valentine's Day, a time when we tend to think
about the over commercialization of love, and especially romantic love,
as well as the symbolism of the human heart. You know,
I think this is a topic we've touched on before
on the show. You know, when it comes to the heart,
(03:22):
we know that this is the center of our circulatory system.
We know it pumps our blood, but it's also seen
as the symbolic or metaphoric seed of love and passion.
And given all these complex ways of thinking about the heart,
we also tend to feel a certain kind of way
about the topic of heart removal. When it comes up,
(03:42):
be it something that comes up in the biological you know,
the medical world, or if it comes up in random
horror movies, or just as a turn of phrase.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Is this how you landed on heart removal for the
topic this week? Where you watching a movie where a
heart gets ripped out?
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I don't think I was specifically when I started thinking
about this, but we have watched several movies on Weird
House Cinema, our Friday Weird movie episodes that like. Particularly,
I think some seventies films we've watched, such as The
Loreleized Grasp, horr Rises from the Tomb, Return of the
Blind Dead, I think all three of those feature a
(04:20):
scene in which somebody's heart is cut out and it's
eaten by say a monster or occultest night that sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Wait, am I remembering wrong? Is the whole point of
Lorealized Grasp that the monster eats people's hearts?
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes? Yeah, she does. Yeah. Well, I mean there are
the aspects of the film, but it clearly in terms
of what is the gory point of the film that
seemed to be one of its main fascinations.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Well, she eats people's hearts since she falls in love
with that. I don't know, Spanish German, Elvis Peter Fonda
kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Oh, yes, yes, anyway, yes, yeah, go back to those
episodes if you want more of that. When it comes
to heart ripping, of course, there are some more famous
examples that probably come to everyone's mind. There's the nineteen
ninety two fighting gay Mortal Kombat. I think everybody that
was around in the nineties and in decades after, but
(05:15):
especially in the nineties, you have that very pixelized version
of that heart rip in mind. And then, of course
there's the nineteen eighty four film Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom, which features a rather famous heart rip
scene that despite the film being set in India, this
actual heart rip and all the things that the baddies
are up to are really take gory elements from at
(05:39):
least a couple of non Indian cultures, and some of
the cultures we're going to discuss in this episode and
kind of make a patchwork villain religion here for Indiana
Jones to go up against. And I think they also
incorporate more than a little bit of fictional satanic ritual,
like it's a very humbly able culture that Indiana Jones
(06:02):
is supposedly encountering in that movie, to say the least. Yeah,
now other heart rips of note correct me if I'm wrong,
but doesn't Jason Vorhees ripped out of heart at least once.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh I don't recall. Probably yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I do know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
That's one of the worst movies in the whole series.
Ends up like The Bunch of People, A bunch of
like troops come in and blow up Jason, and then
somebody eats Jason's heart and turns into Jason.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It's brilliant, Okay, I I had, I haven't. I don't
think i'd actually seen Leprechaun six aka Leprechaun Back to
the Hood from two thousand and three. This is the
last one to star Warwick Davis, but that has a
heart rip in it. Like the heart rip scene I
guess in a film is usually pretty easy to do
because you just it's mostly sound effect and then the
(06:54):
visual of somebody holding a bloody, palpitating heart. Oftentimes that's
done by having the person squeeze like kind of a
rubber heart create the sound effective you desire. Other examples
come to mind the horror movie Valentine's Day. I'd forgotten
about this, but the Prophecy films have a lot of this,
with angels ripping each other's hearts out. Dumb and Dumber
(07:16):
has a heart rip scene that I'd forgotten about. I
can't remember if is that supposed to be a dream
sequence or is that supposed to really happen or does
it matter? In Dumb and Dumber it is a dream sequence, Okay, Okay.
Then there's a Rambo, Last Blood and Last of the Mohicans.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I've actually seen very few of these movies.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Oh well, we might have to come back to the
Prophecy films. Oh but I don't know. Some of those
you could probably miss, especially maybe Leprechaun six. But yeah,
it's it's kind of a staple of horror. Oftentimes, if
you have any kind of like supernatural being, you know,
you have some sort of really lightning quick heart rip.
(07:53):
There's a great example of this on the HBO series
True Blood, which I guess overall looking back on it
kind of a mixed bag. But the excellent character actor
Dennis O'Hare does have this wonderful character, the vampire King
of Mississippi. His name is Russell Eddington. He's a real
highlight of the show. While he's on the show, and
there's a scene where I forget exactly what ticks him off,
(08:14):
but vampires are supposed to be secret in the series,
and he just gets mad and instantly like speeds to
like a live news broadcast and rips the broadcasters heart
out through his back, along with the piece of his spine,
and that stands out in my mind is one of
the finest moments of that series.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The main thing that comes to my mind is that
the manual heart removal is the primary move of an
unarmed Terminator in the Terminator films.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Oh did he rip some hearts out?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
That's what Yeh's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the first
movie when he comes out to the punks. Yeah, he
like Bill Paxton or somebody or the guy Bill Paxton's
hanging out with.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
It's been so long since I saw the first Terminator.
I really need to go back in and watch it.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I don't know why that's the move they chose. I mean,
it's scary in the movie. I don't know if that
really speaks of robotic efficiency.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It's like taking the batteries out right, yeah, all right, Well,
with that out of the way, we're gonna begin to
move into what we're ultimately really talking about in this
pair of episodes this week, and that is heart removals
and how they factored into different views, different supernatural understandings
(09:28):
of the human body and the cosmos. We're not gonna
we're probably not gonna go super in depth into heart
symbolism and metaphors in terms of trying to be, you know,
to completely cover the topic, because it is a broad topic.
You have, like any given culture has some sort of
idea about what the heart is, and there's a lot
(09:48):
of overlap, but then there are some distinct ideas mixed
in there as well, and we'll touch on some of these.
I think a good place to start would be, of course,
with the Egyptian heart. Now, there was we had a
past episode of the show this was there was an
interview that I did with author Bill Shutt, who wrote
a book called Pump. It's quite good. It gets into
(10:11):
animal hearts and various in the history of understanding the
human heart, Medical History of the Heart. Wonderful read. And
in that book he does bring up that, yes, the
ancient Egyptians knew the heart is ab or ib or HATI.
It was treated with a great deal of reverence, as
this was the organ said to contain a record of
(10:32):
the individual's good and bad deeds. And I think a
number of any if you've consumed any amount of Egyptology
over the years, you're probably familiar with the basic scenario
that is often related here that after you have died,
it is this heart that will be weighed against a
feather of maat the Goddess of Truth, to see if
(10:55):
you can indeed pass on into the realms beyond our
life here on earth, will or if you're going to
be consumed by this ferocious beast of annihilation and thus
no longer exist.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I think it's a crocodile type or crocodile ish beast,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yes, yeah, it is a crocodile asque I'm blanking on
the name of the entity off the top of my head,
But yeah, you basically have the split road between annihilation
and continued existence. But you can only continue to exist
if your heart matches up against this feather of maat
the Goddess of Truth. Now, as Geraldine Pinch mentions in
(11:42):
her book, Egyptian mythology. Yeah, the ancient Egyptian's view, the
heart is the organ of thought and feeling, and it
was the seat of consciousness itself, and Maat the goddess
here is often seen as this ostridge feather adorned goddess
of truth and goodness. So thus her feather would match
(12:02):
the weight of your heart if you had truth in
your heart, if you had not at in your heart
at all. So that's the basic scenario there now. Shut
cites historian Roger K. French, who rationalized that the basic
idea in the Egyptian model here is that life is warm.
(12:23):
The heart is warm, the heart moves, and with its
movements we breathe, and our vessels carry blood to the
rest of our body. Shut also points out that the
fifteen fifty five BCE Book of the Heart may reveal
some level of understanding regarding heart attacks and aneurysms among
(12:45):
the ancient Egyptians, but historians are not all in agreement
onto what degree we could interpret it this way. Now,
given the importance of the heart in all of this,
especially the continuation of the soul and Egyptian belief, this
probably reminds a lot of people out there of another
fact about the mummified remains of an individual, about what
(13:05):
happens to various internal organs. Several of these internal organs
are often placed inside of a canomic jar, including the heart.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yes, And so that brings me to how I wanted
to look at a specific example of a mummy to
examine treatment of the heart in a case where it
was well documented. So obviously, Egyptian embalming, mummification, and burial
practices varied by time and place, and ancient Egyptian civilization
(13:36):
spans a really long time, thousands of years. So the
example I'm about to talk about is not characteristic of
everything in ancient Egypt. But I thought it was interesting
to look at one example in particular, especially because it
contradicts a generalization that many people have made over the
years about Egyptian mummification, one that I definitely remember learning
(13:58):
when I was younger. And the generalization is this that
during mummification the brain is always removed. Of course, you
get the famous grotesque image of the hook going through
the face holes to remove the brain, and that the heart,
being the seat of the soul, as you just explained,
was left in place in the body. So maybe the
other organs were removed, but the heart was left in
(14:20):
the chest.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And by the way, if memory serves, I think I'm
remembering from a past episode on mummies. The brain. We
have to remember the brain, I believe, is often thought
to have gone rancid first, to rot it first, and
therefore we have to factor that into all this as well,
along with these understandings for the ancient Egyptians about what
organs were doing.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Now, the specific mummy I was reading about that contradicted
this generalization was featured in a paper based especially around
some ct scan research that was published in twenty fourteen
in the journal the academic journal The Yearbook of Mummy Studies.
It's a funny name. Makes you imagine the mummies are
like writing, you know, stay cool, have a great summer,
(15:04):
or they're like going through drawing hearts around all the
mummies they have a crush on like this mummy's so
cute anyway. So I was reading about this paper in
a concurrent article in Live Science by Owen juris called
ancient Egyptian mummy found with brain no heart. So this
mummy is the body of a woman who lived about
(15:25):
seventeen hundred years ago according to radiocarbon dating, placing her
under the period of Roman control of Egypt. And she
died somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty, and
her body shows signs of severe dental health issues and
tooth loss, which apparently is quite common for ancient Egyptian
bodies from this period. I don't know if that's because
(15:46):
they were getting lots of sugar or what. I don't
know what the explanation is, but a lot of dental problems.
In the religious and cultural context would be This was
a person who still adhered to a version of tradition
Egyptian religion, or the variant of it that was popular
at this time, at a time when Christianity was actually
(16:06):
spreading through the region and becoming more and more dominant. Now,
in contradiction to the brain removed, heart left in place
generalization I heard when I was growing up, this mummy
is exactly the opposite. Analysis of CT scans by the
researchers found that the embalmers in this case they worked
by making an incision in the perineum and then through
(16:28):
here they removed the intestines, the stomach, the liver, and
the heart. Heart came out too. So after all these
organs were removed, they lined the incision that they had
made with resin and linen cloth, and then they placed
a couple of plaques on this woman's body, on the skin,
over the stomach and over the sternum, and to read
from Jeres's summary quote, something that may have been intended
(16:52):
to ritually heal the damage the embalmers had done and
act as a replacement of sorts for removed heart. And
this would not be the only example in ancient Egyptian
emvolving practices where the heart was taken out and something
else was put in there, seemingly in its place or
to replace it. I'll mention another couple of examples of
(17:16):
that in a minute. But after this, her body was
treated with spices and with lichen covering I think her
head and her upper body, and she was wrapped and
buried somewhere near Luxor. At the time of this article,
by the way, the mummy was in the collection of
the Red Path Museum at McGill University in Montreal. But anyway,
(17:37):
this raises an interesting question if the heart was so
important in Egyptian religion, that so important that for a
long time, people assumed it was always left in place
when bodies were mummified. What was happening in the cases
where it actually was removed and how common was that? Well,
(17:59):
to quote a profane named Andrew Wade from Master University
who's the author of another piece I'm going to look
at in a minute, Wade says, quote, we don't really
know what's happening to the hearts that are removed. So
it's assumed that, as you alluded to a minute ago, robed,
they were usually when they were removed, they were put
into canopic jars, which we know we're used to hold
(18:21):
internal organs removed from other mummies, but that's not always
known for sure. So sometimes we just don't know what
happened to the heart. And there's still the question of
why why did they do this? Well, we don't know,
but the authors of the ct study speculate that perhaps
the two plaques on her abdomen and her sternum were
meant as a kind of healing or a replacement for
(18:43):
the wounds inflicted by the embalming process itself. Like, okay,
we had to cut a hole in your body in
order to process your body for burial, So here's a
plaster healing symbol to counteract that incision. And then perhaps
the plaque on the sternum was somehow a replacement for
the missing heart, But again we don't know for sure,
and we don't know why the heart was removed. But
(19:06):
I came across another piece that has some interesting thoughts
about this. So for a more general look at the
treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification, I was looking at.
I don't think this is a paper in an academic journal.
I think this is a fact sheet from a presentation
at an academic conference that was put together by a
(19:27):
couple of experts, by Andrew D. Wade and Andrew J. Nelson.
I know that one of the two authors here, Wade,
was the one who was quoted in that article we
were just talking about. So the authors of this presentation
here say that many generalizations made these days about the
treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification are based not
(19:48):
on modern empirical research, but rather on accounts given by
classical authors. So if we are going to use literary evidence,
evidence from ancient texts for what these funeral practices were,
you know, it would be really good to have a
lot of direct Egyptian accounts, and we have some Egyptian
accounts about beliefs about funeral practices and the afterlife, but
(20:11):
instead a lot of the literary evidence we use is
mostly in Greek and Roman texts from authors like Herodotus
and Plutarch, And in fact, they say, the only author
specifically mentioning the heart as opposed to making more general
statements about what is done with the organs during mummification
is the Ptolemaic period Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who writes
(20:35):
as follows quote, when they have gathered to treat the
body after it has been slit open, one of them
thrusts his hand through the opening in the corpse into
the trunk and extracts everything but the kidneys and the heart,
and another one cleanses each of the viscera, washing them
in palm wine and spices. So based on this we've
(20:55):
got Diodorus here saying that the heart is always left
in place. But of course, remember he was Ptolemaic period,
and this is one author. And this presentation I looked
at was designed to compare those literary accounts of heart
treatment to evidence again from CT scans or from mummies
that have actually been empirically taken apart and described in
(21:17):
the scientific literature. So we looked to see what was
left in them. And they say there are three basic
patterns of heart treatment and mummies. One is retention, so
the heart stays in the chest even if other organs
are removed. Number two is removal, the heart is taken
out of the body. And number three is replacement, where
the heart is removed and something symbolic is left in
(21:39):
its place, generally something called a heart scaub, which is
a type of amulet. So how do the empirical finding
stack up the author's write quote the heart was noted
as intact in only twenty one of eighty individuals, where
this organ's disposition was recorded in barely more than a
quarter of the individuals, and this sample was the heart
(22:02):
retained in situ. In only one case was the heart
possibly sewn back into place, and in one other case
was a heart scare of a present presumably to replace
the removed heart. And so rob you can see I've
included a chart from their presentation below where you can
look at the trends where these are not percentages, but
(22:22):
these are absolute numbers. Of examples from these different periods,
and you can see that heart retention predominates in the
small number of samples of mummies we have from the
Middle and New Kingdoms. But then as time goes on,
heart retention is outnumbered by heart removals in the Third
Intermediate Period, the Late Period, and the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. So,
(22:46):
in the words of the authors quote, mummies were increasingly
absent their hearts from the New Kingdom onward. As time
goes on, more and more of the mummies we find
have their hearts removed, and so the authors conclude to quote,
the stereotype of universal heart retention or replacement on accidental
removal is far from the truth. The heart was uncommonly
(23:09):
retained in situ and rarely returned or replaced by a
heart scare up. The hypothesis constructed from the stereotyped account
by Diodorus is therefore falsified by these data.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Interesting. Interesting, yeah, Now also worth just driving home though,
that this is all separate, of course, from the purely
sort of mythological situation in which the heart is weighed
that's taking place in another realm, that is not taking
place in the physical world.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Right, this is a study about what happened to the bodies,
not necessarily about what the people in question believed about
what was happening in the afterlife.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Right, And though of it's also worth driving home that
also with belief, especially when we're talking about ancient Egypt. Again,
like you said, we're talking about a very long period
of time in which practices change, but also beliefs also change.
So it's hard to just you can't just sum everything
up and like say a pamphlet about like here's what
(24:06):
the ancient Egyptians believed or did, because you're covering such
a broad period of time.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Correct, And this is the point the authors here are making.
They use this as evidence that the classical descriptions of
Egyptian mummification by like Greek and Latin authors should only
be used, as they say, at best quote a possible
snapshot of mummification performed by one particular workshop unquote, and
(24:31):
not like an adequate description of universal practices or even
of the most common practices across time and space. So
but I still had the question about like why, though,
is there any clue as to why this difference that
in some cases the heart is retained in other cases
the heart is removed, and are there any trends in
(24:52):
like whose hearts were removed and whose were left in place.
The authors do offer a bit of speculation here that,
you know, interestingly and the mummies available to us, there
seems to be a somewhat of a correlation with access
to mummification by different classes. So in the New Kingdom
(25:13):
there essentially was a process of democratization of mummification. Previously,
mummification had been an incredibly exclusive right which was only
available to you know, the top top elites. But then
they say quote as time progressed, the nobles gained increasing
access to mummification and retained their hearts. With the democratization
(25:37):
of mummification, however, the commoners being mummified were not receiving
the same treatment, possibly to ensure that the elite maintained
a more favorable afterlife than their subjects.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Oh wow, that went in a different direction than I
was expecting. I thought it would just maybe be like, well,
this is this is a premium service for premium customers.
We can't offer the same level of mummification services for
a lesser price. But it seems like it also could
be ensuring the status quo in the afterlife.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
It could be because I mean, so I don't know
how it would necessarily be cheaper to remove the heart
than not remove the heart, you know, like it just
in terms of the actual cost in the like labor
to the embalmers. So yeah, it could be a deliberate
choice to sort of create an artificial tiered system for
(26:28):
quality of mummification and make sure, well, there's a really
special kind of mummification where your heart stays in and
that's only available to the elites. But we don't know
that for sure. I want to be very clear, we
don't know the reasoning. But that is an interesting, plausible
scenario that it's like it was in order to create
a kind of elite or premium tiered type of mummification
(26:51):
at a time when more people were getting mummification at all. Fascinating,
But we don't know for sure, and so I think
this remains a really tristing question I would love to
know more of someone can have more evidence to shed
direct light on why this difference emerged.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Now, another scenario of heart removal that's rather different in
many respects, but one that probably instantly comes to many
people's minds that I want to discuss is the ritual
removal of human hearts by the Mayans and the Aztecs,
but especially for research purposes here the Mayans, so the
(27:38):
ancient Mayans are known to have performed human sacrifices involving
the removal of the heart, though not in the post
mortem sense, the removal of the heart essentially via ritualistic sacrifice,
ritualistic execution. You could think of it as vivisection or
just or even death by heart removal, I imagine. One
(28:01):
article I was reading on the topic was Procedures in
Human Heart Extraction and Ritual Meaning by Tesler and Chuchina,
published in Latin American Antiquity in two thousand and six,
And as you can tell by the title, this is
a paper that deals predominantly with the procedures. How were
they carrying this out? Not so much, you know, the whys.
(28:23):
We'll get into some of the whys. But essentially these
were religious practices. But I was not aware that there
was There's been so much, so much discussion and attempts
to understand exactly how the heart was removed. So they
looked at skeletal remains, a suspected heart removal human sacrifice cases,
and contended that the sacrificers would carry these procedures out
(28:46):
by quote a trans diaphragmatic And I had to look
that up. Webster says, use the hard G on trans diaphragmatic.
So I'm going with what Webster's saying in this case,
the definition being occurring, passing, or performed through the diaphragm.
You mean the diaphragum, Yes, the diaphragm. And so this
(29:08):
would yeah opening immediately below the rib cage, and this
would help ensure rapid removal of the heart. And this
is where they get into their going up against some
previous theories about how they carried this out. In particular,
there was an eight to ten minute procedure estimate by
Robesik and Hales in nineteen eighty four. These authors had
(29:30):
argued that the sacrificer would have cut through the thorax
from side to side, collapsing the lung in the process.
This would make the victim unconscious within three to four
minutes and allow the rest of the surgery to proceed
without struggle. And they do kind of frame it as
kind of a surgery the section with heart removal occurring
while the heart was still palpitating, which seemed to be
(29:52):
the desired effect to pull the heart out while the
heart seems to still have life in it. Another analysis
from Gonzales Torres argued as well for a below the
ribs approach, but stressed that the exact style may have
varied from region to region. So again we get into
a similar situation with mummification. Just because one mummification lab
(30:16):
was doing it one way doesn't mean they were doing
it the same way at another lab at another time.
And likewise, the way hearts were removed via blood ritual
blood sacrifice in one instance, it might be different in another,
you know, different styles for different sacrificers, or some sort
of evolution of style Tesla and Chacina. Meanwhile, right quote.
(30:36):
It must be underlined in this context that ritual heart
removal entailed a violent vivisection of a struggling victim, and
was therefore quicker and fundamentally distinctive from the cautious procedures
implied in a quote unquote surgical operation as visualized by
Rubiesack and Hales. Now, the sacrificial victims in these situations
(30:59):
were typically enslaved people, sometimes children or prisoners of war
who were I'm reading that they were often either painted
blue first or pelted with arrows, and once the heart
was removed, its blood was generally used to smear or
anoint some sort of divine icon or some sort of structure,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Now, as sacrifices, these would have had a religious significance.
Is the significance of the act better understood than maybe
the significance of the removal or non removal of the
heart in the Egyptian example?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
I believe so, based on the work I was looking at.
There's a paper here by Tesler and Oliver in Open
Caskets and Broken Hearts, great title from a twenty twenty
edition of Current Anthropology, and the authors here are right
that the quote partitioning and the liberation of vitalizing matter,
(31:55):
namely the heart and blood, fed specific sacred forces during
divine cult and mythic reenactment. They also provide a note
on Aztec sacrifices quote. As for the Aztecs, we conclude
that different trunk opening procedures were practiced as part of
ritual sequences that in each case enabled access to the
(32:15):
cosmic sacred mountain with its vivifying essences. So in other words,
hearts and blood were essentially food for gods of the
sun and gods of the earth, deities who in turn
sacrificed or were in turn, or you could say, originally
sacrificed something to create the universe. And the sacrifices here
(32:36):
were acts of the actual blood ritual sacrifices, not the
mythological sacrifices, were acts of quote, obligation, reciprocation, and reenactment.
So there are several different things going on there, Like
there's a sort of a mythic understanding of what the
heart and the blood is. There's this reenactment of things
that occurred in sacred time, the idea that there was
(32:58):
some sort of blood ritual and sacrifice that occurred with
mythological beings, and the thing that is taking place in
the sacrifice is important insofar as it is re enacting
this mythic incident. And there's this also, you know, basically,
like what we sort of generalize about sacrifice, something is
(33:18):
offered up so that something else may be offered down
to us as humans. They also mentioned in this article
that while the under the rib technique does seem more common,
and I believe This is a slightly later work. There
are three distinct tactics that were used. There's cutting directly
under the ribs, there's making an incision between two ribs,
(33:38):
and then there's horizontally severing the sternum in order to
access the heart. But again it seems like going under
the ribs was the most common technique. Now additionally and
just sort of like trying to get into the whole,
like what did ancient people or in this case, what
did the Mayans who are engaging in heart removal sacrifice?
(33:59):
What did they think of the heart? What other ideas
we're going on regarding the center of our circulatory system.
On this I found an interesting discussion of ideas concerning
the human body among the Satal people. The Adal people
are a Mayan people in southern Mexico. So in this
particular work, it is the Ethnophysiology of the Satal Maya
(34:23):
of the Highland Chapists by Cameron Lyttleton Adams. This was
a Doctor's of Philosophy dissertation from the University of Georgia.
So I'm not going to get into everything that's discussed here,
and again this is not the Mayan people of old,
but contemporary Mayan peoples, but there are these interesting ideas
in their thinking about the connection of the heart to cognition,
(34:46):
not thinking with the heart instead of the brain, but
sort of thinking with it. So I found that kind
of interesting because there are some other instances we'll get
into as well, in addition to the Egyptian model, where
this seems like maybe a modern twist on these older
ideas of the heart being the center of thought, the
center of being. So maybe it's a situation where like
(35:09):
in the modern world, you know that the brain is
the center of cognition, but there's still the symbolic and
metaphorical importance of the heart as being something vital to
who we are and having some sort of emotional connection
which I think we can all relate to that, especially
on Valentine's to Day. We're so on Valentine's Day, we're
so steeped in this idea that, yeah, the heart is
(35:32):
not just a thing that pumps blood.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, And there is to some degree some accuracy and
wisdom in that way of thinking. Because, of course, while
I think it is quite clear that the brain is
the necessary organ for cognition, like you couldn't have thinking
without the brain, that the rest of the body influences
the thinking that happens in the brain, and the brain
is not like a thing floating apart from the body.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah. Now, Adams has this wonderful little line in here
I want to read. I found this very fascinating quote. Further,
health is referred to by the semantic pair walking and working,
and the heart is conceived of as a homunculous, an
internal being that makes commands that must be obeyed. Now,
(36:20):
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth or
visualizations in anyone else's worldview, so I don't think this
is supposed to literally be a homunculus or this idea
that like the heart, that in each of us there's
like a squat, little like tough, little like red flesh
being that lives in the center of our chest and
sort of, you know, puppet masters the rest of us.
(36:41):
It's more like an idea of like what's going on
in the heart versus what's going on on the outside.
It's this is more metaphorical, but I think it's still
an intriguing idea. Well, and I could.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Be misunderstanding, but I kind of read that as it
sounds like it's suggesting the heart as a something that
is separate from the conscious mind but has desires of
its own that must be obeyed.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair as well, though it
is it's hard for me to not just picture like
literal homunculus in the heart, but I know that's not
what the author is going for here. But it's interesting
to think about all this. Like when we think about
heart and brain, we think, okay, brain is thought, heart
is his certain story system. But of course if we
know that the two need each other, like the brain
(37:25):
cannot live independent of some sort of heart that is
doing the job of the heart, be that a transplanted
heart or an artificial heart, like that is a role
that has to be filled for the brain to do
its thing as well.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
And that feedback from and input from the rest of
the body affects how the brain works. The r for
in incredibly mundane ways that you're familiar with, such as
like you think different when you're hungry, like when you're
getting feedback from your digestive system or something, or from
your blood sugar. That's going to affect the way you
feel and the way you think. But it also in
(38:00):
much subtler and stranger ways as well, that there's a
relationship between what's happening and say, your gut microbiome and
the way your brain works, and on and on.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, yeah, And then of course there's the very simple
observation that, hey, when I am very excited, when I'm agitated,
my heart is beating faster, and when I'm very calm,
my heart is beating very slowly, and realizing that, yeah,
there are all these very observable connections between the way
that we you know, what's going on in our mind
and our being and what's going on seemingly in the
center of our chest.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
All right, well, I think maybe we're going to have
to call this episode there for part one, but we
will be back in part two to discuss more heart
removal traditions and thoughts about heart removal from the point
of view of other cultures. In Norse traditions, in medieval Christianity,
we're going to talk about boiling some crusaders. It's going
(38:54):
to be fun.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yes, there will be more human sacrifice, there will be
more heart removed, and much more. So. Be sure to
check back in on Thursday as we continue our special
Valentine's Day celebration of the removed Heart. In the meantime,
if you would like to listen to other episodes Stuff
to Blow your Mind, well you will find them all
(39:16):
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We
have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays the normal schedules,
we do a short form Monster Factor or Artifact episode,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
do an episode of Weird House Cinema. That's where really
(39:37):
most of the heart ripping takes place on this show.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. H
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time for
a vault episode. This originally aired February fourteenth, twenty twenty three,
and it's called Because It Is My Heart Part one.
This is the first part of a series we did
about heart removal and heart burial and such concepts.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, because it's that time of year, you know, it's
Valentine's it's a pon us. So get in there and
enjoy this heart related content.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Let's jump right in.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
In the Desert, I saw a creature, naked bestial who's
squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands
and ate of it. I said, is it good? Friend?
It is bitter, bitter, he answered, But I like it
because it is bitter and because it is my heart.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And that, of
course is the poem in the Desert by Stephen Crane,
a poem that I've long found nice and creepy and
thought provoking.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I think a lot of it depends on which word
in the last sentence you emphasize. Does he like it
because it is my heart or because it is my heart?
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, there are several ways to piece it apart there.
But it's also the perfect poem for Valentine's Day. Today
is Valentine's Day. I don't know if anyone has ever
taken in the desert and transformed it into a Valentine,
but I think that's a fabulous idea. Depending on who
you're giving it to, you want to make sure that
they're going to understand the cleverness of this. But it's
(02:03):
just the right length. You know. You could put you know,
half of it on the front, half of it inside.
You could draw the best youal creature there consuming its
own heart. Somebody has to have done this before. I'm
sure someone will send links to this effect to us.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
You could put it on those little heart shaped candies
that look like they're like made of chalk.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Basically, Oh yeah, that would be clever. I mean, it
has to have been done. It's such a great idea.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Does anybody eat those? By the way, that does somebody
like the taste of chalk enough that they would consume that.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
I remember eating them when I was a child, you know,
and maybe and I don't know if they're bitter, that
would but they are shaped like hearts. Yeah, at a
time when you ate a lot of candy, it made
sense to at least try a few of them. But
I think then you realize there were better candies to eat,
easier candies to eat.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, that's such a childhood mentality. It's like, well, it's
not good, but it is candy, so I guess I
have to eat it.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
I should at least at least try it. It's just polite. Yeah. So, yes,
it's Valentine's Day, a time when we tend to think
about the over commercialization of love, and especially romantic love,
as well as the symbolism of the human heart. You know,
I think this is a topic we've touched on before
on the show. You know, when it comes to the heart,
(03:22):
we know that this is the center of our circulatory system.
We know it pumps our blood, but it's also seen
as the symbolic or metaphoric seed of love and passion.
And given all these complex ways of thinking about the heart,
we also tend to feel a certain kind of way
about the topic of heart removal. When it comes up,
(03:42):
be it something that comes up in the biological you know,
the medical world, or if it comes up in random
horror movies, or just as a turn of phrase.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Is this how you landed on heart removal for the
topic this week? Where you watching a movie where a
heart gets ripped out?
Speaker 1 (04:00):
I don't think I was specifically when I started thinking
about this, but we have watched several movies on Weird
House Cinema, our Friday Weird movie episodes that like. Particularly,
I think some seventies films we've watched, such as The
Loreleized Grasp, horr Rises from the Tomb, Return of the
Blind Dead, I think all three of those feature a
(04:20):
scene in which somebody's heart is cut out and it's
eaten by say a monster or occultest night that sort
of thing.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Wait, am I remembering wrong? Is the whole point of
Lorealized Grasp that the monster eats people's hearts?
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Yes? Yeah, she does. Yeah. Well, I mean there are
the aspects of the film, but it clearly in terms
of what is the gory point of the film that
seemed to be one of its main fascinations.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Well, she eats people's hearts since she falls in love
with that. I don't know, Spanish German, Elvis Peter Fonda
kind of guy.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Oh, yes, yes, anyway, yes, yeah, go back to those
episodes if you want more of that. When it comes
to heart ripping, of course, there are some more famous
examples that probably come to everyone's mind. There's the nineteen
ninety two fighting gay Mortal Kombat. I think everybody that
was around in the nineties and in decades after, but
(05:15):
especially in the nineties, you have that very pixelized version
of that heart rip in mind. And then, of course
there's the nineteen eighty four film Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom, which features a rather famous heart rip
scene that despite the film being set in India, this
actual heart rip and all the things that the baddies
are up to are really take gory elements from at
(05:39):
least a couple of non Indian cultures, and some of
the cultures we're going to discuss in this episode and
kind of make a patchwork villain religion here for Indiana
Jones to go up against. And I think they also
incorporate more than a little bit of fictional satanic ritual,
like it's a very humbly able culture that Indiana Jones
(06:02):
is supposedly encountering in that movie, to say the least. Yeah,
now other heart rips of note correct me if I'm wrong,
but doesn't Jason Vorhees ripped out of heart at least once.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh I don't recall. Probably yeah, well.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
I do know.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
That's one of the worst movies in the whole series.
Ends up like The Bunch of People, A bunch of
like troops come in and blow up Jason, and then
somebody eats Jason's heart and turns into Jason.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
It's brilliant, Okay, I I had, I haven't. I don't
think i'd actually seen Leprechaun six aka Leprechaun Back to
the Hood from two thousand and three. This is the
last one to star Warwick Davis, but that has a
heart rip in it. Like the heart rip scene I
guess in a film is usually pretty easy to do
because you just it's mostly sound effect and then the
(06:54):
visual of somebody holding a bloody, palpitating heart. Oftentimes that's
done by having the person squeeze like kind of a
rubber heart create the sound effective you desire. Other examples
come to mind the horror movie Valentine's Day. I'd forgotten
about this, but the Prophecy films have a lot of this,
with angels ripping each other's hearts out. Dumb and Dumber
(07:16):
has a heart rip scene that I'd forgotten about. I
can't remember if is that supposed to be a dream
sequence or is that supposed to really happen or does
it matter? In Dumb and Dumber it is a dream sequence, Okay, Okay.
Then there's a Rambo, Last Blood and Last of the Mohicans.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I've actually seen very few of these movies.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Oh well, we might have to come back to the
Prophecy films. Oh but I don't know. Some of those
you could probably miss, especially maybe Leprechaun six. But yeah,
it's it's kind of a staple of horror. Oftentimes, if
you have any kind of like supernatural being, you know,
you have some sort of really lightning quick heart rip.
(07:53):
There's a great example of this on the HBO series
True Blood, which I guess overall looking back on it
kind of a mixed bag. But the excellent character actor
Dennis O'Hare does have this wonderful character, the vampire King
of Mississippi. His name is Russell Eddington. He's a real
highlight of the show. While he's on the show, and
there's a scene where I forget exactly what ticks him off,
(08:14):
but vampires are supposed to be secret in the series,
and he just gets mad and instantly like speeds to
like a live news broadcast and rips the broadcasters heart
out through his back, along with the piece of his spine,
and that stands out in my mind is one of
the finest moments of that series.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
The main thing that comes to my mind is that
the manual heart removal is the primary move of an
unarmed Terminator in the Terminator films.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Oh did he rip some hearts out?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
That's what Yeh's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the first
movie when he comes out to the punks. Yeah, he
like Bill Paxton or somebody or the guy Bill Paxton's
hanging out with.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
It's been so long since I saw the first Terminator.
I really need to go back in and watch it.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I don't know why that's the move they chose. I mean,
it's scary in the movie. I don't know if that
really speaks of robotic efficiency.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It's like taking the batteries out right, yeah, all right, Well,
with that out of the way, we're gonna begin to
move into what we're ultimately really talking about in this
pair of episodes this week, and that is heart removals
and how they factored into different views, different supernatural understandings
(09:28):
of the human body and the cosmos. We're not gonna
we're probably not gonna go super in depth into heart
symbolism and metaphors in terms of trying to be, you know,
to completely cover the topic, because it is a broad topic.
You have, like any given culture has some sort of
idea about what the heart is, and there's a lot
(09:48):
of overlap, but then there are some distinct ideas mixed
in there as well, and we'll touch on some of these.
I think a good place to start would be, of course,
with the Egyptian heart. Now, there was we had a
past episode of the show this was there was an
interview that I did with author Bill Shutt, who wrote
a book called Pump. It's quite good. It gets into
(10:11):
animal hearts and various in the history of understanding the
human heart, Medical History of the Heart. Wonderful read. And
in that book he does bring up that, yes, the
ancient Egyptians knew the heart is ab or ib or HATI.
It was treated with a great deal of reverence, as
this was the organ said to contain a record of
(10:32):
the individual's good and bad deeds. And I think a
number of any if you've consumed any amount of Egyptology
over the years, you're probably familiar with the basic scenario
that is often related here that after you have died,
it is this heart that will be weighed against a
feather of maat the Goddess of Truth, to see if
(10:55):
you can indeed pass on into the realms beyond our
life here on earth, will or if you're going to
be consumed by this ferocious beast of annihilation and thus
no longer exist.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
I think it's a crocodile type or crocodile ish beast,
isn't it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yes, yeah, it is a crocodile asque I'm blanking on
the name of the entity off the top of my head,
But yeah, you basically have the split road between annihilation
and continued existence. But you can only continue to exist
if your heart matches up against this feather of maat
the Goddess of Truth. Now, as Geraldine Pinch mentions in
(11:42):
her book, Egyptian mythology. Yeah, the ancient Egyptian's view, the
heart is the organ of thought and feeling, and it
was the seat of consciousness itself, and Maat the goddess
here is often seen as this ostridge feather adorned goddess
of truth and goodness. So thus her feather would match
(12:02):
the weight of your heart if you had truth in
your heart, if you had not at in your heart
at all. So that's the basic scenario there now. Shut
cites historian Roger K. French, who rationalized that the basic
idea in the Egyptian model here is that life is warm.
(12:23):
The heart is warm, the heart moves, and with its
movements we breathe, and our vessels carry blood to the
rest of our body. Shut also points out that the
fifteen fifty five BCE Book of the Heart may reveal
some level of understanding regarding heart attacks and aneurysms among
(12:45):
the ancient Egyptians, but historians are not all in agreement
onto what degree we could interpret it this way. Now,
given the importance of the heart in all of this,
especially the continuation of the soul and Egyptian belief, this
probably reminds a lot of people out there of another
fact about the mummified remains of an individual, about what
(13:05):
happens to various internal organs. Several of these internal organs
are often placed inside of a canomic jar, including the heart.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Yes, And so that brings me to how I wanted
to look at a specific example of a mummy to
examine treatment of the heart in a case where it
was well documented. So obviously, Egyptian embalming, mummification, and burial
practices varied by time and place, and ancient Egyptian civilization
(13:36):
spans a really long time, thousands of years. So the
example I'm about to talk about is not characteristic of
everything in ancient Egypt. But I thought it was interesting
to look at one example in particular, especially because it
contradicts a generalization that many people have made over the
years about Egyptian mummification, one that I definitely remember learning
(13:58):
when I was younger. And the generalization is this that
during mummification the brain is always removed. Of course, you
get the famous grotesque image of the hook going through
the face holes to remove the brain, and that the heart,
being the seat of the soul, as you just explained,
was left in place in the body. So maybe the
other organs were removed, but the heart was left in
(14:20):
the chest.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
And by the way, if memory serves, I think I'm
remembering from a past episode on mummies. The brain. We
have to remember the brain, I believe, is often thought
to have gone rancid first, to rot it first, and
therefore we have to factor that into all this as well,
along with these understandings for the ancient Egyptians about what
organs were doing.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Now, the specific mummy I was reading about that contradicted
this generalization was featured in a paper based especially around
some ct scan research that was published in twenty fourteen
in the journal the academic journal The Yearbook of Mummy Studies.
It's a funny name. Makes you imagine the mummies are
like writing, you know, stay cool, have a great summer,
(15:04):
or they're like going through drawing hearts around all the
mummies they have a crush on like this mummy's so
cute anyway. So I was reading about this paper in
a concurrent article in Live Science by Owen juris called
ancient Egyptian mummy found with brain no heart. So this
mummy is the body of a woman who lived about
(15:25):
seventeen hundred years ago according to radiocarbon dating, placing her
under the period of Roman control of Egypt. And she
died somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty, and
her body shows signs of severe dental health issues and
tooth loss, which apparently is quite common for ancient Egyptian
bodies from this period. I don't know if that's because
(15:46):
they were getting lots of sugar or what. I don't
know what the explanation is, but a lot of dental problems.
In the religious and cultural context would be This was
a person who still adhered to a version of tradition
Egyptian religion, or the variant of it that was popular
at this time, at a time when Christianity was actually
(16:06):
spreading through the region and becoming more and more dominant. Now,
in contradiction to the brain removed, heart left in place
generalization I heard when I was growing up, this mummy
is exactly the opposite. Analysis of CT scans by the
researchers found that the embalmers in this case they worked
by making an incision in the perineum and then through
(16:28):
here they removed the intestines, the stomach, the liver, and
the heart. Heart came out too. So after all these
organs were removed, they lined the incision that they had
made with resin and linen cloth, and then they placed
a couple of plaques on this woman's body, on the skin,
over the stomach and over the sternum, and to read
from Jeres's summary quote, something that may have been intended
(16:52):
to ritually heal the damage the embalmers had done and
act as a replacement of sorts for removed heart. And
this would not be the only example in ancient Egyptian
emvolving practices where the heart was taken out and something
else was put in there, seemingly in its place or
to replace it. I'll mention another couple of examples of
(17:16):
that in a minute. But after this, her body was
treated with spices and with lichen covering I think her
head and her upper body, and she was wrapped and
buried somewhere near Luxor. At the time of this article,
by the way, the mummy was in the collection of
the Red Path Museum at McGill University in Montreal. But anyway,
(17:37):
this raises an interesting question if the heart was so
important in Egyptian religion, that so important that for a
long time, people assumed it was always left in place
when bodies were mummified. What was happening in the cases
where it actually was removed and how common was that? Well,
(17:59):
to quote a profane named Andrew Wade from Master University
who's the author of another piece I'm going to look
at in a minute, Wade says, quote, we don't really
know what's happening to the hearts that are removed. So
it's assumed that, as you alluded to a minute ago, robed,
they were usually when they were removed, they were put
into canopic jars, which we know we're used to hold
(18:21):
internal organs removed from other mummies, but that's not always
known for sure. So sometimes we just don't know what
happened to the heart. And there's still the question of
why why did they do this? Well, we don't know,
but the authors of the ct study speculate that perhaps
the two plaques on her abdomen and her sternum were
meant as a kind of healing or a replacement for
(18:43):
the wounds inflicted by the embalming process itself. Like, okay,
we had to cut a hole in your body in
order to process your body for burial, So here's a
plaster healing symbol to counteract that incision. And then perhaps
the plaque on the sternum was somehow a replacement for
the missing heart, But again we don't know for sure,
and we don't know why the heart was removed. But
(19:06):
I came across another piece that has some interesting thoughts
about this. So for a more general look at the
treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification, I was looking at.
I don't think this is a paper in an academic journal.
I think this is a fact sheet from a presentation
at an academic conference that was put together by a
(19:27):
couple of experts, by Andrew D. Wade and Andrew J. Nelson.
I know that one of the two authors here, Wade,
was the one who was quoted in that article we
were just talking about. So the authors of this presentation
here say that many generalizations made these days about the
treatment of the heart in Egyptian mummification are based not
(19:48):
on modern empirical research, but rather on accounts given by
classical authors. So if we are going to use literary evidence,
evidence from ancient texts for what these funeral practices were,
you know, it would be really good to have a
lot of direct Egyptian accounts, and we have some Egyptian
accounts about beliefs about funeral practices and the afterlife, but
(20:11):
instead a lot of the literary evidence we use is
mostly in Greek and Roman texts from authors like Herodotus
and Plutarch, And in fact, they say, the only author
specifically mentioning the heart as opposed to making more general
statements about what is done with the organs during mummification
is the Ptolemaic period Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who writes
(20:35):
as follows quote, when they have gathered to treat the
body after it has been slit open, one of them
thrusts his hand through the opening in the corpse into
the trunk and extracts everything but the kidneys and the heart,
and another one cleanses each of the viscera, washing them
in palm wine and spices. So based on this we've
(20:55):
got Diodorus here saying that the heart is always left
in place. But of course, remember he was Ptolemaic period,
and this is one author. And this presentation I looked
at was designed to compare those literary accounts of heart
treatment to evidence again from CT scans or from mummies
that have actually been empirically taken apart and described in
(21:17):
the scientific literature. So we looked to see what was
left in them. And they say there are three basic
patterns of heart treatment and mummies. One is retention, so
the heart stays in the chest even if other organs
are removed. Number two is removal, the heart is taken
out of the body. And number three is replacement, where
the heart is removed and something symbolic is left in
(21:39):
its place, generally something called a heart scaub, which is
a type of amulet. So how do the empirical finding
stack up the author's write quote the heart was noted
as intact in only twenty one of eighty individuals, where
this organ's disposition was recorded in barely more than a
quarter of the individuals, and this sample was the heart
(22:02):
retained in situ. In only one case was the heart
possibly sewn back into place, and in one other case
was a heart scare of a present presumably to replace
the removed heart. And so rob you can see I've
included a chart from their presentation below where you can
look at the trends where these are not percentages, but
(22:22):
these are absolute numbers. Of examples from these different periods,
and you can see that heart retention predominates in the
small number of samples of mummies we have from the
Middle and New Kingdoms. But then as time goes on,
heart retention is outnumbered by heart removals in the Third
Intermediate Period, the Late Period, and the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. So,
(22:46):
in the words of the authors quote, mummies were increasingly
absent their hearts from the New Kingdom onward. As time
goes on, more and more of the mummies we find
have their hearts removed, and so the authors conclude to quote,
the stereotype of universal heart retention or replacement on accidental
removal is far from the truth. The heart was uncommonly
(23:09):
retained in situ and rarely returned or replaced by a
heart scare up. The hypothesis constructed from the stereotyped account
by Diodorus is therefore falsified by these data.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Interesting. Interesting, yeah, Now also worth just driving home though,
that this is all separate, of course, from the purely
sort of mythological situation in which the heart is weighed
that's taking place in another realm, that is not taking
place in the physical world.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Right, this is a study about what happened to the bodies,
not necessarily about what the people in question believed about
what was happening in the afterlife.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
Right, And though of it's also worth driving home that
also with belief, especially when we're talking about ancient Egypt. Again,
like you said, we're talking about a very long period
of time in which practices change, but also beliefs also change.
So it's hard to just you can't just sum everything
up and like say a pamphlet about like here's what
(24:06):
the ancient Egyptians believed or did, because you're covering such
a broad period of time.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
Correct, And this is the point the authors here are making.
They use this as evidence that the classical descriptions of
Egyptian mummification by like Greek and Latin authors should only
be used, as they say, at best quote a possible
snapshot of mummification performed by one particular workshop unquote, and
(24:31):
not like an adequate description of universal practices or even
of the most common practices across time and space. So
but I still had the question about like why, though,
is there any clue as to why this difference that
in some cases the heart is retained in other cases
the heart is removed, and are there any trends in
(24:52):
like whose hearts were removed and whose were left in place.
The authors do offer a bit of speculation here that,
you know, interestingly and the mummies available to us, there
seems to be a somewhat of a correlation with access
to mummification by different classes. So in the New Kingdom
(25:13):
there essentially was a process of democratization of mummification. Previously,
mummification had been an incredibly exclusive right which was only
available to you know, the top top elites. But then
they say quote as time progressed, the nobles gained increasing
access to mummification and retained their hearts. With the democratization
(25:37):
of mummification, however, the commoners being mummified were not receiving
the same treatment, possibly to ensure that the elite maintained
a more favorable afterlife than their subjects.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Oh wow, that went in a different direction than I
was expecting. I thought it would just maybe be like, well,
this is this is a premium service for premium customers.
We can't offer the same level of mummification services for
a lesser price. But it seems like it also could
be ensuring the status quo in the afterlife.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
It could be because I mean, so I don't know
how it would necessarily be cheaper to remove the heart
than not remove the heart, you know, like it just
in terms of the actual cost in the like labor
to the embalmers. So yeah, it could be a deliberate
choice to sort of create an artificial tiered system for
(26:28):
quality of mummification and make sure, well, there's a really
special kind of mummification where your heart stays in and
that's only available to the elites. But we don't know
that for sure. I want to be very clear, we
don't know the reasoning. But that is an interesting, plausible
scenario that it's like it was in order to create
a kind of elite or premium tiered type of mummification
(26:51):
at a time when more people were getting mummification at all. Fascinating,
But we don't know for sure, and so I think
this remains a really tristing question I would love to
know more of someone can have more evidence to shed
direct light on why this difference emerged.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Now, another scenario of heart removal that's rather different in
many respects, but one that probably instantly comes to many
people's minds that I want to discuss is the ritual
removal of human hearts by the Mayans and the Aztecs,
but especially for research purposes here the Mayans, so the
(27:38):
ancient Mayans are known to have performed human sacrifices involving
the removal of the heart, though not in the post
mortem sense, the removal of the heart essentially via ritualistic sacrifice,
ritualistic execution. You could think of it as vivisection or
just or even death by heart removal, I imagine. One
(28:01):
article I was reading on the topic was Procedures in
Human Heart Extraction and Ritual Meaning by Tesler and Chuchina,
published in Latin American Antiquity in two thousand and six,
And as you can tell by the title, this is
a paper that deals predominantly with the procedures. How were
they carrying this out? Not so much, you know, the whys.
(28:23):
We'll get into some of the whys. But essentially these
were religious practices. But I was not aware that there
was There's been so much, so much discussion and attempts
to understand exactly how the heart was removed. So they
looked at skeletal remains, a suspected heart removal human sacrifice cases,
and contended that the sacrificers would carry these procedures out
(28:46):
by quote a trans diaphragmatic And I had to look
that up. Webster says, use the hard G on trans diaphragmatic.
So I'm going with what Webster's saying in this case,
the definition being occurring, passing, or performed through the diaphragm.
You mean the diaphragum, Yes, the diaphragm. And so this
(29:08):
would yeah opening immediately below the rib cage, and this
would help ensure rapid removal of the heart. And this
is where they get into their going up against some
previous theories about how they carried this out. In particular,
there was an eight to ten minute procedure estimate by
Robesik and Hales in nineteen eighty four. These authors had
(29:30):
argued that the sacrificer would have cut through the thorax
from side to side, collapsing the lung in the process.
This would make the victim unconscious within three to four
minutes and allow the rest of the surgery to proceed
without struggle. And they do kind of frame it as
kind of a surgery the section with heart removal occurring
while the heart was still palpitating, which seemed to be
(29:52):
the desired effect to pull the heart out while the
heart seems to still have life in it. Another analysis
from Gonzales Torres argued as well for a below the
ribs approach, but stressed that the exact style may have
varied from region to region. So again we get into
a similar situation with mummification. Just because one mummification lab
(30:16):
was doing it one way doesn't mean they were doing
it the same way at another lab at another time.
And likewise, the way hearts were removed via blood ritual
blood sacrifice in one instance, it might be different in another,
you know, different styles for different sacrificers, or some sort
of evolution of style Tesla and Chacina. Meanwhile, right quote.
(30:36):
It must be underlined in this context that ritual heart
removal entailed a violent vivisection of a struggling victim, and
was therefore quicker and fundamentally distinctive from the cautious procedures
implied in a quote unquote surgical operation as visualized by
Rubiesack and Hales. Now, the sacrificial victims in these situations
(30:59):
were typically enslaved people, sometimes children or prisoners of war
who were I'm reading that they were often either painted
blue first or pelted with arrows, and once the heart
was removed, its blood was generally used to smear or
anoint some sort of divine icon or some sort of structure,
that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
Now, as sacrifices, these would have had a religious significance.
Is the significance of the act better understood than maybe
the significance of the removal or non removal of the
heart in the Egyptian example?
Speaker 1 (31:33):
I believe so, based on the work I was looking at.
There's a paper here by Tesler and Oliver in Open
Caskets and Broken Hearts, great title from a twenty twenty
edition of Current Anthropology, and the authors here are right
that the quote partitioning and the liberation of vitalizing matter,
(31:55):
namely the heart and blood, fed specific sacred forces during
divine cult and mythic reenactment. They also provide a note
on Aztec sacrifices quote. As for the Aztecs, we conclude
that different trunk opening procedures were practiced as part of
ritual sequences that in each case enabled access to the
(32:15):
cosmic sacred mountain with its vivifying essences. So in other words,
hearts and blood were essentially food for gods of the
sun and gods of the earth, deities who in turn
sacrificed or were in turn, or you could say, originally
sacrificed something to create the universe. And the sacrifices here
(32:36):
were acts of the actual blood ritual sacrifices, not the
mythological sacrifices, were acts of quote, obligation, reciprocation, and reenactment.
So there are several different things going on there, Like
there's a sort of a mythic understanding of what the
heart and the blood is. There's this reenactment of things
that occurred in sacred time, the idea that there was
(32:58):
some sort of blood ritual and sacrifice that occurred with
mythological beings, and the thing that is taking place in
the sacrifice is important insofar as it is re enacting
this mythic incident. And there's this also, you know, basically,
like what we sort of generalize about sacrifice, something is
(33:18):
offered up so that something else may be offered down
to us as humans. They also mentioned in this article
that while the under the rib technique does seem more common,
and I believe This is a slightly later work. There
are three distinct tactics that were used. There's cutting directly
under the ribs, there's making an incision between two ribs,
(33:38):
and then there's horizontally severing the sternum in order to
access the heart. But again it seems like going under
the ribs was the most common technique. Now additionally and
just sort of like trying to get into the whole,
like what did ancient people or in this case, what
did the Mayans who are engaging in heart removal sacrifice?
(33:59):
What did they think of the heart? What other ideas
we're going on regarding the center of our circulatory system.
On this I found an interesting discussion of ideas concerning
the human body among the Satal people. The Adal people
are a Mayan people in southern Mexico. So in this
particular work, it is the Ethnophysiology of the Satal Maya
(34:23):
of the Highland Chapists by Cameron Lyttleton Adams. This was
a Doctor's of Philosophy dissertation from the University of Georgia.
So I'm not going to get into everything that's discussed here,
and again this is not the Mayan people of old,
but contemporary Mayan peoples, but there are these interesting ideas
in their thinking about the connection of the heart to cognition,
(34:46):
not thinking with the heart instead of the brain, but
sort of thinking with it. So I found that kind
of interesting because there are some other instances we'll get
into as well, in addition to the Egyptian model, where
this seems like maybe a modern twist on these older
ideas of the heart being the center of thought, the
center of being. So maybe it's a situation where like
(35:09):
in the modern world, you know that the brain is
the center of cognition, but there's still the symbolic and
metaphorical importance of the heart as being something vital to
who we are and having some sort of emotional connection
which I think we can all relate to that, especially
on Valentine's to Day. We're so on Valentine's Day, we're
so steeped in this idea that, yeah, the heart is
(35:32):
not just a thing that pumps blood.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Yeah, And there is to some degree some accuracy and
wisdom in that way of thinking. Because, of course, while
I think it is quite clear that the brain is
the necessary organ for cognition, like you couldn't have thinking
without the brain, that the rest of the body influences
the thinking that happens in the brain, and the brain
is not like a thing floating apart from the body.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Yeah. Now, Adams has this wonderful little line in here
I want to read. I found this very fascinating quote. Further,
health is referred to by the semantic pair walking and working,
and the heart is conceived of as a homunculous, an
internal being that makes commands that must be obeyed. Now,
(36:20):
I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth or
visualizations in anyone else's worldview, so I don't think this
is supposed to literally be a homunculus or this idea
that like the heart, that in each of us there's
like a squat, little like tough, little like red flesh
being that lives in the center of our chest and
sort of, you know, puppet masters the rest of us.
(36:41):
It's more like an idea of like what's going on
in the heart versus what's going on on the outside.
It's this is more metaphorical, but I think it's still
an intriguing idea. Well, and I could.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
Be misunderstanding, but I kind of read that as it
sounds like it's suggesting the heart as a something that
is separate from the conscious mind but has desires of
its own that must be obeyed.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's fair as well, though it
is it's hard for me to not just picture like
literal homunculus in the heart, but I know that's not
what the author is going for here. But it's interesting
to think about all this. Like when we think about
heart and brain, we think, okay, brain is thought, heart
is his certain story system. But of course if we
know that the two need each other, like the brain
(37:25):
cannot live independent of some sort of heart that is
doing the job of the heart, be that a transplanted
heart or an artificial heart, like that is a role
that has to be filled for the brain to do
its thing as well.
Speaker 2 (37:39):
And that feedback from and input from the rest of
the body affects how the brain works. The r for
in incredibly mundane ways that you're familiar with, such as
like you think different when you're hungry, like when you're
getting feedback from your digestive system or something, or from
your blood sugar. That's going to affect the way you
feel and the way you think. But it also in
(38:00):
much subtler and stranger ways as well, that there's a
relationship between what's happening and say, your gut microbiome and
the way your brain works, and on and on.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, yeah, And then of course there's the very simple
observation that, hey, when I am very excited, when I'm agitated,
my heart is beating faster, and when I'm very calm,
my heart is beating very slowly, and realizing that, yeah,
there are all these very observable connections between the way
that we you know, what's going on in our mind
and our being and what's going on seemingly in the
center of our chest.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
All right, well, I think maybe we're going to have
to call this episode there for part one, but we
will be back in part two to discuss more heart
removal traditions and thoughts about heart removal from the point
of view of other cultures. In Norse traditions, in medieval Christianity,
we're going to talk about boiling some crusaders. It's going
(38:54):
to be fun.
Speaker 1 (38:55):
Yes, there will be more human sacrifice, there will be
more heart removed, and much more. So. Be sure to
check back in on Thursday as we continue our special
Valentine's Day celebration of the removed Heart. In the meantime,
if you would like to listen to other episodes Stuff
to Blow your Mind, well you will find them all
(39:16):
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We
have our core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
we do a listener mail episode. On Wednesdays the normal schedules,
we do a short form Monster Factor or Artifact episode,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
do an episode of Weird House Cinema. That's where really
(39:37):
most of the heart ripping takes place on this show.
Speaker 2 (39:39):
Huge thanks to our audio producer JJ Posway. If you
would like to get in touch with us with feedback
on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
for the future, or just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. H
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